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Human Laughter Up To 16 Million Years Old
An anonymous reader writes "Published today in the journal Current Biology, a new study shows that laughter is not a unique human trait, but a behavior shared by all great apes. Tickle a baby chimpanzee and it will giggle just like a human infant. This is because laughter evolved millions of years ago in one of our common ancestors, say scientists."
And that rats also giggled when tickled.
A reference from 1998 might be uselful for those interested.
Evolution is quite real. Humanity has played with it for a long time. But we must drop the assumption that behavior observed now has been there 16 million years ago. Why do we assume chimpanzees stopped evolving, again?
Might be a case of convergent evolution.
From what i have understood, social animals behave more or less the same; there is a evolutionary advantage in some behaviours. That should then also why we can communicate better with dogs rather than polar bears, despite that they both are about equally "far" from us.
Rats are social animals and, possibly, their giggling is one cue to a mutual social behavious - perhaps social animals giggle. How then do dogs giggle? I do not know what do expect, but perhaps they giggle, but we just have not identified it as such yet.
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From the article:
If you tickle an orangutan, for example, it makes a series of loud panting hoots; it would be easy to mistake these sounds for pain or distress, rather than joy.
If you tickled me, especially if you when I was a small child, I would make sounds that were easy to mistake for joy when they were really sounds of pain or distress. I HATED being tickled. Hated it. My Mom would tickle me until I couldn't breathe when I was about 3-4, and I tried desperately to get away, but I couldn't stop laughing or uncurl myself from a ball. It took her a few years to get that I really, honestly despised it.
My point is, how do we know the apes are laughing? How do we know they're enjoying it and not just incapable of fighting it off like I was when I was little?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
It's not even news either. Studies showed that rats make high pitched (ultrasound) noises when you tickle them.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
If one mammal can laugh, why not another? We share plenty of other traits.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The problem isn't really a single trait, it the lack of a complete set of traits. Much of what is known about the past is interpreted in order to fit into a prescribed story. You have relationships between form and function that go completely ignored too. Similarities in DNA can easily be attributed to similarities in appearance where the DNA is a certain way because of Two arms and two legs or the way the arms and legs bend rather then because of a common ancestor. There was a recent discussion about dog breeds and how they would be labeled different species altogether is they were extinct and and we dug up the bones. You could theoretically, under the current definition being applied in evolutionary biology as speciation, have two border collies, one in the UK and one in America, separated by the Atlantic ocean and they would be considered separate species.
Now this isn't to say that there isn't a common ancestral connections, it's to say that there is no empirical evidence proving it and too much weight is being put on the evidence claiming it is true. In fact, some people, even here on slashdot, will claim that evolution as it is currently stated is a proven fact that is indisputable (even to science) despite never witnessing speciation in the real world without bending the definition of species. They won't even allow for Evolution to be broken into distinct groups for challenges as if it harms their holy word or something. Take this laughter situation, rats have been witnessed to emit ultrasonic squeals when tickled as a youth. Dog and cats make the same respective growls and purs when tickled at young ages. To make the same claim that laughter is 16 million years old and that this shows proof of a common ancestor, then rats, cats, dogs, and elephants, most likely belong in the same family with the same ancestors and are practicing something 16 million years old.
On the other hand, if laughter, especially at an early age, it a function of necessity in pack animals (rats, apes, elephants, canine, felines, and humans are all pack animals in that we band together in early years of life and display what could be considered laughter) in which young animals are encouraged by enjoyment and feedback of that enjoyment to stay with their parents/siblings to learn (interpret) instinct and so on to ensure their survival the species, the only connections to ancestors would be survival over a set of environmental circumstances. Laughter could be nothing more then an evolved trait that animals which group together have found keeps them together at critical stages in life. In short, it could be nothing more then a learned behavior with benefits that encouraged those who did it well to live longer and procreate more then those who didn't.
One of the problems is that biological evolution is such a broad term that encompasses many things. Take the bible for instance, there are many historically real facts in there. There are some that is questionable and unverifiable to date. However, saying that a burning bush never spoke to someone names Moses doesn't mean that the Egyptians didn't enslave the jews, or that rome didn't conquer the land currently known as Israel and so on.
With that in mind, there are several aspects of evolution that should have subcategories but don't specifically because people want the appearance of challenges to the validity to appear as challenges to what we know. You pointed to the genetic engineering in which we created breed of the same species. This has been present with cattle probably just as long. However, that is what some attempt to consider as micro evolution (changes within the same species) verses a macro evolution which is changes large enough to create separate species.
You will find that almost no one disagrees with the premise of micro evolution where some disagree with macro evolution. Now they are related to the extent that enough micro evolutionary changes are thought to product a macro evolutionary change. However, this doesn't mean that the line of thinking is true, nor does it mean that if the speciation portion is false, that the micro evolution has to be false too. Therefore the presence of micro evolution only supports macro evolution, it doesn't prove that aspect, and pointing to it for a response to a macro evolution comment only deflects the position behind tricks and smoking mirrors. It doesn't address anything relevant to the conversation other then it is a mechanical part in the theory.
Please don't say birds can fly to the moon because we observe them flying so high and far away that the naked human eye can't spot them under some circumstances. That is the reality of what you did, you pointed to evolution within a species to counter a statement questioning the evidence of if two separate species evolved away from a common ancestor somewhere in time.