Behavior of Birds Depends On Their Hatching Order 67
An anonymous reader writes "A new study looks at the behavior of birds and found the hatching order of birds influences how they behave in adulthood. The study was conducted by Dr. Ian Hartley and Dr. Mark Mainwaring (LEC), researchers at the University of Lancaster Environment Center. The researchers noticed that the youngest members of the zebra finch broods were more adventurous than their older siblings in later life."
Anedotal evidence suggests same for humans... (Score:5, Interesting)
... or is that just me and the people I know?
Re:Anedotal evidence suggests same for humans... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's been an open question in psychology for over a century. There's some evidence for it, and some against it, and nobody has any kind of conclusive proof one way or the other.
Re:Anedotal evidence suggests same for humans... (Score:4, Interesting)
Months of difference make a difference in sports and the classroom. Why shouldn't years of difference make a difference among siblings?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/03/05/f-birth-month-sports-learning-health.html [www.cbc.ca]
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Months of difference make a difference in sports and the classroom. Why shouldn't years of difference make a difference among siblings?
That's so wrong, it makes me sad. -der than a typical Monday.
First of all, the study rather clearly is about hatchlings in a given brood, so unless your kids are triplets you can't observe the same thing.
Next, the reasons behind the effect of birth MONTH on sports and education are pretty much self-evident: the physical and mental development of children in a given classroom or sports league is greatest in those who just miss a cutoff date. That has nothing to do with multiple birth-order.
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Twins or multiple births aren't even analagous. Birds hatch independently, mammals don't birth independently.
The topic drifted.
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Yeah, I guess the topic was wandering. To go farther afield-- I've seen studies of dog litters which suggest the most aggressive puppies are the ones surrounded by the most mail fetuses in utero.
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Because being old for your grade has obvious benefits in terms of intellectual maturity for academic work and physical maturity for sports. And being young for your grade has those same obvious deficits.
Years different wouldn't have impact at all on those and hence you wouldn't expect the same differences (assuming you aren't one of those young for their grade idiots of course).
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we would be about equal in numbers to their study. I think if there's going to be anything to this, they need
a much bigger group.
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Birds are not humans. Dogs are not humans. Fish are not humans. Even monkeys are not humans. Please stop drawing parallels between humans, who exist in highly complex constantly changing societal structures and often do things for entirely non-immediately-intuitive reasons, and other types of creatures. These comparisons rarely have much grounding in reality, since intelligence is a phenomenon unto itself.
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Re:Anedotal evidence suggests same for humans... (Score:4, Insightful)
Human intelligence does not negate our evolutionary origins.
Oh, yes it does. We can fly higher, move faster, prolong our lives and do any number of things that our evolutionary origins would preclude. In fact we can do almost anything any animal can do, except better, and a great deal more besides, by using that intelligence. Intelligence is the ultimate evolutionary advantage, to the extent that it steps outside the commonly perceived framework of evolution and creates its own framework.
That's not to say it's not evolution, rather that it's a different form of evolution, whereby capability is derived from generation upon generation of accumulated knowledge without changing the raw biological underpinnings much. This knowledge in turn informs behaviour, which is what we're talking about. We can learn a lot about animals by studying animals, but trying to then somehow lay this onto human behaviour patterns is an exercise in futility at best.
Short version, instinct and intelligence are wildly different things, and humans are far more creatures of the latter than the former.
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Short version, instinct and intelligence are wildly different things, and humans are far more creatures of the latter than the former.
Sure. Except slashdotters. Missing Option: Breasts!
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You're hacking your brain whenever you learn something new - its a mistake to conflate the gross biological structure with the informational structures we have developed. Inherited biology, genetics, these have little enough to do with it. Take for example European adventurism in the 19th century - were they genetically superior to the states they subjugated? I'm sure they would have liked to believe so. The reality is that they simply had superior knowledge - in terms of technology - to their opponents, ac
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What you're saying is that anything with emotional content must be the result of nature rather than nurture? Let's talk about sexuality so, right at the coalface. What part of nature led to S&M, swingers, hotwifing, nappy fetishes, uniform fetishes, exhibitionism, dogging, or any of the rest of the wonderfully diverse panolpy of human sexuality? Or how about this, which is more interesting, having sex with biologically attractive opposites or fulfilling a secret fantasy? You can't say there isn't a prim
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However, the template upon which our behaviors rest comes from millions of years of evolution and are strongly impacted by them.
Millions of years of evolution are less important than thousands of years of culture and knowledge, since we have evolved to the stage where learning is far more important than instinct. Keep a person isolated from everyone in a jungle for their whole life. Put the same person's identical twin through the finest education and upbringing which can be offered by the twenty first century. The end results may as well be different species in terms of how they will respond to stimuli and challenges, I guarantee i
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No, it doesn't.
The humanity has lived lifestyle analogous to the way other mammals live in the wild for most of its existence, the triumphs of the human intelligence that you celebrate are a relatively modern thing and still aren't a reality for a big percentage of the wolrd population.
None of which runs counter to what I'm saying.
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Short version, instinct and intelligence are wildly different things, and humans are far more creatures of the latter than the former.
In my experience you have the order reversed.
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We do things that not any one animal is better at, but there are a considerable number of things that other animals can do that I think are far more impressive.
A cheetah, for instance, can run ~100kph and accelerate to that speed in roughly 3s. Sure, we can build cars that can do that, but they're thousands of kilograms and it takes nearly every ounce of engineering knowledge we possess to accelerate those kilograms that fast, but we do so at far lower efficiency than the cheetah. If our goal is to accelera
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These comparisons rarely have much grounding in reality, since intelligence is a phenomenon unto itself.
There's very little difference between the intelligence level of humans vs. other mammals. It's just that a little bit makes a big difference.
For the most part, the things you do that you think you do because you've thought it out, you do out of base instinct. The cognitive part of your brain comes up with the justification after the decision has been made.
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They might not be human, but humans and they are all still animals. Do you know where the expression "pecking order" comes from? Chickens. When chickens first meet, they quickly work out a hierarchy through fighting, aka the pecking order.
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Unless you are seriously proposing that humans differ in kind in some profound way from everything else, it seems absurd to suggest that things can't be learned(or, at very least, used to construct good hypotheses to test against humans and narrow down the amount of human testing you need to do).
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Take any animal behaviour and I guarantee you'll find a set of humans somewhere that behave in a somewhat similar fashion. There are after all seven billion of us, so eh causation correlation and all that. Of course humans differ profoundly, show me the animal that has set a flag on the moon.
This is along the lines of a nature versus nurture debate which is hardly even a debate at all - using two people who are biologically almost identical, one from the early bronze age, one raised by the finest minds and
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It's funny, you can recognize this and yet here you are, planting your flag on Slashdot, on your device made of plastics and rare metals that requires digging deep into the earth to harvest, burning an unrenewable resource that destroys your environment to do it.
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btw, we use renewable hydro electric here... still ruins the environment though, just mainly before production :(
Sometimes it's almost futile to fight the flow, but there's always hope, that like a montreal street crossing, you'll gather enough people going in the same direction to change
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Are you seriously saying that animals besides humans don't "exist in highly complex constantly changing societal structures and often do things for entirely non-immediately-intuitive reasons"
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The point was developed beyond the pithy one liner in a subsequent post. :)
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Nonsense, Humans are Animals, period. All this stuff you know how to do was taught to you. The only thing that makes us special is a highly developed language center in our Brains. And even that has to be taught how to function.
If I had thrown you in the Jungle at age 5, and some explorers found you at age 25; you are going to act anything other than Human. There have even been real cases of such. Without being taught anything, you are nothing more than a grunting Monkey, not even being able to talk.
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If I had thrown you in the Jungle at age 5, and some explorers found you at age 25; you are going to act anything other than Human. There have even been real cases of such. Without being taught anything, you are nothing more than a grunting Monkey, not even being able to talk.
Exactly my point.
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Line A is not line B. They're not even the same length! And yet, they're parallel. If you know A1(x, y) A2(x, y) B1(x, y), you can determine the x for any y on line B.
Dogs protect their offspring, humans protect their offspring for much the same reasons. You absolutely can draw parallels for a huge number of behaviors between humans and other animals. Just because exceptions exist (line B isn't as long as line A, so there is no corresponding x coordinate to y+40), doesn't mean you should discard your reason
"Adventurous" my ass (Score:1)
Theft (Score:5, Funny)
I reckon scientists would see some really interesting behaviour if they got a bunch of pigs to steal the eggs before they hatch.
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Corrilation is not... (you know) (Score:2)
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Quite so. It's probably best to assume (lacking any other evidence) that the researchers did their best to rule this out, but this kind of article never goes into that much depth.
Also, is it nitpicky to point out that it's not hatching order per se, but incubation time which affects behaviour? True, hatching order is entirely dependent on incubation time (assuming they were all laid at the same time), but it's not like #1 from one brood will always be more exploratory than #2 from another brood.
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Marcia, Marcia, Marcia (Score:2)
That's all I've got to say..