Talk:Lucy (chimpanzee)

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Dates

Resolved

– Long since fixed.

So when did all this occur? There are no dates at all in this article. --SigPig 12:06, 30 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Fouts

Resolved

– Long since fixed.

Some description of who "Fouts" is would be helpful. Ex. "Roger Fouts, who worked with Lucy as a ..."SteveMtl 23:22, 8 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: page moved. Malcolmxl5 (talk) 02:59, 12 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Lucy Temerlin → Lucy (chimpanzee) – It is not conventional to add the surname of a pet or research animal's owner/keeper to the animal's name in formal writing (whatever pet owners may do on their Facebook pages), and Lucy is almost exclusively referred to in reliable sources as simply "Lucy" (or by phrases such as "the chimpanzee Lucy" or "Lucy the chimp") in both scholarly literature (e.g. on primatology and animal communication), and the mainstream press. Naming her article here "Lucy Temerlin" is not only ridiculously twee, it's an obvious form of "animals are just like people" PoV-pushing, as well as a verifiability problem. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 20:26, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Support - putting Lucy + Temerlin into GB shows 1,620x for the two names in all kinds of combinations with all but 7x avoiding "Lucy Temerlin". 1x is the p209 chapter heading from Lucy: growing up human : a chimpanzee daughter by Temerlin, written "One Day in the Life of Lucy Temerlin" gets picked up as "Lucy Temerlin" by 6x sources. In ictu oculi (talk) 05:51, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
support Standard practice and neutral. DGG ( talk ) 22:23, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Very well known simply as "Lucy". Apteva (talk) 04:38, 6 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Support, for all the reasons above. FWIW, in the 1970s I met Lucy, and knew her human "brother" Steve, and they had very different fates as adults.--Curtis Clark (talk) 04:51, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Support per In ictu oculi. Rlendog (talk) 23:13, 10 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Prevarication

The statement that prevarication (informally "lying") was, before Lucy, thought to be exclusive to humans needs independent reliable sources, preferably several, and preferably from journals and other scientific works on animal communication, animal psychology, linguistics, etc., per the "Wikipedia:Exceptional claims require exceptional sources" policy. [Hint: I don't think this will actually be possible, because it's not true.] For one thing, anyone who has had a dog for any length of time knows that (at least in the smarter, larger-brained breeds) they will regularly prevaricate by attempting to hide or distract attention from wrongdoing (tearing through the garbage bag, whatever), and clearly show expression of guilt, as well as an abstract fear of punishment that may come in the near future for something done in the recent past, and an conscious willingness to deceive, mislead or distract to avoid said punishment. All of these things obviously show a low level of basic self-awareness that does not seem to be present in wild animals or even in feral domestic populations. This isn't news; people have known this for thousands of years – one of the things that makes dogs so trainable, compared to cats and cattle and whatnot, is this very capacity for crude future-risk-vs-reward analysis. The book that reliably provides the sign language dialogue, is obviously not reliable (if it was even the source) on a claim that people did not believe animals could prevaricate before Lucy's story came out. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 20:57, 4 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Leaving aside higher animals like horses, when wild animals display tricks, changing colour, puffing up etc to avoid being eaten, or to lure prey, it isn't deliberate deception? Sounds like OR. Or a misreading of Thomas Aquinas' views on animal morality. In ictu oculi (talk) 05:59, 5 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Those are all instinctual behavior patterns; I'm talking about conscious prevarication in communication behavior, from the animal toward humans, in domestic-animal–human-keeper interaction. And, yes, my point is that it's blatant original research to say in this article that no one knew domestic animals were capable of this before Lucy. If the book that might be being cited as the source for this actually said that, it is clearly unreliable on points of the history of animal ethology, even if it is reliable on the history of Lucy and her keepers. — SMcCandlish Talk⇒ ɖ^⊝כ^⊙þ Contrib. 00:32, 7 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Proving deliberate prevarication is not always trivial even in humans, but I agree with SMcCandlish, and would add to it that those animal behaviorists who would have rejected it in dogs, for example, would have rejected it in chimps even with the evidence given, and those who would have accepted it, the other way around.--Curtis Clark (talk) 04:57, 8 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Owned?

ok, somebody paid, but "own" is not the correct word.