Worth reading today is the New York Times‘s special issue on “The Creature Connection,” which has six diverse articles centered on humans and their relationships with other species:
The lead article by Natalie Angier, “The creature connection“, about our strange relationship with pets and domesticated animals
Benedict Carey on the role that pets play in American family life, “Emotional power broker on the modern family”
Carl Zimmer on the evolutionary origin of animals: “Where do animals come from?” This is a good piece and a must-read if you’re interested in evolution.
Carol Yoon on the ethics of eating plants: “No face, but plants like life too”
Biologist Sean B. Carroll on the developmental genetics of polydactyly (with a kitteh connection): “For whom the cell mutates: the origin of genetic quirks.”
Nicholas Wade on the origin of human sociality: “Supremacy of a social network.” I don’t much like this piece, as it’s full of speculations without the responsible solicitation of dissenting views—a hallmark of poor science journalism.
Natalie Angier is such a good writer. I could write for years and never come up with a sentence as good as the one that opens her article:
Heartily concur. Having been the owner (“ownee”?) of two black standard female poodles, I freely confess to my positive bias regarding this sentence.
So, will this draw the creationary wackaloons out of their ooze in letters to the editor (and if so, will any get printed), or will they remain silent? It’d be interesting to know what the volume of unprinted letters contain.
I know the PETA crowd is going to get quite upset over that article on the ethics of eating plants, but it raises some very thorny and important ethical questions.
If we ever encounter alien intelligences, chances are excellent that their “faces,” if any, will be at least as bizarre as those of cephalopods, and it’s all but guaranteed that they will be completely incomprehensible to our instincts in every way — gestures, vocalizations, chemical cues, everything will have meanings that don’t even come close to mapping into terrestrial experiences.
Oh, sure, we’d probably be able to create translations and mappings and what-not; that’s not my point.
My point is that alien intelligences will be as near-impossible for us to “emotionally” read as it is for us to read plant emotions. (Here I’m referring to stress reactions to predation and infestation, mating reactions, and so on. We use “fear” as a label to our reaction to avoid being eaten; might as well use the same label to a plant’s reaction to avoid being eaten.)
We’d probably agree that it wouldn’t be ethically acceptable to eat such aliens despite the difficulties in communicating them, so why is it more ethically acceptable to eat plants than animals? As the article points out, plants avoid predation as vigorously as animals; we’re just not wired to intuitively read the stress of a lettuce plant the way we’re wired to read the stress of the bunny eating the lettuce alive.
We could try to come up with a guideline that suggested a requisite level of cognitive ability…but why should that matter? If the suffering of an infant isn’t less important than the suffering of an adult genius, why should the suffering of a worm be less important than the suffering of the child?
Me? I’m vaguely disturbed by all of it, but not enough to buck the trend of countless millennia. Maybe vat-grown foods will help…but not only is that a looooooong ways away, the level of industrialization and energy consumption it would require might result in a net loss.
I know DNA was being absurd with that scene in Milliway’s, but, the more I think about it, the more it seems like it just might be the least-bad solution to the problem.
b&
I love your allusion to “mating” plants. LOL.
For some time now I’ve been waiting for a botanical (fungal/microbial/etc.) “revolution” in evolution teaching. The stories are there, but not, IME, much attended to. The zoological chauvinism of the discipline permeates it. (Oh, the tragedy of kingdomism! Or domainism, depending on how you lump/split.) 😀
I agree–revolution is needed. I think this chauvinism is so blatant! Plants should be fascinating subjects for research. I think it’s the agriculture connection that’s holding it back.
(And their names are so much easier for me to remember/learn.)
By the way, that article was really silly. Plants are “trying” to survive?
The trouble is I suppose Lynn – & I am sure RD touches on this in at least one of his books – how else do you express these things in ordinary language? I agree giving intentionality to non-thinking life forms is to some degree anthropomorphising, but how would you put it?
Why? You’re commiting the same anthropomorphic error as the author of that article, assuming that since evolution has equipped plants with certain survival tools, the plants must “want” to survive in the same way that you and I (and other sentient beings) do. To have genuine wants, fears, and feelings, you need a brain. Without one, there’s nobody there to do the wanting or feeling. That’s the ethical difference between eating plants and eating animals, which the author manages to completely overlook.
She also overlooks the fact that many parts of plants are meant to be eaten. Flowers give nectar in exchange for pollination. Trees produce tasty fruit in order to get their seeds transported. Grass grows from the bottom in expectation of being grazed (and fertilized). All the plant really “cares” about is getting its genes into the next generation, and if giving up parts of itself, or clones of itself, as food can do that, it’s a win-win.
Precisely.
Oh, I understand the basic idea.
But who says that a brain is the only way to perform cognition?
Why not a distributed nervous system as opposed to a centralized one?
There are plants whose reactions to stimuli are far more complicated than the reactions of many animals. Some even communicate with each other and interact preferably with close relatives. Isn’t it reasonable, therefore, to suggest that such plants are performing at a higher cognitive level than those animals which don’t do as much?
As to your latter point, “all” a cow cares about is getting its genes into the next generation. What matter if the particular cow is slaughtered before it has a chance to reproduce? What matter if its life is agony and misery? Similarly, what matter if a head of lettuce or a radish experiences similar pain upon being slaughtered for the dinner table, so long as the seed farm keeps propagating those genes? Not to go all Godwin on the thread, but would Hitler have been justifiable if he only murdered people with healthy children and left the children in good foster homes?
As the author observes, it’s easy to dismiss the idea of plants thinking and feeling because we have absolutely no evolutionary-acquired mechanisms for easily observing such activity in them. Yet, when one attempts to objectively quantify the situation, we find that there’s a great deal of overlap on the cognitive scale between plants and animals, with some plants displaying quite surprising cognitive abilities.
It’s (pardon me) a thorny subject, and not one that can be so trivially dismissed. It may well be that it’s less ethically questionable to eat the worm on the cabbage leaf than it is to boil the cabbage head.
Cheers,
b&
P.S. Dinner on Thursday at chez Goren will, of course, be corned beef brisket with steamed cabbage and new potatoes. I don’t claim to be taking any sort of high ground here, just observing that the subject isn’t nearly so clear-cut as it intuitively seems. Shouldn’t be surprising, either. Relativity and quantum mechanics are hardly intuitive, either; why should we expect as complicated a subject as the biology of cognition to be intuitive? b&
If you can show me, in a cabbage or radish, a distributed nervous system of comparable complexity to the cow’s centralized one, then I’ll concede you may have a point. Until then, it’s all hand-waving and false equivalence.
First, I would be most surprised to find (terrestrial) plants with cognitive capabilities comparable to a cow’s.
I would not, however, be surprised to find a plant with more cognitive capability than a worm.
Where cabbages and radishes fall on that spectrum, I honestly have no clue. It’s damned far from my area of expertise.
Google informs me that there is peer-reviewed literature on the subject. See here and here, for example. The field seems quite young; I’d bet my money on it having an interesting future.
Cheers,
b&
Come on now, Ben. Do you really believe that trimming the lawn is mass torture?
Honestly? I don’t know. Maybe. If so, I wouldn’t be shocked.
I just had my home treated for termites last week. I’m sure the termites died horrid deaths by the countless thousands. The termite catastrophe is probably ongoing, too; that stuff is supposed to be slow-acting and long-lasting.
Will I treat for termites again if they reappear? Yes, of course. Without hesitation (barring my usual procrastination, of course).
I don’t have a lawn; I long ago decided that, if I was ever going to put that much effort into growing grasses, they’d be grasses like wheat, corn, or rice whose harvests I could eat rather than have to discard. Right now, all I have are weeds that need to be exterminated, though I’m hoping to start a garden in several months.
The reason the weeds are flourishing at the moment is laziness, not compassion. In the next week or so I hope to find the give-a-damn to dig up the number of the guys who cleaned up the yard last time.
Whether or not it would change anybody’s actions, we should learn whether or not trimming the lawn is or isn’t mass torture. At the very least, we can then make an informed decision rather rely upon instinct we know full well is quite fallible in this matter. We’d also add to our knowledge of the universe, which is always handy (even if nobody has a clue how or when it’ll be useful). And, if it turns out that trimming the lawn really is mass torture, perhaps somebody can figure out a way to ease the suffering of the grass. All else being equal, wouldn’t you rather have humanely-harvested plants?
The one thing I am sure of is that discussions like these will raise consciousness and awareness. To live is to suffer and to cause suffering; to kill and be killed; to eat and be eaten. It’s the hand we’ve been dealt. As part of our struggle to create Heaven on Earth, we should strive to eliminate Hells wherever we find them…but we also need a pragmatism to realize that the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good, or even the not-quite-as-horrible.
Am I a selfish so-and-so? Yup. But at least I sometimes pause to pretend to feel sorry for the fact. And it makes me feel better that I do some nice things, too, like scratch a cat’s butt as I type this. It’s about all I seem capable of, so I don’t spend too much energy beating myself up over it.
Cheers,
b&
Two possibilities:
1. Pray for manna from Heaven.
2. Genetically engineer ourselves – perhaps via chlorophyll – to make our own food.
Soylent Green?
I could really go for #2…except that the terrestrial solar constant isn’t anywhere near enough to provide sufficient energy for anything even remotely resembling human activity.
There’s a reason it takes 40 acres and a mule to feed an agrarian family. Do the math, and it “just happens” to turn out that the energy budgets pretty much balance.
Plants mostly* don’t move because they’re solar powered, and solar power really isn’t quite enough to drive locomotion.
Herbivores mostly* consume lots of plant matter, concentrating the energy the plants have collected into their own energy stores. Herbivores have to spend most of their time eating because plant energy isn’t very concentrated.
Carnivores mostly* eat herbivores. They get the energy third-hand, but in a very concentrated form. They tend to expend their energy in short, fast bursts; the rest of their time is essentially leisure.
Humans take it one step further. Agriculture is a super-efficient (for us) way of collecting energy. That abundance of energy is what allows us to explore new energy sources and efficiencies, thereby driving civilization as we know it.
Which takes us to option #1. The solution may well be solar-powered orbital food factories that synthesize healthy and tasty food without any intermediate life-based stages. Manna from the heavens, but the chefs would be spacefaring humans, not gods.
There’s also option #3, any of the various transhuman fantasies. None of them seem like something I’d be personally interested in, so I’m not the one to ask about such things.
Cheers,
b&
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* Plants are surprisingly motile, as time-lapse photography reveals. Many ostensible herbivores, such as cows, consume significant amounts of insect matter as they graze. And even obligate carnivores such as cats will eat the plant contents of their prey’s stomaches and perhaps nibble on the occasional living plant here and there.
When you say – in one of the above “As part of our struggle to create Heaven on Earth, we should strive to eliminate Hells wherever we find them…” to me that sounds like anthropomorphising an indifferent universe?
Also – 40 acres to feed a family is way too high surely? These people keep themselves in veg (at least) with 60 sq m –
http://www.aselfsufficientlife.com/how-big-should-the-vegetable-garden-be.html
I agree that we should be open about possible types of ‘cognition’.
Ben, are we all invited to dinner?!
Godwin – are we to assume you mean William, the great freethinker – “Populations were therefore always doomed to grow until distress was felt, at least by the poorer segment of the society. Consequently, poverty was an inevitable phenomenon of society.” to – pardon me – quote from Wikipedia?
Sure, but it’ll have to be a casual affair…I just got a dishwasher and microwave installed, and I’m afraid there’s still a lot of leftover chaos that won’t get straightened out until the weekend at least.
The Godwin I was referring to was Mike, though, not William. “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”
Cheers.
b&
Male mantids? Male spiders? They are frequently eaten. What about parasites that change a host behaviour in order to be consumed & finish the life cycle in a carni/omnivorous animal?
If you have not seen it, try the film District 9 from 2009 –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_9
The aliens look alien – the humans call them shrimps.
You don’t have to be a PETA crowd to find her logic awkward:
1) There might be reasons not to eat plants and fungi, because we know less about them than we think (fair enough).
2) So let’s continue killing intelligent animal beings (about whose capacity for pain etc. we have already figured enough to make a sound ethical decision for not eating them)
Wade’s article irritated me as well, but it will make wonderful discussion fodder for my philosophy of biology class!
As an ex-yeccer, I subconsciously read everything for “how would a young earth creationist quotemine this?”
“We’re just missing the intervening steps,” said Nicole King, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.
I winced.
I love the accompanying illustrations by Yvetta Fedorova.
I have never been able to understand why a cabbage’s desire not to be eaten was less worthy than a cow’s. When I first read Peter Singer on the subject of ‘speciesism’ I was quite impressed by the first half of the book, then I realised that having spent several hundred pages telling me how evil it was to priveledge our own species over all the others he then went on to determine which animals he considered edible (shell fish mostly IIRC) by how much their nervous system resembled ours, which seemed to me be absolute hyposcrisy. Either humans are special or they aren’t. He merely drew the line further down the bush of life. It seemed to me that the difference between our species and all others (for us)was in fact a most salient difference and ever since then I have had a deep mistrust of his opinions. He’s obviously very good at what he does but if I have to choose a philosopher I’ll be going with Dennet every time thank-you very much.
Save the cabbages I say! The reality is that if you want to eat an ethical diet you have to live on fruit and nectar, it can’t be done. Since I’m not prepared to shoot myself I’ll just have get over it. I went snorkelling this morning and saw lots of dinner swimming around 😉