Apekind Arising!

The Apekind are coming for us! The chimps, the Barbarys, the orangutans, the gibbons, the monkeys, the gorillas, those sneaky rhesus monkeys — they’re all smarter than we are, more moral, prettier, they’re evolving faster than we are, they have more research money than we do, and they have access to better cigarettes!

The research documenting Apekind’s progression to pass us is undeniable:

“Like humans, monkeys benefit enormously from being actively involved in learning instead of having information presented to them passively,” said Nate Kornell, a UCLA postdoctoral scholar in psychology and lead author of the study, which appears in the August issue of the journal Psychological Science.”The advantage of active learning appears to be a fundamental property of memory in humans and nonhumans alike.” In Kornell’s study, conducted when he was a psychology graduate student at Columbia University, two rhesus macaque monkeys learned to place five photographs in a particular order. The photographs were displayed on a touch-screen computer monitor similar to those found on ATMs.

When the monkeys pressed a correct photograph, a border appeared around it. When either monkey pressed all five photographs in the correct order, he received a food reward. The chance of guessing all five accurately is less than one percent.

Apekind are all about advancement — while we reject the perception of unfairness even if it means we starve:

LEIPZIG, Germany, Oct. 8 (UPI) — German researchers have demonstrated chimpanzees make choices that protect their self-interest more consistently than do humans. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig studied the chimp’s choices by using an economic game with two players. In the game, a human or chimpanzee who receives something of value can offer to share it with another. If the proposed share is rejected, neither player gets anything. Humans typically make offers close to 50 percent of the reward.They also reject as unfair offers of significantly less than half of the reward, even though this choice means they get nothing. The study, however, showed chimpanzees reliably made offers of substantially less than 50 percent, and accepted offers of any size, no matter how small. The researchers concluded chimpanzees do not show a willingness to make fair offers and reject unfair ones. In this way, they protect their self interest and are unwilling to pay a cost to punish someone they perceive as unfair.

Monkey see, monkey do: They’re all about comfort, too!

The way human adults grasp objects is typically influenced more by their knowledge of what they intend to do with the objects than the objects’ immediate appearance. Psychologists call this the “end-state comfort effect,” when we adopt initially unusual, and perhaps uncomfortable, postures to make it easier to actually use an object. For example, waiters will pick up an inverted glass with their thumb pointing down if they plan to pour water into the glass.While grabbing thumb-down may feel awkward at first, it allows the waiter to be more comfortable when the glass is turned over and water poured inside. Pennsylvania State University psychologists, Dan Weiss, Jason Wark, and David Rosenbaum decided to see if cotton-top tamarins (non-tool users) would show the end-state comfort effect. In the first experiment, Weiss and colleagues presented the monkeys with a small cup containing a marshmallow.

The cup was either suspended upright or upside down. Would these monkeys, a non-tool using species, adopt an unusual grasping pattern while removing the cup from the apparatus to retrieve the marshmallow? The monkeys grabbed the inverted cup with their thumb pointing down, thereby behaving much like human adults. In the second experiment, the monkeys were confronted with a new handle shape and still displayed grasps that were consistent with end-state comfort.

Can true hot monkey love be that far behind?

Apekind Arising!

They know our weaknesses because they’ve had them before us!

They already know our ways and they have defined our means before us! How soon before we become a nation ruled by — and then a world populated by — Apekind?