Animal minds

From Ari N. Schulman at New Atlantis: The question then is how mere mechanisms could be in the business of interpreting anything. To say that concepts can reside in physical things in the way we encounter them is only to raise more urgently the question of how concepts can reside in physical things as they actually are — of how matter can be such that certain bits of it come to know about each other. To say that experience inherently bears meaning, that perception already interprets the world to us before we ever reflect on it, is not to find a curious circumstance in which nature and reason are reconciled but to challenge how we find them set apart to Read More ›

From Hank Campbell at Science 2.0: Colony Collapse Disorder, the belief that honeybees, an important pollinator, are being killed off in droves, has been good for environmental fundraising but hasn’t had a scientific foundation. … Nonetheless, it has persisted for 10 years despite data showing that periodic die-offs in bees are as common, and therefore predictable, as solar cycles and California droughts. From the time that records of bees were formally kept, there were reports of mass die-offs without explanation, a thousand years before pesticides even existed. More. Indeed. There are even superstitions connected with the humanly unpredictable ways of bees, including sudden departures and mass die-offs. One problem is that extinction and serious declines feel like Armageddon and many Read More ›

From George Johnson at Undark: In November, Judge María Alejandra Mauricio of the Third Court of Guarantees in Mendoza decreed that Cecilia is a “nonhuman person” — one that was being denied “the fundamental right” of all sentient beings “to be born, to live, grow, and die in the proper environment for their species.” Agreeing to a petition by animal rights lawyers in Argentina for a writ of habeas corpus — a demand that a court rule on whether a prisoner or inmate is being legally detained — the judge ordered that the chimpanzee be freed from the zoo and transferred to a great ape sanctuary in Brazil. In an earlier case, an appeals court in Buenos Aires upheld a Read More ›

From David Klinghoffer, noting Tom Bethell’s objection to one self-defeating complaint about “human exceptionalism,” that it involves the sin of hubris, or pride, at Evolution News and Views: The accusation of arrogance is self-defeating on its face. Only humans are capable of arrogance or of seeing themselves as superior to other animals. Animals cannot rise to that level of abstraction. Do cats or dogs think themselves superior to humans? (Well, dogs don’t, but I’m not so sure about cats.) The criticism of arrogance itself rests on human exceptionalism. Yes. The remark about cats is a joke, obviously. Some cats appear haughty to us because we read our own feelings into their way of carrying themselves. This is the error of Read More ›

In a beetle species. From ScienceDaily: The burying beetle is intimately involved in raising its children, including regurgitating food to its begging offspring. … Behavioral scientists predicted that genetic changes occur over time to develop parenting in a species. Based on this hypothesis, Moore’s team sequenced and assembled the genome of the burying beetle and measured the abundance of neuropeptides. They theorized that behaviors related to parenting stemmed from alterations in existing genes rather than the evolution of new ones. Their prediction proved correct; “When new traits evolve, evolution tends to modify existing genetic pathways rather than create new genes,” Moore said. The research, Moore said, suggests that many of the genes influencing parenting will be the same across many Read More ›

From Victoria Gill at BBC: With thousands of hours of listening as the apes communicated, the researchers found that the animals embedded several different bits of information in their squeaks. The team compared this to how we might use more than one word to convey the same meaning – saying “car” but also “automobile” and “vehicle” “They seemed to make doubly sure that the message was received, so they would send the same message with different [kiss squeak combination] signals,” The scientists say their study suggests that, rather than a concerted effort to form complex words, it might have been this “redundancy” – forming different sounds that had the same meaning, in order to reinforce a message – that drove Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Adults and children in the US, adults from a ‘low numeracy’ tribe in Bolivia and rhesus monkeys ALL possessed the ability to distinguish between large and small quantities of objects, regardless of the surface area they occupy. This ability is likely a shared evolutionary trait, according to a study. This is news? They’re surely reaching now. The ability to distinguish between more and less is, one need hardly be surprised, found among animals of all types. For example, In a study published last summer in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Kevin C. Burns of Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and his colleagues burrowed holes in fallen logs and stored varying numbers of mealworms (beetle larvae) Read More ›

From Josh Gabbatiss at BBC: In their experiments, Appel and Cocroft found that recordings of the munching noises produced by caterpillars caused plants to flood their leaves with chemical defences designed to ward off attackers. “We showed that plants responded to an ecologically-relevant ‘sound’ with an ecologically-relevant response,” says Cocroft. … For example, despite lacking eyes, plants such as Arabidopsis possess at least 11 types of photoreceptor, compared to our measly four. This means that, in a way, their vision is more complex than ours. Plants have different priorities, and their sensory systems reflect this. As Chamovitz points out in his book: “light for a plant is much more than a signal; light is food.” More. The article cautions, refreshingly, Read More ›

Taking issue wth paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch writes at Air and Space Smithsonian: Since we doubtlessly did originate from animal ancestors, the gap between us and them must have been bridged at some point in time. Perhaps it was not a jump, but a continuous evolution. Were the mental abilities of the cavewoman or caveman really as advanced as today’s humans? How much ability for abstraction and appreciation of complex numbers did they have? Since modern humans are the evidence that bridging the gap is possible, we might ask why it wasn’t bridged earlier, perhaps by an intelligent octopus, a smart dinosaur, a dolphin, or another ape? They’ve had millions more years to evolve than we have, Read More ›

From Colin Barras at New Scientist: The team discovered that male and female baboons each produce four vowel-like sounds. Females produce one that males don’t, and vice versa, so in total there are five distinct vowels. They correspond to the second syllable in “roses”, and the vowel sounds in “you”, “thought”, “trap” and “ah”. … “We believe that one of the major advantages of our study is that we worked on real vocalisations, which were spontaneously produced by baboons in a social context,” says Fagot. But Philip Lieberman at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, is not convinced. He thinks the researchers have unwittingly processed the baboon calls in a way that accentuates the fundamental frequency of the call and Read More ›

From Ben Mauk at LiveScience: To say we are more “evolved” than our hairy cousins is just wrong. (See how long you last naked in the Congo Heartland, and then tell me who’s got the evolutionary upper hand.) More. Ah, a question we can answer without a Google search! Free-living apes must survive naked in the Congo Heartland but few humans ever need to, or not for long. Which is why apes live in our conservation programs and we do not live in theirs. So we have the upper hand, no contest. Pop science is funny that way. People can make really inane statements and they pass for the best of science wisdom. Actually, a different variety of pop science Read More ›

From Salk Institute: “Our research shows that, despite having exactly the same genes and neurons as adults, adolescent roundworms have completely different food-seeking preferences and abilities,” says Sreekanth Chalasani, associate professor in Salk’s Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory and senior author of the paper published in eNeuro in January 2017. “It is in adulthood that we finally see the worms become more efficient and competent at finding food.” The microscopic Caenorhabditis elegans worm may seem like an odd source of insight into human brain development. With only 302 neurons to humans’ almost 100 billion, C. elegans is a vastly simpler organism but its basic neurological circuitry has many similarities to ours. And, since scientists have already mapped the adult roundworms’ neurons anatomically Read More ›

Probably. The belief that birds must be less intelligent than mammals was based on Darwinism, not observation. From ScienceDaily: Chickens are not as clueless or “bird-brained” as people believe them to be. They have distinct personalities and can outmaneuver one another. They know their place in the pecking order, and can reason by deduction, which is an ability that humans develop by the age of seven. Chicken intelligence is therefore unnecessarily underestimated and overshadowed by other avian groups. So says Lori Marino, senior scientist for The Someone Project, a joint venture of Farm Sanctuary and the Kimmela Center in the USA, who reviewed the latest research about the psychology, behavior and emotions of the world’s most abundant domestic animal. Her Read More ›

From Drake Baer at New York Mag: Maybe it’s built into the structure of science itself. Oxford zoologist Antone Martinho makes the case in a new essay for Aeon. Martinho’s lab studies ducklings, while at home, he’s just adopted a pair of “celestial parrotlets,” a sublimely named species of mini-parrot indigenous to South America and suitable for a professorial apartment. As a pet owner, Martinho thinks that his new companions think, but he’d never say that as a scientist, even as his ducklings crane their necks at a new stimulus, in the classic body language of a confused dog. … Which brings us to the elephant in the room: Science can’t infer much about animal consciousness — if it’s there Read More ›

From Andy Coghlan at New Scientist: “No one can say now that there’s a vocal anatomy problem with monkey speech,” says Asif Ghazanfar at Princeton University, and co-leader of the study team. “They have a speech-ready vocal anatomy, but not a speech-ready brain. Now we need to find out why the human but not the monkey brain can produce language.” … “They have gathered the type of data that confirms that monkey vocal tracts are speech-ready,” says Adriano Lameira at Durham University in the UK, who recently showed that an orangutan called Rocky could mimic human speech. And Philip Lieberman at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says: “I’ve pointed out for decades that monkeys could talk, with reduced intelligibility, Read More ›