Animal Social Complexity - Intelligence and Culture

danny writes "How are brain size and intelligence related to social complexity? What are the evolutionary underpinnings of cooperation? How sophisticated are animal communication and social cognition? And do animals have culture? Read on for my review of Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence, Culture, and Individualized Societies." Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence and Culture author Frans de Waal and Peter Tyack pages 616 pages publisher Harvard University Press rating 9 reviewer Danny Yee ISBN 0674009290 summary 18 papers on primates, cetaceans, other mammals and birds

How are brain size and intelligence related to social complexity? What are the evolutionary underpinnings of cooperation? How sophisticated are animal communication and social cognition? And do animals have culture? These are some of the broad questions addressed by the eighteen papers in Animal Social Complexity, which look not only at primates and cetaceans, but also at hyenas, elephants, bats, and birds. The common focus is on societies that are individualized, with members recognising each other as individuals, and stable, with long-lived members and on-going relationships, and in which there are learned survival skills and social behaviours. Some of the papers are overviews of particular species or taxa, some address specific questions in the context of a particular species, and some present cross-species comparisons.

Consisting of the papers from a conference held in 2000, Animal Social Complexity is a professional volume, complete with a hundred pages of references. But the topics covered are of widespread interest, and the multi- and inter-disciplinary nature of the papers makes them mostly accessible to the lay reader.

Carel Van Schaik and Robert Deaner present a life history perspective on cognitive evolution: demonstrating a link between social complexity and intelligence/brain size is complicated because both are correlated with long life spans. Randall Wells presents an outline of dolphin social complexity based on long-term studies on the communities in Sarasota Bay, Florida. And Katy Payne gives an overview of social complexity in the three elephant species.

Christophe Boesch describes examples of complex cooperation among Tai chimpanzees, in group hunts for monkeys and in territorial conflict with other chimpanzee groups. Christine Drea and Laurence Frank describe the social system of spotted hyenas and argue that more attention should be paid to social complexity in carnivores. It has commonly been argued that social stress is a consequence of subordination; Scott Creel and Jennifer Sands present evidence suggesting that it may in fact be a cost of domination, at least in some species.

Three of the papers debate the underlying mechanisms of social cognition. Ronald Schusterman et al. argue for equivalence classifications as a basic structure. In contrast, Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney argue that "nonhuman primates are innately predisposed to group other individuals into hierarchical classes". And for Frans de Waal the conditionality of behaviour suggests a role for if-then structures in primate "social syntax".

Taking a comparative approach to laughter and smiling in primates, Jan Van Hoof and Signe Preuschoft find that "laughter has evolved in the context of joyful play, and that the broad smile has evolved as an expression of nonhostility and friendliness, taking its origin in the expression of fearful submission". Looking at vocal learning in four parrot species from Costa Rica, Jack Bradbury suggests that in "ecology, social organization, and vocal communication, parrots appear to be more convergent with dolphins than they are with other birds".

Gerald Wilkinson looks to bats for an independent test of the Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis, probing the relationships between brain size, vocal complexity, and colony size. And Peter Tyack explores bottlenose dolphins' use of signature whistles in communicating social relationships.

Following in the footsteps of Imanishi, pioneer of Japanese primatology, Tetsuro Matsuzawa considers, as examples of "culture", sweet potato washing among Koshima monkeys and nut cracking using stone tools by Bossou chimpanzees. Toshisada Nishida describes the "flexibility and individuality of cultural behavior patterns" among chimpanzees at Mahale. And in "Ten Dispatches from the Chimpanzee Culture Wars" William McGrew gives an overview of the arguments between cultural anthropologists, psychologists, and primatologists (among others) over chimpanzee culture -- and over the definition of culture.

Hal Whitehead looks at sperm whales, the cetacean culture debate more generally, and the possible effects of "cultural hitchhiking" on genetic diversity. And Meredith West et al. find a critical role for social interaction in learning and development in cowbirds and starlings.

In addition to the eighteen papers, there are a dozen shorter "case studies" which tackle narrower questions. Animal Social Complexity is an important contribution to the scientific literature. And it has a wealth of material for anyone fascinated by social animals and not intimidated by scientific methodology, a little bit of statistics, references and scholarly language.

Danny Yee has written over 700 book reviews. You can purchase Animal Social Complexity: Intelligence and Culture from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Comments

Mmm, animals.

[monstroyer]

As long as these theories about animals don't interfere with my eating them, it's all good to me.

Re:Mmm, animals.

[netfool]

Hey, it never stopped them from eating us.

Re:Mmm, animals.

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as these theories about animals don't interfere with my fucking them, it's all good to me.
Eating off, too.

Re:Mmm, animals.

[essreenim]

Yeahh, I was about to read it all and then...

it was too long!

But animals do not have culture - no,
actually not all humans are advanced enough to claim it in my opinion but thats another matter! ;)

Re:Mmm, animals.

[Anonymous Coward]

But animals do not have culture - no

Neither do humans, if the sample we see around here is any indication.

Re:Mmm, animals.

[starm_]

"it was too long!

actually not all humans are advanced enough to claim it in my opinion but thats another matter!"

Specially those who can't get through 2 pages of text.

Re:Mmm, animals.

[cbreaker]

Of course, they never bred us just to eat us. Damn, that sounds cruel.

Re:Mmm, animals.

[Jason Ford]

Is anyone else bored with this tired joke? Or tired of eating animals? If so, please visit www.whyvegan.org.

Re:Mmm, animals.

[essreenim]

Good reply.
But you must not confuse ones willingness to sieve through text with one's ability to do so, my apprentice ;)

on a more serious note

[loveandpeace]

this sounds like a fantastic set of papers. at any point is there a discussion on the mechanism by which culture is transmitted? how is cognition meansured.

many thanks for taking the time to review this and to bring it to my attention.

Interesting idea

[cubicledrone]

But no, animals do not have culture. When a dog writes "Marraige of Figaro" then it might be possible. Most dogs would rather just drink out of the toilet.

Re:Interesting idea

[southpolesammy]

First off -- geez, there are some bad moderators out there today. Parent post offtopic? Hardly. Dead on topic, if you ask me.

That being said, culture doesn't necessarily have to mean an appreciation of the arts or some human social charateristics. It could simply be the existence of order within a group. In that case, culture can be as simple as the patterns of a flock of birds or a school of fish, or as complex as the interactions of humans in determining socio-political norms. It pertains to the possibility of non-randomness in behavior, and this denotes intelligence and possibly culture.

Re:Interesting idea

[dustmote]

I would think it would relate more to learned patterns of behavior, though, and exclude instinctive behaviors. Like the flocking simulators they set up in the early 90's that showed that bird behaviors in flocks can be simplified to a few set rules, more or less. I think culture is transmitted information, not encoded. That's just IMHO, of course.

Re:Interesting idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't read the book or the summary, but maybe some seemingly complex behaviours are epiphenomenons that emerge from interactions of much more basic patterns?

Re:Interesting idea

[Dan the Intern]

That depends on what opne considers "culture." Coincidentally, I just started taking an elective in cultural anthropology. One of the first things we discussed in the class was animals and culture. It seems that chimpanzees can actually use tree branches to dig termites out of their mounds. I know this isn't new, but I think that learned tool use is at least the beginnings of culture.

Re:Interesting idea

[WormholeFiend]

Silly man. Dogs drink out of the toilet because the water is more fresh and cool than the water you put in their drinking bowl. Dogs own you. They make you walk around when you dont feel like it, and they make you pick up their poop after them. Dogs assimilate you into their culture in order to have you fulfil their every needs.

Re:Interesting idea

[NixLuver]

From reading the review, I assumed that the differentiation was individualization of groups; i.e., a given group of chimpanzees has characteristic behaviors, and another group has a different set of characteristic behaviors; this would tend to indicate learned behaviors as a tribal imperative, or rudimentary culture - as distinguished from instinct. In fact, if these differences in common behaviors didn't exist, we would chalk up most special behaviors as instinctive, no?

Re:Interesting idea

[panurge]

Most of the human race couldn't write The Marriage of Figaro (sic). You're confusing high culture (play written by senior French civil servant) with culture, i.e. tribally distinct behavior patterns.

As an example, while we're on France around the Revolution, Mariane is often portrayed in French painting as bare breasted. The acceptability of this is an example of a cultural difference between the French of the period and the US of the Superbowl incident. If one tribe of chimpanzees has a characteristic behavior pattern that differs from that of another tribe - there is some ground for discussing whether this is a cultural difference akin to the difference between French and American beach behavior, or the difference between American and European uses of knives and forks.

Re:Interesting idea

[amplt1337]

But no, animals do not have culture. When a dog writes "Marraige of Figaro" then it might be possible.

Well, when you write "Marriage of Figaro" maybe I'll listen to your judgments on other species.

Meanwhile, "culture" is something everyday, that we all participate in, rather than strictly the highbrow Culture with a capital C.

And who's to say that dogs don't have an extremely elevated aesthetic sensibility that's just beyond the grasp of our (differently limited) human brains?

Re:Interesting idea

[etLux]

I cannot help but note that my dog, Harry, does manage to spell somewhat better...

Re:Interesting idea

[Anonymous Coward]

"Social complexity turns out to be widespread indeed. For example, in many animal societies one individual's innovation, such as tool use or a hunting technique, may spread within the group, thus creating a distinct culture. As this collection of studies on a wide range of species shows, animals develop a great variety of traditions, which in turn affect fitness and survival."

Re:Interesting idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, when you write "Marriage of Figaro" maybe I'll listen to your judgments on other species.

Oh please. What, animals are a political class now? Should they form a political action committee? Should the candidates speak at their conventions? Should they issue a platform statement?

For that matter how do you know the previous poster isn't a composer or writer?

Meanwhile, "culture" is something everyday, that we all participate in, rather than strictly the highbrow Culture with a capital C.

Culture is:

The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought.

Intellectual and artistic activity and the works produced by it.

Development of the intellect through training or education.

Enlightenment resulting from such training or education.

Humans 4, Animals 0

Since animals have no arts, beliefs, institutions, intellectual or artistic activity, intellect, enlightenment or education, I'd say no, animals have no culture.

I'm sure the dog feels very intellectual and enlightened when it's licking its own ass.

Re:Interesting idea

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends on what opne considers "culture."

Well, if ass-licking and shit-eating are culture, I'd say the animals are on the fast track to high civilization.

Re:Interesting idea

[Anonymous Coward]

For that matter how do you know the previous poster isn't a composer or writer?

I don't. But I'm nonetheless certain that he did not write Marriage of Figaro (or at least if he did I'll be impressed for a great many reasons). Oh, and as both a songwriter and writer, and someone who understands the basic tenets of cultural anthropology, I feel perfectly qualified to say he's confusing Culture with culture.

Culture is:...

I don't know why I'm continuing this when it's obvious there's no point having a discussion with you: you have defined culture as something that animals do not have, that is expressly limited to human endeavor, therefore the remainder of your argument is circular. Thank you, drive through.
(Though nevertheless, I would say that animals do exhibit at least your second and third criteria, "intellectual and artistic activity" and "development of the intellect through training/education" -- rhesus monkeys can be taught math, gorillas can paint, and these are all learned behaviors.)

Since animals have no arts, beliefs, institutions, intellectual or artistic activity, intellect, enlightenment or education, I'd say no, animals have no culture.

Look, I'm no PETA troll talking about the enlightened nature of the animals or whatever, but you should recognize that just because you don't appreciate something doesn't mean it's not there. These same arguments have been used to demonize foreign human cultures for centuries.
You, as a human animal, are highly evolved towards perceiving human culture and human cultural distinctions. Moreover you are highly trained by your life experience to see and recognize the significance of those human cultural distinctions within your own culture. You are less trained to understand foreign human cultures, and therefore acts of cultural significance seem either random or just plain go unnoticed by you. How much the more so would cultural actions which have no relevance to you, because you are evolved not to care about interpreting them? It's like birdsong (which, incidentally, I don't think is cultural) -- to you it's pretty noise, because you're not evolved to know it, but to the birds, the differences are much, much more apparent.

I'm sure the dog feels very intellectual and enlightened when it's licking its own ass.

And I'm sure you look pretty smart when you're sitting on the porcelain throne too. (posting AC because I'm pretty sure nobody else cares about this.)

Re:Interesting idea

[Anonymous Coward]

No matter how many times I watch Americans try to use a knife and fork when they eat, I still have to force myself not to break into laughter.

It is just hilarious! Most of the non-Americans out there (ie. civilised people) probably haven't seen it, but those of you who have know what I am talking about!

Re:Interesting idea

[AliasF97]

Your last point is interesting, though I personally do not think it is so. I only base this on the observation that dogs don't seem to take an aesthetic appreciation to "scenes of nature". For example, when a person comes across a patch of flowers, he/she is able to appreciate its beauty. A dog may appreciate the flowers, but only in the sense that they are comfortable to lie on. A dog does not stop at the top of a cliff to take in the breathtaking view, nor does it travel great distances to find the best area to view the fall foliage. But, upon reasoning this all out in my head, dogs do seem to find an appreciation for shiny objects and flashing lights. Perhaps there is, as you say, an aesthetic appreciation there that we do not really comprehend. I don't know if I'd call that an "elevated" aesthetic sensibility, but maybe there is some level of appreciation that would be comparable to a human viewing a masterful painting. "Besides, a dog's got personality, and personality goes a long way."

Re:Interesting idea

[shawb]

Transmitted Behavior Patterns: Koko and Michael> the gorillas learning sign language is a fine example of animals learning.

Arts: the Bowerbird will Decorate it's nest, actively arranging objects in a way that suits his aesthetic.
Koko and Michael the gorillas are also known for their paintings.

Beliefs? This one is Tricky. I'll leave it up to someone else to tackle this for now. Although animals showing signs of mourning (evidence shown under institutions) forms a good basis for beliefs.

Institutions? Such as social hierarchy. That is found all over in nature... wolf packs, bee/termite hives...
And the "human" institution of mourning the dead? Let's see... koko again. And Elephants mourning their dead is a well documented phenomenon.

Re:Interesting idea

[value_added]

Yeah, but why is that when you point at the moon, your dog stares your finger?

Re:Interesting idea

[dandelion_wine]

Because of the two, only your finger is in biting range.

Re:Interesting idea

[TimboJones]

Try pointing with your eyes instead of your finger. Your dog doesn't understand what pointing means. Unless you have a retriever/pointer, and even then, they point with their nose.

Then, think about how dumb your dog thinks you are when you won't perform what seems to him like a perfectly obvious command.

Re:Interesting idea

[GrumpySimon]

From what I've seen (and IAAEP - I am a evolutionary psychologist), most modern definitions of 'culture' for scientific research seem to have settled something like: culture is non-genetic information transmitted between organisms.

Oh: and there's a quote from one of the books authors (Frans de Waal) in a Nature paper from 1999:

"The question of whether animals have culture is a bit like asking whether chickens can fly. Compared with an albatross or a falcon, perhaps not, but chickens do have wings, they do flap them, and they can get up in the trees."

Yeah, sure *they* don't have Beethoven's Ninth or the Magna Carta, but they do have some ability / capability for 'culture' which we've managed to go crazy with.

Re:Interesting idea

[Justabit]

There is actually lots of left over neutriets and proteens in 'poopy' and a dog could eat worse in actual dog food.

Re:Interesting idea

[Justabit]

How come I seem to always score a 1 and not even get a coment. not fair. Just once Id like to get a 2 or a 3 and a coment like 'do your taxes' or 'Ontopic but stupid'. 5300 Karma, wow that sounds like you have been doing much good works. can you trade them in for frequent flyer points? what would the exchange rate be? (please give me a good score, please!!!!)

Re:Interesting idea

[Justabit]

Ive trained Cats and dogs to look at where you are pointing by throwing food (Or placing it) and pointing to it. they are slow and it takes weeks but they eventually look at where you are pointing (thinking that there is food there). I'm not sure that they would look at the moon and think 'food?' or if they could eventually learn to look at things to make master happy and happy master gives food. I'm sure that they would not apreciate what the moon means for many milenia depending on how we choose to manipulate there genes in the future.

Re:Interesting idea

[Justabit]

I suport you in your campagn " improbable" seems to add something. any other ideas for moderator language? cant they type in anything but are too lazy and just click on whats available in a pulldown menu?

Re:Interesting idea

[Scrameustache]

Dogs own you. They make you walk around when you dont feel like it, and they make you pick up their poop after them.

God damn I'm tired of that stupid Seinfield crap.

Yeah, dog owners pick up their poop, while holding a choke chain around their necks, after having subjected them to cosmetic surgery as babies, after having surgically sterilised them, after having taken them forcibly from their mothers...

Brain Size?!?

[Mrs. Grundy]

How are brain size and intelligence related to social complexity?

Well, if we look at ants, bees and termites, we can safely draw the conclusion that brain size and social complexity are inversely proportional.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[theMerovingian]

Seconded! I have a huge brain, and am above average in intelligence, but my social life is negligible.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[st1nky187]

The common focus is on societies that are individualized, with members recognising each other as individuals, and stable, with long-lived members and on-going relationships, and in which there are learned survival skills and social behaviours.
You might be able to say that but insects do not view each other as individuals and thus are not the subject of the book.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[SatanicPuppy]

Untrue. Human beings have much larger brains than ants/bees/termites, and our society is proportionally MORE complex, not less.

Communal insects have workers, drones, and queens.

We have all those, plus lawyers, porn stars, and programmers. Yee ha. It's good to be human.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[catbutt]

Ants bees and termites have an advantage when it comes to social complexity though: because they have a queen (rather than the workers reproducing directly) a fundamentally different Darwinian dynamic happens, that encourages cooperation. It's not intelligence as much as it is their evolutionary "motivators" that cause them to work together as they do rather than compete with each other as other animals often do.

(Note that a worker bee is designed to die when it stings, since its only motivation is what is good for the colony, rather than what is good for itself. That would *never* happen in a species where all the individuals could reproduce directly.)

Re:Brain Size?!?

[Johnny5000]

Maybe people are put-off by your pumpkin-sized head, needed to carry around that huge brain.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[etLux]

Ants, bees, and termites are, indeed, quite highly sophisticated and evolved in comparison to mere humans. Not one of their advanced cultures has ever launched a nuclear weapon.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[SparafucileMan]

We refer to the communal insects as workers, drones, and queens, and you're assuming that they view eachother in the same fashion. For all we know, they refer to themselves as "worker who's good at finding x part of y leaf", "worker who's good at regurgitating food", "worker who's exceptionally good at cleaning off the young"...etc etc. The biology terms are just convenient classifications for us stupid, time-strapped humans and do not refect reality.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[Karhgath]

But on the other hand, there isn't a km square of land that doesn't have ants, they existed thousands of years before us(we are but infant compared to them in term of age) and they are the only animal that can resist nuclear and biological weapons. We use science because we have weak bodies. Maybe their science isn't as advance as our because they are physically strong and work as a collective, so science is less important for them?

Oh, and you know that they do use chemical weapons, and some species are known to make and use weapons similar to catapults? They seem to use military tactics and adapts pretty fast, probably because of their collectivness due to their mode of communication.

So lets not dismiss them right away.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[Warlover]

Ants, bees, and termites are, indeed, quite highly sophisticated and evolved in comparison to mere humans. Not one of their advanced cultures has ever launched a nuclear weapon.
====
But bees and ants have perfected racial and tribal genocide down to a fine art.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you talked about your huge brain and above average intelligence less, you might have a better social life. Just trying to help.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[etLux]

Picky picky picky.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[AliasF97]

Or, they could view themselves as, well, as absolutely nothing because their lives may be based on simple programmed responses to certain chemicals, and they really may have no concept of "self" whatsoever. I'm not saying that is necessarily the case, but you are criticizing the previous poster for over-simplifying insects' behavior by applying human classifications to them, when you may, in fact, be over-complicating their behavior by applying human feelings and thought processes to them.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[SparafucileMan]

They don't need a "concept" of self to "refer" or "view" themselves or those ants around them. It's possible to build self-referential systems that are completely mechanical in nature. Any programming system with recursion has this ability, for example.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think most evolutionary biologists would bristle at your parenthetical comment. While there is still a debate after all these years about whether or not selection operates at the group level, there isn't much disagreement about the nature or scope of biological altruism, of which your bee is an example.

Social bees exhibit this behavior because it benefits its genotype, which is shared amongst all the members of his colony. In other words, their "evolutionary motivation" is to see that their genes have the best chance to propagate, just like every other individual of every other species. It just so happens that in social insects, this goal is shared by the whole colony, since they have the same genes. So, biological altruism and other apparently thoughtful or self-harming behaviors are common amongst the social insects.

Secondly, there are many other species, including species that reproduce directly, that exhibit altruistic behavior for similar reasons. One of the classic examples is vervet monkeys, who live in colonies. When one senses a predator, he will call out a loud alarm to alert the other members of his colony that danger is near. This has the unfortunate side effect of making him stand out more to the potential predator. Many birds will fight to the death to protect their young. Etc.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[AliasF97]

Sure, could be. I'm not saying "this is how it is". I'm just noting that it is entirely possible, is it not, that an ant may go through its entire life without developing a single "view" about itself or those around it. Just as you said that our classification system does not reflect reality, and my be selling the ants short, I'm saying that our classification system might also be giving them more credit than they deserve.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[nomadic]

Or even "aspiring playwright who's only working temporarily as an aphid herder", "jazz saxophonist who's carrying food to the queen until he gets a good gig", etc.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[Colonel Panijk]

Note that a worker bee is designed to die when it stings...

IIRC, not all bee-like insects die when they sting. Some (the honeybees?) have barbless stingers.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[InstantCrisis]

A previous post in this discussion remarked that culture is *transmitted* and not hardwired. Though the apis class structure is involunarily genetic/chemical, they do have language. A bee can do a dance that tells other bees where there is food. What is language except the ability to express the idea of something that isn't present/currently observable?

I don't know if bee language is learned or hardwired, though. My instinct is to say learned because a lot of things can go wrong with hardwiring "five steps counterclockwise means the flower is 60' to the southeast."

There are many organisms with larger brains and not nearly as much ability to transmit information. Ex: college math professors.

InstantCrisis

Re:Brain Size?!?

[GrumpySimon]

It's well known that mammalian brain size is clearly related to body size.

So - let's keep it simple, and look just within the primate family: Kevin Reader & Simon Laland did a study a few years ago of a comparative analysis of 533 instances of innovation, 445 observations of social learning & tool use, 607 episodes of tool use in primates.

This shows quite a clear relationship between primate brain size and social learning (& hence, complexity of social groups), in that, large brained primates innovate / learn from others / use tools more than small-brained primates.

The paper is available here: Social intelligence, innovation, and enhanced brain size in primates

Re:Brain Size?!?

[Scrameustache]

But on the other hand, there isn't a km square of land that doesn't have ants,

There is a whole continent devoid of ants: the antartic.
There are no ants in artic climates.

and they are the only animal that can resist nuclear and biological weapons.

That's cockroaches.

We use science because we have weak bodies.

I don't know about you, but I am stronger than an ant.

Re:Brain Size?!?

[Cheetahfeathers]

Yeah, but we're the only one that can build space ships. Just wait until the sun explodes. We should have space ships that can take us far away from earth by then. Just see the ants try _that_!

Re:Brain Size?!?

[catbutt]

I believe worker honeybees do die when they sting. Regardless, I didn't mean to imply that all colony-type animals "should" behave in a kamakazi nature like that....only that there is not nearly as strong reason for them *not* to do so (compared with non-colony animals).

Yeasts have culture

[djeaux]

But I wish the "blurb" had left brain size out of the mix. If brain size has anything to do with intelligence (within a group), then humans would be in the zoo & elephants would be running the show.

Once I read "brain size," all I could do was think of the efforts -- well discussed in Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man -- of 19th and 20th century physical anthropologists to use "brain size is correlated with intelligence" to justify racism & sexism.

The only thing that brain size is really correlated with is body size. Cattle have larger brains than most monkeys. Men have larger brains than women. Blacks have larger brains than whites.

Sounds to me like the anthropologists are out looking for grant money...

Re:Yeasts have culture

[BWJones]

Brain size (in terms of mass) does not have everything to do with intelligence, rather I would more likely believe that brain size (in terms of computational circuits) would be more appropriate. For instance, while human brains are not as big as elephants, we have evolved a convoluted surface topology of the brain to maximize total cortical area devoted to processing. To an impressive degree, so have elephants, but check out their overall topology. elephants have HUGE temporal lobes that may have significance in terms of auditory processing.

You also have to consider that elephant brains while larger actually are a smaller percentage of total body weight than human brains.

Re:Yeasts have culture

[jd]

Brain size is usually taken in relation to something else, and not as an absolute value.

Popular measures include relating brain size to body mass or body complexity. The premise of these measures is that you've got to factor out the overheads. In computer terms, it's similar to the concept of looking at RAM in terms of the OS requirements, and the overheads for each thread.

Another popular measure looks at the number of folds in the neocortex, but this only works on animals with a neocortex, so it's really not a generalizable measure.

Re:Yeasts have culture

[savagedome]

Men have larger brains than women

Yes. But if you are talking about putting it to use too, remember what Robin Williams said. "God gives men a brain and a penis, and only enough blood to run one at a time.".

Re:Yeasts have culture

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not a matter of the size of the brain. Its a matter of the brain's peaks and valleys (sulci and gyri). The more sulci and gyri, the higher the brain mass and greater complexity. Humans, by far, have the most sulci and gyri in our smaller brains. This allows for more brain in a smaller container!

Re:Yeasts have culture

[djeaux]

Brain size is usually taken in relation to something else, and not as an absolute value

Of course.

I will reiterate my recommendation of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. In it, he traces the history of many of our most cherished statistical methods (Spearman, Pearson, etc), which were developed to relate brain size to "something else." In those cases, the purpose was to adjust the brain size of white males so it consistently came out on top.

Another main theme of Gould's book is "reification" of intelligence. Reification involves (among other things) assigning a numeric value to something that isn't exactly quantifiable.

My original point, though, was to object to the article's use of "intelligence/brain size" as if the two were unarguably interchangeable.

Re:Yeasts have culture

[southpolesammy]

So an elephant's brain is to ENIAC as a human brain is to a modern PC? Hmmm...

(Waits for the inevitable BSOD posts....)

Re:Yeasts have culture

[NixLuver]

"You also have to consider that elephant brains while larger actually are a smaller percentage of total body weight than human brains."

This would seem to contradict your earlier suggestion that 'brain size in terms of computational circuits' should be part of the measure, and in fact contradicts this part:

Brain size (in terms of mass) does not have everything to do with intelligence,

Since we're not really certain what part of our brain houses our 'intelligence', it's difficult for me to accept the common assertion that the Elephant/Dolphin (insert animal here) brain is 'mostly' used for auditory processing. Since 'intelligence' is widely (not universally) considered an 'emergent characteristic', it's impossible to say that those 'circuits' dedicated to 'auditory processing' might not also give rise to an 'emergent identity or intelligence'.

Re:Yeasts have culture

[orthogonal]

I will reiterate my recommendation of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man.

As long as you also warn those you recommend that Gould wrote Mismeasure, in large part, to aid in the campaign -- largely grounded in Marxist ideology rather than science -- of denigration of E.O. Wilson and Sociobiology.

To put Gould (and Rose and Lewontin) in context, recommend also Ullica Segerstrale 's Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond, a dense but thoroughly entertaining look at Sociobiology (and later, Evolutionary Psychology) and its ideological attackers.

Basically, E.O. Wilson (since "rehabilitated" among the leftist crowd for his string environmental advocacy) was ruthlessly hounded by Gould and his supporters, for purely ideological reasons. One popular chant of the time was "Racist Wilson you can't hide, we charge you with genocide!" -- once culminating in dousing Wilson with a pitcher* cold water at a 1978 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. (One anti-Wilson witness dismisses this assault by complaining that he remembers it as a "small paper cup" -- as if it's ok to disrupt scientific discourse with mob aggression so long you only throw "small cups" of water at those you disagree with.)

The brief take-home point: Gould is known in the lay community -- outside the science and biology community -- as a great defender of evolution against the religious right. Inside the scientific community, the opinion of Gould is far more equivocal, with many considering Gould to have served to discredit evolutionary theory in favor of the "punctuationism" pseudo-theory and Marxist ideology. To some, Gould's actions on Wilson and Sociobiology demonstrate his lack of scientific objectivity.

(Personal note: I hope this post serves to confound anyone who assumed that I'm anti-Bush and anti-Ashcroft because I'm some "hippy-dippy" leftist. ;) )

Re:Yeasts have culture

[BerntB]

I will reiterate my recommendation of Gould's The Mismeasure of Man.

Here is another viewpoint...

There was a lot of criticism of Gould, claiming he did straw man attacks from people like Ernst, George Williams, E O Wilson, Trivers, Maynard Smith, Hamilton.

Re:Yeasts have culture

[djeaux]

Actually, I believe Gould wrote Mismeasure to denigrate intelligence testing. It was largely stimulated by the discovery that one of his sons had a learning disability.

Gould's best shots at E.O. Wilson are in other works.

Trust me, there are plenty of biologists who think that Wilson shoulda stuck with fire ants.

Re:Yeasts have culture

[BerntB]

Trust me, there are plenty of biologists who think that Wilson shoulda stuck with fire ants.

Most critics of Wilson's "Sociobiology" I've seen (Lewontin, Rose, Gould, etc) seems to be more or less explicitly marxist. (And/or religious.)

Religious people (christans, marxists, etc) have problems of some kind with part of personality and intelligence being built in. (Don't explain -- I couldn't care less about old testament exegetics or the positions of young and old Marx.)

At least, the marxists are the only critics that I've seen. Can you give references to many others?

Anyway, the criticism of Gould's books from prominent biologists should be much, much more than the criticism of Wilson's writing...

(Since it is outside their area I assume that few biologists have commented on the "mismeasure" book -- I just note that Gould was accused of doing straw man attacks by both intelligence researchers and evolutionary biologists...)

Re:Yeasts have culture

[nomadic]

But I wish the "blurb" had left brain size out of the mix. If brain size has anything to do with intelligence (within a group), then humans would be in the zoo & elephants would be running the show.

I once heard an evolutionary theorist at an AMNH lecture say that in terms of brain to body mass nothing beats a baby chihuaha. Seriously.

Re:Yeasts have culture

[mburns]

Let me make the claim that the current topic of discussion - social complexity and its inherent implication of social differentiation, strongly supports Gould's advocacy of group evolution. Otherwise, extremes of inborn intelligence would be selected against. See the work of Howard K. Bloom.

Punctuationalist theory gathers evidence in its favor from a simple mathematical consideration - that genetic change is necessarily very slow in a large interbreeding population, and much faster in a small population.

--
Michael J. Burns http://home.mindspring.com/~mburns9/

Re:Yeasts have culture

[djeaux]

Gould was a popular writer. He made a good living doing it. That alone is enough to make a lot of his peers very jealous. The fact that he was a socialist in an American society that was swinging to the right must be considered as well. Gould's "enemies" are as guilty of attacking a straw man as he is. (And he is very guilty of doing that -- it sells books.)

As far as it being "Marxist," I challenge you to find any theory that isn't colored to some extent by politics, right-left, right-wrong. In fact, one of the beautiful things about Mismeasure is the irony. The tough thing is that it is Gould's second most tedious book (Ontogeny & Phylogeny gets first place) & most readers never make it to the end, where Gould exposes his real rationale for writing -- his learning-disabled son.

Re:Yeasts have culture

[BerntB]

That alone is enough to make a lot of his peers very jealous. [...] Gould's "enemies" are as guilty of attacking a straw man as he is. (And he is very guilty of doing that -- it sells books.)

You are accusing other researchers of doing personal attacks and nonserious arguments here. That is quite serious. The criticism of Gould was specific on the points where he did straw man attacks. Can you back up your claims?

Note both that Gould generally refused to answer the specific points of critique and that your position more or less claims that his writing was to sell books ignoring reality -- which makes his writing uninteresting if you have the ambition to understand the world as well as possible!!

I never thought I'd say that I prefer books by a less cynical author!

I challenge you to find any theory that isn't colored to some extent by politics, right-left, right-wrong.

Your argument is that if perfection is impossible in an aera, we can't grade something as more or less close to perfection! According to that "logic":
Since you can't cool anything to 0 K (absolute zero). Since that is the case, all termometers are irrelevant -- since perfection is impossible.

Re:Yeasts have culture

[Anonymous Coward]

(I posted when I wanted to preview. Sorry.)

I wrote:
Since you can't cool anything to 0 K (absolute zero). Since that is the case, all termometers are irrelevant -- since perfection is impossible.

I meant:
Since you can't cool anything to 0 K (absolute zero) then all termometers are irrelevant -- because (according to your argument) if perfection is impossible any graduation is meaningless?!

Re:Yeasts have culture

[djeaux]

Your argument is that if perfection is impossible in an aera, we can't grade something as more or less close to perfection!

I didn't say that. You said that.

What I said is that you'll be hard-pressed to find any theory that isn't colored to some extent by politics. It may be the politics of publication, or the politics of peer review, or the politics of tenure, but it's there. If the state of the discipline within which the person is working is "revolutionary," you're likely to see some wild ideas. If the discipline is doing "normal science," there's intense pressure on scientists not to rock the boat.

Gould rocked the boat in a discipline that wasn't exactly ready for it. And made money doing it. Man, I can figure why his "peer group" decided the best thing to do was dismiss him as a "Marxist."

I'll rely on my thermometer, inaccurate & relative though it may be, because it is reliably inaccurate. ;-)

Re:Yeasts have culture

[BerntB]

Again:
You didn't provide any support this time either for your claims regarding other researchers doing straw man attacks on Gould that were equally bad as Gould's own intellectually dishonest arguments...

Gould rocked the boat in a discipline that wasn't exactly ready for it. And made money doing it. Man, I can figure why his "peer group" decided the best thing to do was dismiss him as a "Marxist."

Get real -- when Gould did his terrible ad hominem attacks on Wilson in popular press (etc) his opinions were quite mainstream for academia.

I've only seen Gould's politics discussed regarding why Gould did nonserious straw man arguments (and claims of racism regarding intelligence researchers) -- not as ad hominem arguments. If there are other examples (as you repeatedly claim), please give references.

What I said is that you'll be hard-pressed to find any theory that isn't colored to some extent by politics.

OK, that is your position. Let's take an example:
I'm fanatic about sushi. Since I'm a self-professed fanatic my opinions can be disregarded regarding, say, city planning?

You find more or less large amounts of politics everywhere. And some people stand mostly above it -- and some don't. Your theories that Gould was hounded by his evol biology critics in a way that was as intellectually dishonest as he himself do need support... something you refuse to give.

Again -- I've read people livid about his dishonest way of arguing, but I've not seen personal attacks without Gould starting.

Either support your claims that the evol biology critics of Gould acted at his low level -- or shut up. (As the US English idiom so non-charmingly put it: "S..t or get off the pot!")

(You didn't want to comment on that you claim that Gould misrepresents reality in his books -- which makes them uninteresting to people interested in learning about the world!?)

Re:Yeasts have culture

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to have an axe to grind with a dead man & that is an imminently unenviable position to be in.

Re:Yeasts have culture

[BerntB]

You seem to have an axe to grind with a dead man

Here I have an axe to grind with intellectually dishonest arguments. Sadly, those will die.

In this case, "djeaux" bases his argument on that others are as bad as Gould was -- but repeatedly fails to give examples.

Re:Yeasts have culture

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sadly, those will die." to "Sadly, those won't die."

Sigh.

Anyway -- djeaux, I'm still waiting for you to put references where your big claims are..?

Not smiling?

[BWJones]

"laughter has evolved in the context of joyful play, and that the broad smile has evolved as an expression of nonhostility and friendliness, taking its origin in the expression of fearful submission".

Ah, this must explain why I never felt like smiling during my punk rock days. I was younger, angry and much less secure and could have "evolved" a behavioral approach that prevented my appearing submissive to anybody. (that and I simply thought of myself as one baaaad dude. :-)

Animals 'live in the moment'

[MarkWatson]

..which is something that a lot of people seem difficulties doing.

Don't get me wrong: nothing wrong with planning for the future, or in a quiet moment remembering cool stuff that we did with our grandparents when they were still alive, but almost all of our thoughts are best focused on what we are doing now.

BTW, I too often rant to my friends and family about what I consider to be an indication of the fall of western civilization: too many people are caught up in a lust for material possessions - I think that is just another aspect of not living in the moment.

-Mark

Re:Animals 'live in the moment'

[Tripster]

I too often rant to my friends and family about what I consider to be an indication of the fall of western civilization: too many people are caught up in a lust for material possessions - I think that is just another aspect of not living in the moment.

Me too! Recently I did my tax returns, I run my own business from home and after all my write-offs I made a whopping $5000/year or so! Obviously I am not out to win any monopoly game here.

I hate jewelry, my wife loves the stuff, but I maintain it is worthless except in tbe minds of those who actually are enamoured by shiny things. Come on, it's freaking rocks and metal! Sure the work the craftsperson did to turn it into a ring is worth something but the materials themselves to me are worthless.

We live in the now, I myself am amazed at life itself, being alive is an interesting experience but really it is just a vacation from death because you will return to that state eventually.

Then there's the real big questions, like is any of this worth the effort? Let's be realistic, science is starting to show us that eventually, no matter what, humanity will die out entirely. We'll either get wiped out by gamma ray bursts, wiped by the Andromeda galaxy colliding with us and flinging us into a hostile enviroment or simply die when our sun runs out of fuel and goes dark, explodes or whatever it plans on doing at EOL.

On the positive side of things, the planet we sit on didn't always exist anyway, and the atoms in us have already been through a few furnaces before, so it's not like we're gonna notice really.

Re:Animals 'live in the moment'

[timeOday]

I guess impulse purchasing with a Credit Card is AOK then... no delayed gratification there!

Re:Animals 'live in the moment'

[wombatmobile]

BTW, I too often rant to my friends and family about what I consider to be an indication of the fall of western civilization: too many people are caught up in a lust for material possessions - I think that is just another aspect of not living in the moment.

What is? The lust, or your ranting against the lust?

Re:Animals 'live in the moment'

[sl0wp0is0n]

Then there's the real big questions, like is any of this worth the effort? Let's be realistic, science is starting to show us that eventually, no matter what, humanity will die out entirely. We'll either get wiped out by gamma ray bursts, wiped by the Andromeda galaxy colliding with us and flinging us into a hostile enviroment or simply die when our sun runs out of fuel and goes dark, explodes or whatever it plans on doing at EOL.

That's all the more reason not to be afraid of anything. We started from nada and we will end up with nada. So, go ahead, take that risk you always wanted to take, but were always afraid of, because you kept thinking of repercussions. And don't forget to have all the fun you can while you are doing it.

Re:Animals 'live in the moment'

[Anonymous Coward]

unfortunately, this appears to be a side effect of mass communication. the real measure might be the the ratio of gain in collective intelligence vs the negative side effects of marketing induced consumerism.

j.herber

Re:Animals 'live in the moment'

[Tripster]

Definitely, that is pretty much what my attitude has become as I've grown older, I've also been able to come to terms with death much more because my attitude is "I was dead before I was born" and I don't recall any of that.

I don't have religious beliefs to fall back on, I don't believe in life after death either other than the spirit/memories of those who have died remain with the living, but only for so long unless you did something famous or something.

I have had lots of friends and family die in my 37 years, not once has any of those who passed before me came back and given any indication of an "afterlife", sure we could always go with "maybe they can't" but it's more likely that they can't because they aren't in existence on any level anymore, outside of their atoms which are now being recycled on our planet getting ready for the next time they become part of something.

I find it quite incredible that there's a good chance atoms and molecules in my body at one point were possibly part of a dinosaur, heck some of them could have existed in previous generations of humans.

Re:Animals 'live in the moment'

[DeadPrez]

And here I thought I had an advantage of living in the past, present and future on a whim. I was hoping those living in the present only and needing to go into debt to buy a new pair of shoes (or whatnot) they'll wear once were the unevolved animals.

Dolphins.

[bad enema]

I distinctively remember hearing on a radio talk show (Coast to Coast, late night) that there has been research and soft "evidence" that dolphins form very complex societies, and that they even understand and practice self-sacrifice for the benefit of the population.

But whether or not we as humans regard such a practice as "cultural" or "savage" is another issue altogether.

Re:Dolphins.

[Scrameustache]

dolphins form very complex societies, and that they even understand and practice self-sacrifice for the benefit of the population.

Hey, as long as they don't take to human sacrifice, I'm fine with 'em...

Ants, termites, wasps, and bees...

[antdude]

They are social insects and they work together (in the same family) in growing, foraging for food, etc. Ants do not have big brains, they are complex as a group. Ants socialize by chemical odors to attack, defend, forage for food, etc.

Re:Ants, termites, wasps, and bees...

[itzdandy]

Consider Ant intelligence in a different way that most mamals.

The chemically processes that drive ant society basically make the colony a large, slow, brain. Different nodes/ants perform different tasks and use chemical and electrical intructions to do so. The more ants, the more successfull the colony. The more ants to faster the colony adapts and grows.

you can see evidence of this by the fact that the number of offspring produced by the queen cannot grow exponentially like it does in other animals that have a number of breeders simply bacause the queen cannot produce more eggs just because the colony is larger. The colony does grow exponentially because of better organization and efficiency with more ants.

Re:Ants, termites, wasps, and bees...

[Silburn_Luke]

That's why the collection of papers make a point of referring to *individualised* species. Its not to say that social insects aren't a fascinating and productive area of study but their forms of intelligence and social organisation are such a radically different thing that its questionable how applicable conclusions drawn from insect studies are to mammalian or avian sociability.

Regards
Luke

Art Bell

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the same show that rants and raves about floridation, radio transmitters in $20 bills, HAARP, black helicopters, tinfoil helmets, vast ruined cities on Mars, and ancient astronaut theories.

Hacking into a horse's brain.

[SharpFang]

Called Natural Horsemanship. A technique that is based on deep understanding of horses social structures.
Your first step is to teach the horse you mean no danger. Become a -safe- element of the environment. No matter what goes on, the horse feels fine with you.
Second step: Get the horse to recognise you as another horse. Of course no hooves, no eating grass. But typical horse behaviours. Horses yield from pressure from other horses but push against predators. Horses rarely approach each other directly, usually go along some rather obscure curves. And so on...
Third step: Gain leadership of the herd. Challenging the horse, duelling it, in a special kind of fight that doesn't involve violence, but charisma. Strong, hard looks, stepping forward, making the oponent lose ground...
And then polishing the communication. Getting the horse used to unusual situation, generally utilising newly gained power.
Horses that were proclaimed "lost" by the best classical trainers, were "recovered" and wildest ones became nice and gentle thanks to "horse whisperers" as those who practice natural horsemanship are sometimes called.

Re:Hacking into a horse's brain.

[Llywelyn]

>Hacking into a horse's brain ...just needs a really sharp axe.

Sorry, good information, but couldn't resist. :-)

Re:Hacking into a horse's brain.

[SharpFang]

As usually...
You miss the difference between a hacker and a cracker :)

zerg

[Lord Omlette]

So how big are penguin brains?

Now from Harvard University Press...

[Anonymous Coward]

How are trust fund size and physical attractiveness related to the complexity of one's social structure?

Pet peeve.

[Anonymous Coward]

"And do animals have culture?"

Of course. One example species would be ourselves.

Sorry, but humans talking of animals as if they don't belong to the group themselves is just a pet peeve of mine.

Re:Pet peeve.

[Anonymous Coward]

But they don't belong to the same group. I suppose the truth of that has escaped you.

Re:Pet peeve.

[Garridan]

Do humans have culture? I don't see much evidence of that here in the US...

Re:Pet peeve.

[DR SoB]

Try looking just about anywhere else.. :D Seriously, the original poster was dead on accurate.. But my question, so we can all debate what makes a being "self-aware" yadda-yadda, what makes society "civil", yadda-yadda. But here's my question, what makes an "animal" an "animal"??

Re:Pet peeve.

[el-spectre]

A lot of folks talk this way because the concept of evolution offends them. To which I typically respond "ok, ok... we all didn't evolve... some of you are still monkeys"

(yeah, I know we came from apes, not monkeys... but the insult works better)

Re:Pet peeve.

[Sgt York]

But here's my question, what makes an "animal" an "animal"??

Any life form that is obligate multicellular, posseses distinct organ systems, is heterophagic and capable of controlled, self-sustained motion at some point in its life cycle is an animal. Humans are animals in the biological sense. We are not a Kingdom unto ourselves.

Re:Pet peeve.

[DR SoB]

oooookay.. I had to get the dictionary out.. And I found out that "heterophagic" isn't a word? What's up with that?? Aside from that word that doesn't meet anything, there are plant's that meet your criteria.. So again, what's up with that? Where did you get that definition?? "We are not a Kingdom unto ourselves." At least this I can agree with. (I think!)

Re:Pet peeve.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe YOU came from apes, but I came from a common ansestor of apes, monkeys, and humans.

Re:Pet peeve.

[Anonymous Coward]

That word does have meaning, you just have a cheap dictionary. Plants are homophagic and don't possess organ systems, so don't meet those requirements.

Re:Pet peeve.

[Sgt York]

heterophagic : More common usage is "heterotroph" or "heteroptrophic"..I probably should have used that term. It's from the Greek roots, it means "to eat others". They are biological terms, not likely to be in your abridged Webster's. Sorry, I should have defined it in the original post.

It means that the organism's caloric food source is the consumption of other organisms. The "we are not a Kingdom unto ourselves" is a reference to the fact that we are members of the animal Kingdom.

And what plant (slime mold is not a plant!) "is capable of controlled, self-sustained motion at some point in its life cycle"?

Re:Pet peeve.

[blugu64]

"Did you mean: heterophasic"

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=U TF -8&q=heterophagic&btnG=Google+Search

Re:Pet peeve.

[DR SoB]

"heterophagic : More common usage is "heterotroph" or "heteroptrophic"..I probably should have used that term. It's from the Greek roots, it means "to eat others". They are biological terms, not likely to be in your abridged Webster's. Sorry, I should have defined it in the original post. " Cool! "It means that the organism's caloric food source is the consumption of other organisms. The "we are not a Kingdom unto ourselves" is a reference to the fact that we are members of the animal Kingdom." I know.. I agreed with you! :D "And what plant (slime mold is not a plant!) "is capable of controlled, self-sustained motion at some point in its life cycle"?" Okay: "Plants that move" http://www.uvm.edu/llcenter/programs/0304/plants.h tm "Plants that eat insects" http://www.coolquiz.com/trivia/explain/docs/plants .asp Carnivorous Plants by Adrian Slack (MIT Press, $24.95) Plants that can move: How about: Venus' flytraps, Pitcher plants, Sundews and butterworts? :D So I ask you again, what exact defines an "Animal"?

Re:Pet peeve.

[DR SoB]

"you just have a cheap dictionary" Please show me your "expensive" dictionary... Personally, I consulted 4, 2 Amercian 1 Canadian and 1 British, just to be sure.. "Homophagic" isn't the word he used. Sgt. York described it much better then you did, AC.

Re:Pet peeve.

[Anonymous Coward]

The term "pet peeve" is a pet peeve of mine. I believe you meant to use "Animal Companion Disharmony"

Re:Pet peeve.

[Anonymous Coward]

An animal is something with animal cells.

Re:Pet peeve.

[starm_]

Numerous scientific studies have shown that animals can learn thing and act as teachers to other animals passing knowledge from generation to generation. Crows can count, Chimps can learn sign language and even teach it to their kids. Dolphins mimic humans around them, birds learn songs that become parts of their society. Beavers find elaborate solutions to patch their dams. Squids can learn to open jars.

In 1920 a bird learned to open milk bottles in England. A few weeks later all of that bird specie knew how to open these bottles. Human had to redesign the bottle so that the birds wouldn't drink their milk.

It makes you think of how when you separate a young animal from its natural society he doesn't get to learn the culture he's suppose to learn and cannot necessarily survive well later. Or when you change animals habitats they have to relearn how to live in this new habitat. In the old habitat they had all the knowledge about it that was passed from generation to generation.

Often people assume that if you take a few animals relocate them because you want to build over their home everything will be fine. They will reproduce and live in their new place. But these animals are forced to leave their home their social network, friends and teachers. They may not have the resources to survive.

Re:Pet peeve.

[Sgt York]

Wow...include a page break evrey now and then..;D

Remember...the organism must fulfill all requirements listed. Remember also that heterotrophy refers to caloric food source. Venus fly traps, pitcher plants and the like use the insects they catch as a nitrogen source. Their caloric foodsource is still photosynthesis, making them autotrophs.

As for motion, what is described at the (broken) link is not the controlled motion I was talking about. I suppose I should have again been exceptionally precise with my statements; we're talking about transportation here.

Besides, none of these still meet the requirement of heterotrophy.

So I ask you again, what exact defines an "Animal"?

So, with an added clarification, I repeat: Heterotrophy, controlled self-sustained (transportational; as in for the purpose of moving from one place to another) motion, and obligate multicellular.

Re:Pet peeve.

[brre]

Of course. The correct phrase would have been "do animals other than humans have culture?"

Premack asked "can animals other than humans have language", and as a result of his research concluded there's no clear line between what we call language in humans and the communication he could demonstrate in other animals. He found quantitative differences but didn't figure there was a qualitative difference. Looks like we may conclude the same is true of culture, tool use, and so on: no clear line, quantitative differences but not qualitative.

However most humans believe there is a clear line. Researchers know better, but most humans haven't listed to them. Yet another example of how little humans have used those communications skills we're so proud of.

dolphins

[snarkh]

Here is an interesting table:

Species Brain Weight as % of Body Weight
human 2.10
bottlenose dolphin 0.94
African elephant 0.15
killer whale 0.09
cow 0.08
sperm whale (male) 0.02
fin whale 0.01

http://dubinserver.colorado.edu/prj/jbes03/brain .h tml

Re:dolphins

[Gunark]

You made some pretty glaring omissions:

lesser short-tailed shrew 2.80%
little brown bat 2.50%
mouse 1.30%

The brain weight as percentage of body weight thing just doesn't work. What you're looking for is the "encephalization factor".

The formula for that is:

brain weight
-------------
(body weight) ^ .69

Done this way, brain vs. body weight works in our favor (the human encephalization factor is .71, higher than anything else).

Re:dolphins

[mefus]

What you're looking for is the "encephalization factor".

I appreciate those additional entries from the table, but that "encephalization factor" is rank numerology.

Sheesh.

Re:dolphins

[Anonymous Coward]

No numerology has to do with how letters and words arranged in a special way give meaning.
This is just numbermanipulation, something quite different.

Re:dolphins

[Gunark]

No, it's based on the average brain-to-body weight ratio for mammals. Look it up in any first year neuroscience book.

But I think you're right in more general terms. Using any sort of gross brain measurement as an assessment of intelligence IS rank numerology.

Re:dolphins

[mrogers]

That figure of 0.69 looks pretty arbitrary... still I guess it proves that we're the only ones intelligent enough to rig the statistics in our favour. ;-)

Re:dolphins

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot:

Cowboy Neal 0.000001

Re:dolphins

[Silburn_Luke]

Its not arbitrary at all.

You need to include an exponent to factor out the effects of the cube/square law and there have been plenty of cross-species studies (and unfortunate mishaps - check out the story of the elephant who got dosed with LSD back in the early 60s) that back up a scaling factor of around ^0.7 or so.

Regards
Luke

Re:dolphins

[mrogers]

*grumble grumble* Damn scientists spoiling my fun with your empirical facts. ;-)

"The Book of Memory" or "The Civilizing Process"

[The Ape With No Name]

Carruthers, Mary. The book of memory : a study of memory in medieval culture / Mary J. Carruthers. Cambridge [England] ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 1990

A multi-disciplinary approach to how medieval memory was constituted. Carruthers goes into how modern memory is "documentary" rather than "rote." Really dense and good book that avoids the pitfalls of behaviorism that animal psychologists can fall into. Since I haven't read the above papers, I would assume these folks are enlightened by contemporary critical psychology.

Also:

Elias, Norbert. The civilizing process : sociogenetic and psychogenetic investigations / Norbert Elias ; translated by Edmund Jephcott with some notes and corrections by the author ; edited by Eric Dunning, Johan Goudsblom, and Stephen Mennell. Oxford, UK ; Malden, Mass. : Blackwell Publishers, 2000.

This book goes into the role that manners play in European elitism. Absolutely fascinating. Don't be put off by the Freudian "psychogenesis" stuff, it is a veritable treasure trove and fun to read as well with lots of "Don't wipe your ass then show it to your wife" stuff from the 13th C.

some days

[WormholeFiend]

I feel like an ant, going daily from the anthill I call my appartment building, to the anthill I call my workplace.

And I wonder, what do the real ants think about me?

Re:some days

[SparafucileMan]

They probably admire your efficiency in your support of the Hive.

Re:some days

[TyrranzzX]

"And I wonder, what do the real ants think about me?" Ant: W0000, a nice yummy crumb. Oh wow...wtf? What the HELL is that? The ground is moving all around me. *several seconds later and one missed pot shot at the ant* Ant: OH DEAR GOD! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!!! AAAAAHHHHHHHHH

Re:mares

[Anonymous Coward]

But really!
I jump on mine and shout Are you going or not?!
And she goes or not.

The final step

[djeaux]

PROFIT!

Re:The final step

[SharpFang]

you're, unfortunately, mostly right.

Re:sheila fraser audited my junk liberally

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually did a Google search for more instances of this a while ago, and it looks like the Batman troll is a recent creation of a warped individual. Heheheh.

However, it does bear a strong resemblance to some Wesley Willis songs. I could imagine him singing something like this.

Uh, moderators?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is hardly a troll, it's the truth.

Re:Orkut

[Anonymous Coward]

They are just flexing their "psychological experimentation" muscles. Thank you for playing, only the truly elite now remain.

Brain size and cognative/communication ability

[weeboo0104]

As the owner of an African Grey parrot, I see everyday how brain size affects communication and social cognition. My Grey tells me "Wanna go to bed" when she is tired, says "Want food", "Want water", "Want a toy", and want scratch whenever she wants one of these other things. She also identifies people by name. My grey (her name is Elmo. I thought she was male until she was DNA tested) also knows how to say "I love you". Earlier in the year, she started learning that women aren't all named the name of my ex-girlfriend. I have a female roomate and a girlfriend now and Elmo started listening for whoever was in the house at the time and saying "I love $PROPERNAME" Whenever she wanted to interact with that person and would also just call them by name.

I have a lot of other stories too. My slashdot name is based on the name "Weeboo" which is what Elmo named me for some reason.

If you want to read more about avian (specifically African Grey) cognitive ability, try going to www.alexfoundation.org to read more about an African Grey named Alex and Dr. Irene Pepperbergs research with interspecies communication and animal cognitive ability.

Re:Brain size and cognative/communication ability

[WormholeFiend]

if your parrot had offspring, would it teach them what it knows?

Re:Brain size and cognative/communication ability

[weeboo0104]

I think it is very possible. I also have an Amazon parrot that does not talk and have caught Elmo picking up the various objects and toys on her cage and identifying them while Deuce (my Amazon) sits on the cage with her.

I know that if Elmo asks for a specific object (object "x") and you give object "y" instead, Elmo repeats her original request or ignores object "y". She occasionaly will say "no" when she doesn't get what she wants, but has abandoned that word in favor of the more entertaining (and embarrasing) "son of a b*tch"

Re:Brain size and cognative/communication ability

[captainClassLoader]

Pepperbergs' work appeared recently on the Animal Planet cable channel. Alex the parrot is really brilliant - He can identify colors, shapes, food types, materials - He responds (and asks for things) in English, which only makes him seem smarter.

Re:Brain size and cognative/communication ability

[nairolF]

My slashdot name is based on the name "Weeboo" which is what Elmo named me for some reason.

And she's probably wondering why you called her "Elmo".

Re:Brain size and cognative/communication ability

[BigBadBri]

You're lucky.

Our Grey's psychotic - he hates men, and will only interact with women.

He recognises the names of different foods, and you can list them - banana, carrot, beans, peas, nuts, etc - and he will say 'Want Some!' when you get to what he wants, and he will ask for particular items if he sees you eating them.

Trouble is, only my girlfriend and daughter can feed him - I have to lob whatever it is in his dish, or he'll try to take my finger off.

Pepperberg was on BBC Radio the other week - it was a great half-hour of radio.

Re:Brain size and cognative/communication ability

[AliasF97]

I don't remember where or when, but I heard that crows have a reasonably complex social order. So much so, that when a flock of crows is gathered together, one crow is charged with "keeping watch," and if a predator gets through without a warning, the other crows kill the one that was supposed to keep guard. Has anyone else ever heard of this? If so, it would seem to lend some credence to this intelligence/social structure theory.

Re:Brain size and cognative/communication ability

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Thats why a group of crows is referred to as a "murder". because they will murder the one that betrays the group.

Re:Brain size and cognative/communication ability

[TimboJones]

In Gaiman's Sandman series (I forget which book exactly), a character spoke of the behaviour of a parliament of rooks. A whole load of rooks will gather in a field, encircling one of their number, who will 'speak' at some length. When he finishes, the rest of the parliament, as one, will either take off in flight or descend on the speaker and kill him dead.

Well

[Anonymous Coward]

what about the "A HARD SEX! WOW!" troll? I never did track down where that one came from.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never seen that one. Link?

Take a number, dood

[Anonymous Coward]

nfm

Animals that can play the piano.

[bad enema]

One of the staples of culture as we define it is musical achievement. It has been demonstrated that certain animals can "play" the piano with more complexity than simply banging their beaks/paws on the keys. That is, they can both recognize musical tunes and harmony and demonstrate the capacity to mimic the sounds.

Now considered separately, meither of the abilities to mimic nor to differentiate between pleasant and unplesant sounds is truly "cultural", or more cultural than instinctive. However, this is where we certainly run into a question of the definition of culture -and what exactly makes us as humans gifted with it and not any other animal.

Re:How can you not laugh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Japanese primatology

Ugh! Ugh! Emperor Hirohito want take over world! Germans help! Ugh! Ugh!

Hyenas...

[Anonymous Coward]

Laurence Frank describe the social system of spotted hyenas and argue that more attention should be paid to social complexity in carnivores. It has commonly been argued that social stress is a consequence of subordination;

Of course it causes social stress and other negative emotions when every female of your species has clitoris of your penis size.

I, for one,....

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, welcome our giant alien ant moderators. Only such as they would think that humans are not the most sophisticated social animals around.

Animal intelligence and society

[Anonymous Coward]

First, define intelligence. :) The problem with this kind of research is that intelligence isn't (as yet) quantifiable, only qualifiable and only in very abstract terms.

We have two known examples of demonstrable lateral thinking on the part of avians. Grey Parrots have shown an ability to actually understand sentances containing verbs, adverbs, adjectives and the indefinite article. They also exhibit the ability to handle basic arithmetic.

Crows, on the other hand, have been shown to be able to study problems, manufacture tools from raw materials, and use those tools to solve those problems.

It's easy to argue that these cases are only over a very limited range of conditions, and under very controlled conditions. And that's all true.

The point I'm making is that if we use a simple definition of intelligence - say the ability to handle abstract concepts, logical and lateral thinking, and the ability to handle conceptual modelling (which is basically what a language is), then intelligence is amazingly common on Earth.

Hey, that's not too bad a definition, but it includes too wide a range of life. It becomes useless as a definition, because so little is excluded.

Now we move onto society. If we do a basic study of human society, we see that reptilian traits (eg: the ability to act/react without thought) are far more highly prized than mammalian traits (eg: the ability to have emotional associations, the ability to form bonds that have nothing to do with personal gain, etc).

From a strict study of current social patterns, humans are probably one of the most primitive of all the mammals. The preference of using the older, reflexive parts of the brain, over and above the emotional and intellectual parts, is definitely regressive.

Modern society is the way it is because it actually works. Many things, from riding a bicycle to karate, would be impossible if there was a heavy dependence on the "thinking" parts of the brain.

My point? Societies are going to evolve towards whatever works well, though not necessarily for the same reasons, and are not necessarily constrained to the social norms.

In consequence, any such study is going to be extremely difficult to do. There are a lot of unknowns, and many of them are unknowable. Further, social studies often fall into the "soft" sciences, which are badly-funded and often badly-run.

The papers are worth reading, but I'm not confident that those doing the research know enough to do the research well. I'm not even sure anyone does. That makes the results suspect, even if the actual studies themselves are of value.

Analog: DNA "complexity"

[ianscot]

I would more likely believe that brain size (in terms of computational circuits) would be more appropriate...

A similar argument could be made -- would be made, intuitively, I'd think -- that the more "complex" a critter is, the more complex its DNA would be. More combinations means more potential "circuits" would be the idea. Actually looking at the human genome, though, makes you scratch your head over that one. Though expected to be around 100,000 genes, the human genome turns out to be 30-40,000 genes instead -- right around the level of bacteria, for one comparison.

Personally I'm into your elephant link, and thinking about how their minds work. I love looking at the old skulls and thinking about what that kind of "people" must've been like with a braincase shaped like that. But I dunno, I was reading someplace about Clark's Nutcrackers possibly needing to trade brain size against memory (for where they store seeds), and thinking "How reductive is that?" Seems like the sort of size=power reasoning that would evaporate under scrutiny. Applied to areas of the brain, or to overall brain sizes, it just seems to belong to the world of phrenology.

(And you left out physeter brains -- sperm whales', which are the biggest out there, right?)

Re:Analog: DNA "complexity"

[mrogers]

Though expected to be around 100,000 genes, the human genome turns out to be 30-40,000 genes instead -- right around the level of bacteria, for one comparison.

I don't understand why this figure generated so much fuss. We're looking at a combinatorial system - you don't need many inputs to get an enormous number of outputs. It's like being amazed that telephone numbers in a large city "only" have eight digits.

Picture the human genome as a binary string 30,000 bits long. Each bit represents a gene: 1 means active, 0 means inactive (genes with more than 2 possible states can be represented by multiple bits). This gives us an upper limit of 2^30,000 possible phenotypes without even considering developmental influences. That number dwarfs the number of atoms in the universe, let alone the number of people that have ever lived. Even if only one in a trillion of those phenotypes is viable, we still have 2^29,960 to choose from. For me, the question is not "how can this be complex enough to create a human being?" but "how can we find the tiny subset of this information that actually corresponds to human beings?".

Automatic Behaviour in Distro

[wombatmobile]

Some animal behaviour comes with the distribution in ROM and is documented.

Do animals dance?

[gregRowe]

Do animals other than humans dance to audio? I am serious! It seems like it is a natural reaction for humans to move when they hear a rythmic sound, do other animals do the same?

Re:Do animals dance?

[Slick_Snake]

I've seen various birds do it all the time. These included the more intelegent birds such as parrots and macaws. I noticed that some of them only did it to certain song that they "liked."

Re:Do animals dance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes horses swing their heads rhythmically to music.
Dogs "sing" to different instruments.
But usually "recorded" music, meaning anything that passes through electronic media, is so mangled and broken that only humans can't tell the difference. It just doesn't work on animals, just as ascii art pr0n doesn't turn people on.

animals

[Anonymous Coward]

Furry

Whew! Re:The final step

[StefanJ]

I thought you were going to write something about driving the stallions out of the herd and mounting the mares.

Re:Whew! Re:The final step

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, come on, this too!

One Way Relationship

[$lingBlade]

It seems to me that humans are involved in a one-way relationship with every other animal on the planet. If there were a mass extinction of humans, through anything other than a species-hopping virus and/or global thermonuclear war, if we simply *weren't* here anymore, animals (in my opinion) would continue to live and thrive. If our extinction was not based on any environmental factors other than social issues.

I would say that it's their *lack of society* that makes other animals so strong... the way they seemingly operate on instinct and loosely defined (by our conventions) social structures. Oscillating (beyond our understanding) between these two polar opposites. If however all the animals on the planet were suddenly gone, including insects, I think we'd probably last a few years or less. Point is, we need them, they *don't* need us. What's more, I believe we could learn a lot from them in terms of living socially. And I mean that in a sincere way not a dig against us as humans but as suggestion that just because we appear to be the most intellectually motivated species on the planet, doesn't mean we're automatically right and just in our endeavours.

I'm reminded of the line from Aliens when they're discussing the impending break-in of the aliens and someone says something to the effect of "you don't see them fucking one another over for a share".

Re:One Way Relationship

[Wanderer2]

If however all the animals on the planet were suddenly gone, including insects, I think we'd probably last a few years or less. Point is, we need them, they *don't* need us.

Isn't this simply because we have no natural predator? No animal bases its life on hunting, killing and eating humans (except the Predator :). Being at the top of the food chain means we wouldn't be missed if we vanished. Some domesticated species of animals and plants would probably struggle to survive, but everything else would continue. This isn't to do with social effects, but to our expansion into wildly different areas of the globe and, naturally, to our killing off of any potential predator.

Re:One Way Relationship

[bersl2]

Two ant colonies will destroy each other, because they are not born of the same line of queens.

Male lions who have usurped others as the head of a pride will, given the chance, kill the offspring of the former male.

Those are two examples of animals of the same species fucking each other over in the name of family: a hardwired war and family feud.

Human intelligence has complexified the situation. We are able to find other reasons to cooperate (indeed, in the two situations above for us, our animal instincts rise to the top); yet we are capable of backstabbing, something (to my knowledge) they do not do.

Disclaimer: I do not know the meaning of what I just wrote. I usually wish animals were anthropomorphized. Feh...

Re:One Way Relationship

[itzdandy]

idiot..

we don't need them. The planet needs animal life to support animal life. If all other animal life died out, only science and technology could save the remaining single species as it would overpopulate and ravage its food source.

also, if all dog species died out, humans would not perish, not would many other species.

if all humans die, just one species has been eliminated and most others would survive as they do now. Now if all ants died, that would be an ecological disaster and a number species would be lost as a result of one of the worlds most populous species being lost and its contributions to the landscape such as waste removal(dead animals)

humans are not a form of life all unto themselves.

the system is not plant, animal, human. we fit into the animal group!

Smart

[SparafucileMan]

There's a species of tropical birds (sorry I forget the name) where the male is responsible for building the house. So it gathers all the sticks and builds itself a multi-story house. Then is clears out the ground floor so its nice and clean. Then it goes out and gathers the finest flowers it can find and groups them into a pile on the ground floor. It does the same thing with the finest fruits. Then it lines the entrance-way to the house with some more fruit. Then, very proud of itself, it calls for the females to come check out his crib. Whoever builds the nicest house gets the hottest chicks. If that's not "smart and intelligent", then I don't know what is. And no, I'm not making this up.

Ants, Termites and Bees

[Mouth of Sauron]

While I wouldn't say they have 'culture' they do exhibit a high amount of social complexity. But are they more or less complex than the Naked Mole Rat, the only mammal that lives in a colony like hive insects?

Re:Ants, Termites and Bees

[Jonathan]

Well, socially I'd have to say the ants are more complex -- they have more social casts, and thus are better adapted to living as hive animals than the mole rats. I know that's hard for us mammals to accept, but mammals aren't the pinnacle of social animals -- heck, most species of mammals don't even live in packs/herds.

What are evolutionary underpinnings of cooperation

[Anonymous Coward]

Ball sniffing.

Shortly after males stopped greeting each other with an obligatory ball sniff, the first armies were formed.

bower birds

[boredman]

They're called bower birds, and they live in Australia.

Re:bower birds

[SparafucileMan]

So close...the pictures I've seen of the bowers always show some walls rather than a huge house, and as far as I know the bowers paint the inside of their 'house', whereas the species I'm thinking of does not. I think the mysterious bird is from South America.

Re:bower birds

[boredman]

Really? Interesting... Please post if you find any info about them!

Why Ants, Bees, Wasps are social

[G4from128k]

A peculiarity in the genetics (haplodiploidy) of insects in the order Hymenoptera is the likely underlying cause of the evolution of sociality in ants, bees, and wasps. While females (all worker bees, ants, wasps, etc. are female) have two sets of chromosomes, males only have one. This affects the relatedness of individuals. In particular, haplodiploidy makes an ant, for example, more related to its sisters than to its own daughters and sons. For ants, bees, and wasps, the most selfish way to pass on your genes is to raise more sisters. As a result, social behavior appears to independently evolved as many as 11 times in Hymenopterans -- appearing several times in the ancestors of what we now know as ants, bees, and wasps.

Sometime being social is the most selfish strategy possible.

re: pet peeve -- Scientists as Creationists

[soren100]

When it comes to animal thought, feeling, and culture many scientists seem turn into strict Creationists.

How? Because they seem to believe that thought, feeling and culture somehow spontaneously arose in humans instead of evolving slowly over aeons in many different species of animals.

If we have it, why would scientists be surprised that other animals have it too unless the scientists believed in some type of creationism?

Thankfully science is beginning to evolve past that point but if you talk to any scientist that doesn't acdept higher mental acitivity in animals just call him a creationist.

Conditioning != cognition

[Wind_Walker]

What you're describing is just conditioning. You likely gave Elmo food while saying "Want Food" a lot. Thus, the brain connected "Want Food" with you giving food. Then, whenever Elmo is hungry, she just triggers your response by saying "Want Food"

This has been done for centuries. It neither demonstrates knowledge nor understanding - just primitive cause-and-effect association.

Re:Conditioning != cognition

[weeboo0104]

It neither demonstrates knowledge nor understanding - just primitive cause-and-effect association

Possibly. Of course if that were the case, then if she asked for juice and I gave her water, she wouldn't push away the water and ask for juice again. Food is just a generic term. Dr. Pepperbergs Grey identifies specific food items and even assigns names to new fruit. For example, he knew the words for bananna and cherry. When presented with an apple, he called it a banerry. Insides colored like a bananna, outsides red and shaped like a cherry.

Re:Conditioning != cognition

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in this case. These parrots can be shown a small collection of objects, and answer the "question what color is the block?" correctly. they can be shown an item and answer the question "what is this?" and the answer is not 'want $OBJECT' nor is it the objects color.

It is very hard to define this as mere conditioning, even with my limited knowledge of it. I am sure that the whole range of behavior is totally unexplainable by mere conditioning.

Weird bee trivia

[drox]

Ants bees and termites have an advantage when it comes to social complexity though: because they have a queen (rather than the workers reproducing directly) a fundamentally different Darwinian dynamic happens, that encourages cooperation.

It's not just the Darwinian dynamic that encourages cooperation; it's helped along by pheromones from the queen bee. These pheromones inhibit the sexual development of the worker bees (who are all sexually immature females as a result).

Deprived of a queen (and her pheromones) for a sufficient time, some worker bees will stop cooperating and will begin to lay eggs. They also begin to secrete the same pheromone that queen bees secrete, inducing other worker bees to feed and groom them as though they were the queen.

However... these egg-laying worker bees have never mated. Indeed they can't mate; they never developed the required anatomy. So they lay only unfertilized eggs, which, due to a strange quirk of bee biology, develop into male bees (male bees all come from unfertilized eggs - they have no fathers and no sons!). A hive with laying workers is soon teeming with males, who do no work and cannot even feed themselves, but who CAN mate with queen bees (from another hive - remember this hive's queenless) and thus carry on the bee's genetic legacy.

Worker bees aren't truly sterile; they're just *mostly* sterile.

Re:Weird bee trivia

[grungefade]

Is this true? How am i supposed to believe just something someone says? do you have any backing sources?

Re:Weird bee trivia

[drox]

Well I've been a beekeeper since 1998, but if you don't want to take my word for it, you could look in any entymology text.

Re:Weird bee trivia

[Anonymous Coward]

doesn't mean much from an AC, but this is what I understood as well. My family tried to raise bees several years ago.

Re:Weird bee trivia

[catbutt]

Sorry if I'm late on this one...but...

I'm sure you are right about the pheromones from the queen, but I think your conclusions about cause and effect are a bit backwards. Pheromone systems like that are most likely to evolve in a colony sitution. Bee colonies are almost like single organisms in an evolutionary sense (because of the way the reproduce), so that level of interoperation is likely to happen, just as hormones happen within a single organism.

In a species that reproduces directly, it is harder for pheromones-communication system to evolve, since it must be in the interest of each individual to respond "correctly" to the pheromone. In other words, you could have a conflict of evolutionary interest.

Re:Weird bee trivia

[drox]

Pheromone systems like that are most likely to evolve in a colony sitution.

Yes. It seems even some mammals (naked mole rats, IIRC) follow this pattern. And they live in underground colonies, which I doubt is mere coincidence.

In a species that reproduces directly, it is harder for pheromones-communication system to evolve, since it must be in the interest of each individual to respond "correctly" to the pheromone. In other words, you could have a conflict of evolutionary interest.

Here's where I beg to differ. Worker bees, subdominant mole rats, and assorted other communally-living organisms aren't truly sterile. but most of them don't reproduce (they're mostly sterile). By putting aside their own direct reproduction in favor of helping their close relatives reproduce, they actually increase their reproductive potential. They *might* be able to successfully breed, but the chances are small. Their mother/sister/cousin/whatever, however, is a extremely successful breeder, so it's usually in their best interest to help her rather than strike out on their own. The pheromones help regulate this, as well as ensuring that, when the queen is gone, the colony's DNA can still be passed on (in bees, through the male line only). So it's in each worker's best interest to respond correctly to the pheromones.

Animals 'live in the moment' to their own demise

[swb]

My dog will eat stuff she doesn't get fed very often (raw meat, wet dog food) until she gets sick, and some breeds can kill themselves doing that.

Orangutans have culture

[line.at.infinity]

The beeb reports.

You fucking suck.

[Anonymous Coward]

How cute.

Rattlesnakes

[BigBadBri]

On the BBC today - rattlesnakes have social lives.

I'd never thought of snakes as social before, but this looks like interesting research.

Alex

[Llywelyn]

Ever study Alex? Read up, its an interesting case study that if you apply the older "animals lack cognition" model raises serious question about whether *we* have actual cognition.

Considering that crows can both make and use tools and octopus can learn to open containers by watching other octopus, limiting these things to "primitive cause-and-effect association" seems a bit chauvinistic on our part.

Kropotkin and a book not directly related.

[readpunk]

If you are serious in studying this and other sociology/nature/behaviour styled stuff. Check out "Mutual Aid" by Kropotkin. It gives the anti-social darwinism view of nature and relationships in nature, supported by the ideas of Darwin himself.

How is "brain size" measured

[whitroth]

The question here is are we talking straight weight, the ratio of brain weight to body weight...or brain surface area (which depends on convolutions)?

mark

insects organise chaos

[goon]

this post is spot on. In David Suzuki's latest series, The Sacred Balence , he talked to a scientist Brian Goodman about Ants. Goodman gathered data on the communication between ants that are working and ants not working.

• "... Some kind of collective emergent behaviour will be observed as the result of local coupling. In neural organizations, retrieval of associative memory (and maybe consciousness) can be thought of as emergent properties. ..." (www.sacredbalance.com/web/antsociety.html)

Plotting the results, he found that once the number of connections between ants got to a particular number, the results created a sort of harmonic wave representing systematic organisation occuring. This goes some way to explaining how multitude of ants, each with specialised behaviour and functions know what to do just at the right time.

There's a simulation on this page (java applet) with detailed information (or where to get it) on the maths behind the model.

Re:Animals 'live in the moment' to their own demis

[Anonymous Coward]

So do people. :-)

with enough monkeys...

[chocolatetrumpet]

You see, with enough monkeys, and enough pianos, you can eventually derive the complete works of Chopin...

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

ant theory of aliens

[chocolatetrumpet]

I always liked the "ant theory of aliens"; the idea is that, in the same way humans constantly surround ants, and the ants cannot even understand our presence due to the simplicity of their organism, humans are constantly surrounded by alien life, but we cannot know and are unable to conceptualize it.

Maybe the aliens have been using raid (the weather) on us for some time now...

Social Structures + The Human Species

[bettiwettiwoo]

... the way they seemingly operate on instinct and loosely defined (by our conventions) social structures.

I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by 'loosely defined [...] social structures'. A lot of species live in groups with very clearly defined structures and roles: who's the alpha male/female and who isn't, for example, which decides who gets to eat first, who gets to drink first, who gets to mate etc etc. The individual fulfilling each role may of course vary -- for instance, alpha male gets old and tired and eventually gets ousted from his alpha male position by up-and-coming alpha male-to-be -- nevertheless, the structure of the hierarchy itself (the structure of the group/society) does not change (in my example the position of alpha male remains).

If however all the animals on the planet were suddenly gone, including insects, I think we'd probably last a few years or less.

Why? Let's face it: so far -- I admit that it might be hard to extrapolate with any larger degree of certainty as humankind is such a new species -- it appears to me that humans are some sort of larger equivalent to rats and cockroaches.

Think about it.

First of all we can eat almost anything: animal or vegetarian, the choice is yours, your body will be able to derive nourishment from either (didn't your mama ever teach you about vegetables?) -- although on a purely vegan diet vitamin B12 might be a bit of a problem.

Secondly, we appear to be able to live under almost any conditions: Eskimos live in extreme cold; Africans in (sometime) extreme heat; desert people endure lack of water; during moonsoons people on the Asian sub-continent get drenched in water. Or look at those people who during the Middle Ages were tortured/imprisoned by being locked up into boxes in which they could neither sit nor stand nor lie down fully but had to half-sit/-stand: there were people who survived inside such boxes for years!

Thirdly, some people seem unusually difficult to kill: when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki most people died but not all people did, some actually survived. They may have developed cancer in later years, their offspring might have developmental problems, but they survived: that's definitely cockroach quality! We also heal quite easily. Have you ever seen Star Gate? When the uber-alien says that it chose to reside in a human body because it was so easy to mend? That's actually true.

Furthermore, because the human species is so 'young' there are signs that our evolution is still very much on-going: a genetic disposition to, I believe, sleeping sickness with particularly the Asian population carries with it a certain measure of immunity to malaria: that particular genetic mutation/change is a direct evolutionary response to the 'environmental' pressure of malaria. In other words, there is still ample room for improvement/change. If the world would all of a sudden become animal-less, odds are we would, after an initial period of adjustment of course, survive and prosper as a species.

Re:Social Structures + The Human Species

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe, sleeping sickness with particularly the Asian population carries with it a certain measure of immunity to malaria:

No, it is not sleeping sickness. It is sickle cell anemia. those who are carriers of the gene, but do not have it, are resistant to malaria (malaria is a blood borne parasite, the gene makes it harder to infect red blood cells).

It would appear that having approxamately 1/4 of your offspring die is less of a disadvantage than being more suseptable to malaria. At least in Africa.

Animal Cultures

[GrumpySimon]

Over the past five years there's been a major research effort looking at primate cultures mainly under the guidance of Cristophe Boesch (Chimps - Pan troglodytes spp) and Carole van Schaik (Orang-utans - Pongo pygmaeus), and even Monkeys (the village idiots of the primate family) have been shown to have culture traits.

Anyway, a great webpage on this from Boesch's team Chimpanzee Culture

See also -
Whiten et al. Nature, 399:682-685
van Schaik et al. (2003). Orangutan cultures and the evolution of material culture. Science 299:102-105.
Perry & Manson (2003). Traditions in Monkeys. Evolutionary Anthropology 12:71-81

Oh, and it's not only primates - Fish biologists have also jumped on board -
Bshary et al (2002). Fish cognition: a primate's eye view. Animal Cognition 5:1-13

which shows that fish can do all sorts of massively complex social behaviors - e.g. predator avoidance and something which is very cool, inter-specific (ie: different species co-operating) co-operative hunting. For example: Moray eels (Gymnothorax javanicus) and Red sea coral groupers (Plectropomus pessuliferus). The Morays sneak through holes whilst groupers wait to catch escaping fish - they actually 'go hunting together' and signal each other by shaking their bodies.

Oh, and let's not forget the bird-people:
Corvus Moneduloides

Hunt & Gray (2003). Diversification and cumulative evolution in New Caledonian crow tool manufacture. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences.

Lefebvre et al (2002). Tools and Brains in Birds. Behaviour, 139, 939-973.

I once read, many eons ago... (30 years?)

[Anonymous Coward]

... that brain size indeed is an inaccurate proxy for intelligence.

Rather, "energy intake" per weight unit would be a better indicator.

This is very old, and probably outdated, but the idea was that intelligent animals spend (and therefore eat) a lot more energy, proportionally to physical size, than less brilliant ones. This embeds the notion of total energy spending compared to what is used in daily chores (movement, feeding, nurturing etc.)

Of course, a bear just before hibernation would eat a lot and seem very intelligent... :-(

Sessile animals?

[tepples]

controlled self-sustained (transportational; as in for the purpose of moving from one place to another) motion

What about those organisms that anchor themselves to rocks or something, such as sponges, corals, tunicates, etc?

Re:Sessile animals?

[Sgt York]

In the original, I mentioned the qualifier "at some point in the life cycle"

Sponges, other tunicates, corals and barnacles are free swimming as larvae. They only become sessile as adults.Reminds me of a favorite quote of mine regarding sea squirts (tunicates), which are, incidentally, the closest thing there is to a vertebrate that's not quite a vertebrate:

The juvenile seasquirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it. It's rather like getting tenure.

What? A snake?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who'd think of that?

Already been recorded: Thai Elephant Orchestra

[lunachik]

I will leave it to Aquarius Records, SF's little shop of strange and wonderful things, to explain this one.

review from aquariusrecords.org:

THAI ELEPHANT ORCHESTRA s/t (Mulatta Records) cd 15.98

First it was Frogs of North America invading our record bins, then it was Antarctic Seals and Penguins, followed by Insects in Stored Foodstuffs... now it's Elephants from Thailand! Brilliant recordings by non-human, um, sound-artists that we just can't get enough of here at Aquarius. In this case, the elephants are not just making their natural noises, they are indeed playing instruments! You may have read about this project in the New York Times -- when we found out about it we immediately contacted the label and ordered a whole bunch (based also on the on-line sample we heard at www.mulatta.org) and now here they are. These are elephants from a elephant preseve in Thailand who have been trained to play specially-built instruments (many marimba-like instruments similar to the traditional Thai renat, as well as such things as harmonicas, drums, and even a stringed "electric bass"), but they haven't been trained *what* to play, it's all improvised with minimal human guidance! Yet it's definitely music. It was kind of an experiment to find out how the creatures might express themselves, and we'd say it was very successful indeed. If we didn't know these were elephants, we'd think this was a strange No Neck Blues Band recording or something. Imagine a stumbling, primitive hippy folk jam on gamelan instruments, but not one that's random or erratic. The elephants play steady beats, the struck gongs or chimes interspersed with their vocalizations as well. With no overdubs and few edits this is certainly a very impressive recording!

The Thai Elephant Orchestra was dreamed up, and this disc produced, by David Soldier (New York musician and academic) and Richard Lair (American expatriate elephant expert, who advises the Thai Elephant Conservation Center where this project goes on). The two came up with the idea that elephants, being social animals, might enjoy playing music together, and proceeded to investigate... Happily, not only did the elephants enjoy playing, they were good at it, demonstrating that they were able to decide what sounded good (to them) and what didn't.

The booklet features photos and detailed, fascinating liner notes by both men. Here is what Soldier says the criteria was for the construction of the instruments, which were made by New York instrument builder Ken Butler (of "Gravikords, Whirligigs..." fame):

"1. The instruments must be suitable to the elephant's anatomy, which means large instruments operated by the trunk.
"2. The instruments must withstand jungle heat, humidity -- and the elephants.
"3. The instruments should require minimum upkeep.
"4. The instruments should have a Thai sound, because the regular daily audience is Thai, the mahouts would enjoy the music more, and the elephants have heard Thai music all their lives."

Some more great tid-bits from the notes: "The elephants took easily to the harmonica, which sparked the first elephant music fad: one morning I arrived to hear the sound of harmonicas from all over -- from the hills and from the river. The elephants were walking in from the forest playing harmonicas, which they hold easily in the tip of their trunks."

"The elephants didn't seem interested in the bells or theremin. At first they were spooked by the synthesizer keyboard, but later two animals were entranced by it. They disliked playing Ken's reed instruments with a large mouthpiece, or rather, trunkpiece. A mahout told me they were afraid that a snake might jump into their nostrils!"

As sort of bonus tracks, in addition to the forty-plus minutes of elephant improv, there's also some non-instrumental elephant field recordings, several tracks of humans and elephants playing together, and even a few traditional Thai songs played by humans, abou

Damn you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you know how to use a spoiler alert?

Idiot.

Example of Animal culture

[56ksucks]

We'll use cats as an example of animal culture. When cat A sees cat B it us customary for cat A to approach cat B and commence the butt sniffing process, a common greeting among cats. If Cat A is male and determines that cat B is female he will attempt to mount her and thus begins the boinking process. This is the courtship process of cats. The female will either respond by agreeing to mate, or hissing and growling and slapping him with her claws if she does not agree. If both cats are of the same gender they will simply growl and his and slap each other with their front paws. In either event, the cats will then leave the scene of the sex/fight and attempt to find something to eat as food is the driving force in the cat culture. Cats have a very simple language consisting of purrs, hisses, and meows. A purr often means happiness. A hiss means it is angry, and a meow means it wants something. Because the culture is based on food and sex these are the only 3 words the cat really needs. When it is time to use the restroom it is customary for the cat to search for a spot where it can cover its poop if no such spot can be found the cat will simply poop on your carpet. Punishing a cat often seems pointless because after punishment it is customary for the cat to only refrain from pooping on your carpet as long as you are watching. If you aren't looking the cat believes it is once again safe to dookie on your floor. It is also customary in cat cultures for cats that are familiar with one another to lick each other's butt hole as a sign of affection. Licking the butt hole of a friend is similar to a handshake.

Re:Example of Animal culture

[Silburn_Luke]

Cats are a poor example of animal culture, descended as they are from a solitary species. Their interactions are pretty simple (as noted in your post) and taken in the round cats are pretty dumb.

Dogs on the other hand are social carnivores and have the capability for far more complex social behaviour as a consequence. Dogs and wolves are pretty bright - much more so than cats.

A common idea people have about cats and dogs is that cats are smarter than dogs, because they can't be told what to do by their keepers whereas dogs will make endless fools of themselves in order to please their alpha. This is mistaken however and merely interprets a cat's solipsistic narcissism as evidence of some form of a higher, machievellian intellect.

In fact cats don't play the fool for their parent/keeper figures because they don't have the capability to form these social pair-bonds, which are the linchpin of pack/band formation.

Regards
Luke

Re:Example of Animal culture

[56ksucks]

It was a joke dude :) And I have several cats of my own. They can be taught to respond to commands and can be very sociable to each other.

Re:I HAVE MONKEY PENIS

[Justabit]

hey, arnt we decended from monkeys? So... arnt we supposed to have penises like them? Did you mean you have an animal that looks like a monkey penis? I give Up

Re:How can you not laugh?

[Justabit]

why isnt a rock like a hammer? (no its not a joke) When a monkey uses it to get to the inside of a nut It is acheiving the same thing (Admitedly with less style ) as using a hammer. besides nut tastes better with bits of shell and rock mixed in with it!

Re:"The Book of Memory" or "The Civilizing Process

[tiled_rainbows]

Don't wipe your ass then show it to your wife

Strange how society's changed. Nowadays, if you're going to show your arse to anybody, it's generally considered good manners to have wiped it first.

Pigs are smart?

[IroNick]

I've heared that pigs are the smartest animals. This sounds like a good idea: They can adapt easily to their surroundings and they eat whatever they feel like. I think they can be fairly social and I belive they can do most dog tricks. Hmm. Any thoughts?

Re:Pigs are smart?

[nothingtodo]

Yes, pigs are very smart. My grandmother told me of a story in which two sows had babies and when food was put out for all the pigs, one of the two sows would go first and eat whilst the second sow watched the piglets. Then they'd switch so the other sow could go eat. I've also heard of other examples of pig smarts as well. I've heard the small pet kind can be tried as good as a dog.

Animal culture at home

[nothingtodo]

A culture could be described as a hierarchy, right? If so, I observe an interesting one with my pets, an old beagle, a younger shih tzu and a perfectly black fluffy cat. The 14 year old beagle is the top dog. The other animals do not challenge her. She will charge them if they come too close or if she's cranky. The shih tzu submits to the beagle, actually is scared of her. She will calmly wait for food until the beagle is done. The cat does her own thing. The shih tzu and her sometimes lick each other and sometimes will do greco-roman wrestling. They grew up together. Sometimes the cat will avoid the beagle or sometimes will ignore her outright when she growls and charges at her. Strangely though, things change. The beagle has sniffed nose to nose with the other animals and sometimes does not mind being near them. Sometimes the beagle will attack, then stop short and do something else. When riding in the car, the dogs will huddle close to one another and not be afraid at all. The interaction between them is unique and predictable, but then sometimes random.

Re:How can you not laugh?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not about getting into the nut. It's the level of sophistication required to make real tools. The monkey is doing nothing more than taking an existing object and using it. Pretty smart but that can in no way be compared to what we humans can do with raw materials. There is no animal that even comes close to humans. None. Period

we should look at more than the size of one's.....

[1iar_parad0x]

We should be looking at physiological complexity -- not just pure brain size. How much sensory information runs through the body of an animal?

Incidentally, does anyone have a good definition of the word complex? Outside of algorithm analysis/combinatorics and algorithmic information theory, I can't find a good mathematical definition of complexity. Can anyone site a good paper on the subject?

Actually, I may be spouting some quackery here.... However, how complex are the biofeedback systems of different animals? Certainly information theory can analyze this. I've got to believe humans are more "complex".