Blute Blog

I was saddened to read in the New York Times recently of the death of Fran de Waal of Emory University and the Yerkes Primate Research Centre at age 75. I have not read all of his more recent books nor would I probably agree with all of his reflections on animal cognition, especially his apparent recent skepticism about science. However, I certainly remember being impressed by his early experimental proof that chimps can learn socially by observation. He and some colleagues created a puzzle that was too difficult for members of two groups to solve. But then they took an individual from each group and trained them separately to solve it with individual learning methods, but differently. When they put the two back in the separate groups, the members of each group learned to do so – definitely by observation because each group learned the specific method of the model placed in their group.

I was so impressed that when decades ago I was in charge briefly of a dinner with a guest speaker held annually at my University of Toronto campus, I invited de Waal to speak and enjoyed his visit immensely.

Now I see in Nature on March 21 of this year that Bridges et. al. have performed a similar experiment successfully on, guess what, bumblebees!