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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.
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?
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.
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
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
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
after careful analysis of your statement over a period of 3 hours, I understand that you are telling me next weeks lottery numbers.
what does this similarity imply about the evolution of behavior?
Empathy contributes to population fitness?
I'm using Emesene now on Lucid and so far, I'm happy with it.
w00t
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