The first popular article to come from our project is now published on-line at Scientific American.
I did much of the work on this years ago. So you can imagine how excited I am to see it get out and into the light.
The piece asks whether Koko the gorilla, and other animals, could possibly link sex and babies.
The piece asks whether Koko the gorilla, and other animals, could possibly link sex and babies.
Whether your gut says of course not or of course, let us show your gut the actual evidence.
The printed January issue should hit the shelves in a week...
The printed January issue should hit the shelves in a week...
 |
| Oh, baby. |
... our book, The Baby Makers, which has more space for us to explore more curious territory, should hit the shelves a bit later, geologically speaking.
*which is still without contract. Here's how to fix that: holly_dunsworth@uri.edu
*which is still without contract. Here's how to fix that: holly_dunsworth@uri.edu
Interesting, sadly, I heard some female humans report that they did not know that sex made them pregnant, but they eventually figured out the correlation and causation....
ReplyDeleteSo you read about women figuring out, on their own as if in cultural isolation, that sex makes babies? If that's what you meant, would you please please send the reference?
ReplyDeleteI have hard such stories many many times. This I think was in the regular news media if not elsewhere. In some instances the woman was quite obese and, if the stories have been true, they went into labor without having known they were pregnant. I have not to my recollection known of instances reported in academic sources, but only in public media, so can't vouch for their truthfulness.
ReplyDeleteNot knowing you're pregnant is a whole other thing from not knowing how people get pregnant.
ReplyDeleteI would offer that behaving as if one knows something (a better way to put it is behavior consistent with knowing something) is not the same as knowing something. Even very complex behaviors can be constructed around networked simple algorithms that have an additive appearance of forethought and knowledge. Ant colonies can perform remarkable feats without a single ant knowing what it's doing. Same with some physiological feats like acquired immunity. Or a computer modeling the weather. Or natural selection. The appearance of knowledge is often like the appearance of design: the product of much dumber processes.
ReplyDeleteSo what is true knowledge then? Presumably it requires open-ended associationist learning. (Even that is no guarantee that the 'knower' actually knows how something works or is relying on correlation and so has a false knowledge. Cultures have all kinds of strange notions about human reproduction for example. And, to get speculative, perhaps consciousness is an inevitable consequence (neither bug nor 'intent' - not that selection intends anything) of open-ended association learning.
Hi, I only saw your reply today. I briefly searched the web and cannot confirm what I remember hearing in a TV interview back in the 1970s or 1980s. But if it was true, the mother was a young teen bride in the south and she said that she had a child or two before she understood the cause and effect. Sorry that I mentioned something that I cannot vouch that my report was true....
ReplyDeleteOkay, I found the source of my childhood memory. Country singer Loretta Lynn famously said:
ReplyDelete"I didn't know how babies were made until I was pregnant with my fourth child."
I recall seeing her say that during a TV show in the 1970s. Also, Lynn (1976) wrote in her famous autobiography COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER that she married at the age of thirteen and had four children by the time she turned eighteen. However, recent discoveries indicate that she probably married at the age of fifteen and then had four children in rapid succession. Regardless of her age of matrimony, she became a vocal advocate for birth control and currently avoids the topic of her age.
That said, her famous quote about not knowing how babies were made until her fourth pregnancy might have been a mere comedic one-liner. Anyway, I also recall some counseling research and school nurses say that some tween and teen mothers do not always know that sex made them pregnant.
Per your research, if her statement were true, then it in no way represents any entire modern human population while could also make a great one-liner to open up discussion about animal species that don't understand the fruit of their sexual instincts. Incidentally, it represents the importance of sex education for tweens and teens.
I also think that an interesting angle is to look at which species of male animals are aware of their paternity.