Thou art an infinite template for my imitation!

I will delight in the same things you delight in.

I throw you a wiffle ball.

Here.

Thomas
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Study: Monkeys share human preference for imitation

(CNN) — A new study shows capuchin monkeys prefer humans whose behavior mimics theirs, a trait they share with humans, scientists say.

Research conducted by the National Institutes of Health in cooperation with two Italian institutions examined how monkeys reacted to two types of humans — ones who copied their actions and ones who didn’t.

“If one person imitates what a monkey does, and the other person does not imitate, the monkey prefers to spend more time in front of the person that imitated them,” said Dr. Annika Paukner at the National Institutes of Health offices in Poolesville, Maryland.

Research has shown for some time that humans prefer to interact with others who act like them, and people have a subconscious tendency to imitate others. Paukner told CNN the new study shows it is more than just a human trait.
“It’s something that’s quite old and something very, very basic. It’s not just for us sophisticated humans,” she said.

In the study, a capuchin monkey was given a wiffle ball and was allowed to interact with a pair of researchers — one who, using another ball, attempted to mimic the action of the monkey, and one who deliberately acted in a different way.

Monkeys in the study consistently spent more time interacting with the imitators. They also more readily accepted food and trinkets from the mimicking humans, even when the non-imitators offered the same rewards.
According to the report, the new findings indicate an evolutionary link to the way humans form friendships and create social connections.

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Ha!
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Science finds understanding in what has often been merely seen; art lets us see what has often been merely understood.

Is the poet who studies the science of rhyme, scientific? Or is the poet who uses ‘scientific’ subjects?

There is an art to attacking a fortress; there is an art to finding a solution to a practical problem, but is this also considered a science? Surely it is. Here then, science and art are exactly the same.

Unless we define our terms, we are saying exactly nothing.

Compared to Plato, Bacon and Poe, Wordsworth was a mystic.

I don’t know ANY 20th century poets who were actually scientific. Manifesto-ism is NOT science.
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Such a simple thing,
just a flower;
petals and pistil and stamen,
a scent and a color,
a blossom and some seeds.
Just a stem and some leaves,
growing, absorbing, reflecting
the light, some roots taking
water from soil for the bloom.
Just xylem and phloem, some
membranes and tissue and cells,
a nucleus, some organelles,
green chloroplasts transforming
the sun into starches and sugars,
just chlorophyll, molecules
of elements and atoms built
of protons and electrons,
muons and quarks, made of waves
and strings and fields of time
and space and energy and chance.
It’s really quite simple.
Just a flower.

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Copyright 2008 – HARDWOOD-77 Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald
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The romantics were just winding up a correspondence that had been going on for at least two centuries before them; though I wonder if they were also responsible for a founding myth that cleaved poetry and science apart…?
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“Art is not the waging of taste only, nor the exercise of argument, but like love the experience of imminent revelation.”

I think one probably ought to chew through that before indulging in simple nostalgia for an age when cranial measurement was also considered part of science.
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