Mrs. Darth Vader
06-07-2010, 20:54
Sagan starts chapter 17 with a linguistic lesson. He gives a lecture on the Latin word “Primus” meaning principle or first. Sagan gives examples like Prime Minister, President, and Premier all at root meaning first. Then Sagan asks How could a squirrel monkey be considered first? Or did we humans put ourselves as first above all life forms for arrogant reasons? Our cousins the monkeys again remind us to be humble. Finally Sagan gives the definition of Apes and which animals fall under this category.
“Apes are bigger and smarter than monkeys and lack tails. Included in the ape category are Chimpanzees, Gorillas, Gibbons, Siamangs and Orangutans.” Page 319 at the bottom in small print. Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan.
Sagan then gives a good poke at human arrogance and assumption about being “first” and above all others.
“We’ve found it convenient, even reassuring, to believe that life on earth is a vast dominance hierarchy-sometimes called “The Great Chain of Being”- with us as the alphas. Sometimes we claim that it wasn’t our idea, that we were commanded by a Higher Power, the most Alpha of Alphas, to take over. Naturally we had no choice but to obey.” Page 320 Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan. A little tong and cheek by Carl Sagan.
Sometimes we do not even pretend to humbly obey but just brag of human superiority over all the other animals. Sagan compares primates to nations with many different customs.
Sagan decides to start with the baboon. He states that the Hamadryas baboons are different from the Savanna baboons. And free baboons differ greatly from over populated captured baboons. The free Savanna baboons spend the night sleeping on cliffs. They sleep as a very large group but in the morning they split up into smaller groups. Each group going it’s separate way. Each small group has a group leader or “captain”. Surprisingly at the days end all the groups re-converge at the same watering hole. They choose different watering holes at different days of the week. Do they talk this out telling the “group captains” of each small group which watering hole to meet at when?
The male hamadryas baboon has fang like teeth and is ruthless in character. The male is twice the size of the female which is why he controls her in an extreme degree. His face is the color of raw meet. Her face is mouse (as in rodent) grey-brown. You would think that they were different species to look at them. Hamadryas baboon males pick their women as they reach puberty. The women are enslaved for life with the male that picks her. One male may have ten females. The hamadryas male has his own harem. They did not need the Koran to tell them to do this practice. The males keep the peace among all females. The females of the hamadryas baboon has to submit in the most excessive degree. Chimps are feminists compared to these guys. The most minnor infraction of the behavioral code could mean that the female gets her skull punctured and crushed by the male’s jaws. For not being sexually submissive enough, the female is bitten in the neck and killed. The male hamadryas enforces the behavioral code ruthlessly. The male holds her feet with his while having sex to make sure the female will not run away. Sexual coercion is most evident in hamadryas male baboons. The female in this species has a lousy lot. The closest human equivalent is Muslim women in the middle east.
Sagan goes back to the savanna baboon. What a difference in behaviors. The savanna baboon has no size difference between the sexes. Females and males are relatively the same size. There are no harems. They can walk for miles. The savanna baboon it is the male who leaves the group looking for another group to belong to. When the male hits puberty he leaves. When the male finds a new perspective group, he must try to convince the other males to let him in the group. Here it is social skills not ruthlessness that gets you in the group. Compared to the hamadryas baboon, the savanna baboons are civilized. Many tactics are used to get into a group. Submission, bluff, coercion and alliance making in the male hierarchy to name a few. But the best strategy is to get a sponsor. Befriend a female with her children by grooming her and the children. Baby sit and care for the children, in short become indispensable. If this works the female will sponsor him into the group. This tactic is done in human society as well. Need citizenship, a Green Card get an American sponsor. The savanna baboon is a female Dominance hierarchy species. There are other monkeys that have female dominance hierarchies.
“When there are conspicuous differences in stature between the sexes (usually it’s the males who are bigger), there’s exploitation and abuse of the smaller and weaker (usually the females)* The fact that in every human ethnic group and culture males have been on average larger than females has not escaped the notice of Primatologists. It may have something to do with the penchant of men for sexism, coercion of women, rape, and harems when they can get away with it”. Page 322 Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan.
The hamadryas baboons are considered the most hierarchy oriented and brutal of all the primate order. Of course one could wonder about humans.
“The hamadryas males, in a species in which nothing else is owned, have a clear sense of females as private property”. Page 323 Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan. This is an interesting note about the hamadryas male. Humans have for many years owned other people as property. Even today secret American fiefdoms exists. Everyone pretends they are not there but they are. We just hide our ownership of people as apposed to the days when we sold them on the auction block.
Sagan then begins to tell the story he stated in the previous chapter that he would cover. Solly Zuckerman was an anatomist to the Zoological Society of London. Zuckerman went and got hamadryas baboons from Africa and brought them back to London. He put them in a partly opened enclosure. Zuckerman did not understand that baboons should all come from the same group. Zuckerman got baboons from many different groups. In short that meant that all the baboons were strangers to each other. So no dominance hierarchies were established. These captured hamadryas baboons no longer lived in their established communities. They no longer had their working governments. The place where they were put was called “Monkey Hill”. The zoologists had no idea what would happen. “Monkey Hill” very quickly turned into “Pork Chop Hill”. Zuckerman put too many baboons in Monkey Hill. Like the rats, it was over populated. They also had more males than females. This is unnatural for hamadryas baboons because they usually, in the wild, had many females to one male. Needless to say it was not long before they went berserk. The males fought each other to attempt to get a dominance hierarchy. They fought over the few females. Females were killed the fastest. These hamadryas baboons were forced to live in conditions which were unnatural to there species. In the wild hamadryas baboons do not kill one another wholesale. Sagan then sights a human example where people behaved like those hamadryas baboons. In 1790 fugitive Englishmen and a few Polynesian women were put on a small boat because they committed mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty. They landed on a small Island. There was no well established dominance hierarchy. The Englishmen went berserk just like the hamadryas baboons. We now have a more contemporary historical example. In 1985 the country of Liberia collapsed due to the fact the government became too small to run the country. The results of the loss of government was 5 years of total anarchy where the people killed everything that moved. They killed each other. They killed any dogs and other animals who happened to be in the area. Liberia did all the government cuts in 1985 that Newt Gingrich proposed in 1996. Since Gingrich proposed this legislation eleven years after the Liberian incident, one could easily wonder if his goal was to depopulate America. Monkey Hill, 1790 the Bounty fugitives and Liberia all prove that no government means wholesale slaughter.
Zuckerman went from heading the London zoo to become Principle Scientific Adviser to the British Ministry of Defense. Sagan now decides to introduce us to other categories of primates to give you a sample of how varied and different from one another they are. The lemur species are run by the females. Here the females dominate the males. Gibbons with their long arms swing and leap from tree to tree. Gibbons are monogamous. They marry for life and do not cheat on their mates. Gibbons “sing” a lot. They make haunting sounds to protect their territory. Gibbons make use of resonant frequency. Gibbon males and females share pretty much equal social status. Gibbons are one of the more pleasant forms of primates. The bonobos are reclusive. Bonobos are smaller and more slender than chimpanzees. Bonobos are considered a subspecies of the chimp. Bonobos often stand up and walk on two legs. When walking bonobos look like prehistoric man. Bonobos are unique because ¼ of the time they mate face to face. Most other primates mate with his front to her back. When Bonobos engage in sex it is mutual. This too is unique about them because the other primates sex is ordered by the male. The females must comply. Sex is mandatory. Bonobos willingly do sex when both male and female want to. Bonobos smile is like our own smile to express joy. It also is a submissive posture on occasion but it is also for happyness. Bonobos have better social skills than chimps. They also do a form of conflict resolution.
Sagan then comforts us by saying that even though the hamadryas baboon is a relative so is the gibbons and the bonobos. Just like real live human relatives you have some good ones and some bad ones.
Sagan then ends the chapter telling about different apes, chimps monkeys and other primates. He calls this subsection of the chapter “Some Sketches From Life”. He starts with monkeys and how they will enjoy tea, coffee, alcohol and even smoking tabacco. Squirrel monkeys do not like strangers but if the stranger comes with a submissive posture, he might get accepted.
“Colobine monkeys:
Infants are often passed around to each females from soon after birth. This pattern may continue for the first few months of life. In particular contrast to some macaques and baboons, every colobine infant has free access to every other infant, and females of all ranks have free access to all infants. Swapping of infants may be one of the roots of the [ comparatively] non aggressive colobine society”. Page 336 Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors” by Carl Sagan.
Last the Titis and other small monkeys make the best dads. For some reason these monkeys are the most paternal of primate fathers.
“Apes are bigger and smarter than monkeys and lack tails. Included in the ape category are Chimpanzees, Gorillas, Gibbons, Siamangs and Orangutans.” Page 319 at the bottom in small print. Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan.
Sagan then gives a good poke at human arrogance and assumption about being “first” and above all others.
“We’ve found it convenient, even reassuring, to believe that life on earth is a vast dominance hierarchy-sometimes called “The Great Chain of Being”- with us as the alphas. Sometimes we claim that it wasn’t our idea, that we were commanded by a Higher Power, the most Alpha of Alphas, to take over. Naturally we had no choice but to obey.” Page 320 Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan. A little tong and cheek by Carl Sagan.
Sometimes we do not even pretend to humbly obey but just brag of human superiority over all the other animals. Sagan compares primates to nations with many different customs.
Sagan decides to start with the baboon. He states that the Hamadryas baboons are different from the Savanna baboons. And free baboons differ greatly from over populated captured baboons. The free Savanna baboons spend the night sleeping on cliffs. They sleep as a very large group but in the morning they split up into smaller groups. Each group going it’s separate way. Each small group has a group leader or “captain”. Surprisingly at the days end all the groups re-converge at the same watering hole. They choose different watering holes at different days of the week. Do they talk this out telling the “group captains” of each small group which watering hole to meet at when?
The male hamadryas baboon has fang like teeth and is ruthless in character. The male is twice the size of the female which is why he controls her in an extreme degree. His face is the color of raw meet. Her face is mouse (as in rodent) grey-brown. You would think that they were different species to look at them. Hamadryas baboon males pick their women as they reach puberty. The women are enslaved for life with the male that picks her. One male may have ten females. The hamadryas male has his own harem. They did not need the Koran to tell them to do this practice. The males keep the peace among all females. The females of the hamadryas baboon has to submit in the most excessive degree. Chimps are feminists compared to these guys. The most minnor infraction of the behavioral code could mean that the female gets her skull punctured and crushed by the male’s jaws. For not being sexually submissive enough, the female is bitten in the neck and killed. The male hamadryas enforces the behavioral code ruthlessly. The male holds her feet with his while having sex to make sure the female will not run away. Sexual coercion is most evident in hamadryas male baboons. The female in this species has a lousy lot. The closest human equivalent is Muslim women in the middle east.
Sagan goes back to the savanna baboon. What a difference in behaviors. The savanna baboon has no size difference between the sexes. Females and males are relatively the same size. There are no harems. They can walk for miles. The savanna baboon it is the male who leaves the group looking for another group to belong to. When the male hits puberty he leaves. When the male finds a new perspective group, he must try to convince the other males to let him in the group. Here it is social skills not ruthlessness that gets you in the group. Compared to the hamadryas baboon, the savanna baboons are civilized. Many tactics are used to get into a group. Submission, bluff, coercion and alliance making in the male hierarchy to name a few. But the best strategy is to get a sponsor. Befriend a female with her children by grooming her and the children. Baby sit and care for the children, in short become indispensable. If this works the female will sponsor him into the group. This tactic is done in human society as well. Need citizenship, a Green Card get an American sponsor. The savanna baboon is a female Dominance hierarchy species. There are other monkeys that have female dominance hierarchies.
“When there are conspicuous differences in stature between the sexes (usually it’s the males who are bigger), there’s exploitation and abuse of the smaller and weaker (usually the females)* The fact that in every human ethnic group and culture males have been on average larger than females has not escaped the notice of Primatologists. It may have something to do with the penchant of men for sexism, coercion of women, rape, and harems when they can get away with it”. Page 322 Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan.
The hamadryas baboons are considered the most hierarchy oriented and brutal of all the primate order. Of course one could wonder about humans.
“The hamadryas males, in a species in which nothing else is owned, have a clear sense of females as private property”. Page 323 Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan. This is an interesting note about the hamadryas male. Humans have for many years owned other people as property. Even today secret American fiefdoms exists. Everyone pretends they are not there but they are. We just hide our ownership of people as apposed to the days when we sold them on the auction block.
Sagan then begins to tell the story he stated in the previous chapter that he would cover. Solly Zuckerman was an anatomist to the Zoological Society of London. Zuckerman went and got hamadryas baboons from Africa and brought them back to London. He put them in a partly opened enclosure. Zuckerman did not understand that baboons should all come from the same group. Zuckerman got baboons from many different groups. In short that meant that all the baboons were strangers to each other. So no dominance hierarchies were established. These captured hamadryas baboons no longer lived in their established communities. They no longer had their working governments. The place where they were put was called “Monkey Hill”. The zoologists had no idea what would happen. “Monkey Hill” very quickly turned into “Pork Chop Hill”. Zuckerman put too many baboons in Monkey Hill. Like the rats, it was over populated. They also had more males than females. This is unnatural for hamadryas baboons because they usually, in the wild, had many females to one male. Needless to say it was not long before they went berserk. The males fought each other to attempt to get a dominance hierarchy. They fought over the few females. Females were killed the fastest. These hamadryas baboons were forced to live in conditions which were unnatural to there species. In the wild hamadryas baboons do not kill one another wholesale. Sagan then sights a human example where people behaved like those hamadryas baboons. In 1790 fugitive Englishmen and a few Polynesian women were put on a small boat because they committed mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty. They landed on a small Island. There was no well established dominance hierarchy. The Englishmen went berserk just like the hamadryas baboons. We now have a more contemporary historical example. In 1985 the country of Liberia collapsed due to the fact the government became too small to run the country. The results of the loss of government was 5 years of total anarchy where the people killed everything that moved. They killed each other. They killed any dogs and other animals who happened to be in the area. Liberia did all the government cuts in 1985 that Newt Gingrich proposed in 1996. Since Gingrich proposed this legislation eleven years after the Liberian incident, one could easily wonder if his goal was to depopulate America. Monkey Hill, 1790 the Bounty fugitives and Liberia all prove that no government means wholesale slaughter.
Zuckerman went from heading the London zoo to become Principle Scientific Adviser to the British Ministry of Defense. Sagan now decides to introduce us to other categories of primates to give you a sample of how varied and different from one another they are. The lemur species are run by the females. Here the females dominate the males. Gibbons with their long arms swing and leap from tree to tree. Gibbons are monogamous. They marry for life and do not cheat on their mates. Gibbons “sing” a lot. They make haunting sounds to protect their territory. Gibbons make use of resonant frequency. Gibbon males and females share pretty much equal social status. Gibbons are one of the more pleasant forms of primates. The bonobos are reclusive. Bonobos are smaller and more slender than chimpanzees. Bonobos are considered a subspecies of the chimp. Bonobos often stand up and walk on two legs. When walking bonobos look like prehistoric man. Bonobos are unique because ¼ of the time they mate face to face. Most other primates mate with his front to her back. When Bonobos engage in sex it is mutual. This too is unique about them because the other primates sex is ordered by the male. The females must comply. Sex is mandatory. Bonobos willingly do sex when both male and female want to. Bonobos smile is like our own smile to express joy. It also is a submissive posture on occasion but it is also for happyness. Bonobos have better social skills than chimps. They also do a form of conflict resolution.
Sagan then comforts us by saying that even though the hamadryas baboon is a relative so is the gibbons and the bonobos. Just like real live human relatives you have some good ones and some bad ones.
Sagan then ends the chapter telling about different apes, chimps monkeys and other primates. He calls this subsection of the chapter “Some Sketches From Life”. He starts with monkeys and how they will enjoy tea, coffee, alcohol and even smoking tabacco. Squirrel monkeys do not like strangers but if the stranger comes with a submissive posture, he might get accepted.
“Colobine monkeys:
Infants are often passed around to each females from soon after birth. This pattern may continue for the first few months of life. In particular contrast to some macaques and baboons, every colobine infant has free access to every other infant, and females of all ranks have free access to all infants. Swapping of infants may be one of the roots of the [ comparatively] non aggressive colobine society”. Page 336 Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors” by Carl Sagan.
Last the Titis and other small monkeys make the best dads. For some reason these monkeys are the most paternal of primate fathers.