Sunday, July 18, 2010

This is the Stuff of Which We are Made

John D. Hawks is a paleontologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has a blog and I found the following bit posted there:
In one group of capuchins, the team's long-term observations have allowed them to witness a rare event: the emergence of a new tradition. In what Perry calls a "bizarre" and "high-risk" ritual, the monkeys poke each other's eyeballs. One monkey will insert his or her long, sharp, dirty fingernail deep into the eye socket of another animal, between the eyelid and the eyeball, up to the first knuckle. In videos Perry played for the meeting, the monkeys on the receiving end of the fingernail, typically social allies, could be seen to grimace and bat their eyelids furiously (as did many members of the audience) but did not attempt to remove the finger or otherwise object to the treatment. Indeed, during these eye-poking sessions, which last up to an hour, monkeys insisted on the finger being reinserted if it popped out of the eye socket.

Why would the monkeys do something potentially dangerous? Perry suggests that capuchins, which, like humans, are highly cooperative and live in large groups, use this apparently pain-inflicting behavior to test the strength of their social bonds.
Ouch! This is one of the more painful "trials" a social animal puts other through to test the social bond. I haven't seen videos or pictures, but my mental picture is painful enough.

I'm always amazed at the "tests" that people put their friends and lovers through. The above shows it to be natural, but who would like to think that this kind of petty torture is "the stuff of which we are made"... at least in the sense of making our social bonds. But we do. While you don't see humans sitting around poking their finger into other people's eye sockets, there is something similar going on in most social relationships. The stakes are high, so the costs have to be correspondingly high as well. Ouch!

Hawks points out that the most visible form on this "testing" is in group hazing rituals.

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