Slashdot Mirror
Magpies Are Self-Aware
FireStormZ writes "Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies, a species with a brain structure very different from mammals, could also identify themselves. It had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, don't have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways."
Oh the irony of your post. Especially your "mythology" when you mention the "soul" 3 times in your post. Pray tell, where does this "soul" of which you speak go after we leave this place?
The point is that those tribes which have embraced this ideology have dominated the world, while those that did not were driven to extinction. It's evolution at work, just at a different level of granularity than what you can look at in a lab.
The whole concept of a "soul" exists for the purpose of supporting the perspective that we are aliens in this place, that we will go home through some mystical means when our vehicle here (our body) wears out, and we can do anything we like to the place while we're here, because it's alien and inconsequential.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Don't give us all so much credit. There are a lot of things hard-wired into an animal's brain that comes from millions of years of evolution, and other things that come from the organism's experiences.
For instance, a heterosexual man can't help but look at a pretty girl, which annoys the hell out of their wives. When I stopped smoking, a year later when I didn't have any craving for tobacco whatever and had no desire to light a cigarette, nevertheless when I walked down the steps at work my hand automatically grabbed the shirt pocket that had held cigarettes all those years.
We are only another species of organism. There's nothing special about us; at least, no more than any other species. We have big brains, so what? We almost became extinct 70,000 years ago despite our big brains.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Don't give them all so much credit.
Hens are awfully dumb. They have an instinctive reaction to images of weasels (panic/run) and to sound (tweeting) of small chickens ("herd/care").
Slashdotters are awfully dumb. They have an instinctive reaction to images of the opposite sex (arousal/enlarged penises) and to sound (heavy breathing) of the their favourite bands ("tribal/belonging"). Don't give them all so much credit.
Employees are awfully dumb. They have an instinctive reaction to the arrival of their boss (panic/run) and to sound (yelling) of anyone in authority ("fear/flight"). Don't give them all so much credit.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Setting aside the hand-wavy theories and taxonomies promoted by those in the social sciences, I'd say that such generalisations, while possibly interesting, are mostly meaningless. If a fairly accurate generalisation can be made, it's that our age-old insistence that we're somehow unique or different is repeatedly proven wrong, and the underlying hubris has interfered with our ability to understand not only ourselves, but the world around us.
Although i am a hard-line meat eating humanist, i do think he has a point, and you have not been able to contradict him.
Apart from an species bias based on genetic composition, there's no clear cut criteria to define human (tool making and self awareness discarded). Now you propose, among others, i presume, city building, literature writing and movie directing as criteria. I have not done anything of the above, and apart from genetic similarity, i have no relation to anyone who has. Am I Human?
To put it differently: Who built cities? was it the worker? his part in city building is no more complex than the role performed by the crow using a tool. Maybe the architect? then his humanity is tied to a capacity for abstract design, but then again, there are many homo sapiens of whom we do not know if they posses such capacity. Are they to be considered human too? and if we have no proof of their capacity, on what basis should they be considered human?
In the end, the whole capacity-based point of view is flawed. It's impossible to determine now if any capacity chosen as criteria will not be replicated by some non-human agent in the future, be it because we discovered it or because we create it, so we end up with only two possible criteria: Genetics and Empathy. And both are arbitrary: In the strict sense, the concept of "species" is irrelevant form a genetic point of view, as argued by Dawkins in the Selfish Gene and the Extended Phenotype. And empathy is just a generalization and aggregation of a capacity based criteria, not to say it's subjective and not possible to state formally (e.g. some forms of disability produce repulsion, etc).
All in all, i think this is no trivial matter...
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem