My dear but strange friend Daniel Williams... an introduction to a sketch

Concerning the birth and subsequent existence of The Wire Monkey I have much to say and yet I lack now the finesse and passion with which to say those things most detailing and vital. I will be forthright and confess my skill and talent and my own zest for life has been diminished by an ill-spent life of drinking and intoxicants, isolation and poverty. In short, I am not qualified really to tell the tale and yet the task has fallen upon me to do just that. The tale must be told by someone who came to know Daniel Williams as a close friend and confidant. How, you may ask, did I come upon this strange term for him, that of The Wire Monkey.  Well, it is a term I coined from my readings decades ago on what is commonly referred to as The Monkey Love Experiments" by behaviorist psychologist Harry Harlow. Later Harlow´s brilliant studies would come under criticism and scorn by weak willed and Lilly livered animal rights activists who do not have the true depth and breath of humanity to see in the experiments their universal and eternal value. Okay, so a few of the little creatures went insane or died from in the most horrible methods imaginable, but I ask you, what do you have to do, dear reader, to make an omelet? Well, I have here a couple excerpts from a case study on Harlow´s brilliant work that may give you first in an insight into what this genius was investigating, and second, provide you with such a succinct introduction into the nature of my old friend that I would waste pages trying to do the same with my sorry and anemic method:

The textbook Principles of General Psychology (1980 John Wiley and Sons) describes the experiments of Harry Harlow and his associates at the Primate Laboratory of the University of Wisconsin: 

 "In Harlow's initial experiments infant monkeys were separated from their mothers at six to twelve hours after birth and were raised instead with substitute or 'surrogate' mothers made either of heavy wire or of wood covered with soft terry cloth. In one experiment both types of surrogates were present in the cage, but only one was equipped with a nipple from which the infant could nurse. Some infants received nourishment from the wire mother, and others were fed from the cloth mother. Even when the wire mother was the source of nourishment, the infant monkey spent a greater amount of time clinging to the cloth surrogate."

Unfortunately:

"...the actions of surrogate-raised monkeys became bizarre later in life. They engaged in stereotyped behavior patterns such as clutching themselves and rocking constantly back and forth; they exhibited excessive and misdirected aggression..."

 To make matters worse:

"Sex behavior was, for all practical purposes, destroyed; sexual posturing was commonly stereotyped and infantile. Frequently when an isolate [surrogate-raised] female was approached by a normal male, she would sit unmoved, squatting upon the floor -- a posture in which only her heart was in the right place. Contrariwise, an isolate male might approach an in-estrus female, but he might clasp the head instead of the hind legs, and then engage in pelvic thrusts. Other isolate males grasped the female's body laterally, whereby all sexual efforts left them working at cross purposes with reality.

Predictably:

"The behavior of these monkeys as mothers -- the 'motherless mothers' as Harlow called them -- proved to be very inadequate ... These mothers tended to be either indifferent or abusive toward their babies. The indifferent mothers did not nurse, comfort, or protect their young, but they did not harm them. The abusive mothers violently bit or otherwise injured their infants, to the point that many of them died."

With that I will close this introduction into my reflections, called Commentarius Perpetuus on my  dear yet strange friend Daniel Williams.

6:25 PM - 10/26/2005 - post comment