Monkey see – monkey do? Maybe not.

While browsing this evening, I came across an article that both I, with my interest in biology, and my wife, interested in teaching and childhood development could both enjoy. Carl Zimmer of The Loom has an interesting article in the New York times titled Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don’t. (A quick hint… if you get prompted for a username / password and don’t want to register, pull up the article at Google News. Links from there seem to let people get through without signing in. I have no idea why).

Scientists were studying developing chimps (which for the record, are apes, not monkeys) and comparing their development with that of children. The author approved of his preschool daughter participating in the study, and, as Zimmer does, his prose of the results were both interesting and humerous.

Driving into New Haven for our meeting, I felt as if Charlotte had just taken some kind of interspecies SAT. It was silly, but I hoped that Charlotte would show the chimps that she could see cause and effect as well as they could. Score one for Homo sapiens.

Essentially, young chimps can see past unnecessary steps in accomplishing a task, while young children are completely committed to imitating. The evolutionary ramifications of this are quite interesting.

Mr. Lyons sees his results as evidence that humans are hard-wired to learn by imitation, even when that is clearly not the best way to learn. If he is right, this represents a big evolutionary change from our ape ancestors. Other primates are bad at imitation. When they watch another primate doing something, they seem to focus on what its goals are and ignore its actions.

As human ancestors began to make complicated tools, figuring out goals might not have been good enough anymore. Hominids needed a way to register automatically what other hominids did, even if they didn’t understand the intentions behind them. They needed to imitate.