how to be wrong about gorillas
according to a fun phys.org article gorillas spend much more time in trees than we had previously thought.
ok. cool. but why did we previously thought that?
there are at least two things at play here. both based on the fact that we had observed the most easily observable population of gorillas--virunga mountain gorillas--and extrapolated from there.
ok. cool. but why would we do this?
this actually happens a lot: we gather data where it's convenient and extrapolate from this convenient data conveniently forgetting about other data that might exist. other data that might (for instance) disprove the conclusions we drew from the data. which would be inconvenient.
now it sounds like i might be attributing malice to that which can be best explained by something else and i promise you that despite my general vibe i don't intend anything like that. all of this is deeply human or at least deeply modern human stuff.
anyways a lot of psych studies to this. imagine if you will a person who is interested in studying gardening and decides that--due to budgetary constraints or laziness or history or whatever--they will study the gardens that just so happen to be visible from their window.
imagine this person then generalising their findings to all gardens everywhere. this is of course insane and you can come up with dozen reasons off the top of your head why stuff that happens in gardens in oakville ontario isn't generalisable to lima peru or bishkek kyrgyzstan.
psych studies often run on people who happen to be in college or live in a college town. which is certainly an interesting group of people who produce particularly fecund results! but not representative! and thus not reproducible!
medical studies (i found this out in the year of our lord twenty-twenty-six and it absolutely blew my mind) are often run solely on men. because women apparently are just smaller men? with a few extra organs and wildly different immune systems? just make the pill 25% smaller! and call it a day!
this sort of bad generalization disease is a modernist pathology. it seems allergic to variety. everything has to be one thing. (this is partly why despite their vociferous and aureate protestations to the contrary i consider fundamentalist christianity to absolutely reek of modernism; it's riven through with it like one of those cheeses that's actually (surprise!) mostly a kind of fetid mould.)
there is to be sure only so much room on any given butterfly-pinning paper. and pins are expensive. and also consider the taxonomies: with all that variety they might not seem so useful after all!
so that's the first thing.
the second thing is i think we generally underestimate animals. whereas we humans have produced all this variation and difference and culture and music and it's very obvious (unless you're running a study!) that people in iraq and people in japan and people in the northwest territories live highly differentiated lives with unique experience and outlooks... well a gorilla's just a goddamn gorilla. you think different groups of gorillas do different things? get outta here!
and yet we keep finding non-instinctual (some might say suspiciously cultural) adaptations and behaviours across different groups of the same animal. consider if you will the very cool and praxial orcas who keep attacking yatchs for what i can only assume is a deep understanding of economix and also the less cool orcas who wear dead salmons as hats.
anyways. shit's wild. maybe jot that down somewhere.