Archive for the ‘Behaviour’ Category
May 10, 2013
“Moral Turpitude” at the University of New Hampshire which does not amount to “moral delinquency of a grave order” can still lead to dismissal. Seems to me like playing with words to be able to apply some common sense. But the UNH use of “to grieve” may be innovative if a little odd.
The University of New Hampshire has terminated the employment of a Professor for “moral turpitude”. The University press release (my emphasis):
After an extensive review of the facts, Provost John Aber has determined that it is appropriate to terminate the employment of Marco Dorfsman, associate professor of Spanish, effective May 17, 2013. Professor Dorfsman admitted to intentionally lowering the student evaluations of another faculty member. This serious breach of ethical standards constitutes moral turpitude that cannot be tolerated at UNH.
Provost Aber’s determination was informed by the recommendation of the Professional Standards Committee (PSC) of the Faculty Senate. The PSC members unanimously agreed that Professor Dorfsman’s conduct constituted moral turpitude and “evinces a gross disregard for the rights of others, is a clear and intentional breach of duties owed to others and to the university by virtue of employment at UNH and membership in the profession, in which such an act is considered contrary to the accepted and expected rules of moral behavior, justice, or honesty, and evokes condemnation.” The PSC’s recommendation contained a range of possible sanctions.
The provost’s decision reinforces UNH’s commitment to upholding and teaching ethical behavior. Professor Dorfsman’s conduct disregarded the rights of his colleague, undermined the evaluations submitted by our students (a prime source of data for employment decisions for all instructors), and corrupted an important process by which our faculty’s teaching effectiveness is measured.
If Professor Dorfsman decides to grieve the provost’s dismissal decision, the case will be decided by an arbitrator.
“To grieve” obviously has a rather special meaning at UNH. Clearly it cannot just mean “to sorrow” but must (also) mean “to contest” or “to pursue a grievance” which is not an action I normally associate with “grieving”. I wonder how – if he decides to contest the dismissal – he is expected to demonstrate his grieving. Perhaps there is a threshold of proof of pain or sorrow or hurt or grief that he must first attain?
The CHE reports that “last year the university agreed to a new contract with its faculty union that eased the standard of discipline to allow the institution to fire professors who demonstrate moral turpitude”. This use of “moral turpitude” was introduced last year instead of “moral delinquency of a grave order”:
After a long stalemate, the University of New Hampshire has agreed to a new contract with its faculty union that lowers the threshold for the university to take disciplinary action against professors, according to Foster’s Daily Democrat. The sticking point in the contract talks stemmed from a 2009 incident in which a professor was convicted of indecent exposure, yet later allowed by an arbitrator to keep his job. Administrators had sought to fire the professor, but the arbitrator ruled that his crime, while morally delinquent, did not rise to the old contract’s standard of “moral delinquency of a grave order.” The faculty union objected to the university’s attempt to rewrite the contract, saying that the proposed disciplinary provisions were too broad. The language in the new contract has been changed to allow the university to fire professors who demonstrate “moral turpitude,” therefore easing the disciplinary standard, according to the newspaper.
Tags:ethics, Marco Dorfsman, Moral turpitude, to grieve, UNH, University of New Hampshire, use of language
Posted in Academic misconduct, Behaviour, Ethics, Language | Comments Off on “Moral Turpitude” at University of New Hampshire
May 10, 2013
Despicable when a newspaper of the stature of the Financial Times has to resort to this kind of shoddy journalism.
This is from Svenska Dagbladet (my free translation):
You are an Embarrassment Financial Times!
It must be deplored that some reporters cold-bloodedly invented information about the new WTO Director Roberto Azevedo.
The day after the World Trade Organization had chosen the Brazilian diplomat as new head a major article was published in the prestigious Financial Times. It began with a detailed description of how Azevedo appeared when he came out of the WTO headquarters in Geneva at 18.30 on Tuesday night to meet a large press contingent. “He came out of the headquarters and met an expectant press gang outside,” writes the paper’s two reporters. The report continues on how Azevedo was quiet and did not say anything. But his happy facial expressions and his smile revealed that he had been elected. A smile that was also used in the title:
The FT Headline: “Sealed with a smile: how Brazil got its man Azevêdo into the WTO”
By Claire Jones in London and Joseph Leahy in São Paulo Last updated: May 8, 2013 9:26 pm
The Brazilian candidate betrayed his success with a smile.
Just after 6.30pm local time on Tuesday evening, Roberto Azevêdo made his way out of the World Trade Organisation’s Geneva headquarters to find an expectant press pack gathered outside.
The Brazilian ambassador to the WTO remained silent. But his cheery expression was a giveaway: minutes earlier, Mr Azevêdo had been told he had secured the nomination to replace Pascal Lamy. With that, he capped an almost five-month campaign by Brazil that saw him visit 47 countries and join President Dilma Rousseff in key meetings with global leaders as she lobbied on his behalf. …
The Svenska Dagbladet continues:
Not just embarrassing, it was just not true.
Azevedo did not come out of the WTO headquarters.
Nor was he silent, nor did he smile and he certainly did not meet any press contingent. He was not even there!.
He sat and waited nervously with Brazil’s UN delegation several kilometers away.
The only one who received the news at WTO headquarters was Brazil’s deputy ambassador Estanislau Amaral.
I know this along with all the other journalists with certainty because we were there. We saw Amaral hurrying out, spoke briefly with him, saw him go off in his official car. No Azevedo in sight. Moreover a picture of Azevedo was sent on Twitter at that moment was sitting in his office in a completely different part of town with his wife Maria.
The FT journalists were not even there.
One sat in London, Claire Jones, and one in Sao Paulo, Joseph Leahy. They invented the story that implied their presence and to provide a personal touch. Not a very good journalistic idea for a magazine that should be concerned about its credibility and its reputation.
They could learn from what happened with journalists at Bloomberg this week. Two journalists in Prague published an article on the Czech National Bank one minute ahead of an embargo. It caused Bloomberg’s news director in Washington to hit the roof, take the next plane to Prague and and fire them on the spot. Journalistic reliability is “extremely important” was the explanation.
Tags:Brazil, Claire Jones, Financial Times, FT, inventing facts, Joseph Leahy, Roberto Azevedo, shoddy journalism, WTO
Posted in Behaviour, Brazil, Ethics, Media | Comments Off on Financial Times accused of lying and shoddy journalism
May 9, 2013
Fertility rates are dropping sharply across the world and simple arithmetic tells us that by 2100 world population will be steady or declining slightly. In fact, rather than facing a population explosion and food shortages we will be facing the demographic challenges of a stable or declining population together with an increase in longevity. A new flexibility in the patterns of working will be needed as the populations in work reduce in proportion to those beyond retirement age. Retirement age itself will have to increase.
Yet it seems to me that the utterly alarmist, Malthusian, catastrophe scenarios for world population put forward in the 1970’s and 80’s by the Club of Rome, Ehrlich and other doom-mongers still prevail as “conventional wisdom” – even though it has long been established that their basic assumptions were plain wrong. For some reason environmentalists are the most ardent deniers of what the arithmetic says. They are the first to proclaim the dangers of population explosions yet are extremely loth to abandon catastrophe scenarios they have espoused when they are shown to be exaggerated or false.
I was therefore glad to see the subject getting attention in GeoCurrents where Martin W Lewis addresses and presents the sharply falling fertility rates around the world and in the various States in India. His maps are particularly well put together. The average fertlity rate in India is now down to 2.5 but many of the States fall well below the “replacement rate” of 2.2. The variation of fertility rates is impacted by the “usual suspects”; GDP, female literacy, proportion of urban dwellers, life expectancy, the Human Development Index (HDI) and the availability of electricity. But as Lewis shows there is also a striking correlation between fertility and TV ownership (seems plausible) and between fertility rates and the exposure of women to the media (also very plausible).
India’s Plummeting Birthrate: A Television-Induced Transformation?
…. It can be deceptive, however, to view India as an undivided whole. As shown on the map posted here, fertility figures for half of India are actually below replacement level. Were it not for the Hindi-speaking heartland, India would already be looking at population stabilization and even decline. All the states of southern India post TFR figures below 1.9. A number of states in the far north and the northeast boast similarly low fertility levels, including West Bengal, noted for its swarming metropolis of Calcutta (Kolkata).
(from GeoCurrents)
India’s geographical birthrate disparities, coupled with the country’s admirable ability to collect socio-economic data, allow us to carefully examine ideas about fertility decline. The remainder of this post will do so through cartography, comparing the Indian fertility-rate map with maps of other social and economic indicators. …….
……
Some scholars have argued that recent fertility decreases in India and elsewhere in the Third World are more specifically linked to one technological innovation: television. The TV hypothesis is well-known in the field, discussed, for example, in the LiveScience article on the African population explosion mentioned above. In regard to India, Robert Jensen and Emily Oster argue persuasively that television works this magic mostly by enhancing the social position of women. As they state in their abstract:
This paper explores the effect of the introduction of cable television on women’s status in rural India. Using a three-year, individual-level panel dataset, we find that the introduction of cable television is associated with significant decreases in the reported acceptability of domestic violence towards women and son preference, as well as increases in women’s autonomy and decreases in fertility. We also find suggestive evidence that exposure to cable increases school enrollment for younger children, perhaps through increased participation of women in household decision-making. We argue that the results are not driven by pre-existing differential trends.
As it turns out, the map of television ownership in India does bear a particularly close resemblance to the fertility map. Two anomalously low-fertility states with low levels of female education, Andhra Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir, score relatively high on TV penetration, as does West Bengal, which lags on several other important socio-economic indicators. The correlation is far from perfect: Mizoram ranks higher on the TV chart than its fertility figures would indicate, whereas Odisha and Assam rank lower. Odisha and Assam turn out to be a bit less exceptional in a related but broader and more gender-focused metric, that of “female exposure to media.” These figures, which include a television component, seem to provide the best overall correlation with the spatial patterns of Indian fertility.
(from GeoCurrents)
Tags:Club of Rome, fertility decline, GeoCurrents, India, Martin W Lewis, population decline, Total fertility rate
Posted in Aging, Behaviour, Demographics, India | Comments Off on India’s plummeting birth rates illustrate the coming population decline
May 9, 2013
Back in 2009, Dr Jeremy Spencer from the University of Reading published a paper in the British Journal of Nutrition about how drinking champagne was good for your heart.
image – LiveScience
Research from the University of Reading suggests that two glasses of Champagne a day may be good for your heart and circulation. The researchers have found that drinking Champagne wine daily in moderate amounts causes improvements in the way blood vessels function. ……
….. Dr Jeremy Spencer, from the Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences said: “Our research has shown that drinking around two glasses of Champagne can have beneficial effects on the way blood vessels function, in a similar way to that observed with red wine. We always encourage a responsible approach to alcohol consumption, but the fact that drinking Champagne has the potential to reduce the risks of suffering from cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and stroke, is very exciting news.”
Four years on he is now Professor of Nutritional Biochemistry and Medicine and – presumably – many cases of champagne later, he has just published another paper on the benefits of champagne in improving memory and holding back dementia .
New research shows that drinking one to three glasses of champagne a week may counteract the memory loss associated with ageing, and could help delay the onset of degenerative brain disorders, such as dementia.
Scientists at the University of Reading have shown that the phenolic compounds found in champagne can improve spatial memory, which is responsible for recording information about one’s environment, and storing the information for future navigation. ….
….. Professor Jeremy Spencer, Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences, University of Reading, said: “These exciting results illustrate for the first time that the moderate consumption of champagne has the potential to influence cognitive functioning, such as memory. Such observations have previously been reported with red wine, through the actions of flavonoids contained within it.
“However, our research shows that champagne, which lacks flavonoids, is also capable of influencing brain function through the actions of smaller phenolic compounds, previously thought to lack biological activity. …
The paper is published in Antioxidants and Redox Signalling.
I have a very clear “vision” of what Professor Spencer’s lab might look like. A lot more genteel than a pub or a bar — since it’s champagne! I don’t suppose Prof. Spencer has much difficulty in recruiting post-grads and post-docs (whose alcohol consumption capacity is legendary and insatiable). The Department of Food and Nutritional Sciences boasts that it has over 100 PhD and MPhil students!
We currently have over 100 PhD and MPhil students, who each belong to one or more of our 3 research groups:
- Food and Bioprocessing Sciences
- Food Microbial Sciences
- Human Nutrition
Since 1998, we have enjoyed a 97-100% pass rate. Sponsorship comes from research councils, Government departments, the European Union, charities, industry, the Reading Endowment Trust Fund and overseas scholarships.
Note — a 97 – 100% pass rate!
Tags:Champagne, Jeremy Spencer, Pinot meunier, Pinot Noir, Reading University
Posted in Behaviour, Medicine, Memory, Science | 2 Comments »
May 8, 2013
I note that battle lines are being drawn in the US between the parties concerning peer review and the NSF. The Republicans are questioning a number of NSF grants and demanding some justification of the review process for funding awards. The Democrats are taking this as an heretical attack on SCIENCE. But I also note that one important distinction is not being drawn.
Choosing projects for funding from the public purse is fundamentally a political process and requires justification in simple terms to the providers of that funding (the taxpayer). While peer review – for all its faults – may be used to select projects the reviewers cannot escape the responsibility to justify their selections to the funders (and not just to the funding organisation – NSF – set up to channel the funds). Of course the NSF would prefer that they have complete freedom in disbursing the funds allocated to them in any way they please – but that won’t wash. The acceptance of public funds demands public accountability.
Peer review for publication is a very different thing. This should be in – engineering terms – a “Quality gate”. It should be a check of the quality of the work done and its independence. But here reviewers also carry a “fiduciary” responsibility which is not always met. The reviewers carry an obligation of trust and ethical propriety not only to the journals they serve but also to the readers and subscribers of that journal. Where funding is involved this “fiduciary” responsibility extends to the providers of the funds. Unlike reviewers for funding selection who – I think – must be able to justify their choices to a wider audience than the “in-crowd”, the publication reviewer does not need to provide explanations for his opinions. But his opinions cannot be secret opinions – and that requires that such reviewers not be anonymous and that their opinions be available. Journal editors have the final responsibility for what is published or not. But reviewers should not escape being held responsible and accountable for their share of such decisions. They cannot escape from ownership and consequences of their own opinions and judgements on which decisions to publish or reject may be based.
Financial auditors cannot escape their fiduciary responsibilities (though they often escape accountability). Can the scientific community continue to take – or appear to take – less responsibility than the financial community? Accountability is quite another matter.
ScienceInsider:
The new chair of the House of Representatives science committee has drafted a bill that, in effect, would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress. For good measure, it would also set in motion a process to determine whether the same criteria should be adopted by every other federal science agency.
The legislation, being worked up by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), represents the latest—and bluntest—attack on NSF by congressional Republicans seeking to halt what they believe is frivolous and wasteful research being funded in the social sciences. Last month, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) successfully attached language to a 2013 spending bill that prohibits NSF from funding any political science research for the rest of the fiscal year unless its director certifies that it pertains to economic development or national security. Smith’s draft bill, called the “High Quality Research Act,” would apply similar language to NSF’s entire research portfolio across all the disciplines that it supports.
Nature:
In a brief 15-minute speech today, US President Barack Obama championed independence for the peer-review process, in front of an audience of elite researchers at the 150th annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC.
“In order for us to maintain our edge, we’ve got to protect our rigorous peer review system,” Obama said. His support comes on the heels of draft legislation, dated 18 April, that ScienceInsider reports is being discussed by the chairman of the US House of Representatives Science Committee, Lamar Smith (Republican, Texas). That legislation would overhaul peer review of grants submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and require the NSF director to certify each funded project as benefitting the economic or public health of the United States.
Tags:Barack Obama, fiduciary responsibility, funding peer review, Lamar Smith, National Science Foundation, nsf grants, peer review, Publication peer review, United States
Posted in Behaviour, Politics, Science | Comments Off on Peer review for funding is different to that for publication
May 7, 2013
Oh Good Grief!
As if the field of psychology did not have enough scandal and fakery already.
A childish spat between academics at Rutgers and infantile behaviour by Robert Trivers, a Professor of Anthropology who ought to know better. His opponent is William Brown, now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire. But in this infantile academic spat it does seem as if the “establishment” are circling the wagons. I suspect that Robert Trivers, and Nature and other psychology heavyweights will prevail — but only to the further discredit of the discipline and its narcissistic “star performers”.
Can’t they just both be spanked — in public? or put in the stocks?
A study featured in Nature in 2005 has drawn suspicion from university officials and one of its authors.
Nature:
Few researchers have tried harder than Robert Trivers to retract one of their own papers. In 2005, Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, published an attention-grabbing finding: Jamaican teenagers with a high degree of body symmetry were more likely to be rated ‘good dancers’ by their peers than were those with less symmetrical bodies. The study, which suggested that dancing is a signal for sexual selection in humans, was featured on the cover of this journal (W. M. Brown et al. Nature 438, 1148–1150; 2005).
But two years later, Trivers began to suspect that the study data had been faked by one of his co-authors, William Brown, a postdoctoral researcher at the time. In seeking a retraction, Trivers self-published The Anatomy of a Fraud, a small book detailing what he saw as evidence of data fabrication. Later, Trivers had a verbal altercation over the matter with a close colleague and was temporarily banned from campus.
An investigation of the case, completed by Rutgers and released publicly last month, now seems to validate Trivers’ allegations. Brown disputes the university’s finding, but it could help to clear the controversy that has clouded Trivers’ reputation as the author of several pioneering papers in the 1970s. For example, Trivers advanced an influential theory of ‘reciprocal altruism’, in which people behave unselfishly and hope that they will later be rewarded for their good deeds. He also analysed human sexuality in terms of the investments that mothers and fathers each make in child-rearing. ….
In 2008, Trivers sought to retract the paper, but found the editors at Nature reluctant to do so. The paper remains unretracted, although a spokeswoman for Nature says that the case is under “active consideration”. (Information available to Nature’s research-manuscript editors is not generally shared with its reporters.) ….
…. Last year, the investigation concluded that there was “clear and convincing” evidence of fabrication by Brown, who it alleged had altered overall asymmetry measures of dancers to support the notion that better dancers were more symmetrical. The report was not published for more than a year, at which point Trivers posted it online. Rutgers has sent a copy to the NSF’s inspector-general, who is reviewing it to determine what action, if any, to take. ……
Brown, now a psychologist at the University of Bedfordshire, UK, denies fabricating the data. He criticizes the Rutgers investigation for comparing his data set with the one from Trivers’ group rather than the original hard copies of the source data.
Tags:Nature, Robert Trivers, Rutgers University, University of Bedfordshire, William Brown
Posted in Academic misconduct, Behaviour, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on Faking the rythm: infantile academic spat at Rutgers University
May 7, 2013
Reuters reports that EU politicians are to meet at a summit to reassess energy policy in the post-fracking world (and – but this is not to be admitted under pain of being shunned – a post-global-warming reality). I just note that politicians will be the most adept at changing direction aand taking credit for moving away from global warming orthodoxy. Many scientists will find their own exit strategies but many will find it difficult to find the rationale to move away from what has become their religion and their livelihood. The least adept at embracing the new reality will the “climate bureaucrats” whose comfortable existence depends upon the global warming religion continuing in force. And all those who have milked the EU subsidy regime for all its worth will not be pleased but they will just move on to the next scam.
(Reuters) – EU heads of state and government will seek ways to limit the impact of energy costs on European competitiveness at a summit this month, a draft document seen by Reuters showed.
European industry says it is disadvantaged because of the price it pays for energy compared with the United States, where the shale gas revolution has drastically lowered costs.
The document ahead of the May 22 EU summit, which has energy and taxation on the agenda, calls for examination of the impact of energy prices and costs and action to limit the effects.
One option is developing the European Union’s own shale gas resources, although this is not mentioned directly. Instead, the draft refers to safe and sustainable development of “indigenous sources of energy”.
Europe’s very different geography and land ownership would make it hard for the European Union to rival the United States in shale gas, but the executive European Commission is working on a framework to guide prospectors.
The leaders are expected to urge the Commission to analyze energy prices and costs in member states “with a particular focus on the EU’s competitiveness” against global rivals.
The draft also points to massive investment costs in boosting power generation and networks as likely to drive up energy prices.
Arguments over energy costs have featured prominently in political debate ahead of German elections and played a part in blocking a Commission proposal to boost carbon prices on the EU market.
The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), where carbon prices have sunk to record lows, is not on the draft agenda, but it could be debated on the sidelines of the summit, EU sources have said.
Efforts to repair that market are also a focus of attention for the European Parliament.
Tags:Emissions trading, ETS, European Union, fracking, global warming, Shale gas
Posted in Alarmism, Behaviour, Climate, Energy, Politics | 1 Comment »
May 5, 2013
Either the Royal Society has sold a Fellowship or perhaps they believe that HRH Prince Andrew, the Duke of York will bring great credit to the Society and the scientific community. A remarkable vote where only a “Yes” vote was permitted. No doubt we will hear that there was a clear consensus in favour and that his elevation was supported by – wait for it – all those who supported him!
To put it mildly, Randy Andy has a rather spotted biography.
Either way it does little credit to the Royal Society or its Fellows.
The Guardian:
After more than 350 years of largely happy association with assorted royalty Britain’s pre-eminent scientific institution, the Royal Society, faces unprecedented dissent from members after Prince Andrew was elected to become a fellow.
While the objections to the prince mainly centre on his slightly chequered career as a royal, a small number among the 1,450 or so Royal Societyfellowship are asking the wider question of whether it is time for an institution based on science to end the practice of honouring people on the basis of heredity.
The controversy has been fuelled by the way the prince was elected to be a royal fellow, a status he shares with Princes Philip, Charles and William, Princess Anne and the Duke of Kent, while the Queen is the organisation’s patron. The ballots sent out to ordinary fellows provided only one box to tick, supporting the measure. Those opposed had to write “no” themselves or otherwise mark or spoil the paper. …
Tags:FRS, Prince Andrew Duke of York, Randy Andy, Royal Society
Posted in Academic misconduct, Behaviour, Corruption | Comments Off on Randy Andy FRS
May 4, 2013
Being able to distinguish between “more” and “less” is – most likely – a capability that is a pre-requisite for the evolutionary development of the ability to count which itself must lead to the invention of numbers. Recent experiments with baboons demonstrates that they have a clear ability to make quite complex more/less distinctions.
Allison M. Barnard, Kelly D. Hughes, Regina R. Gerhardt, Louis DiVincenti, Jenna M. Bovee and Jessica F. Cantlon.Inherently Analog Quantity Representations in Olive Baboons (Papio anubis). Frontiers in Comparative Psychology, 2013 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00253
From the University of Rochester press release:
… Now a new study with a troop of zoo baboons and lots of peanuts shows that a less obvious trait—the ability to understand numbers—also is shared by man and his primate cousins.
“The human capacity for complex symbolic math is clearly unique to our species,” says co-author Jessica Cantlon, assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. “But where did this numeric prowess come from? In this study we’ve shown that non-human primates also possess basic quantitative abilities. In fact, non-human primates can be as accurate at discriminating between different quantities as a human child.”
“This tells us that non-human primates have in common with humans a fundamental ability to make approximate quantity judgments,” says Cantlon. “Humans build on this talent by learning number words and developing a linguistic system of numbers, but in the absence of language and counting, complex math abilities do still exist.” ……
……… The baboons’ choices, conclude the authors, clearly relied on this latter “more than” or “less than” cognitive approach, known as the analog system. The baboons were able to consistently discriminate pairs with numbers larger than three as long as the relative difference between the peanuts in each cup was large. Research has shown that children who have not yet learned to count also depend on such comparisons to discriminate between number groups, as do human adults when they are required to quickly estimate quantity.
Studies with other animals, including birds, lemurs, chimpanzees, and even fish, have also revealed a similar ability to estimate relative quantity, but scientists have been wary of the findings because much of this research is limited to animals trained extensively in experimental procedures. The concern is that the results could reflect more about the experimenters than about the innate ability of the animals. ……..
……… To rule out such influence, the study relied on zoo baboons with no prior exposure to experimental procedures. Additionally, a control condition tested for human bias by using two experimenters—each blind to the contents of the other cup—and found that the choice patterns remained unchanged.
A final experiment tested two baboons over 130 more trials. The monkeys showed little improvement in their choice rate, indicating that learning did not play a significant role in understanding quantity.
“What’s surprising is that without any prior training, these animals have the ability to solve numerical problems,” says Cantlon. The results indicate that baboons not only use comparisons to understand numbers, but that these abilities occur naturally and in the wild, the authors conclude. …….
Tags:baboons, counting, evolution cognitive psychology, humans, more and less, numbers
Posted in Behaviour, Evolution, Mathematics, psychology | Comments Off on Baboons can tell “more” from “less” – but that is still a long way from counting
The k2p blog 