Re: virus: Do we have a WOW MORRIS here?

Dave Pape (davepape@dial.pipex.com)
Wed, 26 Feb 1997 23:17:00 GMT

At 16:44 25/02/97 -0800, Lior wrote:
>Dave wrote:
>Thought while on the London Underground: People are pretty fcken mellow
>apes... I can't imagine that you could stuff a tube train with gorillas,
>send it round the Circle Line for an hour, and expect as few
>fights/sexual
>episodes as you get with humans. This makes me really want to do the
>experiment, only I wouldn't like to be the one who got the gorillas out
>of
>the tube train afterwards.
>----
>It's illogical (and I think unproved) that gorillas are as violent as
>you say. If it was so, they wouldn't survive period. And once you're
>accustomed to being stuffed in a tube with too much of your kind, fight
>episodes aren't so common.

Unproved maybe. Except I'm sure that chimps/gorillas resolve diagreements
less subtlely than humans because they can't use symbolic trade, don't have
legal systems, can't explain why there's a misunderstanding, etc etc.

PLUS urban humans (see Des Morris) tend to ignore each other a lot, which I
reckon helps take the heat out of a lot of interactions in crowded situations...

Mind you, maybe urban gorillas could learn that strategy too.

Whatever, the main aim of the post was that I love the mental image of
animal psychologists trying to get 600 crazy gorillas off a tube train after
the experiment which we'd need to (scientifically) decide which of us was right.

Jeez! I said "right"!

Dave Pape
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