Archive for the ‘other minds’ Category
other minds, other ways: killer whales etc
So in my quest to find inspiration as a wannabe female supremacist, I’ve been learning bits and pieces about octopuses (fascinating but way too bizarre and solitary to be role models), elephants, coyotes, lions, killer whales, lemurs, and of course bonobos. So in this piece I’ll focus on cetaceans, and killer whales in particular.
I’m coming close to the end of Carl Safina’s book Beyond Words: what animals think and feel, which is just what the matriarch ordered. Not that all the social animals he describes are matriarchal, but they’re all intelligent, complex and very much worth reflecting upon and valuing, especially considering how much we have done to them and to the environments they rely on.
So cetaceans are all complex ocean-dwelling mammals. There are about 90 species and they’re generally divided into whales, dolphins and porpoises. Safina introduces killer whales as ‘the world’s largest dolphins’, and quotes a remark from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, ‘Exception might be taken to the name bestowed upon this whale… for we are all killers’. Humans particularly. Safina’s first chapter on them is called ‘Sea Rex’, and introduces them so:
Feared in our own time by even the sea’s greatest whales, killer whales exert power without peer since dinosaurs sighed out, sixty-five million years ago. But the killer’s subtle, sensitive side makes a hunter with complex notes that T rex could never have hoped to emulate: intelligent, maternal, long-lived, cooperative, intensely social, devoted to family. They are, like us, warm-blooded milk-makers, mammals whose personalities are really not much different from ours. They’re just a lot bigger. And notably less violent.
I knew before reading this book that these whales were also called orcas, and in fact thought the ‘orca’ term was a replacement, a less pejorative term, but maybe not, as it’s a latin reference to a demonic underworld. The Latin name is Orcinus orca, and there are various other names bestowed on them by sea-faring cultures. Safina prefers the term ‘killer’, always bearing in mind human capacities in that regard.
They’re matriarchal, the females being, as with elephants, the knowledge-keepers and the guides for the pods in their long migratory travels. And they’re very sexual, always a big interest of mine. In describing a party-style gathering that combined three pods, Safina noted the ‘x-rated’ style of their play. Male-male sex play is particularly notable, due to those things males have – ‘three-foot wangers draped over each other’, was one description re the adult males, and as for the youngsters, ‘soon after they stop nursing, there’s a lot of rolling around with their little snakes out’. This sex play is common to many dolphin species, and according to Safina, bottlenose dolphins engage in more same-sexual behaviour than any other known creature. Clearly bonobos need to lift their game.
Unsurprisingly, Safina makes comparisons with elephants:
As with elephants, each killer whale family’s elder decision-making matriarch has memorised the family’s survival manual, maintaining knowledge of the region, the routes and island passes, the rivers where salmon concentrate in their seasons, and so on. She’s often out in front.
But one glaring difference is that killer whales kill, even other, much bigger whales, while elephants are strictly vego. And they’re quite ruthless killing machines, though they’ve never been known to kill humans, in or out of the water – they’re too intelligent for that.
But their relations with humans are even more interesting, if the stories told to Safina are to be believed – stories told about various dolphin species. For example, killer whale pods (the term given to particular extended-family groups that hunt and play together, as I understand it), appear able to distinguish between vessels carrying nice humans and those nasty ones out to hunt or capture them. At a time just before laws were introduced to prevent organisations like Sea World from capturing baby whales, whole whale pods would hang around observer boats that they knew to be friendly and safe. Another story told of a whale pod guiding a small whale-friendly boat out of Puget Sound in a dangerously thick fog. Safina relates other stories told to him of captive dolphins (killer whales also being dolphins) engaging in highly intelligent trickery to wangle extra food from their captors. So much of this and other behaviours indicate that we’ve barely begun to comprehend the minds of these creatures, adapted to environments so far removed from our own.
Of course, with such ‘other-worldly’ creatures, it may be hard to tell myth from reality. They have saved dogs from drowning – plausible, they would have noticed dogs hanging around humans, and would not recognise them as potential food. Other behaviours, from playful to life-saving, towards humans they know to be whale-friendly, are more mysterious and perhaps simply indicate that we’re a long way form understanding minds so differently adapted from, and yet comparably complex as, our own. I’ve just started reading Dennett’s now 30-year-old Kinds of Minds, wondering if whales-dolphins will be looked at. I suspect not, or not much.
Finally, is there a way to associate those cetacean species that are female dominant as being different from those that aren’t? Or is their water-world so alien to us that it’s, so far, difficult to tell? And yet, their ancestry is terrestrial…
Wikipedia lists 94 species, all of which are uniparous (giving birth to one child at a time) as far as we know, and maternal care of offspring is intense and long-lasting, with paternal care being minimal at best – though pods are generally close-knit. Reproductive rates are low. This quote from a Royal Society paper, ‘Causes and consequences of female centrality in cetacean societies’, linked below, might help:
… every cetacean calf is a significant investment, and offspring care is central to female fitness. Here strategies diverge, especially between toothed and baleen whales, in terms of mother–calf association and related social structures, which range from ephemeral grouping patterns to stable, multi-level, societies in which social groups are strongly organized around female kinship. Some species exhibit social and/or spatial philopatry [remaining in same group or place, or returning there for breeding] in both sexes, a rare phenomenon in vertebrates. Communal care can be vital, especially among deep-diving species, and can be supported by female kinship. Female-based sociality, in its diverse forms, is therefore a prevailing feature of cetacean societies. Beyond the key role in offspring survival, it provides the substrate for significant vertical and horizontal cultural transmission, as well as the only definitive non-human examples of menopause.
The paper goes on to emphasise what Safina also points out, that ‘we know almost nothing about the social structure of most…. cetacean species’. What Safina does provide is a fund of pretty convincing anecdotal evidence of the complex understanding of human behaviour displayed by those species we’ve had contact with, in the wild and in captivity. And considering the obvious importance of females in those cetacean societies we’ve observed, I’m heartened by the paper’s emphasis on my own great topic of interest:
This [understanding of female roles in cetaceans] has important implications for understanding socio-cultural changes in modern human societies, where, for example, a comparative understanding of female social roles can guide thinking about sources and solutions to the problem of underrepresentation of women in positions of leadership.
So I haven’t yet fully digested this lengthy paper, so I’ll leave it to my next piece to report on it.
References
Carl Safina, Beyond words: what animals think & feel, 2016
octopuses r n t us
I watched a video yesterday on those amazing sea creatures and was reminded of a couple of books I read a few years ago by Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other minds: the octopus and the evolution of intelligent life, and Metazoa: animal minds and the birth of consciousness. Yes, again it’s about being engrossed and then more or less forgetting everything, so this time I won’t go on about myself and focus solely on octopuses. There are around 300 species of these shape-and-colour-shifting cephalopods, ranging in size from the Giant Pacific (the largest ever found weighing at about 270 kgs) to the Octopus wolfi (less than a gram). Which makes me wonder, how smart could such a mini-octopus be…?
Octopuses have been living in our oceans for some 300 million years, pre-dating the dinosaurs. They are invertebrates, i.e no backbone, but they do have hard beaky bits, the only part that can’t shape-shift. They’re famously solitary, living in home-made rock shelters, or shells or crevices – in fact in all sorts of innovative hideaways, and they’re not very long-lived at all, for all their smarts. The Giant Pacific lasts about five years at most, others not so much. Basically, they live to breed, then they die – males and females alike. Talk about a mind-blowing orgasm. This is called semelparity, which contrasts with iteroparous us. There are sex-based differences though, in this senescence. The females guard their eggs for a while, wasting away and generally dying just as the eggs hatch. This wasting process is similar in both sexes (though sometimes the male is killed by the female), and is brought about by secretions of the optic gland, ‘an endocrine gland located near the optic lobes, between the brain and eyes’, according to AI, which doesn’t lie. Anyway, this death-on-giving-birth system ensures, if that’s the word, that every new-born octopus is an orphan. Nothing is learned from their parents. They have to rely on their own smarts.
So what’s most interesting about them, surely, is the stuff that makes them think, from the get-go. It’s not a brain, in the mammalian or birdian sense, it’s a kind of decentralised nervous system. They do have a brain, of sorts, but they have eight other ‘arm-brains’. So each arm works separately but they must also be co-ordinated for the creature to get anywhere. Hard to work all that out, but then they’ve had 300 million years to do it. As to how many neurons they have, you can imagine, with the vast difference in species sizes, that it varies considerably. The common octopus, Octopus vulgaris, has about the same number as a dog, two-thirds of which are in the arms, the rest in the head. Nine brains, sort of. It has the largest brain-to-body mass of any invertebrate, unsurprisingly. They’re very visual, and can distinguish human faces, and even make friends with them, sort of. The award-winning documentary ‘My octopus teacher’ apparently demonstrates this (I haven’t seen it, but I will, and I’ve watched a documentary on the documentary, and even that was an emotional experience).
So octopuses can be added to the list of smart, even super-smart critters, but there’s something very very different about them, it seems to me. They’re solitary, and this doesn’t seem to be emphasised enough. They’re orphans, effectively. Of course they mate, because it takes two, but they don’t have mates in the Aussie sense.
Think of what this means. They don’t have parents, or siblings, or relatives – at least not that they know of, though the giant Pacific octopus lays tens of thousands of eggs before it drops dead. They don’t have playmates or teachers. Nothing is passed from generation to generation. Nothing is accumulated. They have no society. Remember the apocalyptically imbecilic remark of Margaret Thatcher, ‘there’s no such thing as society’? Maybe she’d mistaken herself for an octopus. For me, it’s due to the society that I live in that I can write on this laptop, or that I can read or write at all. Through my society I’ve learned something about the ancient Egyptians and Minoans, about Plato and Aristotle, about Voltaire and Diderot, Newton and Maxwell, Planck and Einstein. I’ve learned to play and appreciate the skills of soccer, pool and table tennis. I’ve learned of the joys and miseries associated with countless alcoholic beverages, and the odd not quite licit drug. I’ve driven cars, flown in planes, studied at a university, and sampled many other pleasures, as well as pitfalls, that my WEIRD world has provided. All, or most, of this stuff was around before I was born. They were the accumulations of our culture, part of what all we humans plug into. Octopuses, living and dying for hundreds of millions of years, have had none of that. To survive, they’re still doing what they were doing when our ancestors were synapsid tetrapods, likely sharing their oceans. And of course, they may well survive us. But have they had as much fun?
References
Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other minds: the octopus and the evolution of life, 2017
do bonobos love each other?
Fly with me, lift me up to my feet, set me free from this skin I’ve been too long in
Leddra Chapman, ‘Picking Oranges’
I got to know that your heart beats fast, and I got to know I’m the only one for you. What have I become? I’m a fucking monster, when all I wanted was something beautiful. My love, too much. Your love, not enough
Meg Myers, ‘Monster’
It wasn’t that I didn’t wanna hold your hand, I just knew if we held tight once, we would never let go. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to call you mine – but, you’re not mine
Liza Anne, ‘Watering Can’
right… but why only two?
Canto: So bonobos have been called the ‘make love not war ‘ apes, a joke moniker in a way, but I’ve been thinking about that in an attempt to be more serious about love, fellow-feeling and all that stuff, in bonobos, humans, and other species.
Jacinta: Yes, the idea of ‘true love’, which involves some kind of eternal monogamy, and is seen as peculiarly human, and sells ye olde penny romances, is still with us, and whole governments are raised around it – the couple, the nuclear family and such. Of course, in the WEIRD world, there are increasingly diverse ‘household arrangements’, but they still generally involve separate, enclosed households. Ye olde hippy free love encampments, if they were anything other than an imaginary figment, seem as distant now as our connection with bonobos. A while back we read Ferdinand Mount’s 1982 book The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage, a fairly well-reasoned defence of marriage and monogamy, and its glorious survival in spite of the free love mini-revolution, but of course he didn’t mention bonobos or speculate about the domestic arrangements of australopithecines.
Canto: Mount was – still is – a lifelong conservative, so his history was always going to be tendentious, and as you say, limited to more recent times, so it didn’t really address how we came to be monogamous, if that’s what we are. And just to set the scene with our loving cousins:
Bonobos do not form permanent monogamous sexual relationships with individual partners. They also do not seem to discriminate in their sexual behavior by sex or age, with the possible exception of abstaining from sexual activity between mothers and their adult sons.
Wikipedia entry: bonobo sociosexual behaviour
Jacinta: Conservatives wouldn’t be too happy about that sort of indiscriminate behaviour among humans, but they’d be hard pressed to argue that bonobos are ‘immoral’ or selfish, or dysfunctional and a behavioural threat to the well-being of their own society.
Canto: No, they’d probably just argue that they’re not humans and we have nothing much to learn from them. We’re 8 billion, after all, and they’re just a few thousand. We win! But I don’t think our success has much to do with our domestic arrangements. It presumably has more to do with the enlargement of our prefrontal cortex, and the causes of that, which were presumably numerous and incremental, may have also brought about an increasing division of labour along patriarchal lines.
Jacinta: Certainly our history, at least since it has been recorded, has been overwhelmingly patriarchal. Hunting as a largely male activity, as I believe it also is in chimps, could be kind of brutalising, as it’s a kill-or-be-killed activity at its worst.
Canto: Meanwhile bonobos have been evolving in their own way over the past few million years. Or not. I mean, they’ve been content to stay in the forest, in a pretty lush part of the Congo, consuming a very largely vegetarian diet, not exactly requiring a lot in the way of muscles and physical prowess. And get this, again from Wikipedia:
Bonobo clitorises are larger and more externalized than in most mammals; while the weight of a young adolescent female bonobo “is maybe half” that of a human teenager, she has a clitoris that is “three times bigger than the human equivalent, and visible enough to waggle unmistakably as she walks”
As they say ‘exercise makes the clit grow longer’. Dunnit?
Jacinta: Well, it’s true, bonobo females engage in genito-genital rubbing more than males do, and this seems to form the basis of female group dynamics, which has led to female dominance. Unfortunately in humans, clothing creates a major barrier to this activity, at least in public.
Canto: Ahh, the terrible price of civilisation. But what I’m interested in is the effect of female dominance. Yes, it’s mediated to a large degree by sexual play, and a general closeness, which we don’t seem to have the maturity to adopt, so obsessed have we been with sexual possessiveness and jealousy, to the point of stoning people – sorry, women – for adultery. Death by drowning was the punishment back in Hammurabi’s day, almost 4000 years ago. Under Ancient Greek and Roman law, women could be executed for adultery, while the men would rarely get more than a smacked bottom.
Jacinta: Actually, stoning is still a punishment, for both genders, in countries that apply strict Shari’ah law. But in the WEIRD world, where no-fault divorce is increasingly accepted, adultery has faded as an issue. And generally we’ve become more relaxed about sexuality in all its varieties, and more sceptical about ‘love’, of the everlasting and exclusive type.
Canto: Yes, and yet… love, whether it’s a human invention or not, or whether it’s just hormones – it really hurts. You develop this ridiculous passion for someone, her movements, her smile, her vitality – though she has as much interest in you as in a rotten egg. Or she takes a general interest but backs off when she senses your need. And that’s just ‘unrequited love’. Even when it’s a mutual passion it can sooner or later turn to shit. The quotes above are just three of thousands that could be mined from songs, stories, legends and our own lives. Great expectations, dashed, sublimated, given up on, nursed in solitude. A tension between the cult of individuality and its freedoms and the love that loves to speak its name, where those individuals go together like a horse and carriage, like fire and ice, Batman and Robin, Venus and Mars…
Jacinta: Well, humans do tend to overthink these matters, or over-feel them perhaps, what with our heightened sensibilities. And our civilisations have tended to push us towards exclusive ‘love relations’, and the concept of ownership:
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour. (Exodus 20:17)
So it’s not just that we’ve fallen for the myth of true love and the ideal partner – our society has created a monogamous reproductive norm, and for a good few millennia (not really so long in human history, but we know hardly anything about our sociosexual behaviour beyond the last 10,000 years or so) we’ve fallen in with it – leaving aside sultans, random monarchs and the odd billionaire entrepreneur. Our homes have, over time, become designed to largely rule out even extended family togetherness. Bonobos don’t have homes and they’re not particularly territorial….
Canto: Well, to change the subject, I’m interested in that description of bonobo clitorises. It sounds wild -so to speak. And of course it sounds very much like a penis. It all makes me think of the whole penis envy malarky of Freudian psychotherapy. Not a problem for bonobos, clearly. If we get our social evolution right, our female descendants in the non-foreseeable future (if that makes any sense) will be waggling those clits about most merrily.
Jacinta: Hah, makes a change from current-day ‘clitoridectomy’ aka FGM.
Canto: Well, they could give em a trim, like modern-day circumcision. Or have em shaped and coloured, like orchids….
Jacinta: Lovely. Interestingly, Simone de Beauvoir touches on this in The Second Sex, probably influenced by the penis envy ideas of the time. Writing of woman:
her anatomy condemns her to remain awkward and impotent, like a eunuch: the desire for possession is thwarted for lack of an organ to incarnate it. And man refuses the passive role.
No organ permits the virgin to satisfy her active eroticism; and she does not have the lived experience of he who condemns her to passivity.
the second sex, trans. C Borde & S Malovany-Chevallier, vintage books 2011
But in the WEIRD world, things have changed, or are changing, and hopefully girls are much more expert at playing the organ. Though, unlike bonobos, it’s largely done in solitude.
Canto: But do bonobos love each other, or just each others’ organs? It’s probably as uninteresting a question as What’s this thing called, love?
Jacinta: Well, that’s it, bonobos just get it together, not just for sex, but for safety in numbers, for huddling and cuddling, for play, for warmth, food-sharing and back-scratching. I doubt if they wonder if it’s really love, or how selfish or selfless they’re being. It’s their life – one of community rather than pairing off – as long as they can be left to get on with it.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo
https://www.britannica.com/topic/adultery
Ferdinand Mount, The subversive family: an alternative history of love and marriage, 1982
Simone de Beauvoir, The second sex, 1949
the short life and strange brains of the octopus, and other thoughts
a meeting of minds?
Canto: So we’ve been reading about the strange world of the octopus, and her fellow cephalopods, the squid and the cuttlefish, and what they might tell us about other intelligent forms of life. So what might they?
Jacinta: This is quite a new field of investigation, but certainly an exciting one. The octopus appears to be the most intelligent invertebrate on earth, though we still have lots to learn about it, and we know even less about its cephalopod cousins.
Canto: And we need to be careful about the ‘it’ word, as there are at least 300 species of the beasties, which vary considerably in size, habitat and even quite possibly in life-span.
Jacinta: Yes, some octopuses appear to have very short life-spans, a mere two years, but so little is known about so many of the deeper water species out there…
Canto: They’re predators, of course, feeding mainly on crabs, but some of the shallow-water species are known to scavenge off human activities, stealing bait and the like. They have incredibly flexible, almost amorphous bodies that aren’t co-ordinated simply by a central brain. In fact their nervous systems are still very much a source of mystery.
Jacinta: Like our own. Well, okay we know a helluva lot more about ours. Some other facts: they have three hearts, their eight arms or tentacles are made up of four pairs, they’re all more or less venomous, they’re famously able to match their colour to their surroundings pretty well instantly, they can unscrew the lids of jars to get at the contents, some species collect shells to use as constructions around their homes, they have very high brain-to-body mass ratios, and they appear to be very quick to learn new stuff.
Canto: Apparently tentacles are out, they’re called arms. Tentacles are another thing. A cuttlefish has two tentacles and eight arms. Snails have tentacles. As to the brain and nervous systems of octopuses, here’s what we know. Two thirds of its neurons are to be found in its arms, and they can allow the arms to act independently to some extent. Interestingly, although octopuses have complex motor systems, they don’t have an internalised map of the body as vertebrates apparently do. It’s called a somatotopic map, and it’s found in humans in the primary somatosensory cortex, at the top of the brain. Octopuses’ brains/nervous systems are organised quite differently, and that’s the point – their relationship to us on the evolutionary bush is very distant indeed.
Jacinta: Yes, that’s exactly what makes them fascinating – they’ve evolved a complex nervous system on a completely different plan, like aliens.
Canto: Not quite – they still have neurons after all, and DNA. But the link between humans and octopuses probably goes back at least 500 million years, to some of the earliest complex life forms.
Jacinta: Not so complex by modern standards…
Canto: Indeed, something like a sea worm or sea sponge. Anyway, although they appear to have highly developed intelligence, their learning capacity is really hard to ascertain. They’re not highly social animals like many primates and cetaceans are, and they certainly don’t learn from their parents, since both parents ‘fall apart’ and die shortly after breeding.
Jacinta: They’re quite inventive, even playful, they’ve been observed pushing objects into circular currents and catching them. They also board fishing boats in search of food and find ways of getting out of lab aquariums. Their ability to flatten and elongate or bunch up when required makes them very slippery little suckers, you always have to keep an eye on them.
Canto: Well no doubt researchers will be keen to learn more about their neurology, but this relatively new understanding of their smarts raises questions about their treatment by researchers – not to mention eating them en masse.
Jacinta: Well just sticking with lab treatment, I remember reading in The Lab Rat Chronicles how the rather complacently cruel treatment of lab rats, and all experimental animals, is being questioned more and more, leading to the use of less invasive neurological and other operational approaches..
Canto: Which would in any case be a good thing – the more we can learn without destroying the living thing we’re seeking to learn about, the better, for obvious reasons.
Jacinta: Rats are really smart animals – and just about the most successful animals on the planet – and they certainly feel pain and become depressed, and it’s clear that octopuses do too. In fact some countries have rules against surgical procedures without anaesthetic for octopuses, presumably based on a growing body of knowledge about them.
Canto: They often lose an arm to predators – which by the way they’re able to regrow – and have been observed to favour and tend to damaged or lost arms and other parts, which is a clear sign of ‘feeling’ the damage. But really, the idea that animals don’t feel pain – any animal – has surely had its day.
Jacinta: So what about eating them? I gather that in some parts, eating them live is a thing.
Canto: Well I’ve always been of two minds about this, about eating other animals. And Peter Wohlleben argues for the smartness and the communal life of trees and plants, so that doesn’t leave us with anything to eat at all, if we’re being truly sensitive to others. But there’s no doubt we’re eating too much, we’re destroying the habitats of huge number of species, on land and sea, to feed our growing and increasingly voracious human population. Nobody knows how that’s going to end, though some are hoping, as ever, for technological fixes – artificial meat, ways of creating bumper harvests using less and less land and so forth.
Jacinta: Another whole realm of discussion, but getting back to octopuses, can they tell us anything about consciousness, given their vastly different origin, compared to us?
Canto: Well I don’t want to get into consciousness now – that’s such a massive subject – but they can tell us a lot about a different neurological system, obviously. The fact is, though, that we observe whales, crows, elephants, octopuses, rats and other creatures that are vastly different from each other behaving in ways we, in our indulgent and sometimes condescending manner, consider intelligent, but we know barely anything about, to paraphrase a philosopher, what it’s like to be any of those creatures. Do they have thoughts like us? Or do they have thoughts, but nothing like our own? Which of course raises the question, what exactly is a thought? Can it be reduced to brain processes or do we lose too much in the reduction? Will our endless and increasing probing of human and other brains definitively answer this question?
Jacinta: I think we’ll have to wait till after we die to find out…
References
Other minds: the octopus and the evolution of intelligent life, by Peter Godfrey-Smith
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus
https://onekindplanet.org/animal/octopus/