Referential gestural communication in wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)

with Bill Frost that was begun in Getting's lab. I also have been very interested in the evolution of neural circuits. As a graduate student, I was influenced by the work of Dorothy Paul and Edmund Arbus. I think that understanding a neural circuit means also understanding its evolutionary history. It's a mistake to try to analyze a circuit as if it were 'created' for its current function. Speaking of creation versus evolution, what's your opinion about the current troubles in the US regarding teaching 'intelligent design'? There is a perception in this country that evolution somehow conflicts with religion. So some politicians are attempting to gain the favor of the religious fundamentalists by favoring the teaching of 'alternatives to evolution'. But as was recently pointed out by a Federal Judge in Dover, Pennsylvania, the supposed alternatives are based on religious beliefs, not science, and so may not be taught in public school science classes. In my state, we formed a group called Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education, which has successfully fought against efforts to undermine the teaching of evolution and other scientific concepts. It is essential that scientists speak up on this issue. We should not sit idly by while popular sentiment is whipped up against the scientific process. If 'materialist' explanations fall to supernatural explanations, then we will be taking a major step backward. So, do you think that the problem is that scientists generally are not political enough? I think that scientists tend to be too passive with political questions. It's important for politicians to know there is a political cost to pandering to anti-scientific groups. Scientists should write letters to newspapers and their government representatives whenever they can provide illumination on a question of public concern. Humans commonly use referential gestures, for example pointing, which direct the attention of recipients to particular aspects of the environment [1]. The use of these gestures has been linked with cognitive capacities such as mental state attribution [2,3] because the recipient must infer the signaler's meaning. In our closest living relatives, the non-human primates, referential gestures have been reported only in captive chimpanzees interacting with their human experimenters [4] and human-raised or language-trained apes ([5–7]; but see also [8]). Here we provide the first evidence for the widespread use of a referential gesture by wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Observations of the Ngogo community in Kibale National Park, Uganda, …