tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post114611451456259004..comments2024-03-08T04:09:09.836-06:00Comments on Mixing Memory: Monkeys Playing With Boys and Girls Toys: One for the Annals of Really Bad ResearchChrishttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08417970139690159046noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post-63417104583991209702008-06-04T03:42:00.000-05:002008-06-04T03:42:00.000-05:00I just found this study (and this post) today, but...I just found this study (and this post) today, but if you're actually interested, I can make some comments about why you shouldn't dismiss this study out of hand.<BR/><BR/>First off, the toys were chosen because human children exhibited preferences for those toys. Comparing the toys based on their hypothesized gender roles (human or monkey) is of course ridiculous, and your doing so seems strawman-ish. You've ignored the main reason the toys were chosen.<BR/><BR/>The male monkeys spent more time playing with toys in general, but the gender difference in playing time wasn't significantly significant. That means that conclusions can't be safely drawn about that point.<BR/><BR/>The graphs show the average time spent playing with each toy as a percentage of the total time spent playing with all the toys. For example, the male monkeys spent an average of 20% of their time playing with the ball, while female monkeys spent an average of 10% of their time playing with that toy. The graphs show that the data indicated that the monkeys did spend their playing time differently, when comparing the genders.<BR/><BR/>The monkeys as a whole were more drawn to the dog and the red pan (or pot?) than to, say, the picture book or the police car. But that doesn't change the fact that the genders chose to allocate their time differently, to a statistically significant extent. The male monkeys spent a larger percentage of their playing time with the toys the human males preferred than the females did with those toys. Likewise, the female monkeys spent more of their playing time in contact with the toys preferred by girls than the male monkeys did.<BR/><BR/>As far as I know, vervet monkeys' gender roles exist due to biological factors. The fact that the toy preference shown by human children is also found in primates (who theoretically are untouched by human gender pressures) seems to be strong support for the idea that mental gender differences do have a basis in biology. That much is based in act and research. Any hypotheses the authors make to explain this difference must be proven or disproven by a different study.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09125001952564704371noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post-15022499332652503622008-03-15T17:26:00.000-05:002008-03-15T17:26:00.000-05:00Hey James, this post is really old, so it's unlike...Hey James, this post is really old, so it's unlikely anyone will see any of this, but I should tell you that around here if you're going to make claims like you do in your post, you have to back them up. I've made my claims and arguments for them, in this post. If you think I've misunderstood something, tell me how.Chrishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08417970139690159046noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post-15430568949951142252008-03-15T16:50:00.000-05:002008-03-15T16:50:00.000-05:00Wow, your inability to understand basic science is...Wow, your inability to understand basic science is only exceeded by your pathological desire to have the world work in a way that is comfortable and familiar. Who are you again? You think you can hold a candle to Alexander’s work? If you took a look at the history of science you’d find people making very similar arguments against the heliocentric theory, biological evolution, the germ theory of disease, and continental drift. Um, are you going to get the towns folk together to storm the castle with torches and rakes? You really are pathetic.James Donaldsonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08624106616476464085noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post-1172801774751715132007-03-01T20:16:00.000-06:002007-03-01T20:16:00.000-06:00voila, as i said while i was writing, i reference ...voila, as i said while i was writing, i reference this write-up in my book, <A HREF="http://www.myhusbandbetty.com" REL="nofollow">she's not the man i married</A>, just published by seal press.helen_boydhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10449290480827158734noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post-1151912242782800502006-07-03T02:37:00.000-05:002006-07-03T02:37:00.000-05:00just wanted you to know i'm going to be citing you...just wanted you to know i'm going to be citing your post in an upcoming book. i thought it was a tidy little dissection of this study and its "conclusions."Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post-1146614730140483122006-05-02T19:05:00.000-05:002006-05-02T19:05:00.000-05:00Maybe that macaque was evolutionarily scripted to ...Maybe that macaque was evolutionarily scripted to be a car, and someone should see which sex of vervet would play with him most.<BR/><BR/>This was the first I'd heard of that particular experiement, so reading the takedown (and the elaborations in the replies) was both dismaying and fun. You'd think I'd've run through my lifetime supply of dismay by now. Thanks for the fun, anyway.<BR/><BR/>Just for the record, I don't think being a mere media monger is enough of an excuse to have swallowed something this silly whole. I'm one (and I'm listening!) and I spotted big holes in it immediately.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post-1146237867125222202006-04-28T10:24:00.000-05:002006-04-28T10:24:00.000-05:00This study made me cringe as well--glad to see you...This study made me cringe as well--glad to see you take it apart. Pretty silly. Having spent some time around lab monkeys (rhesus) and watching their behavior, I'd even question whether we have any idea what is going through a monkey's mind when it is "playing" with a "toy." It wasn't obvious to me that the monkeys I worked with recognized toys differently from other objects. <BR/><BR/>I'd rather first see some evidence that vervets are actually attracted to "toys" above other kinds of brightly-colored, arousing objects.<BR/>(one of our macaques really liked keys, which was a real problem when he decided to hide them in his cheek pouch. did that mean he had an evolutionarily scripted, natural predilection for janitorial work?)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post-1146166035010669252006-04-27T14:27:00.000-05:002006-04-27T14:27:00.000-05:00Anon, very good points. It's not clear from the wr...Anon, very good points. It's not clear from the write-up how much the coders knew about the individual monkeys, including whether they were aware of their sex, as they watched the videos and coded them.<BR/><BR/>I wonder why, after conducting this study, they didn't go to other primate species. Perhaps they tried but couldn't get significant results with the same stimuli, because female orangutans liked the orange ball.Chrishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08417970139690159046noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post-1146157928395787422006-04-27T12:12:00.000-05:002006-04-27T12:12:00.000-05:00Oops, one more even more fundamental flaw: Obvious...Oops, one more even more fundamental flaw: Obviously, the people presenting the toys to the monkeys knew how "masculine" they considered the toy. Did they also know which sex the monkey they were presenting it to was? It's not at all hard to believe that the humans' expectations for the monkey could have been picked up by the monkey.<BR/><BR/>I think it would be interesting to see the study repeated with a much larger toy sample, say 30 toys, *not* selected based on (a specific culture of) human sex-role expectations, and then ranked by order of preference by males and by females (it looks like in the actual experiment, the dog would have been #1 on both lists). Looking at which toys show up in significantly different ranks might tell you something about toy selection in vervet monkeys. But I doubt you could draw this kind of sweeping conclusion.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post-1146157173008465002006-04-27T11:59:00.000-05:002006-04-27T11:59:00.000-05:00You left out the funniest (and possibly worst) par...You left out the funniest (and possibly worst) part: generalizing to an entire clade of primates based on ambiguous data about some possibly similar behavior in two species!<BR/><BR/>Show me the same preferences in humans, either species of chimp, orangutans, at least one kind of gibbons and half a dozen *different* representative species of monkey and then you can maybe talk about it being a shared characteristic that developed early in primates. Until you have that kind of broad-based data, you can't rule out convergence, or even the possibility that the behaviors are only superficially similar.<BR/><BR/>Another thing I noticed: neither sex of monkeys liked the picture book much. Probably it was printed in a color scheme designed for the human eye... how similar is vervet monkey color vision to human? The monkeys may not even have been able to relate the pictures to objects they were familiar with because the colors were too different to monkey eyes. (Assuming, of course, that the pictures were of objects monkeys would be familiar with in the first place, which they may very well not have been. Why would a monkey want to look at pictures of humans or human artifacts?) Or maybe they just lacked the cultural knowledge that they should *open* the book because the interesting parts are on the inside.<BR/><BR/>I wonder now if we took a close look at the human studies, if we would see flaws just as serious.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post-1146141302405013312006-04-27T07:35:00.000-05:002006-04-27T07:35:00.000-05:00That was an awesome post! Thank you.That was an awesome post! Thank you.Sandrahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04943949264511919698noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post-1146119626520757612006-04-27T01:33:00.000-05:002006-04-27T01:33:00.000-05:00I don't really know their work. I read one other p...I don't really know their work. I read one other paper by Alexander, and it was certainly better than this one, but I can't speak for the overall quality of her work.Chrishttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08417970139690159046noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8182098.post-1146118482731612902006-04-27T01:14:00.000-05:002006-04-27T01:14:00.000-05:00it's rather amazing that researchers who do such s...it's rather amazing that researchers who do such sloppy work are actually allowed to experiment on actual animals.... Are they known for other, more reliable work or something?Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com