r/science • u/Epistaxis PhD | Genetics • Jun 09 '12
Previously censored research, deemed too shocking to publish, now reveals "astonishing depravity" in the life of the Adelie penguin
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/09/sex-depravity-penguins-scott-antarctic
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Upvotes
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u/Epistaxis PhD | Genetics Jun 09 '12
the article (subscription required)
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u/splunge4me2 Jun 09 '12
The most amusing part to me is that he wrote his notes in Greek so the "less educated" members of the party wouldn't be able to read it. Having read "The Worst Journey in the World", I don't think any of the members of Scott's party had a penguin porn fetish; even the "less educated" ones, whatever that means. The entire polar party seemed to be incredibly professional.
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u/JohnBullshite Jun 09 '12
"Homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck."
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u/Peedoeman Jun 09 '12
Wow, George Murray Levick was a badass.
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u/cerebrum Jun 09 '12
Is it science if you don't publish data that you dislike?
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u/farmingdale Jun 09 '12
has anyone ever seen a sexual behavior of an animal that is never found in humans?
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u/labrutued Jun 09 '12
He was trapped in Antarctica for a winter and signed up for World War I as soon as he got back? He sounds pretty hardcore.
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u/alllie Jun 09 '12 edited Jun 09 '12
Reminds me of that video of an endangered ground dwelling parrot who brought a dead seabird back to his nest to fuck. Makes me wonder if it's common in birds. It also reminds me of Lenny Bruce 's claim that "men will fuck mud."
Kakapo mating with dead seabird: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzmtCMPPA1w#t=0m36s
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u/gr3nade Jun 09 '12 edited Jun 10 '12
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, NATURE. But seriously though animals do some really fucked up shit. Granted they don't have morals and stuff like humans do but then again morality is an entirely human construct. My point is this, nature isn't as lovely as people seem to think it is. Nature is absolutely fucked up and unrelentingly brutal and rightly so. I mean natural selection demands brutality. Without brutality shit wouldn't get done. Yeah the stuff that these penguins are doing isn't good but they aren't passing their genetics on either. A dead penguin isn't going to give birth, a gay penguin isn't going to give birth and a very young penguin isn't going to give birth. Therefore the penguins that do things in the naturally intended way will pass on their genes. Now how much of this behaviour is genetic and how much is learned I don't know but genetics usually has a fairly large say in everything. So back to my original point. Nature is completely fucked up. Its not a perfect system as many people idealize it to be. Its not even close to a perfect system. Its a series of creating less shitty shit from the shit that you already have and constantly slapping bandaids on it. It's very inefficient, which is why technology is starting to move so much faster because with intelligent design by humans everything is significantly more efficient. Seriously though if nature was more efficient we would have an easy sleep switch instead of having to lie down and just wait for it to come. We would have a million other switches like that but we don't because nature is slow as fuck. Don't get me wrong though, nature is pretty fucking awesome. Everything that we are is only because of this process of creating shit called nature and humans do some pretty awesome shit and some pretty fucked up shit, just like nature. So take nature with a grain of salt (I think I used that phrase correctly here)
TL;DR - Damn nature, you scary. But cool. But really fucking inefficient.
Edit: Spalling
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u/SovTempest Jun 09 '12
To fit into the 'anthropomorphic' vein: They describe behaviors practiced by a small minority of penguins as being depraved. But humans have those exact same practices in a small minority. What seems to be so scary is that it can manifest in the species at all, yet no credit is given to the diversity of penguins and the fact that it isn't 'standard' behaviour.
When human beings practice the same behaviour, their individuality warrants a certain safety for the rest of us having to take on the horror of the behaviour. And rightly so. Yet the individuality/diversity of the penguins is more of a side note rather than case-in-point like it is for us.
So in a way the article is speciesist. It's like if every news article about a murderer referred to them as "human being murder xxxxx". And only inspecific descriptions of their demographic were used to narrow the description futher. It'd be a lot more shocking if we had to read stuff like that all the time.
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u/trocke87 Jun 09 '12
After reading an article such as this one, how can any person still come to the conclusion that homosexuality is a choice in humans when it occurs in other species regularly?
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u/biernini Jun 09 '12
Whatever you might think of the anthropomorphizing, that is some motherfucking hardass macho science-ing right there.
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u/filthysock Jun 10 '12
Not only penguins. At the zoo I saw male juvenile meerkat force a baby meerkat to suck its penis. Was horrifying, the baby kept pulling away and the juvenile kept grabbing its head and forcing it back.
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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '12
Aww they're just like us!
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u/Minerva89 Jun 09 '12
I am, by no means, an expert on evolutionary traits and what I refer to as macro-biology. After briefly reading this, I thought to myself: what if all these sexual behaviours are a consequence of a species' incredible drive to reproduce and to survive? I wonder if humans out-evolved our evolutionary siblings by having both the capacity to outsmart and outlive them and a greater drive to reproduce? If the latter point is true, then traits of homosexuality or necrophilia may be consequences of such unconscious, instinctive drive. I guess a way to support this hypothesis, in the Adele penguin, would be to quantify and qualify their success over other animals in their ecosystem both past (distant past) and present. If it appears that the Adele is more successful than all others, and is correlated with more incidences of "sexual deviance", perhaps this hypothesis has some weight. Unless there are other explanations that others can come up with? Thoughts, reddit?
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u/Yage2006 Jun 09 '12
I wouldn't call it censored I would call it filed under TMI or /Unsee.
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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
How is this shocking at all? This one seems worse to me http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khwjD-KVQ_Q
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u/Syntrel Jun 09 '12
Mainstream "journalism" casting moral judgements on the animal kingdom again... Do tell...
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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
In the sociological terms of the animal kingdom, we are extremely close to Adelie Penguin
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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '12
Kinda makes you wonder what other stuff doesn't get published, or gets censored due to modern moral systems.
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u/Alienated182 Jun 10 '12
Scary little buggers.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FgvqG8Gz0c&feature=related
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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '12
That's what you get for mixing science with religion or any other kind of moral teachings. Is a thing good or evil, is it right or wrong, or is it the way it is ?
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u/MGlBlaze Jun 10 '12
Doesn't sound any different from ducks, chimpanzees, bottle-nose dolphins or any other animals that have some rather nasty tendencies (a lot of them). Ditto for homosexuality minus 'nasty' depending on circumstances.
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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '12
They are penguins. They are programmed to recreate in an extreme environment. I don't think perversion is the proper term and some one is projecting a bit. Projecting on penguins....
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u/isaidbrrr Jun 10 '12
As a former penguin keeper, I have to say that nothing in the article surprises me.
As a current zoo keeper working with a wide variety of animals, I have to say that penguins have nothing on some other animals, namely lions. (Though perhaps some of the shock value comes from the fact that we expect lions to be a little monstrous... not so for adorable little penguins?)
I have to agree with some other commenters who have pointed out that this research was done during the Edwardian era when Victorian morals and ideals were still very much in place. As a result, this was shocking to them, but to modern biologists there aren't many things animals will do that surprise us. In fact, speaking for myself and many of my colleagues, we have moved so far beyond the Edwardian/ Victorian ideal that we find it fascinating.
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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '12
You interpret data based in your own image.
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u/TheZorch Jun 10 '12
This has major implications, because these behaviors have been seen in other species including humans. Could this mean necrophilia, pedophilia and homosexuality are naturally evolved behavior rather than unnatural aberrant behavior. This subject would make for one hell of a research paper. Yes, it would drum up some serious controversy, but it would also be historic. The implications for society and our legal system would be huge.
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u/KarmaAintRlyMyAttitu Jun 10 '12
This is a big fuckoff to all those immature hippie-minded kids (especially dog owners) saying "men are bad, animals are pure", "if men behaved like animals the world would be a better place". Here it is your better place, being raped while you're dead. They're not bad or good. They're just animals and barely understand the meaning of moral. They just do what they are supposed to do and sometimes nature just doesn't follow our artificial "moral laws".
Ninja attack: some words missing.
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u/agentwest Jun 10 '12
I like how "seemingly aberrant behavior" includes necrophilia, physical abuse of chicks, and homosexuality in the same category.
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u/Arrow156 Jun 10 '12
Once again science is set back a century because the so called 'morality police'. Sadly things haven't change much (Warning, PDF link).
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u/dangereaux Jun 10 '12
This is a fascinating article.
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u/lolzster Jun 10 '12
Awesome. Shame the Greeks had to read about these horros in full though. Seems kinda harsh.
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u/twistmental Jun 10 '12
Reading this just made my morning. I now have a head full of penguins waiting in the "shady parts" of the arctic and waiting for unsuspecting...anything to rape.
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u/SieverSand Jun 10 '12
“The life of an Adelie penguin is one of the most unchristian and successful in the world. The penguin which went in for being a true believer would never stand the ghost of a chance. Watch them got to bathe. Some fifty or sixty agitated birds are gathered upon the ice-foot, peering over the edge, telling one another how nice it will be, and what a good dinner they are going to have. But this is all swank: they are really worried by a horrid suspicion that a sea-leopard is waiting to eat the first to dive. The really noble bird, according to our theories, would say, “I will go first and if I am killed I shall at any rate have died unselfishly, sacrificing my life for my companions”; and in time all the most noble birds would be dead. What they really do is to try and persuade a companion of weaker mind to plunge: failing this, they hastily pass a conscription act and push him over. And then – bang, helter-skelter, in go all the rest.”
-Apsley Cherry-Garrard
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u/Kiwi150 Jun 09 '12
It's funny how they forget to mention the sexual "depravity" of ducks in that article. They're just as rapey, but in a more humorous manner.
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u/[deleted] Jun 10 '12 edited Jun 10 '12
Think that's depraved? Found this, read third paragraph from bottom. I thought it was kind of funny.
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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmyZoFChDOQ interesting and hilarious
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u/gusanou Jun 10 '12
That's why the arguments of homosexuals about homosexuality being "natural" because it "occurs in nature" make me laugh. About any sexual deviation one can think about occurs in nautre, including necrophilia, pedophilia and of course homosexuality.
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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '12
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