Article ID: CBB000770730

What's in a Name? The Vervet Predator Calls and the Limits of the Washburnian Synthesis (2006)

unapi

Radick, Gregory (Author)


Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
Volume: 37
Pages: 334--362


Publication Date: 2006
Edition Details: Part of special section: “Fielding the Question: Primatological Research in Historical Perspective”
Language: English

After the Second World War, a renaissance in field primatology took place in the United States under the aegis of the `new physical anthropology'. Its leader, Sherwood Washburn, envisioned a science uniting studies of hominid fossils with Darwinian population genetics, experimental functional anatomy, and field observation of non-human primates and human hunter--gatherers. Thanks to Washburn's stimulus, his colleague at Berkeley, the bird ethologist Peter Marler, took up the study of the natural communicative behaviour of apes and monkeys. When Marler's first primatological student, Thomas Struhsaker, reported in the mid-1960s that the vervet monkeys of Amboseli, Kenya, give acoustically distinct alarm calls to different predators, and respond to alarm calls as if to the sight of those predators, a debate broke out over whether the vervet calls thus function as names, translating as `leopard', `eagle' and `python'. Washburn and his students argued that no matter what the behavioural evidence, vervet calls could not be predator names, since monkeys had been shown to lack the neuroanatomical basis of naming. This controversy thus reveals, first, the persistence of older patterns of disciplinary allegiance within the new, synthetic physical anthropology; and second, the impotence of adaptationist Darwinism --- common to both sides of the debate --- as a force for unity.

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Article Rees, Amanda; Radick, Gregory (2006) Introduction. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (p. 269). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000770730/

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Authors & Contributors
Rees, Amanda
Peterson, Dale
Wilson, Emily K.
van Wyhe, John
Regal, Brian
Radick, Gregory
Concepts
Primates
Primatology
Physical anthropology
Animal behavior
Field work
Zoology
Time Periods
20th century, late
20th century
19th century
20th century, early
Renaissance
21st century
Places
United States
Great Britain
Guinea
Japan
Germany
Paris (France)
Institutions
London Zoo
Carnegie Institution of Washington
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