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Empathy Is For the Birds
grrlscientist writes "Common Ravens have been shown to express empathy towards a 'friend' or relative when they are distressed after an aggressive conflict — just like humans and chimpanzees do. But birds are very distant evolutionary relatives of Great Apes, so what does this similarity imply about the evolution of behavior?"
man, i saw the title and was hoping ubuntu ditched empathy and went back to pidgin....
"Common" Ravens are among the most intelligent birds around, if you don't count parrots.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
You're right. The best way of understanding things is to stop observing them.
I wasn't saying that, I was saying that if you observe something for a long enough time, you will start seeing anything that you want to believe.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Humans have consistently underestimated the intelligence of higher animals except for one species whose intelligence has been consistently overestimated.
Psychology is crap!
In the same way a Slashdot comment dissing research is surprising.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Perhaps labeling empathy an advanced behavior is erroneous.
I find the more I observe /. the less I understand it. Is that what you meant?
So mammals evolved from these special birds? these birds are in the group that is known for their intelligence. Other birds do not share these characteristics apparently.
by applying this logic i should assume that all creatures with mammalian-like eyes originates from octopuses, because their kind is more archeic and their eye-structure is very similar (though it is accepted that the eyes developed separately with no relation mammals)
Okay, so it's a lack of objectivity that you're talking about?
That's strange. I can observe cats as much as I want and still see them not being like dogs.
Humans are social animals. So are dogs. Both are generally geared towards working in groups (even cats can be group animals - a lot of the big cats in Africa cooperate although they also can go solo). Not sure about ravens.
To me, it seems logical that empathy is a social behavior. Perhaps it's game theory, where helping out a fellow costs you relatively little at that moment but can net you help when you need it. Aesop's fable about the Lion and the Mouse nicely illustrates and exaggerates the point.
"... which apparently evolved in both species ..." was what I meant to type, of course.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
I hear they mourn their dead. Watch Animal Planet and you can even sometimes see them getting eviscerated in HD - EPIC.
I'm not sure about evolution as far as ravens are concerned, but I do know nature throws us some curve balls every once in a while, and ravens are most definitely one of them.
There was some researcher visiting Fairbanks, AK when I lived there. He was trying to catch ravens for some study he was doing and needed 20 birds. After a few weeks of not catching a single one, the local newspaper caught wind of what he was doing and ran a story on him. The first paragraph explained his lack of success. He had been using cheese puffs as bait in the parking lot of the local supermarket. He had a firing net to cover the birds when they came to investigate...only they never came, even when the lot usually had ravens all over the place.
A reader finally figured it out. There was a McDonald's right next to the lot. He should have been using French Fries. The ravens knew something wasn't right and refused to touch his bait.
I've seen them open zipped containers to steal food (the cargo compartments on snow machines are easy prey)...and then CLOSE THEM.
I watched my cat carry on a 10 minute conversation with one. Obviously some sort of speech between the two...never seen anything like it before, or since.
I've heard one make the sound of dripping water, then fly down and drink from my rain barrel.
After 10 years in Alaska, I've only seen one dead raven. It had been fried on the power line above my friends truck while he was sitting in it eating his lunch. Plonk!...in the back of the truck it fell. It is so rare to find a dead raven that the Dept. of Fish and Game wanted the corpse for study.
Even with a 160F annual temperature variation, they never seem to be affected by the weather. I watched one trying how to figure out how to eat a rock-solid, 1-pound package of hamburger meat at -45F in a Sam's Club parking lot. He eventually dragged under the tail pipe of an idling car to thaw it out(people leave their cars idling while they shop when it is that cold). I know people that would never have figured that out.
I can completely understand the high reverence native cultures afford the creature.
what does this similarity imply about the evolution of behavior?
It tells us that the optimality of the tit for tat strategy is not limited to ape communities, but can arise in other species, leading to the related phenomenon of empathy.
Some of the requirements for tit-for-tat to be optimal probably include the ability to recognize individuals and remember them, keen ability to identify (generalized) "defection", and a willingness to suffer a (short-term) loss to punish defectors, which requires some long-term historical memory. Which is to say, characteristics that persist in apes and probably ravens.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons."
what elevates humankind over other animals is not grey matter, it's our vocal dexterity
take any of us, and remove our ability to talk or write, and we're pretty much a little smarter than your average raven or dolphin: we're isolated islands of thought. so we may get glimmers of brilliance now and then, but it fades, and is trapped in our skulls, and dies with us
or, give ravens and dolphins the ability to take the more complicated ideas in their heads, and share it with others with language, and this launches them to levels comparable with humanity in terms of what they can think. because now they build on each other's ideas, and nothing is forgotten: its passed and shared around, and babies are born in this sea of wisdom and thought, to build upon even more
thoughts don't matter. the ability to COMMUNICATE thoughts matters. that's what puts humanity in a genuine level orders of magnitude over other creatures on this planet
and when mankind developed writing? forget about it, game over, humanity vaults into the stratosphere (literally, around 1950, because of what writing makes possible). now, in fact, these silly biological shells hardly matter anymore. memetic evolution, the retention and sharing of ideas over generations, becomes the real story of change on this planet, and genetic evolution takes a back seat in terms of importance
eventually, the memes will shed these silly biological shells entirely, and shape the world and other worlds completely of its own volition. but it was us silly apes that gave birth to it, whatever it will be, memetically driven idea machine. and don't forget who your father is! you damn future godlike machine thingy
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
so what does this similarity imply about the evolution of behavior?
It means that if we are very good, we come back as ravens.
Hmmm. Flight. Cool.
I am anarch of all I survey.
so what does this similarity imply about the evolution of behavior?
It implies that, even after 140,000,000 years, meat eating dinosaurs are still the coolest things ever.
A few weeks back I was driving down the road and a flock of birds flew under my truck. One of them must have hit the bottom and got hurt as it was laying and moving on the ground. As I looked in the rear view I saw another bird flying out of the grass when they flew into and it was flying around the hurt bird. There was no where to pull over as the road was tight but driving back later that day I saw the bird dead and moved towards the edge of the asphalt. But the bird that flew outlooked like is was trying to help out the other bird or maybe it was its mate.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
mmmmmm understood mint
And, as a bonus, Schrödinger's cat gets to LIVE!
Well, maybe...
...I'd better go check...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Birds show a lot of advanced mental cognitive behavior in relation to socialization that isn't commonly seen throughout the rest of the animal kingdom.
Here's a behavior that isn't commonly seen! Were you surprised?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Schopenhauer wrote about compassion as the real primary/genuine moral incentive ("Foundation of Ethics", p.173, EFJP). If ravens do this too, is this fodder for (moral) Realism - even in an existentialist or materialist context?
our vocal and manual dexterity evolved hand-in-hand with our brain
but i will assert that if we didn't have the vocal/ manual dexderity, there wouldn't be anything for evolution to "work with":
1. a few of us were able to say a little, so this gave those few an evolutionary advantage
2. then a few of those who were able to say a little were able to think a little deeper, which gave those few an evolutionary advantage
3. then subset of those saying a little, with a little deeper thought, in turn got able to enunciate a little more complicated thoughts
4. repeat ad nauseum: you have a feedback loop, a runaway train fo communication building on intelligence building on communication building on, etc
communication is the something that ravens, dolphins etc don't have evolutionarily (yet)
what i'm saying is, we wouldn't be so smart if communication never came into play (and likewise, we wouldn't communicate very much if we weren't so smart). we owe our advantage to our grey matter AND our vocal dexderity. so human beings are smart, sure, but just looking at the grey matter is not the real story, because obviously plenty of other creatures: ravens, dolphins, parrots, kea, etc., are shown to have significant grey matter heft. but its tragic. they're all trapped wit their thoughts in their skulls to their deaths
so what's the big deal with homo sapiens? the big deal, as i said before, is our ability communicate vocally. throw in the ability to write, and forget about it: we are far, far beyond our fellow creatures. mostly because of commmunication, the shared intelligence, the whole of our societies with their shared memory being more than the sum of its parts. that makes us truly special and light years beyond ravens and dolphins
until we kill ourselves off, hopefully not, and evolution bumps the communication/ intelligence evolutionary feedback loop into hyperdrive in one of our animal friends. assuming we don't destroy the planet we share with them and dney them the chance
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Maybe in higher animals, forming societies is the norm and in fact higher thought is common to all animals but in that particular animals perspective. I recall seeing a bird society in Australia and it reminded me of human feudal societies.
after careful analysis of your statement over a period of 3 hours, I understand that you are telling me next weeks lottery numbers.
So technically the score would still be: Evolution: inf. Creationism: 0
What this really shows is that empathy and as a result morality really are evolutionary constructs, that creationists are WRONG when they claim that it takes an invisible sky daddy to be moral.
It also shows that either empathy have been a desirable genetic trait for a VERY long time (at least back to the common ancestor for dinosaurs and mammals), or that the trait developed independently in multiple branches of the evolutionary process, suggesting that it's a very desirable, and natural trait indeed.
what does this similarity imply about the evolution of behavior?
Empathy contributes to population fitness?
Only because you're participating.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
It should not surprise much that ravens are able to communicate. Nor that they have some kind of empathy, or social live, or...
What most uni-dimensional scientists forget is that science is more about communicating ideas than it is only about facts. Let me briefly explain: Currently there is a discipline called 'ontology design' that tries to standardize concepts within science (biology, neuropsych.. . ). Concepts are used to communicate ideas. The concept of 'empathy' is then one of those vague concepts. Give me a standardized (recognized by both biology/psych/phil of science...) definition of empathy and I will shut up. There is no standardized definition of empathy.
So do ravens display 'empathy'? Sure, depends on your definition.
In neuroscience, empathy is tighly connected with emotions (ehem the so-called amygdala), rewards (prefrontal, caudate, bit V1 even...), attention.... In biology: behaviour In chemistry: bit of dopamine?
Science is a limited system, nifty, but limited. It is not standardized at all, let alone that it supports interoperable data. Why is it so hard to see that ravens collaborate, why would 'empathy' (in its limited sense) be restricted to humans? No (decent) scientist would have claimed that.
Science can explain a lot, but those higher-order processes are far from explained. So empathy? Choose your definition and dependent on that it will be 'yes' or 'no'.
Birds are the most underestimated creatures you can find around.
Most people just thinks birds are poop factories (actually, their "dive bombs" are necessary, since they must remove weight from their bodies as soon as possible. By the way you can actually train birds to do that in a corner you want, much like dogs and cats, but most people just lets their birds rot inside a cage without interacting with them). Or just look at the depiction of birds in popular culture, it's either poop jokes or "birds are stupid/evil/pests" jokes. The only positive trait remembered is their singing or their colorfulness.
I always noticed that in those cartoons or anime where animals can walk and talk, birds are often depicted as regular birds instead of intelligent creatures wearing clothes and stuff. Sure there are exceptions like Falco in Starfox but they are far rarer than silly talking dogs and stuff.
If you take a bit of time to read about birds, you'll see they are worth more than just something you put inside a cage. Take a look at ravens, magpies (the pica pica species AKA European magpie), most curved-beak birds, etc...they can be trained to do many "intelligent" things. Even "not so smart" birds like sparrows (you can actually teach a little sparrow to talk like a parrot). And if you actually let a pet bird be comfortable (as opposed to being inside a tiny cage all day long), getting out of the cage and fly around, have toys and stuff, they won't run away from you even if you keep your windows open all day.
The way you train them and the company they give, I find it more fitting for a nerd than cats (which seem to be a popular nerd choice). I had dogs and cats (and a hamster) to compare.
I think the point is that it IS commonly seen throughout the animal kingdom.
Really, I don't get this willingness to pretend that animals have no emotions. Anyone with a horse, dog, cat, or even a relatively unintelligent pet like a ferret has seen playfulness, companionship, affection, and many other "human" traits.
Nevermore
Researchers have long since established that animals are much smarter than any human being. For instance, a bird poking a stick in narrow tube to retrieve a nut placed there by a human being is obviously far and away smarter than the person who designed the rocket which sent men to the moon. That's a fact.
A cow mooing and waving its head from side to side at the site of a fellow cow which has collapsed and died is complete proof that cows experience far more empathy than a human who writes a two hundred page essay which describes in subtle detail the suffering heart of the author at the loss of a loved one.
In truth, what all this actually proves is the desperation on the part of some people to 'prove' that cute animals really (no, really) are as smart as us. Sadly, they're not. Yes they're smarter than lumps of rock, they don't like pain and have some sense of common feeling with their fellow animals, but it is far from what humans are capable of.
Now can we get on to something more interesting.
Disclaimer: I had pet gerbils when I was a kid, and like dogs and cats. I just don't like pretending they're great philosophers or technical wizards when they aren't
I'm using Emesene now on Lucid and so far, I'm happy with it.
w00t
In Baden Baden there are plenty of crows, there are a couple that from time to time sit on a house across from ours and they kiss. Seriously, they sit there and then do what looks like kissing with their beaks.
You can't handle the truth.
Empathy is also a very beneficial trait for hunters. The ability to get a hunch on what your prey will try to do means that you can do what is necessary to corner it.
we went to the moon. we can nuke cities. we've built the Internet. we can stop someone's heart, root around in his chest cavity, then restart it, repaired
if the idea of the relentless march of evolution towards man strikes you as ego-driven and selfish and not scientific, fine. let's compare humanity to other creatures in terms of: memes per generation, gross global environmental change capacity, average vocabulary size, number of other species domesticated, or how about: ability to perceive evolutionary processes themselves. pick a metric, whatever you want: humanity ranks slightly higher than chiclids or bees or mammal ruminants, sorry: the crown of creation
i mean you could pick some metric where mankind lags, where say nematodes, ants, bacteria, or blue whales dominate us. but in terms of metrics that matter and count, mankind is leaving this silly genetic evolutionary game behind. we can keep alive those darwin would kill, like stephen hawking, we live in artifical environments we made: cities. we don't adapt to the environment, we adapt the environment to our needs. we rule dude
and we're entering a new realm: memetic evolution, the competition and darwinian struggle between ideas. and instead of the nucleus and dna, its simian grey matter and language. sure, natural selection still matters, but its more like: capitalism beats communism in GNP, rather than stink beetle A outstinks stink beetle B
you get the idea. we ARE the crown of creation. we've started a whole new evolutionary sphere, a sphere where these silly biological shells and these antiquated ecosystems are now nothing more than nostalgia, something we could recreate for an ecosphere zoo theme park. forget where we came from, look where we are going: the rise of metaorganisms: our nations and cultures and religions, competing for dominance in a new sphere of life, where instead of cells and their nuclear dna, WE are the cellular units, our language the gene transfer, our brains the nucleus, and these new meta-organisms living on, immortal, beyond any one man or woman
resistance is futile. you will be assimilated
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
you're talking about reality
i'm asking you to imagine us, humans, without the capacity for language. and what you get is a raven or a dolphin: inquisitive, observant, intelligent, inventive. but unable to share our thoughts, we get glimmers that fade and die with us, trapped in our skulls
what i'm trying to say is how communication, not raw intelligence, not grey matter, is what sets us apart from the dolphins and the ravens
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"But birds are very distant evolutionary relatives of Great Apes" is a rather silly statement - so is seaweed, and most likely all other life on Earth!
speaking of birds and empathy - my cock is very empathic with cocks while I watch porn
No way! Birds are evil. They don't feel empathy. Haven't you ever heard of Yelling Bird
Check this vid out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JiJzqXxgxo
A Cat and Crow are friends.. very neat to watch.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
normal cats are very social. When wild, female cats form large social groups.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
there is no empathy!
since a couple of months i am terrorized by a bird that is constantly hitting my bedroom window from 6 am till when it gets dark!
it's really disturbing especially in the morning!
those birds have a nest in my balcony, a little sleep is the least thing i deserve for this!(uh, i feel like a landlord)
I live in an apartment of a 5th storey building and the locality houses a large number of crows. I recently witnessed an interesting incident from my terrace that reflected how strong the feeling of togetherness in these birds is; just as this experiment has proved.
In the backyard of a house at ground-floor; a baby crow was confronted by a cat. An adult crow flying across that place noticed this and raised a distress call. It started cawing in a shrill voice to attract others' attention and soon a crowd of nearly 50 crows assembled at the place. Perched on boundary walls and ledges nearby all the crows started cawing at the same time. This collective action was meant to dissuade the cat from attacking the baby. Each single step that the cat took towards the baby crow was met with increased collective cawing of all the crows. Practically they could have done nothing to actually stop attacking the cat the baby. The cat however grew nervous with all that attention and backed off. The baby crow finally managed to hop to a higher place for safety.
Crows do have a very closely knit society; at least in way that we humans can easily perceive.
I find this all completely fascinating, though I did find it a bit ironic that in a study on empathy, the researchers kidnapped some fledglings and didn't take the feelings of the parents into consideration.
Ah-ha! Mod parent up; that was insightful.
The biggest breakthroughs in the history of science were not discoveries of new facts but new interpretations of what everybody already knew (but they had it wrong). Like Galileo and the Sun circling the Earth. Newton and centrifugal force.
Perhaps today's "popular science" has got it wrong, and many of our highly prized traits of human interaction are very basic things we might find across the board in all animals. That would explain a whole bunch of cross-species bonding activities, like people with pets, horses with non-horse travelling companions, bitches nursing kittens, cats nursing puppies. A gorilla who has learned sign language wanting a cat for a pet.
Of course it would also decrease the perceived difference between Man and all other life forms, and thus make it harder to preserve concepts like Man having the God-given right of dominion over all the beasts, or Man having some intrinsic right to change ecosystems, etc. There is a lot of economics invested in Man being uniquely able to experience compassion, or the suffering that is the flip side of that. Imagine a world where no one could stomach pate de fois gras, or veal cutlets....
Will
Well, stock answer "A" is that empathy can impart benefits to individuals of a species thus giving them an edge in natural selection.
Stock answer "B" says we're anthropomorphizing (a sort of imperialism I suspect) and that birds have no such emotions.
The fun answer is that life is special - a gift from God and that echos of the creator can be found throughout life.
"Written on the pages is the answer to the never ending story..."
I wasn't saying that, I was saying that if you observe something for a long enough time, you will start seeing anything that you want to believe.
If you start with a preconceived notion of what you want to find, yes, this can happen. I doubt you read the article as it states the authors decided to reject one potential finding as "noise" because repeated observations were not more frequent than chance. In general, more observations give you better data.
Anarchists never rule
To me, it seems logical that empathy is a social behavior. Perhaps it's game theory, where helping out a fellow costs you relatively little at that moment but can net you help when you need it. Aesop's fable about the Lion and the Mouse nicely illustrates and exaggerates the point.
Surely it's a social behavior, but whether social groups will naturally have it or not is I think an open, and interesting, question.
The game theory advantage is definitely there, though. For example, Chickadees, Titmice, and some other birds will form mixed big species flocks (with the tiny chickadees usually taking the role of leader, kinda amusingly). When one of them finds food, they'll lead the rest of the flock to it. Even in the winter when food is scarce and you might think a bird would horde the food to itself or just a couple members of its own species, they will bring the whole flock to share. Research has shown that such flocks are actually more successful than lone birds, because while the individual bird might lose out by sharing the limited food supply it finds, it (or other members of its species) will benefit from the other flock member's sharing.
I think it would be interesting to study chickadees and look for indications of empathy. Is it simply an advantageous learned behavior the birds follow by instinct? Or is there an element of "my flock mates are hungry, I should share this food I found with them"?
The enemies of Democracy are
it will be made of wiper blades, tire covers, and window seals. they're gathering the parts now:
http://www.nztourmaps.com/blog/index.php/2009/09/01/kea-car-attack/
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
For a moment, I was concerned that by "empathy not being and advanced behavior", you meant that it was overrated say, in comparison to aggression; while you merely, and quite sensibly, mean that it is not exclusive to humans.
That's because your glasses are the wrong size. See an eye doctor.
Free Martian Whores!
Housecats are social to a considerable extent.
One obvious behavior is sharing surplus food with their social group. Each cat tends to have some specialty in hunting, being particularly good at one or a few types of prey. When they have surplus beyond what they want for themselves, they bring the extra back to the others of their group and present it as a gift. (Thus the gifts of mice, moles, etc. they give to people: As with most domestic animals they behave toward humans as they would toward other cats. We give them our "surplus hunting results", they give us theirs.)
Another, though less obvious, behavior is "cheering up" - a display of empathy, in TFA's language. They react to extreme depression of one of their "friends" - human or cat - by cuddling, rubbing, vocalizations, showoff acrobatics, etc. It's fascinating to watch.
(They'll also selectively feed those of their group who are sick or otherwise weak, hunting more than they normally would if necessary.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Ex-act-ly so. :-)
1) Animals communicate through emotions even between different species.
2) The illusion of human superiority is crumbling, hopefully.
3) I was quite afraid of becoming a vegan finally - after some 10 years of vegetarianism. But... it's really easy
My parser is a grammar nazi.
That the behaviour most likely evolved once in a common ancestor of the Apes (Hom.sap. included) and Corvidae. Though it's not impossible that the behaviour evolved twice, once in an ancestor of the Apes and once in an ancestor of the Corvidae.
I really should check my cladistic nomenclature, because I only wheel it out in alternating Martian years, but the first case is a synapomorphy (shared-derived character) and the latter case is an analogy or a homology (depending on how complex the similarities between the characters are). But I'll be brave and post without checking.
This is a Cladistics 1.0.1 homework question. Why am I answering it?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
...sounds like a Conspiracy to ME!