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[Diane Tinsley <dtinsley AT christiancentury.org>]

i found this quite disturbing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7654267.stm

Monkeys work in Japanese restaurant

A restaurant in Japan has some unusual waiting staff on its books -  
two macaque monkeys.
Yatchan and Fukuchan serve customers hot towels and drinks, and are  
given soya beans as tips.
The monkeys are family pets who have been allowed to help in the bar.  
Animal rights regulations mean the premises have been visited to  
ensure the creatures are not being mistreated.
 
> From josh.greenman AT gmail.com  Mon Oct 13 23:36:01 2008
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Subject: [monkeywire] Tools maketh the monkey
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http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg20026772.100-tools-maketh-the-monkey.html

Tools maketh the monkey
08 October 2008
Laura Spinney

Pin is no ordinary monkey. If you stick out your tongue at her, she'll
return the compliment. If you show her how to open a latched box,
she'll rotate the box until she finds the latch, then open it herself.
Place a piece of fruit just out of reach and she'll pick up a rake and
drag the fruit towards her. All of which is remarkable, because
monkeys are not natural imitators and nor, as a rule, do they use
tools.

Pin is a Japanese macaque trained by Atsushi Iriki, head of the
Laboratory for Symbolic Cognitive Development at the RIKEN Brain
Science Institute in Wako, Japan. According to Iriki, Pin's remarkable
abilities offer an unprecedented window on one of the most important
events in evolution: the emergence of human intelligence.

It's well known that non-human primates can be taught to do very
human-like things: chimps and orang-utans have wowed the world with
their ability to learn sign language, for example. But the general
assumption is that there is an immutable upper limit to their
abilities. Iriki thinks otherwise. "It is often said that a monkey has
the ability of a 2-year-old kid, and an ape that of a 7-year-old, but
it's not like that," he says. "Through training, you can extend the
spectrum of the monkey's ability closer to a human-like intelligence."

Iriki is not attempting to raise a race of supersmart monkeys. He is
much more interested in finding out what macaques can tell us about
ourselves.

His controversial hypothesis is that the macaque brain contains all
the components that gave rise to human intelligence - it's just that
they have never been assembled. In the macaque's natural environment,
there was no demand for it. But put the macaques in a new environment,
place new demands on them, and you can unlock that potential. This,
Iriki says, is the nearest thing we have to experimentally rerunning
the tape of human evolution to reveal how our primate ancestors went
from leaping about in trees to writing symphonies and sending
spacecraft to the moon (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society B, vol 363, p 2229).

Iriki's starting point, like that of many others before him, is that
the explosion of human intellectual abilities was triggered by tool
use. When primates stood up on their hind legs, they freed up their
hands to use tools. This somehow unleashed a cascade of brain changes
that led, slowly but inexorably, to the evolution of higher cognitive
powers such as self-awareness, language and intelligence.

The tool hypothesis has been around for many years, but exactly how
tools kick-started a revolution remains unclear. It is also at odds
with the fossil record. The earliest known stone tools are about 2
million years old, yet nothing resembling fully intelligent behaviour
emerged until 200,000 years ago. "The idea that you start using tools
and, bang, all the rest follows - that's not what the fossil record
seems to suggest," says social neuroscientist Christian Keysers at the
University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands.

Iriki's unique perspective on the problem is that tool use was the
catalyst for a much more important mental breakthrough, albeit one
that took 1.8 million years to unfold: the emergence of a sense of
self. By this he means the ability to conceptualise one's own
existence in time, plan for the future and understand "intentionality"
- your capacity to change your environment.

So how did tool use give rise to a sense of self? Iriki believes the
starting point is the way tools induce a modification of body image -
the basic mental representation of "self" that consists of knowing
where the physical body ends and the environment begins. When we use
tools such as hammers or tennis rackets, we integrate them into our
body image; our brains treat them as a temporary extension of our hand
or arm. To turn a stone or a stick into a tool, our ancestors would
have to have done the same. This, Iriki argues, led to the gradual
dawning of a sense of self more sophisticated than the basic body
image, creating a new evolutionary force that rapidly ratcheted up
intelligence. "Once you have a sense of self, you can intentionally
control the environment, and that modified environment in turn puts
selection pressure on your brain," Iriki says. He has dubbed this
dynamic, two-way interaction between brain and environment
"intentional niche construction", and argues that it is the missing
link in the story of human evolution (see "Home-made evolution").

Sense of self was crucial for another reason: it allowed our ancestors
to conceive of the existence of other selves, each with their own
intentions. This is the essence of "theory of mind", which is what
underpins our shared understanding and hence communication, language,
society and culture.

So far so philosophical, but Iriki's ideas are more than just
speculation. They are the culmination of years of experiments designed
to see how far he can "evolve" macaques towards human-like behaviour
by training them to use tools.

In one series of early experiments, published in 2000, Iriki and
colleagues trained Japanese macaques to use a rake to retrieve fruit
placed out of their reach (Canadian Journal of Physiology and
Pharmacology, vol 78, p 958). It took the macaques about two weeks to
master the technique, but once they had, Iriki found their new skill
had left striking traces in the brain.

During training he and his team recorded the electrical activity of
neurons in the parietal cortex, the part of the brain thought to
encode body image. These neurons respond both to touch and to visual
images of the monkey's own body, and are thought to meld the two into
the body image.

At first, the rake did not trigger activity in the parietal cortex,
even when the macaques were holding it. Over the training period,
however, the neurons gradually started to respond to the rake, and by
the end of the training were firing in response to it just as they
would to an arm or a hand. In other words, the macaques had
incorporated the tool into their body image.

In the next set of experiments, rake-trained macaques were presented
with a tougher task: to retrieve food from under a screen that
obscured their hand, the rake and the fruit from view, guided only by
video images on a screen. Before long they were raking up fruit as
skilfully as before. Now, the parietal neurons were responding to the
video image of the rake-wielding hand.

What this suggests is that, given the right training, the macaque
brain is capable of modifying its body image to incorporate a tool and
can mentally displace that image onto a screen and still recognise it
as "self". Iriki claims this means his trained monkeys have a body
image as sophisticated as that of a 9-year-old child - not quite a
full-blown sense of self, but more sophisticated than your average
monkey.

Training can also unlock what may be the rudiments of language. In
another set of experiments, Iriki and colleagues noticed that some
tool-trained macaques started making cooing noises when they could see
food but the rake was out of reach. Such noises are known as
"reference calls" - voluntary vocalisations referring to specific
objects. Wild macaques never make such noises; their vocalisations are
limited to reflexive responses triggered by external events, such as
the appearance of a predator.

Iriki and his colleagues went on to successfully train two macaques to
request food or the rake using cooing noises. Though each macaque's
calls were different, Iriki says that it should be possible to teach
naive macaques to imitate the calls of others, learning what they mean
in the process. That way, the calls would acquire communicative power
(Neuroscience Research, vol 45, p 383).

Another distinctly human-like skill that can be brought out by tool
training is imitation and joint attention, which are the twin pillars
to communication and the propagation of culture. In the wild, macaques
show very little interest in one another; infants have occasionally
been observed to follow their mother's gaze and imitate her facial
expressions, but adults never do.

This is puzzling, because macaque brains clearly monitor the behaviour
of others. Macaques were the animals in which mirror neurons were
discovered in the early 1990s. These are nerve cells which fire not
only when the animal performs an action but also when it sees the same
action being performed by another.

Iriki reasoned that the missing element in wild macaques might be a
sense of self, and the related ability to appreciate the existence of
other selves. He predicted that tool-trained monkeys might start
following others' gaze (the essence of joint attention) and copying
their actions, just as human children do.

Iriki's monkeys are already raised like children, in an intense
relationship with a human carer, on the rationale that this may help
them learn joint attention and imitation. Sure enough, he found that
three out of four monkeys raised this way, and then trained to use
tools, "got" joint attention. Having achieved that, two of them - Pin
included - began to spontaneously imitate an experimenter's actions,
such as sticking out their tongue (International Journal of
Psychophysiology, vol 50, p 81).

Iriki has also been tracking how his monkeys' brains change as a
result of their training, and has found yet more provocative
similarities with humans. In an as-yet unpublished brain-scanning
study carried out with a team at University College London, his group
has shown that rake training causes areas of the prefrontal cortex and
parietal cortex to expand. In humans, the prefrontal cortex is
important for controlling behaviour in complex social situations, and
is known to have expanded rapidly during our evolution.

Retracing the steps

Taken together, Iriki believes his findings strongly support the idea
that training macaques to use tools recapitulates at least some of the
evolutionary steps made by our ancestors. He does not claim that he
can elevate macaques all the way to human intelligence, but he
believes they are a useful tool for probing how the raw material of
the primate brain evolved into the highly sophisticated thinking
machine in our heads.

Many of Iriki's conclusions are based on just a handful of trained
macaques, and so most researchers would like to see more work before
allowing themselves to be convinced. Nevertheless, Keysers says he
finds Iriki's ideas original and intriguing. "One of the most exciting
findings is just how much of the brain connectivity can really be
changed by this training regime," he says.

Others are more sceptical. Daniel Povinelli, director of the Cognitive
Evolution Group at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, says it is
not surprising that training induces modifications in the macaque
brain, but questions whether these changes recapture events in human
evolution. There's no reason to suppose that the seeds of human-like
intelligence are lurking inside the macaque brain just waiting to be
unlocked, he says. "Iriki has this very progressive view of evolution
- that somehow monkeys are incomplete human beings," says Povinelli.
"That's just not the case." He points out that macaques have been
evolving on their own trajectory since they split from the human
lineage around 25 million years ago. They did not just freeze at a
lower rung of the evolutionary ladder, he says.

"That's not the point," Iriki counters. "What I am interested in is
the common precursors, how one species could be induced to resemble
another, and what kind of brain changes would accompany that."

Iriki's next move is to start working with marmosets, New World
monkeys which can also be trained to use tools and which have the
advantage of breeding more rapidly than macaques. They can also be
genetically engineered, which raises the possibility of endowing them
with traits that may be even more human-like. For now, though, Iriki
is keeping the details of the work under wraps.

Aside from providing insights into our past, Iriki's work also gives
tantalising glimpses of the future. One of the messages of his
research is that the human brain is still a work in progress. Tool use
may have started us on our journey, but there's no reason to suppose
that we've unlocked all the potential in our brains. Perhaps new
"metaphysical" tools such as computers and the internet are already
taking us to the next level. "Mind once emerged in our brains," says
Iriki. "What might emerge next?"