The Ash Twins Blog

Here’s an odd news tibdit from 2003:

Pygmy activists from Congo have demanded the United Nations set up a tribunal to try government and rebel fighters accused of slaughtering and eating Pygmies who are caught in the country’s civil war.

Army, rebel and tribal fighters – some believing the Pygmies are less than human or that eating the flesh would give them magic power – have been pursuing the Pygmies in the dense jungles, killing them and eating their flesh, the activists said at a news conference yesterday.

There have been reports of markets for Pygmy flesh, the representatives alleged.

“In living memory, we have seen cruelty, massacres, genocide, but we have never seen human beings hunted and eaten literally as though they were game animals, as has recently happened,” said Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of the Mbuti Pygmies in Congo.

“Pygmies are being pursued in the forests … people have been eaten,” said Makelo, a delegate to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which is meeting at UN headquarters.

“This is nothing more, nothing less than a crime against humanity,” he declared. “This is a certain kind of genocide.”

Njuma Ekundanayo, an expert member of the Permanent Forum, said attacks against the Pygmies “are not only coming from the army but also from other groups”.

“We don’t understand why the military practises cannibalism against the Pygmies,” she said.

The fighters also rape and sexually assault Pygmy women, and sexually transmitted diseases are spreading in Pygmy communities, the activists said.

About 600,000 Pygmies are believed to live in Congo, which is in the midst of a five-year-old civil war fuelled by deep-seated ethnic and tribal hatreds. Original inhabitants of Congo, the Pygmies continue to live deep in the forests, eking out an existence by hunting and gathering food from small, nomadic base camps.

Earlier this year, human rights activists and UN investigators confirmed that rebels cooked and ate at least a dozen Pygmies and an undetermined number of people from other tribes during fighting with rival insurgents. There have been no reports of Congolese Army soldiers engaging in similar activity. . .

Jean-Pierre Bemba, the group’s leader, has said he was “shocked” by reports that his troops ate people.

Addressing the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues yesterday, Makelo told the body to ask the Security Council, the UN Committee on Human Rights and other bodies to recognise acts of cannibalism as a crime against humanity and acts of genocide.

Hibbing & Alford (2004) present interesting findings from experiments testing psychological responses to decisions by authorities:

[P]eople’s reactions to a given outcome are heavily influenced by the procedure employed to produce the outcome.We find that subjects reactmuch less favorably when a decision maker intentionally keeps a large payoff, thereby leaving the subject with a small payoff, than when that same payoff results from a procedure based on chance or on desert. Moreover, subjects react less favorably to outcomes rendered by decision makers who want to be decision makers than they do to identical outcomes selected by reluctant decision makers. Our results are consistent with increasingly prominent theories of behavior emphasizing people’s aversion to being played for a “sucker,” an attitude that makes perfect sense if people’s main goal is not to acquire as many tangible goods as possible but to make sure they are a valued part of a viable group composed of cooperative individuals.

Source: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=poliscifacpub

Cross & Jackson (2005) demonstrate the effectiveness of heuristical decision algorithms in spiders:

Hutchinson and Gigerenzer (2005) have given us a lot to think about, and we welcome the common ground they are trying to establish between what biologists (especially ecologists) call “rules of thumb” and what psychologists call “simple heuristics”. . .

Our own research, as biologists, is based on using jumping spiders (Salticidae) to study decision making, problem solving, selective attention and other topics related to animal cognition (Cross and Jackson, in press; Harland and Jackson, 2004). Perhaps there is some common ground between understanding how simple heuristics can make us smart and understanding how salticids sometimes seem disturbingly intelligent for animals with minute brains. . .

For most web-building spiders, life may be far more predictable than for Portia, a genus of tropical salticids that single out other spiders as preferred prey (Jackson and Pollard, 1996).We might call Portia a specialist at preying on other spiders, but another spider’s web is for Portia an especially dangerous and unpredictable arena for predator-prey encounters. A spider’s web is part of its sensory system (Witt, 1975), and Portia appears to gain dynamic fine control of the other spider’s behaviour by adjusting the signals made in the web (aggressive mimicry) (Tarsitano et al., 2000). For example, many spiders may be lured in until close enough for Portia to attack, but Portia may avoid luring in long-legged pholcid spiders, choosing instead to keep the pholcid agitated and turning about in the web until there is a gap between the legs for a clear shot at the pholcid’s body (Jackson and Wilcox, 1998). . .

The male spider is what Daniel Dennett (1996) calls a Darwinian animal. It may be ‘intelligent’ in the sense of having a good solution to the problem of how long to persist in courtship, but natural selection, not the individual salticid, derived this solution. There is no need to envisage the individual male spider weighing up probabilities and doing optimality calculations.

A comparable generate-and-test algorithm (operant conditioning or trial-and-error learning) may enable individual animals to derive optimal solutions. Portia illustrates this when deriving signals by trial and error. This is what Dennett called a ‘Skinnerian animal’ . . .

Perhaps it is with Dennett’s third kind of animal (Popperian) that we begin to admire the intelligence of the individual. By running something like a simulation in its head, a Popperian animal can forego the need for real trials in the physical world. Even spiders may be Popperian. Portia, for example, routinely plans and then executes detours by which it can sneak up on other spiders from behind (Jackson et al., 2002; Tarsitano and Jackson, 1997). Although some kind of trial-and-error by simulation may underlie route choice, the particular route chosen need not first be tried out (Tarsitano and Andrew, 1999).