Monkeys: they can make monkeys out of their elders

"Can monkeys mislead?", asks Jef Akst at The Scientist (03 June 2009, paywall).

Capuchin monkeys cry "predator" to trick more senior members of their troop into fleeing the dinner table, leaving more food for themselves, according to a ...

Here are some comments, andalso here.

I don't understand doubt as to whether monkeys can mislead when dogs and cats can do the same thing. Many are the cats who pretended to swallow a vet's pill I was administering. But - suddenly suspicious, I insisted on checking their gums, and sure enough, there the pill was, ready to be spit out in an obscure corner as soon as I wasn't looking. Later, I learned the trick of sticking the pill far below the cat's gag reflex, shutting its mouth, and raising its face toward the ceiling, while girdling its shoulders.

Sadly, the elderly felines never realized the relationship between the pills and their continued good health. They probably just thought I was being aggressive to demonstrate my superiority or something.

Another one for the "apes and monkeys (but not cats) are just like people" file, I guess ...

Mother nature is a bitch files: Primate ancestor had SMALL brain

Many people, loosening their belt after a good dinner, can tell you the fine old materialist folk tale about how the primates were naturally selected for survival and increasing intelligence because they happened to have developed large brains, undoubtedly to control vision or something. According to a recent report in New Scientist , the earliest cat-size primate had a small brain:

This finding - based on a newly described fossil skull - means that large brains evolved independently in new- and old-world primates. It also suggests that evolutionary anthropologists may have to rethink some cherished theories about why such big, powerful brains evolved.

[ ... ]

... diurnality, acute vision and group living - have often been advanced as reasons why primates evolved their large brains. However, Aegyptopithecus, which has all three while still having a tiny brain, argues against these theories, says Simons.

Few, if any, will reflect on the significance of the fact that previous theory depended on the primate ancestor having a large brain - but it apparently didn't. They will simply announce a new theory according to which it had to have a small brain.

If you follow current science and society controversies, you will often hear people say that the Darwinian interpretation of evolution (Darwinism) - the interpretation on which the original primate story depended - is "massively confirmed". And therefore why dissenters from it are completely misguided.

This incident helps explain why Darwinism is massively confirmed - because no evidence ever counts against it.

After a significant disconfirmation, adherents simply regroup around a Darwinist interpretation that has not yet been disconfirmed. No one asks whether a better explanation might be found outside the paradigm.

For example, if the intelligent design theorists are right and evolution is guided, the development of advanced brains in primates would not require that the original primate happened to have a superior brain to its fellow creatures, only that it had a suitable platform on which such a brain could be built. And that suitable platform needn't be an accident either.