Jesse Rogerson

Knowledge gets built into the biology.

Knowledge gets built into the patterns, into the social structures.

And this is a great example of it.

It's a group of spider monkeys that were being followed by a group of scientists.

And they were interested in how knowledge transfers from one to the other.

So they did this from 2012 to 2017.

They literally went into the forest and followed them, followed these spider monkeys.

They're known for forming little groups and then breaking off into smaller groups and then coming back to their big groups again.

So they have these social structures that are kind of like friend groups that cycle, break off into smaller ones and then come back together.

And they were interested how the breaking apart and reforming of the social group affects the knowledge transfer.

So they followed them around and they noticed that the spider monkeys were like going out and investigating portions of the forest, of the trees, of the canopy and recognizing where good food sources are.

And then they would come back, share the knowledge with the group somehow through communicating with them.

And then the entire group would know where the good food was and where it wasn't, even if not all members of the group had visited those places in the forest.

And that's just a really cool demonstration of group intelligence at work.

That's a good question.

I don't have a great answer for that.

I mean, you know, monkeys are able to, species are able to communicate with each other through a variety of ways, sounds and motions and leading and showing.

So I'm sure that they're getting their message across, but I don't have the exact answer.

Yeah, this scares the crap out of me.

And it's not just about deep fakes and influence.