13/11/2011 by admin.

“Quantity has a quality all its own“, which Stalin may or may not have said, is worth thinking about. Many inquiries start with a qualitative difference between man and other animals. This all-important difference is searched for and guessed at. The effort to find the unique x has disrupted and distorted the normal scientific path. On the other hand, quantitative differences between us and other species is a much more fruitful objective to search for.

Here is a quote from Marc Bekoff in a recent post (here):

For as long as human animals have pondered how we might differ from nonhuman animals (hereafter animals for convenience) many ideas have come and gone. For example, it’s been postulated that humans are created in the image of God and are the only rational beings. People vary in their opinions on whether we are the only animals who are created in the image of God and of course it’s not a claim that can be proven or disproven. However, ample research has shown that animals are rational beings and that they also share with us many other traits that were once thought to be uniquely human, including manufacturing and using tools, having culture, having a sense of self, using complex systems of communication, producing art, and having rich and deep emotional lives and knowing right from wrong. Two traits that seem to separate us from other animals are we’re the only animals who cook food and no other animals are as destructive and evil…

The time has come to debunk the myth of human exceptionalism once and for all. It’s a hollow, shallow, and self-serving perspective on who we are. Of course we are exceptional in various arenas as are other animals. Perhaps we should replace the notion of human exceptionalism with species exceptionalism, a move that will force us to appreciate other animals for who they are, not who or what we want them to be.

Separating how we think about humans and other animals is like separating how we think about rivers and the Nile. It is not an efficient way to understand the Nile and it robs effort from understanding rivers in general. The only way this sort of thing happens if we start with “the Nile is not a river”, “don’t use concepts that describe the Nile for any other river (nilomorphism to coin a word)” or “it belittles the Great Nile to say it behaves like other rivers”. We have built an artificial boundary here, we have not ‘divided nature at its joints’. We will sink down to playing semantic games – trying to define Nile so other rivers are not included and trying to define river so that it includes them all except for the Nile. In the same way, dividing man from other animals is also artificial – not the way science should be done.

Human uniqueness has been a sort of holy grail. People have been searching for this mythical piece of knowledge – what is the important distinction. But the important knowledge is the ability to trace how all those things that we share with the other animals have been mixed and modified to produce the unexceptional uniqueness of all animal species. No part of our makeup and our culture started from nothing; everything (gene, gene-like, meme or meme-like) has evolved to its present state; it had evolutionary roots. Science should not be trying to separate us from other animals but should be drawing the connections. By and large Biology has been doing this for years but with the newer brain sciences it has been tough trying to break through the mind-set that humans are unique in a unique way.

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24/06/2011 by admin.

A blog posting has made me angry. As I have said before, I dislike reading angry posts and try to avoid writing them myself. But there is a limit and so here I am writing an angry post. Below is the start of a blog on the Psychology Today site in its Sapient Nature blog.

Human beings are different from other, lower-order, animals in several ways. Humans are the only species with the ability to imagine, which allows us to “time travel” (that is, reminisce about past events and imagine future ones) and to conceive of things (products, ideas) that currently don’t exist. We are also the only species to be aware that we are going to die, which, according to some psychologists, is the primary reason we have traditions and culture.

A third way in which we are different from others species is that we are the only ones to feel the need to be busy. Most lower-order animals would presumably be perfectly satisfied to idle their time away. Give a lower-order animal sufficient quantities of food, love, and shelter, and the animal will likely grow to be fat and happy; the animal would have no issues about lazing around and frittering away the rest of its life.

The writer than carries on with a reasonable post on human reactions to boredom. He even quotes evidence for what he says about human boredom. (here) Well done - if you ignore the start of the post.

Why then the first two paragraphs? As they have nothing to do with the main idea of the post, I assume they are a literary flourish. I do not think that it is reasonable to say any-old-dumb-thing just to try to be an interesting writer. Not if you then want to be taken seriously in your third paragraph.

There is a definition of bullshit saying it is not really a lie and its truthfulness is not the point. The speaker of bullshit does not care if what he says is true, sometimes it is and sometimes it’s not. The bullshitter does not even care if you believe him. It is the overall impression that counts. I don’t get the feeling that the blogger cares whether I believe what he has to say about animals. He makes no attempt to convince me – no science, no anecdotes, no logic, no folk wisdom. Of course, there are ideas that are so accepted and acceptable in particular contexts that they need no support. But here we have a PhD in psychology who teaches in a university and edits journals, writing in a prominent psychology site. He should (and probably does) know what statements need support and what do not.

What animals think does not have a single answer. After all ‘animals’ includes everything from sponges to us. But definitely it includes other primates, dogs, elephants, whales and dolphins, crows and parrots. The author is saying, with a straight face, that these particular animals as well as many others (1) cannot imagine (2) do not foretell death (3) do not feel boredom. The death remark is not obviously false, probably even true, but also probably not the primary cause of anything so important as culture. The other two remarks are controversial at best and unacceptable at worst. Some people would accept them but many wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. In previous postings I have dealt with various aspects of animal thought so I am not going to repeat them here. The point I am making is that the area is controversial and therefore bold sweeping statements cannot be made without some support.

But for bullshit none of this matters. It was the bullshit that made me mad. If I thought that the writer actually believed his first two paragraphs were about anything except setting a tone for the rest of the post, I would have disagreed but not felt angry. I have a vision of the author thinking about how to make a piece about boredom interesting. They can’t think of anything original so they use the ‘only humans can x’ hook. That should make readers feel warm inside. They know that a great many ‘only humans can x’ have been discredited but does that matter. No need to look this one up – their readers will not care. Well I do. And if I was a zoo keeper who spend hours every day trying to keep the animals from going stir-crazy, I would care even more.

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06/09/2010 by admin.

ScienceDaily reports on a recent paper in Cell by R. Tomer and group (here) looks at the similarities between the vertebrate cortex and the mushroom bodies in insects and marine worms.

He developed a new technique, called cellular profiling by image registration (PrImR), which is the first to enable scientists to investigate a large number of genes in a compact brain and determine which are turned on simultaneously. This technique enabled Tomer to determine each cell’s molecular fingerprint, defining cell types according to the genes they express, rather than just based on their shape and location as was done before.

Using this new method, they found similarities that imply an evolutionary common ancestor (rather than independent evolution) of mushroom bodies and the pallium (cerebral cortex). The common ancestor would be living about 600 million years ago.

As well as having the similar cell types, developing in a similar way, it is interesting that mushroom bodies and palliums have similar functions.

This ancestral structure was likely a group of densely packed cells, which received and processed information about smell and directly controlled locomotion. It may have enabled our ancestors crawling over the sea floor to identify food sources, move towards them, and integrate previous experiences into some sort of learning.

It appears that the general pattern is: taking in sensory information and integrating it in sensory-associative areas, using this ‘perception’ to orientate movement, and learning/remembering its environment. This part of various brains is a good candidate to product whatever amount or degree of consciousness the animal possesses.

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20/07/2010 by admin.

ScienceDaily reports on work by Y. Wang and others (here) which compares the mammalian neo-cortex with structures in the brains of birds.

For more than a century, neuroscientists believed that the brains of humans and other mammals differed from the brains of other animals, such as birds (and so were presumably better). This belief was based, in part, upon the readily evident physical structure of the neocortex, the region of the brain responsible for complex cognitive behaviors.

Specifically, the mammalian neocortex features layers of cells (lamination) connected by radially arrayed columns of other cells, forming functional modules characterized by neuronal types and specific connections. Early studies of homologous regions in nonmammalian brains had found no similar arrangement, leading to the presumption that neocortical cells and circuits in mammals were singular in nature.

For 40 years, Karten and colleagues have worked to upend this thinking. In the latest research, they used modern, sophisticated imaging technologies, including a highly sensitive tracer, to map a region of the chicken brain (part of the telencephalon) that is similar to the mammalian auditory cortex. Both regions handle listening duties. They discovered that the avian cortical region was also composed of laminated layers of cells linked by narrow, radial columns of different types of cells with extensive interconnections that form microcircuits that are virtually identical to those found in the mammalian cortex.

The findings indicate that laminar and columnar properties of the neocortex are not unique to mammals, and may in fact have evolved from cells and circuits in much more ancient vertebrates.

This has several ramifications. In vertebrates, different species have brains that differ more in degree and less in kind and therefore simpler brains may be very useful experimental subjects. They may be easier to work with by still give valuable insights. It also weakens the taboo on anthropomorphism. If it acts like cognition – it may be cognition. And finally there is nothing like two different examples of the same principle to find the important aspects of the principle. In trying to understand how the neo-cortex module functions it is useful to have the mammal and bird versions to compare. And consciousness need not be thought of as strictly a mammal thing just because in mammals it involves the neo-cortex.

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20/09/2009 by admin.

ScienceDaily has an item on research into the control of consciousness by M Devor (here).

…discovery of an area of the brain that participates in the control of “alert status.”

Loss of response to painful stimuli and loss of consciousness are the most striking characteristics of surgical anesthesia and anesthesia-like states, such as concussion, reversible coma, and syncope (fainting). These states also exhibit behavioral suppression, loss of muscle tone, a shift to the sleep-like “delta-wave” EEG pattern, and depressed brain metabolism.

It has been widely presumed that this constellation of dramatic functional changes reflects widely distributed suppression of neuronal activity in the brain due to dispersed drug action, or to global oxygen or nutrient starvation.

However, new results revealed by the Hebrew University scientists suggest a radically different architecture — that a small group of neurons near the base of the brain, in the mesopontine tegmentum, has executive control over the alert status of the entire cerebrum and spinal cord, and can generate loss of pain sensation, postural collapse and loss of consciousness through specific neural circuitry.

…this knowledge could contribute to the ability of medical science to treat disorders of consciousness and its loss, such as insomnia, excessive sleepiness and even coma. …

the discovery of a specific cluster of neurons that control the brain’s state of consciousness can be expected to lead to the beginnings of an understanding of the actual wiring diagram that permits a biological machine, the brain, to be conscious.

This seems to imply that at least some aspects of consciousness are extremely ancient and at least shared with all vertibrates.

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16/07/2009 by admin.

Howard Eichenbaum’s group has published many papers on the hippocampus. This one, “Episodic recollection in animals: “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…”, here , makes a good case for animal consciousness. The abstract is below:

In humans, episodic memory is most commonly defined as the subjective experience of recollection, presenting a major challenge to the identification of episodic memory in animals. Here we take the position that episodic memory also has several other distinctive qualities that can be assessed objectively in animals, as well as humans, and the examination of these properties provides insights into underlying mechanisms of episodic memory. We focus on recent evidence accumulated in this laboratory indicating that recognition in rats involves a threshold retrieval process, similar to that observed in human episodic recall. Also, rats can remember the temporal order of unique events, characteristic of the replay of vivid episodic memories in humans. Furthermore, rats combine elements of “when” and “where” events occur, as well as the flow of events within a memory, to distinguish memories that share overlapping features, also characteristic of human episodic memory. Finally, all of these capacities are dependent on the hippocampus, which also plays a critical role in human episodic memory. This combination of findings strongly suggests that animals have the same fundamental information processing functions that underlie episodic recall in humans.

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19/06/2009 by admin.

A study by A. Horowitz reported in ScienceDaily (here) purports to show that dogs do not feel guilt.

This study sheds new light on the natural human tendency to interpret animal behavior in human terms. Anthropomorphisms compare animal behavior to human behavior, and if there is some superficial similarity, then the animal behavior will be interpreted in the same terms as superficially similar human actions. This can include the attribution of higher-order emotions such as guilt or remorse to the animal…Horowitz was able to show that the human tendency to attribute a “guilty look” to a dog was not due to whether the dog was indeed guilty. Instead, people see ‘guilt’ in a dog’s body language when they believe the dog has done something it shouldn’t have – even if the dog is in fact completely innocent of any offense….Dogs looked most “guilty” if they were admonished by their owners for eating the treat. In fact, dogs that had been obedient and had not eaten the treat, but were scolded by their (misinformed) owners, looked more “guilty” than those that had, in fact, eaten the treat. Thus the dog’s guilty look is a response to the owner’s behavior, and not necessarily indicative of any appreciation of its own misdeeds.

The problem here is that there is no control in the experiment. Would a child look guilty if they had done something they should not have but no one had noticed? I have my doubts about some children. Would a child look guilty if they had done nothing they shouldn’t have, but a parent started shouting at them and poking a finger in their face as if they had done something bad? I think I have known children who would look guilty because they assumed they had done some terrible unknown thing. And if you know what you have done wrong, you might look less guilty then if you had done something wrong and did not even know what it was.

Yes, we have to guard against anthropomorphism but we also have to guard against anti-anthropomorphism. Dogs are very social animals and so there is every reason for them to have social emotions like guilt as well as non-social ones like fear.

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27/12/2008 by admin.

Article in the Scientific American Mind site by Paul Patton on intelligence in animals, One World Many Minds, talks about goldfish learning mazes with the skill that rats show.

“By performing tests on goldfish after parts of their forebrain had been destroyed, the Spanish team showed in a study published in 2006 that the spatial abilities of goldfish derive from a part of the roof, or pallium, of the forebrain that may correspond to the hippocampus in mammals. Together these new studies indicate that the common ancestor of cartilaginous fishes, bony fishes and land vertebrates may already have possessed a hippocampuslike structure and the spatial cognitive abilities it confers. The hippocampus, which is also involved in processing emotions, is the main pallial component of the limbic system; in MacLean’s triune brain scheme, it was supposed to have originated with mammals. A variety of other limbic system structures are now known to exist in nonmammals.”

Goldfish are part of the teleost fishes that first evolved 200 million years ago - and well after land vertebrates appeared. Their brain structures therefore developed independently from those of the land vertebrates from common early fish structures. The two main branches of land vertebrates have evolved separately for about 300 million years. The one branches evolved into modern mammals and the second into birds and modern reptiles. They have evolved different brain plans, again based on the plan of their common ancestors. The difference in anatomy was first interpreted mistakenly so that it was thought that birds and reptiles did not have a well developed pallium. It is now known that the dorsal ventricular ridge in birds and reptiles is a pallium structure and is similar in function to the mammalian pallium structure, the cortex. Both the cortex and the DVR are involved cognition, planning, learning, remembering, perceiving, and controlling fine movements. Similar connections with other areas of the brain and between areas within the pallium are found in the cortex and the DVR. The neuroanatomical terminology for birds was revised in 2002 to reflect this new understanding.

“Far from being “birdbrains,” our feathered friends have displayed clever behaviors. Among birds, the largest forebrains are those of parrots and corvids (a group that includes crows, jays, ravens and jackdaws). Relative to body size, the brain of a parrot is as large as that of a chimpanzee, although, in absolute terms, it is about the size of a walnut. In recent years researchers have documented stunning cognitive abilities in these two groups of birds.”

In another Scientific American Mind site item by Nicole Branan there is a report on self-awareness in magpies, Magpies Recognize their faces.

“When you look in the mirror, you know you are seeing yourself. Your dog, on the other hand, thinks its reflection is a fellow canine (if anything). So far scientists thought this lack of self-recognition was ubiquitous in the animal kingdom—with the exception of apes, elephants and dolphins. But a new study presents evidence that self-recognition has also evolved in a bird species.

Helmut Prior of Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and his team tagged magpies with a brightly colored mark below their beaks, where the birds could not see it directly. When the magpies looked in the mirror, some of them tried to reach the mark with their beak or touch it with their foot, which shows that they recognized their own mirror image, the researchers say.”

If that isn’t enough, we also have the invertebrates. Some such as the octopus long known to be quite intelligent with some remarkable talents. But now there are indications that bees may have some consciousness. A Scientific American Mind site article by Christof Kock looks at the talents of bees,

Exploring Consciousness through the Study of Bees.

“And contrary to assertions made by philosophers, novelists and other literati, by and large this stream of consciousness does not relate to quiet self-reflection and introspective thoughts. No, most of it is filled with raw sensations… I suspect this feeling is not that dissimilar to the way animals consciously experience their world. Except perhaps for the great apes and a few other privileged big-brained animals, most species do not posses the highly developed sense of self, the ability to reflect on oneself, that people have. Most biologists and pet owners are willing to grant consciousness to cats, dogs and other mammals. Yet our intuitions fail us completely when we consider fish and birds, let alone invertebrates such as squid, flies or worms. Do they experience the sights and sounds, the pains and pleasures, of life? Surely they can’t be conscious—they look too different from us, too alien.

Insects, in particular, were long thought to be simple, reflexive creatures with hardwired instinctual behaviors. No more. Consider the amazing capabilities of the honeybee, Apis mellifera….”

Experiments are described using glass mazes and sugar-water rewards that show that bees can be taught to run glass mazes using the delayed matching-to-sample paradigm. For example, the bee can be shown a green patch and will remember this in the maze and will turn right if the T has a green patch and left if it has a different colour. Having mastered this skill it can quickly learn to run a maze with different colours to match and with different stripe patterns.  

“Bees live in highly stratified yet flexible social organizations with group decision-making skills that rival academic, corporate or government committees in efficiency. In spring, when bees swarm, they choose a new hive that needs to satisfy many demands within a couple of days (consider that the next time you go house hunting). They communicate information about the location and quality of food sources using the waggle dance. Bees can fly several kilometers and return to their hive, a remarkable navigational performance. Their brains seem to have incorporated a map of their environment. And a scent blown into the hive can trigger a return to the site where the bee previously encountered this odor.

…What this dilemma highlights is that there is no accepted theory of consciousness, no principled theory that would tell us which systems, organic or artificial, are conscious and why. In the absence of such a theory, we must at the very least remain agnostic about consciousness in these creatures.”

It seems to me easier to explain the intelligent actions of animals if they have some form of consciousness then if they haven’t.

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12/12/2008 by admin.

 “Medieval naturalists placed living things along a linear scale called the great chain of beings, or scala naturae. This hierarchical sequence ranked creatures such as worms and slugs as lowly and humans as the highest of earthly beings. In the late 1800s the enormous mass of evidence contained in Charles Darwin’s masterwork, On the Origin of Species, convinced most of his scientific contemporaries that evolution was a reality. Darwin explained that modern species were related by physical descent and saw the relations among species as resembling the diverging branches of a family genealogical tree.”

This quote is from Scientific American Mind Article . The idea of the chain of beings lingered on. The immediate interpretation of evolution was ‘humans are descended from monkeys’ when it should have been ‘humans and monkeys have a common ancestor’.

“Over the past 30 years, however, research in comparative neuroanatomy clearly has shown that complex brains—and sophisticated cognition—have evolved from simpler brains multiple times independently in separate lineages.”

We do not just need to look at what other mammals can do with their brains but also birds, fishes, mollusks and even insects. In our outlook on other animals we should teach ourselves not to think in terms of the ‘chain of beings’. In a sense all living things with us today are approximately the same in terms of newness or oldness, and approximately the same in terms of being well adapted to their environment. There is no clear criteria for ranking species into higher and lower along a chain of beings. Some are bigger, some are faster, some of smarter, some can stay under water longer, some are more fearsome, some are better fliers, some live longer, some have more offspring, some have larger ranges, maybe some are happier, but all of them are approximately equally successful.

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28/10/2008 by admin.

We need to have a lighter blog for a change, so I will talk about dogs.

I have had smart dogs and dumb dogs. There are smart dogs – I know this in the same way that I know that there are cold winters. Not all winters everywhere are cold but I have personally experienced cold winters and I have experienced smart dogs. People who have known parrots, dolphins, bonobos and the like seem to feel the same about those animals. Of course, there are cold winters and then there are Cold Winters – smart like cold is relative.

My current dog is the sort that looks at your hand when you point at something. My last dog was the sort that looked at what you pointed to and not your finger. This smart dog was a cross between a Border Colley and a Huskie. An example of the sort of behaviour that convinced me that there was a real mind in that head was her showing off the house. We were building a house and the whole ground floor was open with just the studs showing where the walls would be. The dog watched me show someone the house on a few occasions. I would stand in one place and say that this was going to be the bathroom. The visitor would have to imagine walls where the studs were, then on to other rooms. One time I was showing someone the kitchen and I said to the dog to show them the bathroom. She went to the ‘bathroom door’ studs and looked over her shoulder which was her sign for ‘follow me’. I told the person to follow her when she did that posture and she led them into the bathroom. I said to show them the living room, the dog went to the edge of the living room space and looked over her shoulder and then entered the space. And so on.

What she had done was to pick up, in my conversations with others, the words (probably ones I had emphasized and that were accompanied by a gesture) for the rooms. And she picked up the idea of going from room to room. She had a large vocabulary of words she understood – I figure she had well over a hundred. I talked to her in an ordinary conversational way rather then barking commands as I must with my present dog. She had already taught me how to follow her. It took her longer to teach me that, than it took her to learn a few of the things I taught her. She understood from my reference to her and to the next room on the tour that I wanted her to take over the task. The usual ‘dogs only follow commands, they do not communicate’ does not seem to me to cover this sort of situation. Shepherds communicate with their dogs. So do blind people. There really is communication between people and some animals. The communication is not through a language, however, it is through things like words, gestures, postures, and symbols. The communication does include quite complex concepts.

I have the same sort of evidence that my dog had a mind as I had that the next person I might be introduced to had a mind. It is easier for me to understand and predict their behaviour if I use a theory-of-mind then it is otherwise. It is also easier for me to believe that the other person has conscious experience like mine than it is to believe they don’t. The same applied to my dog. She will be more conscious of some things than me and less of others because her senses are slightly different, but on the whole it will be a similar sort of experience.

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