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Animal Social Complexity - Intelligence and Culture
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.
As long as these theories about animals don't interfere with my eating them, it's all good to me.
Well, if we look at ants, bees and termites, we can safely draw the conclusion that brain size and social complexity are inversely proportional.
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...
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
"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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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
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.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"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.
Here is an interesting table:
n .h tml
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/brai
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.
-1, "1337" speak
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.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. -Frederick Douglass
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.
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.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
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.
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 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.