Empathy Is For the Birds 201
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?"
Re:Raven... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Enough observation... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:mhm ravens (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:Animal Intelligence (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Not sure about evolution... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 tell us? (Score:4, Interesting)
what does this similarity imply about the evolution of behavior?
It tells us that the optimality of the tit for tat [wikipedia.org] 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.
Re:Raven... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, but it means the underlying mechanisms for toolmaking, empathy, etc, were all present no later than the last common ancestor. If a given animal does not have these traits, then the same sections of the brain are presumably used for some other function(s) as well - function(s) more advantageous to those other animals.
It also means that the underlying mechanisms are truly primitive and cannot involve any part of the brain not common to humans and avians. This means basic skills (such as toolmaking, basic problem solving, empathy, etc) should all be achievable with the Strong AI tools that exist today, which are plenty powerful enough to simulate what are relatively trivial neural circuits - compared to the whole human, or indeed avian, brain, that is.
Re:intelligence doesn't matter, communication does (Score:1, Interesting)
I disagree. The human brain is far more complex than the average raven or dolphin, even without the ability to communicate effectively (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain).
Speech and the written word are extremely important for the advancement of civillisation, certainly, but just slapping a voice box into a raven wouldn't make their brains advanced enough to comprehend language.
Re:damn (Score:1, Interesting)
The first thing I did after nuking a old version of 8.10 and Installing the latest one was opening up Synaptic.
I made damn sure anything I'd never need was removed, and promptly Installed back packets I was comfortable with. That's the power of Linux, customization without most major hassles.
well yeah (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Raven... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:intelligence doesn't matter, communication does (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:intelligence doesn't matter, communication does (Score:3, Interesting)
What you express so boldly (and rather floridly as well) is perhaps what you learn from the more popular part of the scientific press; it is, however, not entirely correct.
what elevates humankind over other animals is not grey matter, it's our vocal dexterity
No, on two counts: Humans are not "elevated" over other animals, or "more highly evolved" or anything like that; and there is no single capability that sets us apart. The idea that we are somehow "the crown of creation" is simply a superstition from the past - we are animals, simply, and what sets us apart is that we have a set of traits that favour abstract intelligence, tool use and verbal communication. It is not that our voices are particularly flexible - most birds are able to generate a far wider range of sounds than humans (but our ears are not able follow them); in many ways, the difference is more a matter of "degrees" or "dimensions", since we don't have any trait that is unique.
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
This is a rather naive assumption - and don't most TV shows prove on a daily basis, that communication is not what matters, since it is perfectly possible to communicate excessively without ever expressing a single, worthwhile thought?
Apart from that - do we know for certain that other animals don't communicate? Of course not - all living organisms communicate (even bacteria, by producing and reacting to chemical clues), and many communicate a good deal more than most would imagine. It is perfectly possible that some communicate thoughts of comparable complexity to ours, but that just haven't learnt their language.
As for writing, yeah, that was of major importance, since it allowed us to store verbal communications in a more durable and reliable form. We have yet to discover another animal that employs writing, although one can speculate that when animals leave marks in the landscape - eg to mark their territory or or the best route to food - this could be what later lead to painting pictures in a cave and evetually writing.
eventually, the memes will shed these silly biological shells entirely
Really? I suspect not; there is a very close connection between what you think of as "me" and the physical body. There has been many psychological experiments that show this - one of the more interesting IMO was one where they used VR to give people another body; eg. a man got the body of a young girl - when he lifted his arm, it would be the arm of a girl etc. It had a surprisingly strong effect on people's identity. Even if it became possible to record a human personality and imprint it on some other autonomous entity, it I don't think it would be the same person any more.
Re:Animal Intelligence (Score:3, Interesting)