Captivity and habituation to humans raise curiosity in vervet monkeys

The cognitive mechanisms causing intraspecific behavioural differences between wild and captive animals remain poorly understood. Although diminished neophobia, resulting from a safer environment and more “free” time, has been proposed to underlie these differences among settings, less is known about how captivity influences exploration tendency. Here, we refer to the combination of reduced neophobia and increased interest in exploring novelty as “curiosity”, which we systematically compared across seven groups of captive and wild vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) by exposing them to a test battery of eight novel stimuli. In the wild sample, we included both monkeys habituated to human presence and unhabituated individuals filmed using motion-triggered cameras. Results revealed clear differences in number of approaches to novel stimuli among captive, wild-habituated and wild-unhabituated monkeys. As foraging pressure and predation risks are assumed to be equal for all wild monkeys, our results do not support a relationship between curiosity and safety or free time. Instead, we propose “the habituation hypothesis” as an explanation of why well-habituated and captive monkeys both approached and explored novelty more than unhabituated individuals. We conclude that varying levels of human and/or human artefact habituation, rather than the risks present in natural environments, better explain variation in curiosity in our sample of vervet monkeys.

Artful construction of the political realm

Continuing the discussion of Scottish texts and politics, this chapter focuses on George Buchanan’s Latin play Baptistes (roughly contemporaneous with Ane Satyre) and his later treatise De Iure Regni Apud Scotos, positing that unlike the playwrights and resistance theorists preceding him, Buchanan conceives of the state and its power as a human artefact rather than a product of divine making. This conception of politics not only aligns Buchanan with Machiavellian political thought in significant ways, but also, together with the fact that Scotland witnessed the actual deposition of the legitimate sovereign at the hands of her nobility, enabled him to formulate a defence of resistance that manages to overcome the limitations of traditional Calvinist resistance arguments.

Difficulties in Doing Liturgical Theology

This study critically examines some traditional methods in liturgical theology. The author argues that liturgy is as much a human artefact as a divine creation, and therefore that liturgical theology needs to take the fruits of historical research and the insights offered by the social sciences much more seriously than it has generally done. He also rejects the notion that there is a single theological meaning within every liturgical act which can be read out of it as a doctrinal norm. On the contrary, liturgies are essentially multivalent, and doctrine shapes both the liturgies themselves and people's interpretations of them at least as much as liturgical practice shapes belief.