Things White People Love: Comparing Black People to Monkeys

No, I don’t mean the self-imagined political wag, nor those of a similarly fantastical oppressed ethnic subculture of the US. I mean the kind of (over)educated middle to upper-middle class, progressive liberal occasionally self-avowed skeptic, contrarian and/or scientific white folk.
I’ve seen the odd social justice action now and again in the US over the past decades. Whether at the local municipal level, the University level or on national TV. African-Americans are typically very well represented even when the issue at hand is not a “black issue” per se. When it comes to the incredible underrepresentative University campus population, it is particularly striking because you will find the black faces that you’d never known were on campus appearing in support of social justice causes.
There is one notable exception and that is the animal-rights campaign. The practitioners of animal rights theology would have you believe they are engaged in a social justice battle akin to many familiar ones. They never seem to look around and ask why their tiny band of followers are so unusually devoid of the black folks.
Perhaps it is because one of their favorite memes is viscerally offensive to African-Americans?

Repost: Insightful Animal Behavior: A "Sufficiently Advanced Technology"

We’ve been talking about the use of animals in research lately. One thing that always comes up is how animals share some critical capacity with humans. I try to point out in all of this that some of these questions are amenable to investigation. Some of the claims can be supported, nullified or qualified on the basis of existing data. The process of describing or interpreting the data is never simple. And it seems that many people who parrot what seem to be simple claims actually have very little understanding of the evidence on which they rest. I have at least one observation in the archive that points out where not thinking hard about the strength of the evidence can lead to unsupported conclusions being widely disseminated. This post was originally published Feb 25, 2008.

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In the midst of World War I, Wolfgang Köhler conducted a famous series of experiments to investigate problem solving ability in chimpanzees. The lasting impression of these experiments, reinforced by just about every introductory Psychology text, was Köhler’s assertion that the chimps demonstrated “insightful” learning.
Did they now?