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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?"
There's a great TED talk on the intelligence of crows.
One time in Malaysia with my family we stopped our car at a tourist spot and noticed that a monkey had been killed by another vehicle, probably quite recently. Another monkey stood on the road beside the dead body thumping its hands onto the top of its head in an expression of obvious grief.
We got out of the car and I stepped into a crowd of agitated primates, all about 40cm high. The tension between us was clear and frankly terrifying for me. I walked off slowly, trying not to make sudden movements.
I had no doubt that there was empathy between all players in that situation.
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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.
Cephelapods are even farther removed and also quite intelligent.
Some indications show that they could be more intelligent than the average great ape.
Some have shown the ability to learn "tricks" after a single demonstration and no practice.
While the ravens are more limited than we are for communication (they cannot build libraries for example), they DO pass ideas to each other (as do other animals), probably by watching and then imitating.
Overall, I don't disagree since just watching and doing can only convey the concrete and our greatest accomplishments require the abstract as well.
I find your sig to be quite apt in this thread. Through IP laws, we are willfully limiting the very thing that makes us what we are. If taken to the extremes the corporations want, we would probably devolve.