
Orangutans plan their future route and communicate it to others - sethbannon
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130911184616.htm
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contingencies
TLDR; Many animals are smarter than we give them credit for. In particular:
primates and most mammals, but even insects!

It's easy to fall in to the trap of worshipping the hyper-specificity of the
western scientific rationalist tradition. However, just because something
doesn't exist as a documented and 'peer-reviewed' (despite the recent
revelations on how many scientific publications actually lack any significant
integrity) piece of categorized research doesn't mean it isn't there, and in
many cases important philosophical perspectives from alternative traditions of
inquiry have been impressively validated by modern science.

Nature is pretty amazing, and experience is richer than we can ever render it
with our petty scribbles.

(Something along these lines is perhaps what lies at the heart of many of the
world's other, arguably more experientially grounded philosophies and
religions, particularly various naturalistic traditions disparagingly grouped
as 'Animism', Daoism, Islam and many of the philosophies of India - Buddhism,
Hinduism, Jainism, etc.)

~~~
ninjin
> "...just because something doesn't exist as a documented and 'peer-reviewed'
> ... piece of categorized research doesn't mean it isn't there, and in many
> cases important philosophical perspectives from alternative traditions of
> inquiry have been impressively validated by modern science."

There is nothing controversial in what you are saying and most scientists are
likely to agree that, at times, modern science does verify what has already
been stated based on non-scientific grounds. But at least to me (and I think
plenty of others) this is not a problem in the first place. Science is an
approximation of the truth, our best current understanding of the world and we
know that there are things that we simply don't know (heck, the world would be
quite boring otherwise).

Science is instead about making small gradual improvements to that
approximation and this is where my view on things clashes (I think) with
yours. The idea that some philosophies/religions sometimes get close to our
scientific understanding reminds me of a person that claimed to have dreams
depicting future events. This person would make a crude drawing of what he
saw, then march down to the local bank that had a clock with year, date and
time and take a photo in-front of that clock. Later on, after for example
9/11, he would go back to these dreams and perhaps find something similar to
this event. But this is the lure of post-hoc reasoning, what he initially had
was a crude drawing and the meaning and connection to New York, Al-Qaeda, etc.
came after the fact. To me, the connection that you describe works in a
similar fashion. There is a lot of strange things that you get with your
package of beliefs but I do think that any claim to being more in-line with
modern science is mostly due to cherry-picking and cheer luck and that we are
better of picking our philosophies/religion based on some fuzzy idea of
"morals" rather than their relation to our current scientific understanding.

~~~
contingencies
Yes, I agree. To clarify, I wasn't saying science is without value, nor was I
encouraging people to select a religion or philosophy based upon its relation
to science. I was merely pointing out that it's easy to become stuck in a
western scientific rationalist perspective, as our societies collectively have
those blinkers on pretty much all the time.

------
Strilanc
They could also be facing "way that looks promising right now" both when
calling and when traveling, without planning.

I don't envy these researchers, having to eliminate all the "stupid" ways to
achieve something in order to figure out how much high-level planning animals
do.

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tristanj
Gosh this article is really sexist. If the authors were writing about people
instead, they would never write so objectively about gender. Considering how
orangutang's are our close genetic cousins, if the authors replaced each
instance of 'orangutang' with 'human', their conclusions would still be
largely correct yet there would be much more public backlash.

~~~
colanderman
Why, are female orangutans known make these calls and elicit gender-reversed
responses?

~~~
tristanj
I'm pointing out that if the authors wrote an article titled "Male humans plan
their travel route up to one day in advance and communicate it to other
members of their species," the authors would be called out in the comments on
how human females are just as capable of doing so and how their paper is
incredibly derogatory to women. Comments like that are notably missing from
this thread even though humans and orangutans are closely related and would
share similar low-level social structures.

~~~
benjoffe
Do you think it's wrong to report about orangutans in this fashion even if
it's true? I don't understand your point.

Edit: also, your mention that comments like this are "notably missing from
this thread" makes little sense when there's currently only one other root
comment against the post.

