Reader Marlene Zuk, who comments here from time to time (she’s a professor of biology at the University of California, Riverside), has a nice op-ed in Sunday’s L. A. Times on animal webcams. While extolling the variety of cams available these days, giving a vast audience the ability to peer into the private lives of animals, she worries about the anthropomorphic feelings produced by this voyeurism. And she uses examples from this website:
Yet it’s that quality of animals appearing to be just like us that makes me want to drop a cautionary pebble into the live video stream. The comments on webcam sites are rife with anthropomorphism, not surprisingly, and even when this is pointed out, the contributors are often undaunted.
After the mother eagle was killed in Virginia, emotions ran high; one faithful follower declared: “Anthropomorphization [sic], hell. Eagles wouldn’t form long-term bonds and carry on like this without the exact same sorts of emotions that drive us to do that sort of thing.” When skeptics scoffed, other posters were quick to come to the first commentator’s defense: “Of course animals feel emotion, and this male eagle will be feeling just as bad in an eagly [sic] kind of way as a person would.”
Ben Goren and Marella, do you recognize your comments here? You’re famous!
I am filled with admiration for the coiner of the adjective “eagly,” and I applaud the kinship with other organisms that many viewers of animal cams feel. But there is a danger in claiming such kinship too insistently. Appearances aside, animals are not just like us, any more than they are all like each other. Rabbits have different lives than bluebirds, and we should expect neither to replicate our own. How can we know what animals feel? The fact is that we can’t. We can look at animal brains, and we can observe their behavior, but their inner lives are mysterious.
And yet one thing that constantly struck me when watching the eagles, hummingbirds, and falcons, is precisely the question Zuk asks: what is the consciousness of animals really like? I think a lot of viewers, at least on this site, are not only aware of this divide, but impelled to think about it.
Zuk also worries that the human-centered viewpoint would make us miss the importance of evolution and natural selection in creating the behaviors we see, neglect the less charismatic species that lack feathers or fur, or even try to intervene in nature when we shouldn’t be interfering.
These are all valid concerns, though I think they’re more than compensated by the interest in nature—and sympathy for its denizens—promoted by such cams. And I still think they should have left at least one eaglet in the Norfolk nest for poppa to feed!
Humans are evolved creatures, and presumably we thus share some continuity of psychological states with other organisms, especially those to whom we are closely related evolutionarily. While it is important not to over-interpret behaviour, it’s also important not to use avoidance of anthropomorphizing as a way to a priori set aside humans as outside of evolutionary history, as somehow qualitatively different from our evolutionary kin.
Having lived with dogs, cats, and even cows, I think that only someone determined to see humans as “special” would say that animals don’t feel emotions. Those emotions may not be identical to ours, and may not have the cognitive complexity of ours, but it is absurd to suggest that animals can’t experience fear, anxiety, and yes, even affection.
After all, we’re animals, and we do.
Amen to that!
I was going to make this exact argument – that it’s simply not parsimonious to think that the way we experience the world arose entirely de novo with us. There are definitely differences between us and other organisms in the ways in which we perceive and respond to the world, but to assume a priori that our experience is qualitatively different from nonhuman animals seems to me to ignore our shared evolutionary history.
We are also pattern seeking organisms. So, the fact that we see emotions in animals could have more to do with us than them. I do not suggest you smile at a baboon to convey the emotion of happiness.
And I don’t suggest you show the bottoms of your feet to a Muslim. The fact that baboons (and Muslims) may interpret some of your behaviour differently than you do doesn’t mean they don’t experience similar emotions. Do you really think that baboons can’t be happy?
I doubt baboons experience ‘happiness’.
How will you convince me otherwise?
I doubt that you, Sven DiMilo, experience “happiness.” How will you convince me otherwise?
b&
That was the point I was going to make:
How can we know what animals feel? The fact is that we can’t. We can look at animal brains, and we can observe their behavior, but their inner lives are mysterious.
The above applies equally well to any human being for all the same reasons. Sure, that guy I cut off in traffic LOOKS mad. But so did the chimpanzee I saw at the zoo. If I can’t infer anger in the second case, what makes me think I can do so in the first?
Two reasons:
1. You share a lot more of your emotional wiring with the ticked-off guy in traffic than with the chimp in the zoo. So extrapolation from your own experience is more likely to be correct in the firt case than in the second.
2. Natural selection has fine-tuned your ability to read emotions in members of your own tribe. It has not prioritized reading emotions in other species to nearly the same degree. Thus the tendency to read other species as if they were human, which is the very definition of anthropomorphism.
If (1) is true, then I should be able to infer from the similarities between my brain and the chimp’s brain that our emotional wiring is at least SOMEWHAT similar — at the very least, it seems like the chimp should have the wiring to feel emotions (the human-specific neural machinery seems more geared towards suppressing emotions).
(2) is begging the question by assuming human beings other than myself have emotions at all. Remember, we’re not allowed to infer that animals have emotions simply because of how they behave. But that’s the only way we know that humans (other than ourselves) have emotions.
“Remember, we’re not allowed to infer that animals have emotions simply because of how they behave.”
Nobody’s saying that. (Or if Sven is, then that’s where I part company with him.) The argument is about to what extent their emotions are like ours. There are good reasons to think they might be similar, but there are equally good reasons to distrust our intuitions about them.
Indeed, our intellect is often–if not mostly–an unconscious slave to our emotions. Our brain makes emotional decisions and then back fills with our intellect to make the decisions seem rational. Witness Creationists and IDers, who think they are intellectual geniuses. Nor are the rest of us immune to “motivated reasoning.”
I’ve always been surprised at how much people try to claim our emotions–our animal selves–as the advanced essence of humanity. We write poetry about love, about aesthetics, about desire, when what we are really doing is waxing on about our animal selves. Not to anthropomorphize, or to recognize our behavior relationship we have with animals, is wrong, as is mistaking our relationship as identical.
Implied equivalence undemonstrated.
Well, since this isn’t a peer-reviewed comment thread I don’t have to prove my claim. But I do think that it is reasonable to assert that since human emotions come from older brain structures and are the prime part of our motivations that other mammal’s are similarly structured–something I believe cognitive psychology bears out.
They don’t call the part of our brain that deals with emotions our “reptilian brain” for nothing. Emotions run deep into our evolutionary history because they are such useful tools for spurring certain behaviors. If an eagle who tends her chicks leaves more offspring than one who doesn’t, that behavior will be selected for. And what easier way to produce such a behavior than to have her love her chicks?
Well, yeah in fact they do.
What a bizarre argument.
How about simply building in the behavior itself?
How about simply building in the behavior itself?
What a bizarre statement. How would one go about doing such a thing?
If you try to answer, please remember that brains are not digital computers that can simply be programmed to move the body about in different ways. Get specific.
Many kinds of insects care for their young. One can readily demonstrate that this behavior is hard-wired by contriving situations that elicit the same stereotyped responses that, in context, look like purposive, “caring” behavior.
Hey, that reads like something I might have…oh, wait, it was.
And I’ll stand by it, too.
It seems to me that the only way for Zuk’s thesis to hold true is if we posit that each species has independently evolved unique mechanisms for pair bonding, nurturing of young, and the like. Or, at the very least, that H. sapiens has independently evolved mechanisms for those behaviors that’s completely unrelated to those in other species.
And, really, does such an hypothesis merit serious consideration lacking evidence to the contrary or a plausible means by which it might occur?
Cheers,
b&
Well obviously we independently arrived at mechanisms for bonding and nurturing – we’re the only animals with souls, doncha know, and that’s why only our feelings matter.
I really can’t think of any other rationale for making that claim; it clearly rests on the assumption of human exceptionalism. If you acknowledge that we are related to eagles, you really can’t argue that their thoughts are so alien to us as to be indecipherable.
Bullshit. The most recent common ancestor of eagles and humans was a smallish lizardy thing that, like modern lizards, would never evince so much as a hint of emotion or thought. Whatever cognitive capabilities advanced birds and mammals have were quite definitely evolved independently.
Can we lay off the cursing, please?
You’re again assuming your conclusion — namely, that cognition and emotion are something so ultra-sophisticated they can only take place in Homo (perhaps even H. sap.?).
You’re also ignoring that all sorts of other very sophisticated structures were already in place not merely in the small lizardy thing but in the fishy thing from many many many many many millennia before that, and all those structures function mostly the same way across vertebrates today. Eyes, the central nervous system, biochemistry, muscles, the circulatory system, embryology, and on and on and on.
And you’re also ignoring that all these species evolved in a shared environment where there is an advantage to being able to communicate with each other. It’s important for the hyena to be able to tell if the leopard is angry because the hyena is trying to muscle in on the kill or if the leopard is feeling fat and happy and doesn’t care about the carcass any more.
When it comes right down to it, you’ve yet to explain why this one particular class of phenomenon must be assumed to be unique to humans, as opposed to all the huge swaths of phenomenon we know we share in common. All you’re doing is asserting that we’re not merely special but somehow incapable of understanding other species in the exact same ways that other species appear to understand each other.
Cheers,
b&
Well if we construct an tree using pair bonding, nuturing the young, etc as our criteria, I expect you’ll find we are somewhat special. Its great to pick and choose animals that share some traits similar to us, like the eagle. But at the same time you are ignoring all the other animals that do not do these things, like the cuckoo.
On the other hand, I know a lot of people who seem quite happy with the cuckoo strategy of having other people raise their kids. (OK, this isn’t very relevant to the subject.)
Actually, I think it’s quite relevant.
Evolution shamelessly recycles and re-purposes whatever it has at hand.
Just because emotions are used to ensure proper parenting doesn’t mean that cuckoos don’t experience emotions. It would be a reasonable hypothesis that cuckoos experience roughly similar emotions as do human lotharios.
Cheers,
b&
no, it really, really would not be a resonable hypothesis.
ORLY?
Do you agree that cuckoos experience pain in response to injury?
Would you agree that the cuckoo experience of pain is roughly analogous to the human experience of pain?
If so, how do you distinguish between one type of stimulus / response that’s analogous and another that isn’t, despite the fact that the stimuli and responses are themselves analogous?
If not…I’m not sure there’s any point in a discussion with somebody who claims that humans are the only animals to experience pain.
b&
Hang on! That’s a very false dichotomy. Agreeing that animals feel pain is hardly the same as agreeing that “cuckoos experience roughly similar emotions as do human lotharios”!
I’m suggesting it’s a spectrum.
Where on the spectrum does one draw the line?
That’s the big question here.
b&
Exactly. The debate, it seems to me, is all about what we take to be the null hypothesis, and it really doesn’t make sense to start with one that seems to deny the majority of our evolutionary history. I realize the value of not wanting to appear to be expecting what you then find, but there’s a limit to going in the opposite direction as well; at the very least, it involves reinventing the wheel way too often.
It goes without saying that there are dangers with anthropomorphism, but there are dangers with the emotional-blank-slate as well, as in cases where medical anaesthesia was not been used because it was assumed infants couldn’t feel pain.
And as to the exceptions–cuckoos, et al; we should expect this. Evolution is all about existing variation allowing the exploitation of different ‘niches.’ If there were only one best strategy, there’d be only one animal.
As to leading humans to ignore less charismatic spp–how could that get any worse? Except amongst biologists, of course, who find them fascinating.
Clearly we need to be investing in slug cams, spider cams, cockroach cams and maybe even an E.coli cam (if they can make the little cameras small enough).
Well, there is the pill cam.
http://www.popsci.com/node/19963
Cool. Now all we have to do is strap one of those to the head of an E.coli and we can see what the little buggers get up to when they don’t think we’re watching =)
the consciousness of animal is based in the same evolutionary origins as ours
only we can talk about it and observe it _of_ them but they cannot do the same talking and same onbservation
the physical machinery is very similar if not the same
we really should spend less time on “consciousness” and more time on “the system properties of human experience” and “the nature and course of human evolution as evolution of deliberative capability”
I didn’t read the eagle thread at the time (and only a bit of it now). Having read D’Amasio, I’m quite convinced that animals have emotions analogous to ours. However I’m equally convinced, a la Nagel, that it is difficult to impossible to imagine what it’s “really like” to be that animal, feeling that emotion. It’s hard enough to do that with other humans — how much harder must it be with neurologies evolved for a different set of requirements?
It’s hard to strike that balance between empathy and anthropomorphism.
“And I still think they should have left at least one eaglet in the Norfolk nest for poppa to feed!”
Emotionally, I was right there with you, but their concern was that the eaglet would have been vulnerable to predation while daddy was out hunting. They made the best survival choice under difficult circumstances. I again refer anyone who hasn’t read it, to the transcript of the initial Moderated Chat from Ed Clark of WCV. It goes into the subject in great detail. Reading it changed my mind on the subject.
And, I think one of the things anthropomorphism gets in the way of is grasping how readily animals can move on. It’s just really unlikely that the male eagle went on “missing” the eaglets for an extended period.
Ed Clark estimated 1 day or so before the eagle moves on and his behavior returns to normal. Of course, that gets back to the “how do you know what they feel?” argument that others are making here.
I know, and we don’t know, but we can make educated guesses. Eagles just don’t have much brain.
For an extended period? So it’s not a question of whether the male eagle finds the experience upsetting, just the duration?
Exactly.
(And of course, other spp.–elephants, e.g.–seem to ‘grieve’ substantially longer…)
Elephants are a whole different kettle of fish. So to speak.
I used to know four of them quite well.
I love your contributions from your zoo experience; and am most envious! 😀
Ya. Knowing elephants was a great thing. Lucky me.
Well for me it’s both. I really don’t know what the male eagle found the experience. I find it hard to guess.
For the record that’s not because I think they have no emotions. I’ve watched the local pair play-fight in the sky on bright breezy spring days, days on which I would love to play-fight in the sky. I just doubt that their emotions are very complicated or that they are about things (facts, states, etc) that are not semi-immediately present.
I would say that what separates humans from animals most is our ability for language. Otherwise, at least in terms of conscious experience, we are probably little different to the other mammals.
Really? You think the conscious experience of, say, mice is little different from that of humans?
Why would that be likely? Given the differences in the brains of the two species, why would that be likely?
This is an important point. If there is anything that might help us make intelligent guesses about the inner lives of animals, it is probably the resemblances and differences between their neurology and ours (of course, real-time brain imaging might be difficult, as most animals won’t voluntarily lie still in the CAT machine).
Right. That’s what I was saying (above somewhere) about educated guesses. There is growing knowledge of what bits of the brain do what, so surely that does give us some at least potential information about what animals think and feel.
Except the octopus. I saw a great thing on the Discovery channel last week about octopus intelligence and how odd their brains are. They’re distributed – they have neurons at the tops of their arms. And they’re spookily “intelligent.”
We have to be careful about our “knowledge of what bits of the brain do what”, too:
http://howbirdsthink.blogspot.com/
Notice I carefully said “there is” knowledge – I deliberately didn’t say “our” because I ain’t got none! That’s me being careful. 🙂
LOL!
By “we,” I obviously meant “they.” 😀
I expect that the inner lives of octopi are beyond comprehension to us, as are those of any protostome — the neurology is totally different for developmental reasons (says he, an engineer spouting about biology on a biologist’s blog ;-)). They may respond to stimuli in understandable ways, and they may be far smarter than mice — but the mouse-mind must be much more like our own, while the octopus’ is entirely alien.
Perhaps there could be convergent evolution of behavioral/emotional responses, though. So many octopi (-podes for you purists!) have been observed to be capable of learning, and of solving “puzzles” (either natural or un-natural–how to open a screw-top jar, for instance), to exhibit responses that seem to reflect states like curiosity, anger, fear, etc.; one wonders whether the capacity to learn might not often lead to similar repertoires no matter how different the physiology/anatomy/evolutionary history may be.
Granted, octopi have behaviours that seem to reflect mental states analogous to ours — but of course the four F’s of survival are universal, so perhaps that’s not surprising. I’m just trying avoid being deuterostomorphic ;-).
FWIW: the blog spell-checker complained about “octopodes” but accepted “octopi” (and I for one welcome our new electronic spelling nazis).
We should not forget lifespan and development from child to adult. Humans begin to learn to speak very early on in their development, but still take years to gain any sophistication.
Imagine a human child that never learned language, how developed do you think it would be?
Humans who are severely mentally disabled, can still have conscious experiences and feel emotions. They may not have a sense of self like us, or the ability to communicate thoughts and actions, but they’re still experiencing.
Wittgenstein: If a lion could speak, we could not understand him. (Philosphical Investigations, p.223)
But lions can speak and we do understand them.
Is there a person here who is unable to tell the difference between a cat asking for food, one warning you to back away, and one in need of a belly rub?
And is there a person here who can’t convey to the cat, “Go away!” or “I’d love to brush your coat”?
Sure, the language isn’t English, and it’s not as sophisticated or as nuanced. And it’s as much non-manual sign language as it is vocalized.
But it most certainly is formalized communication, and what is language but formalized communication?
Cheers,
b&
I would say the language was non-conceptual, but expressive. Our ordinary language is conceptual–has discrete units of memorised sounds or symbols.
The reason we can sometimes ‘understand’ animal language is because we can relate to what they’re feeling or experiencing.
Humans even resort to expressive language when they talk to babies and back to animals. When we say “Go away!” or “No” we do it in an expressive manner, the animal picks up how we feel, and then it ‘understands’ that.
If lions could describe what it is like to be a lion we could only understand if we were were sufficiently like lions. Either they can’t describe what it is like; or else we are just not lionish enough to understand.
The “answer” to Jerry’s question about animal consciousness is the one I give to my daughters (and my students, and myself): “how could you tell what the animal feels?”
In other words, introspection, anthropomorphism and speculation are all well and good, but what we really need to do is *an experiment* that looks at “feeling”, which is presumably more or less coterminous with consciousness (can you feel without being conscious in some way?).
And that is *very* tricky. Best we can come up with regard to self-awareness is the mirror self-recognition test, which is incredibly flawed, but I have seen nothing better.
It suggests dolphins, great apes, one elephant (yes, only one) and magpies have some kind of concept of self and can figure out what a mirror is…
So rather than encourage more speculation or assertions based on our own assumptions, I think posters here (and Marlene Zuk!) should think about what experiments they could do.
PS – There’s a Nobel Prize in it if you can solve this! And probably an autographed copy of WEIT thrown in, too!
Does your experiment do a better job at determining what a human feels as opposed to some other organism?
I’d also suggest that humans are quite adept at reading the body language (and tone of voice and the like) of other humans…and we observe strong parallels both in body language and actions with all sorts of other mammals (at the least). Why should our finely-honed senses for deciphering the emotions of others be inferior to the mirror test? It’s as if you were discounting the eye as inadequate for determining whether or not a banana is ripe in favor of a bimetallic thermometer, merely because the thermometer is immune to observational bias.
b&
The problem is, we know humans are flawed at that – people (and particularly children) often attribute sentiments/intelligence to inanimate objects. We need some other criterion – science.
Yeah, but all our other senses are flawed as well. The response isn’t to throw out the senses and start with something radically different that isn’t even vaguely remotely good at the job at hand, but first to compensate for the failures of our senses (glasses, ear trumpets) and then to develop superior replacements (Hubble, digital recorders with spectral analysis).
Cheers,
b&
What’s the superior replacement for the human Hyperactive Agent Detection Device? That’s not Matthew’s suggestion?
Well, Matthew’s replacement was the mirror test. And a big assumption of the test is that the marking used in the test is significant to the subject of the experiment.
Cats don’t pass the mirror test. But, after Baihu “got tutored” and came home with a cone of shame, he paid quite a bit of attention to himself in the mirror. Tamar’s attitude towards him also changed remarkably.
So, is it more reasonable to suggest that cats don’t pass the mirror test, or that cats don’t care about bits of debris stuck to their coats, but they do care about suddenly having a big blue mane?
I’m neither a psychologist nor an animal behaviorist, so I wouldn’t presume to suggest what the proper tools are. I would, however, suggest that it would be an excellent starting point to have many humans study many videos of animals in many different emotional states. Have the humans categorize their interpretations of the animal’s emotional states. Where you’ve got significant agreement of the animal’s emotional states, you can start to analyze the cues that the humans are using to make that determination, and you can look across species to find which cues are universal. After that, you can work with animators to create synthetic videos to test your hypotheses and run those videos past yet more humans.
You can also get a head start by interviewing animal trainers, artists, and others whose livelihoods depend on accurately reading the emotional states of animals.
This would seem to be graduate-level research, doctorate-level at most. I have to assume that either these sorts of studies have been done, or that nobody in the field cares about this sort of thing.
Cheers,
b&
That doesn’t sound like a very good test, given that what Matthew pointed out needs to be corrected for is the human tendency to read in emotions and intentions. Watching videos of animals in order to categorize their interpretations of the animal’s emotional states would just be a form of story-telling.
That’s why I don’t think it should be restricted to a single human. Have a wide spectrum of humans do the analysis, ideally from a diverse range of cultures, ages, all the usual suspects.
The videos also shouldn’t show context, such as somebody yelling at the dog, but only enough of the animal for the animal’s motions to be discerned. Yell at the dog; start rolling with a tight shot on the dog; wait ten seconds without the human doing any more yelling; stop rolling. Get out the leash and ask the dog if it wants to go for a walk; start rolling with a tight shot…you get the idea.
What you’re left with is the human consensus of the interpretation of the posture, movement, vocalizations — all the things that we might cue off of to interpret emotional state.
Once you have that consensus, you’ve got a good reason to hypothesize that the humans have correctly interpreted the state, and you can start building other independent tests to verify. Can you quantify whatever it was that the humans cued off of? If so, can you build synthetic models, and get humans or even other animals to react appropriately to your models? Can you apply your model to species that weren’t part of the initial analysis?
If the totality of your model is consistent, then you can have a great deal of confidence in your model as an explanation of emotions and their expression.
Cheers,
b&
OT, but reminds me of how much is made in some papers regarding the responses of that wildly diverse set, college psych students… /sarcasm
But given that humans in general tend to over-detect agency, just having lots of humans watch videos wouldn’t correct for that. And anyway just having lots of humans watching videos of dogs isn’t what you’d call an experiment (although it could be a craftily arranged psych experiment, testing human suggestibility or similar).
Well, first off, this is an informal exchange on a Web forum, not a grant application
But that aside…I don’t see that the tendency to over-detect agency would necessarily be a problem. In fact, it could be an advantage: include non-animals in the samples for humans to evaluate, and it should help narrow down exactly which characteristics it is that the humans are picking up on to make determinations of the emotions being expressed.
Again, the idea is to start by using humans to figure out what the outward manifestations of emotions are. Once you’ve identified those, you’ve now got a ruler of sorts to identify various emotions. Once you have your ruler, you can fine-tune it by inducing certain emotions and observing the reactions. Once the ruler is fine-tuned, you can then move on to more objective studies — say, EEG or FMRI or the like, using the ruler to correlate emotions with the objective measurements. Once you’ve bootstrapped your way into those kinds of objective measurements, you can come full circle and observe humans for matching responses.
At the end, you should be able to identify certain brain states as being associated with certain emotions.
Whether or not we’ve got the technology to make effective objective measurements I haven’t a clue — but, if not, why should that prevent the preliminary work from being done?
Cheers,
b&
I have to agree with Dr. Cobb here: we especially need science in an area where we are so prone to bias. We naturally assume, through projection, that animals have the same emotions and even thought processes as we do, whereas they could be very different.
Having said that, I’ve always thought it quite likely that the “higher” (more intelligent) animals have emotions that are quite similar to ours since their neurobiology is similar. But thinking it likely is not the same thing as demonstrating it to be true.
Thinking of chimpanzees as little furry people may not be ideal but is it worse than politicians that say that they don’t come from primates?
In 2009, I wasted endless time watching the eagles at Patricia Bay, BC. (The nest and camera are billed as “Sidney, BC”, but nevermind.) Often wondered just what the interior mental life of a bald eagle is like. There’s no question they have some kind of mental life — they’re not merely automatons — but given that the most recent common ancestor of Haliaeetus leucocephalus and Homo sapiens is a l-o-n-g way back, I doubt it’s much like our own.
Evidence for eagles having emotions, thought, etc:
1. Mom eagle accidentally steps on an egg and crushes it, then gives cry of despair.
2. Raven steals one of two eggs while nest is momentarily sans parents; Mom returns and gets what can only be described as “a puzzled look on her face” – “I’m sure I laid two eggs.”
3. That bald eagles mate for life and can recognize their mates.
But I must admit that they’re not the brightest of birds: they build nests in unsuitable places, and what looks like great engineering is nothing much more than a random agglomeration of twigs and branches.
Does she really give a cry of despair? Do you really know the cry was a cry of despair?
Could the look on her face really “only be described” the way you described it?
Your veiled accusation is right: I am using human terms to describe eagle behavior, but, sadly, I have no idea what terms the eagles would use themselves. Do you?
I should add that the crushed egg and “cry of despair” weren’t at the Pat Bay nest, and I heard about it secondhand.
But I’ll stand by my description of Ma Patbay’s puzzled look when an egg disappeared while she was briefly absent from the nest. She communicated via motion, briefly looking around as if thinking “where is that other egg? I’m sure I laid two.”
Another possible example: Ma Patbay incubating during a ferocious windstorm and repeatedly screeching. Clearly calling for her mate to come relieve her, given the circumstances, though the sonics were (to me, at least) nothing more than the usual bald eagle screeches. A human in the same boat would have been thinking “where is that man of mine?” There may be archival video showing this incident.
Another interesting aspect to bald eagle behavior: they will select a specific tree branch to add to the nest and then break it off by brute force. They don’t just depend on what’s lying around already fallen. Planning ahead? Who knows?
Ah! Looking around “in puzzlement” I’ll buy; it’s the puzzled look I balked at. Eagles don’t have what anyone would call expressive faces; do admit!
The male of the Norfolk pair did exactly the same thing the day after the female was killed and an hour or so after the eaglets were removed. He returned to the nest with a large fish, and stood there looking around for a loooong time. It just about killed me. (I saw much of it in real time.)
But, I nevertheless think he got over it fairly quickly. I don’t know, except that I do know (via the knowledge of others) that the mechanisms that would interfere with that are complicated and eagle brains, not so much.
The calling, sure; they screech a lot, and I always figure they’re calling to each other when they do. But calling a mate isn’t quite the same thing as mourning her for weeks.
Like, how did it compare to the gut-wrenching despair of The God Delusion?
Last night my toddler son was watching A Bug’s Life and my wife asked, “Do flies really see like that?” (The fly’s eye view image was depicted being as multi-faceted as their eyes) I replied that their eyes were certainly like that, but who knows what they “see” like.
What is it like to be a bat?
I’m not an expert, but it seems unlikely that insects perceive a mosaic of overlapping images. As I understand it, each eye-facet (“ommatidium”) is essentially a light-pipe that captures one pixel of image, not a complete image in its own right. Think of those fiber-optic “image stones” you find in novelty shops that appear to lift an image off a page. That’s how insect eyes work, by channeling light to the image-forming surface instead of refracting it.
This is such a fascinating topic! Great op ed, and I’m enjoying the comments.
A few weeks ago I was mentioning Uexküll and his A Foray into the Worlds of Animals
and Humans
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/U/uexkull_foray.html
which I had read about in Agamben a few years back (the passage about the tick that’s quoted on Wikipedia stood out). It seems he had some odd ideas about evolution, but the book sounds interesting. It’s expensive, though. Anyone read it and have an opinion?
I don’t, but I wish there were a way of explaining things to animals. I wish poppa could simply have been informed – “Don’t worry; we’ll feed them until they can take care of themselves.”
neglect the less charismatic species that lack feathers or fur
Why is it that you can select your live lobster from a tank in the higher end restaurants but you never see a cage full of cute bunny rabbits (I’ll eat the one that just wiggled it’s adorable little nose) ?
Just wanted to offer a quick thanks for your interest (and to Jerry for posting). I am in the field doing my cricket work and have limited internet access.
I guess to me the assumption that animals are just like us is kind of presumptuous. In other words, as I say, it means that we just make everything similar to humans, when in fact other species could have their *own versions* of emotions or consciousness, just like they have their own versions of many, many other behaviors.
But did I get it right that if I do an appropriate experiment I get a signed copy of WEIT (forget the Nobel Prize)? 🙂
I see you have your priorities straight! 😀
This reminds me of papers censuring people for making claims that animals perceive colors in one way or the other. We can certainly test if animals can sense some colored object or light, but at the moment we can’t really tell how animals perceive an image. Perhaps one day we will be able to. A similar thing goes for animals and emotions. Do some animals share some emotional responses due to common heritage or coincidence – or is it all simply something we humans imagine? At this point in time I doubt anyone can really say. However, anthropomorphizing animals is not a good thing to do – just ask any number of dead people who’ve considered certain animals their ‘friend’.
How’s that number compare to the number of dead people who’ve considered certain humans their “friend”? Or to the number of people alive today thanks to the efforts of a non-human animal, whether or not that animal was considered anybody’s “friend”?
Cheers,
b&
What’s important isn’t the absolute numbers, but the (serious) injury and fatality rate among humans who believe they can befriend wild animals – especially the larger animals like bears. The rate of serious injury and fatalities in human-human interactions is pretty low despite the overall large numbers – and that’s counting everyone and not just the ones killed by a ‘friend’. Animals simply do not interact with humans in the same way.
The intervention of non-human animals to save a human is vastly overrated (and besides the point) – let’s take the case of dolphins. Dolphins are nice, they save drowning people – except that in reality such behavior is not common and you’re more likely to be bitten by an irate dolphin. Where people feed the dolphins it gets worse: they start to attack small boats demanding food, and yet I don’t recall seeing those incidents on the news. How about guard dogs? Well, they don’t protect because you’re their friend – that’s their training. A pet dog may also get defensive and that’s their instinct.
Surely one key difference between eagle grief and human grief is that the eagle is probably not asking itself “Why did this happen?” or protesting “But she had her whole life ahead of her!” As far as we know we’re the only species capable of thinking in the subjunctive, and part of what makes human grief so acute is the sense of lost opportunities and future possibilites foreclosed. I seriously doubt that any nonhuman animal feels that kind of loss.
What would it mean if animals didn’t have emotion? I understand that nonhuman animals might not experience the full range of emotions that humans experience, and that we might not always (ever?) be able to discern just what this or that animal was feeling, but surely—if there’s anything at all going on in animals’ heads—they have feelings. Emotions are like prewired responses. They’re primitive things.
I can see how people could engage in debates about animal intelligence—what kind? how much?—but emotion?
But the argument isn’t about whether animals have emotion; it’s about what kind and how much and for how long.
Have we even answered that question for humans?
One time, driving between Mason TX and Llano TX, I saw a black vulture by the side of the road maybe 150 yards away. I read its body language that, without doubt, it was puzzled and confused. I thought this a rather remarkable observation. When I came closer, my analysis of the situation was verified. The vulture was trying to figure out how to eat a dead porcupine.
Sure, but that’s one event – it could be a case of confirmation bias. The challenge is to work out tests to evaluate whether or not a vulture looks puzzled when confronted with something challenging.
She has a point but – without having read everyone’s comments – I would turn it around & say we Anthropomorphise Humans. We are animals too – it is just that we add levels of cultural complication.
Well fancy that, fame at last! I’m in Australia and only just got online, so I’m sorry I couldn’t join the conversation earlier but I definitely am ‘undaunted’ by condemnations of anthropomorphism. I think a lot about the divide between us and animals, hence the lauded adjective ‘eagly’ and I do not doubt that it is a salient difference but I also do not forget that we are indeed animals ourselves. We can know what an animal feels in pretty much the same way we know what another person feels, we watch them and their actions and empathise with them. I think the trend is science has been towards increasing understanding that the gap between us and other animals is less than we’d thought and that more errors have been made in assuming otherwise than in over anthropomorphising animals. Look at genetics, HOX genes etc, I think the base assumption should be that animals are all the same until proven otherwise (which no doubt they often will be). So Prof Zuk, thanks for my fifteen minutes but I will not back down.
How is the gap decreasing?
Darwin argued that the differences between animals and ‘man’ is of degree and not of kind. It is becoming more apparent, for instance that dogs are better at reading us than we can them. They can even read our intentions and emotions better than we do our own. I don’t think Charles would have sided with Zuk and others who just because they have interspecific autism think it works the other way around.
If webcams cause viewers to empathize with the wild ones, great! The more folk who learn to tread lightly the better.