Animal minds

What? Where’s the BBC? Where’s New Scientist? Aren’t apes entering the Stone Age now? From Melissa Healy at LA Times: We humans might find nothing more heartwarming than seeing other animals befriend and take care of each other. But new research suggests that, although they appear to perform random acts of kindness, chimpanzees, our primate relatives with the most complex social lives, do not actually act with the simple intention of pleasing one another. That conclusion will probably stir controversy, because chimps appear to engage in many kinds of social activities that would appear to require kindness. They groom one another — but is that kindness or just the opportunity for a delicious treat? They risk personal injury by keeping watch Read More ›

Can’t think why that would be. From Gilead Amit at New Scientist: You possess a “theory of mind” – something that informs your every waking moment, says Josep Call, a psychologist at the University of St Andrews, UK. “When we get dressed in the morning, we’re constantly thinking about what other people think about us.” No other animal can match our ability, making it the essential lubricant for the social interactions that set humans apart. (paywall) More. Sets humans apart? What about: Latest: Apes possess a “theory of mind” (Scientific American) and Ravens have a theory of mind? (New Scientist) Obviously, animals do not have a theory of mind because they do not have theories, period. The fact that an Read More ›

Because it is the usual Darwinian just-so story that we have heard all our lives, we accept it without thinking. Further to: Cats as unintelligent design (The cat parasitizes the human mind; how unintelligent is that?), in the Atlantic story, Britt Peterson wrote “A passion arose for cats,” according to the log of a ship that landed in Samoa, “and they were obtained by all possible means.” Tucker takes an intriguing stab at accounting for that still-thriving passion. “Cats look uncannily like us,” she proposes, and locates their appeal not in their alien aura but in the spell their familiarity exerts and the protective fascination it elicits. “Even better, they look like our infants.” Given their baby-size bodies; large, front-facing Read More ›

So news aggregator Digg labelled a story by Britt Peterson at Atlantic. Curious are the cultural assumptions around design in nature. Anyway, The animal so many dote on is among the world’s most destructive predators. New Zealand’s recent announcement of a plan to eradicate all invasive predators, including feral cats, sparked an immediate response—and not in defense of the stoat, up there with cats among the top 100 on the Global Invasive Species list. “Cat murdering New Zealand[ers] are for the birds,” one commenter vented on The Washington Post’s website. “Removing cats from an area is a futile effort—one that cannot succeed,” another warned. When Australia announced a plan in 2015 to cull 2 million feral cats, the singer Morrissey Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Chimpanzees often use tools to extract or consume food but which tools they choose for which purpose can differ depending on where they live. In 2010, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, initiated the ‘Pan African Programme: The Cultured Chimpanzee’ to characterize and understand the differences in chimpanzee behaviours in un- and poorly studied ape populations across Africa. This is how the researchers encountered a new behavioural variant: Algae fishing with long robust tools at a temporary research site in Bakoun, Guinea. … . “The PanAf project represents a new approach to studying chimpanzees and will provide many interesting insights into chimpanzee demography and social structure, genetics, behavior and culture,” says Hjalmar Read More ›

John Searle gives a nice talk at Google about real intelligence vs. machine intelligence. The conversation is interesting for a number of reasons, including some historical background of Searle’s famous “Chinese Room Argument.”
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From Mindy Weisberger at LiveScience: The newest additions to the Dutch National Police (DNP) are North American “immigrants”: bald eagles that are specially trained to take down airborne drones. The initiative is a first for law enforcement, according to DNP officials. They announced in a statement, released Sept. 13, that the DNP is currently the only police force in the world to include raptors on its roster for drone defense. For the past year, the DNP has tested eagles’ prowess against flying drones, collaborating with a private company called Guard from Above that trains raptors to snatch drones out of the sky. The tests were so successful, the DNP reported, that the police force recently purchased juvenile bald eagles that Read More ›

Equally false. From Rik Smits at the Scientist, commenting on ethologist Frans de Waal’s recent book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?: The essential burden of science is to replace dogma, sentiment, and superstition with an as-far-as-we-now-know theory based on verifiable facts, all the while striving for objectivity. Yet, in his work, de Waal replaces one dogma—the Cartesian/behaviorist stance that animals are mere oblivious response machines—with another. Following “Charles Darwin’s well-known observation that the mental difference between humans and other animals is one of degree rather than kind,” de Waal notes that there is no fundamental difference between man and beast—not even mentally. The problem is not the idea, it is that de Waal posits this Read More ›

From Ruth Williams at The Scientist: Newly made cells in the brains of mice adopt a more complex morphology and connectivity when the animals encounter an unusual environment than if their experiences are run-of-the-mill. Researchers have now figured out just how that happens. According to a study published today (October 27) in Science, a particular type of cell—called an interneuron—in the hippocampus processes the animals’ experiences and subsequently shapes the newly formed neurons. … Most of the cells in the adult mammalian brain are mature and don’t divide, but in a few regions, including an area of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus, neurogenesis occurs. The dentate gyrus is thought to be involved in the formation of new memories. In Read More ›

Seriously, from ScienceDaily: The brains of wild cats don’t necessarily respond to the same evolutionary pressures as those of their fellow mammals, humans and primates, indicates a surprising new study. … Arguably, the fact that people and monkeys have particularly large frontal lobes is linked to their social nature. But cheetahs are also social creatures and their frontal lobes are relatively small. And leopards are solitary beasts, yet their frontal lobes are actually enlarged. So what gives? Sharleen Sakai, lead investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded research, said the findings suggest that multiple factors beyond sociality may influence brain anatomy in carnivores. “Studying feline brain evolution has been a bit like herding cats,” said Sakai, MSU professor of psychology and Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: For the first time, scientists have revealed ancient gene mixing between chimpanzees and bonobos, humankind’s closest relatives, showing parallels with Neanderthal mixing in human ancestry. The study showed that one percent of chimpanzee genomes are derived from bonobos. Only one percent? Keep the file open. Paper. (public access) – Marc de Manuel et al. Chimpanzee genomic diversity reveals ancient admixture with bonobos. Science, 2016; 354 (6311): 477-481 DOI: 10.1126/science.aag2602 … Chimpanzees and bonobos are the closest living relatives of human beings. They diverged from a common ancestor between 1.5 and 2 million years ago and live in different areas of tropical Africa. Until now, it was thought that gene flow between the species would have been impossible, as Read More ›

Can it tell us about dinosaur intelligence? From Brian Resnick at Vox: Closer analysis revealed a few-millimeter-thick layer of structures that looked like blood vessels. There were also traces of meninges, the tough outer layer that protects the brain, preserved in mineral form. … More dinosaur brain specimens could help solve a big mystery about dinosaur intelligence: Were their brains more like modern-day reptiles or more like modern-day birds? In modern reptiles, the brain typically does not take up all the space in the skull. It’s much smaller than the skull, supported by tissue that pads it. In birds, however, the brain does typically take up most of the skull. A more birdlike brain would suggest dinosaurs were more intelligent Read More ›

(To get chocolate cereal) From Agata Blaszczak-Boxe at New Scientist: Rats have been filmed for the first time using hooked tools to get chocolate cereal – a manifestation of their critter intelligence. Akane Nagano and Kenjiro Aoyama, of Doshisha University in Kyotanabe, Japan, placed eight brown rats in a transparent box and trained them to pull small hooked tools to obtain the cereal that was otherwise beyond their reach. In one experiment they gave them two similar hooked tools, one of which worked well for the food retrieval task, and the other did not. The rats quickly learned to choose the correct tool for the job, selecting it 95 per cent of the time. More. Good find! But what was Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: University of Oxford. “Monkeys are seen making stone flakes so humans are ‘not unique’ after all: Wild-bearded capuchin monkeys in Brazil deliberately break stones, unintentionally creating flakes that share many of the characteristics of those produced by early Stone Age hominins.” ScienceDaily, 19 October 2016. Researchers have observed wild-bearded capuchin monkeys in Brazil deliberately break stones, unintentionally creating flakes that share many of the characteristics of those produced by early Stone Age hominins. The difference is that the capuchins’ flakes are not intentional tools for cutting and scraping, but seem to be the by-product of hammering or ‘percussive behaviour’ that the monkeys engage in to extract minerals or lichen from the stones. In a paper, published in Nature, Read More ›

From Catherine Caruso at Scientific American: In the study, published Thursday in Science, a team of scientists recorded the eye movements of three great ape species while the animals watched videos of a man searching for a hidden object that had been moved without his knowledge, and found that they looked more frequently at the location where the man expected the object to be (a belief the apes knew was false), even though the object was no longer there. The findings suggest the apes were able to intuit what the human was thinking. … Apes from all three species consistently passed the test; even though the animals knew King Kong or the rock was gone, when the researcher returned to Read More ›