Posts Tagged ‘language’
the latest on dolphin language
I wrote, or semi-podcasted, on the brain of the dolphin a while back, and much of my focus was on language, often described as the sine qua non of cerebral complexity and intelligence. In that piece, posted about eight months ago, I reported that there there was little clear evidence of any complex language in dolphins, but there had been some interesting research. Allow me to quote myself:
Dolphins do sometimes mimic the whistles of other dolphins too, particularly those of their closest relatives, but signature whistles as a form of recognition and differentiation, are a long way from anything like language. After all, many species can recognise their own mates or kin from the distinctive sounds they make, or from their specific odour, or from visual cues. However, a clever experiment carried out more recently, which synthesised these whistles through a computer, so that the whistle pattern was divorced from its distinctive sound, found that the dolphins responded to these patterns even when produced via a different sound. It seemed that they were recognising names. It’s undoubtedly intriguing, but clearly a lot more research is required.
So it was with some interest that I heard, on a recent SGU podcast, an account of what seemed an elaboration of the experiments conducted above, further confirming that dolphins recognised names. Or were they just reporting the same experiments? Having re-listened to the SGU segment, I find that they didn’t give any details of who did the study they were talking about, the only mention was to a news article. So I’ll just report on anything I can find, because it’s such a cool subject.
There’s a nice TED talk, from February 2013, on dolphin language and intelligence here, which is about researches over many years in the Bahamas with Atlantic spotted dolphins. As always, I suggest you listen to the talk and do the ‘research on the research’ yourself, as I’m not a scientist and I’m only doing this to educate myself, but hopefully I can also engage your interest.
Dolphins have a brain- to-body ratio (a rough but not entirely reliable guide to intelligence) second only to humans, they pass the mirror self-awareness test (another standard for intelligence that’s been questioned recently), they can be made to understand very basic artificial human language tests, and they’re at least rudimentary tool users. But the real interest lies in their own, obviously complex, vocal communication systems.
I probably misrepresented the information on signature whistles before: they’re only what we humans have been able to isolate from all the ‘noise’ dolphins make, because they’re recognisable and interpretable to us. Denise Herzing, in her TED talk, refers to ‘cracking the code’ of dolphins’ communication systems. She and her team have been working with the dolphins over the summer months for 28 years. They work with underwater cameras and hydrophones to correlate the sounds and behaviours of their subjects. This particular species is born without spots, but is fully black-and-white spotted by age 15. They go through distinct developmental phases making them easy to track over the years (dolphins live into their early 50s). The distinctive spotted patterns make them easy to track individually. Females are sexually mature by about age 9, males at around 15. Dolphins are very sexually active with multiple partners, so paternity is not always easy to determine, so this is worked out by collecting fecal matter and analysing its DNA. So, over 28 years, three generations have been tracked.
What really interests me about the dolphin communication question is their relation to sound and their use of sound compared to ours. Herzing describes them as ‘natural acousticians’ who make and hear sounds ten times as high as humans do. They also have highly developed vision, so they communicate via bodily signals, and they have taste and touch. Sound is of course a wave or vibration which can be felt in water, the acoustic impedance of tissue in water being much the same as on land. Tickling, of a kind, does occur.
Signature whistles are the most studied dolphin sounds, as the most easily measured. They’re used as names, in connecting mothers and calves for example. But there are many other vocalisations, such as echo-location clicks (sonar), used in hunting and feeding, and also socially, in tightly-packed sound formations – buzzes, which can be felt in the water. They’re used regularly by males courting females. Burst-pulse sounds are used in times of conflict, and they are the least studied, most hard to measure of dolphin sounds.
Interestingly, Herzing notes that there’s a lot of interaction and co-operation in the Bahamas between spotted and bottle-nose dolphins, including baby-sitting each others’ calves, and combining to chase away sharks, but little mention is made, in this talk at least, of any vocal communication between the two species. When she goes on to talk about synchrony, I think she’s only talking about within-species rather than between species. Synchrony is a mechanism whereby the dolphins co-ordinate sounds and body postures to create a larger, stronger social unit.
As I’ve mentioned, dolphins make plenty of sounds beyond the range of human hearing. Underwater equipment is used to collect these ultrasonic sounds, but we’ve barely begun to analyse them. Whistle complexity has been analysed through information theory, and is highly rated even in relation to human languages, but virtually nothing is known about burst-pulse sounds, which, on a spectrogram, bear a remarkable similarity to human phonemes. Still, we have no Rosetta Stone for interpreting them, so researchers have developed a two-way interface, with underwater keyboards, with both visual and audible components. In developing communication, they’ve exploited the dolphins’ natural curiosity and playfulness. Dolphins, for example, are fond of mimicking the postures and vocalisations of humans, and invite the researchers into their play. Researchers have developed artificial whistles to refer to dolphins’ favourite toys, including sargassum, a kind of seaweed, and ropes and scarves, so that they can request them via the keyboard interface. These whistles were outside the dolphins’ normal repertoire, but easily mimicked by them. The experiment has been successful, but of course it isn’t known how much they understand, or what’s going through their minds with all this. What is clear, however, is that the dolphins are extremely interested in and focused on this type of activity, which sometimes goes on for hours.
This research group has lately been using an underwater wearable computer, known as CHAT (cetacean hearing and telemetry), which focuses on acoustic communication. Sounds are created via a forearm keyboard and an underwater speaker for real-time Q and A. This is still at the prototype stage, but it uses the same game-playing activity, seeking to empower dolphins to request toys, as well as human game-players, through signature whistles. It’s hoped that the technology will be utilisable for other species too in the future.
All of this is kind of by way of background to the research reported on recently. This was really about dolphin memory rather than language – or perhaps more accurately, memory triggered by language. Dolphins recognise the sounds of each others’ signature whistles, but would they recognise the whistle of a dolphin they’d not been in contact with for years. And for how many years? Researcher Jason Bruck tested this by collecting whistles of dolphins in captive facilities throughout the US. Dolphins are moved around a lot, and lose contact with friends and family. Sounds a bit like the foster-care system. Bruck found that when dolphins heard the signature whistles of old companions played to them through an underwater speaker, they responded with great attention and interest. One dolphin was able to recognise the whistle of a friend from whom he was separated at age two, after twenty years’ separation. As biologist Janet Mann put it, this is a big breakthrough but not so surprising, as dolphins are highly social animals whose lives, like ours, are criss-crossed by profound connections with others, with effects positive, negative and equivocal. It’s important, too, for what it suggests – the capacity to remember so much more, in the same coded way. in other words, a complex language, perhaps on a level with ours. Will we ever get to crack this code? Why not. Hopefully we won’t stop trying.
the help
too much imagined in a smile, or not
that is the question.
youth, age, weave with guilt and fading hope
smiles and glances, wondering at wondering.
language will fix it, and it will
fix it.
Her need is clear, surely, and I can help.
No matter that I can help others, many others.
My choice is selfish, not immoral.
Think of the harm principle.
And fuck you.
It will probably not come to that anyway,
and life will go drearily on.
mitochondrial DNA, ancient civilisations and early writing
linear A
It seems to me we’re living in a world of knowledge revolutions, such as a consciousness revolution, a DNA revolution, a cosmological revolution, a stem-cell revolution, in fact every area of science or technology you care to look at seems to be undergoing revolutionary change, with far more happening than you can ever get your head around, especially if you’re as slow, eternally baffled and wide-eyed as I am. Anyway, I find mucking around in the shallows a lot of fun.
The use of mitochondrial and nuclear DNA to trace the provenance of ancient civilizations is one heady development worth keeping tabs on. One such civilization is the Minoan, which flourished 4000 years ago on the island of Crete. More precisely, it’s believed to have lasted for 12 centuries before coming to a sudden end at around 1500 BCE, probably as a result of a volcanic eruption followed by a tsunami. Arthur Evans, the famed excavator of its palatial remains, named the civilization Minoan after the mythical Minos, king of Crete. He believed it to have been a product of refugees or travellers from Egypt, a view which has divided scholars since. A recent mitochondrial DNA analysis, however, has tended to support the view that the Minoan civilisation was indigenous and independently arrived at. However, mitochondrial DNA, which traces back strictly through the female line, has its limitations, and there are plans for further research using nuclear DNA. It’s unlikely that we’ll completely unravel the web of relations that led to the surge in complexity known as the Cretan bronze age in about 2700 BCE, but DNA analysis is certainly helping to clarify the picture.
When I read about ancient civilizations I’m always interested in how they fit into a wider picture. The Minoans seem to have possessed an open, largely peaceful trading culture, so the links would no doubt have been numerous. There’s plenty of evidence of cultural exchange with Egypt over the period. One of the interesting features of early Minoan civilization is its writing system and how it connects with others, particularly Egyptian writing. The earliest writing forms found on Crete, Cretan hieroglyphs and Linear A, are as yet undeciphered. They appear to be related, but have so far have not been traced to any other known language. Linear B, a later Mycenaean-influenced form, was deciphered in the fifties, and this created an expectation that Linear A, which showed superficial similarities to Linear B (both are described as linear because they are more line-based than Cretan hieroglyphs), would soon be cracked, but the logograms or graphemes of Linear A are largely unique. Cretan hieroglyphs bear some relation to Egyptian hieroglyphs but also to various early Mesopotamian writings, so it’s not certain whether it was independently developed. This form of writing, which goes back at least to 3000 BCE, seems to have disappeared by 1700 BCE.
So we seem to have had a relatively sudden evolution of writing around the Mediterranean and the Mesopotamian regions in the late fourth millenium BCE, though various proto-writing forms had existed for millenia beforehand. The big question here is whether the spark that created a more complex and useful type of writing occurred in only one place and was carried to other places by travellers and traders, or was it a matter of similar conditions fostering a set of sparks in the region, kind of coincidentally but not really. Maybe that’s something to explore further but I’m done for now.
how to debate William Lane Craig, or not – part two, in which LFS begins to warm to the topic
the most convenient term in the language
So here we have, in toto, Luigi Funesti-Sordido’s response to the challenge thrown down by William Lane Craig. It will be rather lengthy, so I’ve broken it up into parts in the hope of making the whole more easily digestible. I’m hoping too, to present the video of LFS’s response in the near future, but at the moment it’s tied up in a beautiful red ribbon of legal and contractual wrangling and other such wishful thinking. We shall see.
Luigi Funesti-Sordido: Well g’day ladies and gents and others, believers and unbelievers, agnostics and sceptics, the notionally curious and the curiously indifferent. Dr Craig has urged upon me a particular and onerous task, to refute his eight arguments for the existence of his pet monotheistic being, within the next twenty minutes. That’s about one refutation every two minutes or so, which considering that he didn’t click me an email about what exactly he was going to say, seems a bit rich. But, as the bishop said to the actress, I’m sure I can rise to the occasion. However, I’ve got some news for you. Forget the time limit, I’ll take as much time as I damn-well please, and you will all sit down and shut up, and take your medicine. The point being that putting forward a few points for the existence of Dr Craig’s weird little being doesn’t take long, while pointing out all the weaknesses or unlikelihoods of the arguments can take quite a while – even just to untangle what it is that Dr Craig’s on about. That’s not to say that it’ll take hours to demolish each of Dr Craig’s points, because some can be dealt with much more quickly than others, but I certainly don’t intend to make this a rushed job, for the simple reason that I want it to be comprehensive and as final as it can be. You will note, by the way, that the doors to this auditorium are locked from the outside, and there is no escape. You will note also that if you try to rise from your chairs, you will receive an electric shock, mild at first but gaining in strength as you seek to widen the distance between your buttocks or other body parts and the comfortable upholstery provided for your viewing and listening pleasure. I wish no-one any harm so if you have any heart problems I’d strongly advise you to keep still and keep comfortable, and above all, don’t panic.
So, to the issues. I want first to make some general comments. Of Dr Craig’s eight arguments, five of them involve what appears to be up to date knowledge about the world, in terms of physics, cosmology, mathematics and the field of consciousness. This suggests that Dr Craig is a thoroughly modern and with-it, forward thinking philosopher. However, nothing could be further from the case. Anybody who has observed Dr Craig’s activities over the past several years, would, I think, be right to form the judgement that this is a man obsessed. In fact, I would go further and say, fanatically obsessed. It seems to me that Dr Craig’s sole purpose, his life’s work, his raison d’etre, is to pedal and promote his particular, peculiar and parochial brand of monotheism. Everything else he talks about, whether it be mathematics or morality, cosmology or consciousness, everything has to be bent and shaped and shoe-horned to fit with this peculiar, fanatical obsession. It follows from this, that nothing Dr Craig has to say about these various fields of activity and inquiry can be trusted. If you ask any expert in any of these fields how best to make a contribution, one thing you’re always likely to be told is to rid yourself, as far as you can, of preconceived notions. Keep an open mind. The two principals that drive science, to my mind, are curiosity and scepticism. Is that really the case? And what is the case? Does that argument really stack up? Can we find a better argument to fit the facts? Wow, here’s some new data, we’re going to have to rethink our basic assumptions, isn’t that exciting.
But these principles do not drive Dr Craig. He already knows the answers, all that remains for him is to convince the rest of the world. Students out there, be very wary of such individuals. Dr Craig doesn’t have the intellectual ingredients to make a good scientist. For a start, he doesn’t have a sceptical bone in his body. Imagine if Dr Craig’s dream came true, imagine if every debater capitulated before his watertight arguments, and not only that, after every debate, the whole audience ‘saw the light’ and converted in their thousands, and eventually millions, to his peculiar deity, with its father-part and its son-part and god knows what else? Where would science go then? What would happen to open and relentless questioning? I ask you to ponder that.
Dr Craig does seem to do well in these debates, and a lot of people try to put their finger on the reasons. They say he’s an ‘expert debater’ and that’s partly true, but I think the principal reason is his lack of scepticism, his absolute certainty about his position. This gives his talks something of a steamroller effect, a relentlessness which sceptics, accustomed to dealing with other sceptics, find difficult to handle. There’s also the fact of Dr Craig’s single-minded obsessionalism. This is his one and only topic, whereas his opponents – writers, academic philosophers and scientists in the main, have a much greater variety of interests and don’t, in general, spend a great deal of time thinking about their atheism.
The situation in this respect reminds me of that in Christine Garwood’s fascinating book ‘Flat Earth’. At the height of the Flat Earth belief in the nineteenth century, lecture halls in the US were regularly filled with people from all levels of society who had come to be discombobulated and entertained by the likes of flat-earth proponent ‘Prof’ Joe Holden, holding forth on the imbecilities of ‘global earth theory’, and using the language and theorems of mathematics, physics and astronomy to prove his point. In Britain at the same time, the notorious Parallax, another flat-earther, was challenging prominent scientists, including the Astronomer Royal, to debates on the matter. Another flat-earther of the time challenged no less a scientist than Alfred Russell Wallace to a test of the flat earth view against the global earth view, and according to a great many observers, actually won the contest. Of course, this is a footnote to history now, and I think the real test of Dr Craig’s position will also be how he is seen by posterity. For the fact is that Christianity is in retreat, in some places more rapidly than in others, but certainly in every western country on the planet. And this can hardly be attributed to ignorance.
Now to the first argument, and fortunately I have the gift of perfect recall, so I remember every detail of it. The best explanation of why something exists, rather than nothing, is a supernatural being. But what is a supernatural being? Not being bound by any rules of evidence, it could of course be anything you like. However, a lot of work done by anthropologists and psychologists into the supernatural beings worshipped and loved and feared and placated throughout the many cultures in the world and throughout history, and there have been many thousands of these beings, has found a number of traits in common. In particular, supernatural beings tend to be rather obsessed with us. In fact it almost seems to be that their very purpose is to protect us or punish us. This is clearly the case with Dr Craig’s god, and that should be seen as a big red flag.
To return to Dr Craig’s argument, he asks ‘What is the explanation of the universe?’ Take note of that question. It’s not ‘What is the cause of the universe?’ There’s quite a sizeable difference between those two questions, and I’ll come back to that. If you asked a bunch of cosmologists ‘What caused the universe?’ they might say- and I can only speculate of course – ‘you mean what caused the big bang’ and then they might, perhaps, find some consensus in saying, ‘well nothing caused the big bang, because causes always exist in time before their effects and time actually began with the big bang, so it makes no sense to speak of an antecedent cause, and if you think that’s a satisfying answer to us, you’re wrong, but that’s the best we can do, for now.’ Probably though, I’m underestimating these cosmologists, who would likely come out with something much more sophisticated-sounding. What none of them would say, I’m quite sure, is that the cause must be ‘a transcendent reality, beyond the material universe, whose existence is metaphysically necessary,’ which is what Dr Craig says. This reminds me of what Daniel Dennett says about Dr Craig, that he is able, with absolute equanimity, to pass from the most mundane to the most preposterous assertions in a heartbeat. So what is a transcendent reality, and why should it be metaphysically necessary? I think it’s an artifact of Dr Craig’s imagination, and it’s metaphysically necessary because that’s what Dr Craig desperately wants it to be.
Now let me return to the difference between ’cause’ and ‘explanation’, a word Dr Craig is fond of using. He says at the outset that his ‘god’, a metaphysically necessary transcendent being, is the best explanation of the universe’s existence, and he uses the analogy of the explanation for a ball found by the roadside. Now, the difference between an explanation and a cause seems to me to be that an explanation already assumes the existence of an agent, an ‘explainer’. Somebody, in this case maybe the owner of the ball, who can tell the story of how the ball came to be there. So, Dr Craig, argues, because the whole universe is just as much of a contingent object as a ball, it, too, must have a cosmic owner who can explain its being there. (This is of course why Dr Craig chose as his example a ball, and not, say, a large rock). Only, according to Dr Craig, whereas the ball’s owner/explainer is a contingent entity, like the ball itself, the universe’s owner/explainer must be a ‘transcendent, metaphysically necessary entity.’ To which one might be inclined to say ‘What the…? Where did that idea come from?’ Were I one of those blunt Aussie types, I might be tempted to reply ‘from out of the good doctor’s capacious arsehole’, but being much more civilized I should say that it reminds me of the old cartoon with the equations on the blackboard and the line ‘here a miracle happens’. I think Dr Craig needs to be a great deal more specific in that area.
In short, using the word ‘explanation’ to conjure up a transcendent, necessary explainer is nothing more than a semantic cheat. But I’m not finished with argument one yet. Let’s look more carefully at the argument form he presents:
1. Every contingent thing has an explanation of its existence.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is a transcendent, personal being.
3. The universe is a contingent thing.
4 Therefore the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1,3).
5. Therefore the explanation of the universe is a transcendent, personal being (from 2,4).
Now, this is a version of the age-old cosmological argument, which goes back at least as far as Aristotle, and which can be described in the briefest and most mocking terms as, something can’t come from nothing, therefore god. Arguments on both sides have been heaped up over the centuries, by Aquinas, by Leibniz, by Hume, by Kant, and by innumerable modern philosophers, and it’s unlikely any headway will ever be made, because it’s entirely speculative, or theological, and non-evidence based. The version of it presented here seems particularly weak and tenuous, because there just seems to be an almighty leap from the need for an explanation, supposing such a need is real, and the claim about a transcendent, personal being. In other words, the major problem lies in the conditional claim (2). I don’t find it at all reasonable, or even comprehensible to me, that the universe can be explained by a ‘transcendent’, that’s to say, non-material, personal being. Does this mean personal to me? That seems self-serving and egotistical. What else can be meant by personal? Personal to herself? (Let’s call her she – I’m really sick of male gods, please, please no more of them, please). That makes little sense. It seems to me that Dr Craig has thrown in the ‘personal’ term precisely to make the god our own little personal father-figure and protector. And let’s face it, Dr Craig’s god is very male. My response to that is in line with what Albert Einstein said many times. In his view, and in mine, belief in a personal god is simply a form of childishness.
I could say more, but it’s time to move on to argument two.
fountains 2: dolphins and their brains
Here’s the transcript of my second ‘fountains of good stuff’ podcast, ‘dolphins and their brains’, (linked to above) minus some bits at the beginning and end.
Dolphins have long been considered our cute, smart underwater friends. In fact you might be surprised at how far back such observations go, and at how interested the ancients were in dolphinkind. Aristotle recognised that dolphins weren’t fish, that they couldn’t breathe underwater, that they had lungs and had to return to the surface to breathe just like us. The ancient poet Oppius of Corycus had this to say about them:
Diviner than the dolphin is nothing yet created; for indeed they were aforetime men and lived in cities along with mortals, but by the devising of Dionysus they exchanged the land for the sea and put on the form of fishes.
In these remarks we find the mixing of genuine observation and fascination with mythologising which still persists today. Some modern claims are that dolphins are idyllically happy and playful creatures, that they have a special bond with humans, that they’re at least equivalent in intelligence to us, bearing in mind the vastly different medium they inhabit, and that they have a highly developed language and a social and cultural complexity that we’ve barely begun to tap into.
So how much truth is there to these claims? Well I think we should first look at the grandest of the claims, about dolphin language and culture.
Many of the more hyperbolic claims for a rich dolphin language and culture, as yet beyond the ken of mere humans, were made by John Lilly, a pioneering researcher of the fifties and sixties. Lilly worked with bottle-nosed dolphins, and that is the species I’m referring to, though of course, all thirty or so species of dolphins and porpoises, as well as the forty or more species of whales, tend to be lumped in together as highly communicative and cultured.
Lilly’s attempts to back up his claims about dolphin language didn’t work out so well, however, and his writings on dolphins became increasingly drug-influenced and fantastical. Another researcher in the mid-sixties, Duane Batteau, tried to translate Hawaiian phonemes into the whistle-sounds frequently used by dolphins, using them to convey simple instructions. However, Batteau could only use the sounds as holophrases, that’s to say, instructions with complex elements, such as ‘jump through the hoop I’m holding’. The dolphins couldn’t be taught to recognise individual semantic elements within the complex instruction, such as ‘hoop’, ‘leap’ or ‘five feet high’, which are essential to building up a whole language, at least one that humans would recognise, and using it in a flexible and creative way. The dolphins took some years to learn about a dozen holophrastic sounds, which indicated none of the complexity or nuance of human language.
Since these early researches, little headway has been gained in trying to teach dolphins, or any other species, to understand human language, which is hardly surprising, as they’ve evolved to communicate very differently. Dolphins are very vocal animals, forever sounding off with whistles and clicks that are incomprehensible to most of us, and many of which we’re not even equipped to hear. But is this dolphin language?
Well, early research on dolphin whistles didn’t come up with anything too promising. Individual dolphins produce their own unique whistles, described as ‘signature whistles’, doubtless for the purpose of identifying themselves to others. Interestingly, female dolphins develop signature whistles that are quite different from their mothers’, while male dolphins don’t. This is explained by the fact that male dolphins, after weaning, hang around together in ‘adolescent gangs’ just as male humans do [and quite a few other species too, such as elephants]. Females tend to stick to their mothers, becoming young mothers themselves. They need to be able to differentiate between mothers and children, which is unnecessary for the males.
Dolphins do sometimes mimic the whistles of other dolphins too, particularly those of their closest relatives, but signature whistles as a form of recognition and differentiation, are a long way from anything like language. After all, many species can recognise their own mates or kin from the distinctive sounds they make, or from their specific odour, or from visual cues. However, a clever experiment carried out more recently, which synthesised these whistles through a computer, so that the whistle pattern was divorced from its distinctive sound, found that the dolphins responded to these patterns even when produced via a different sound. It seemed that they were recognising names. It’s undoubtedly intriguing, but clearly a lot more research is required.
Most attempts to elicit information about dolphin language, and dolphin intelligence generally, suffer from a difficulty in imagining a language system completely alien to our own, so that we always try to translate communication into something that might make sense to us. It’s a kind of anthropomorphism problem, which we can probably only overcome by a greater insight into the social life of these creatures and what they might use language for. It will no doubt be a long and painstaking process.
One of the reasons given for the supreme intelligence of the dolphin is its very large brain, and on first thought, it seems a very sound reason. The human brain is considerably larger, both in absolute terms and in terms of brain body ratio, than that of other primates.
In fact the human brain has become so large that we have trouble pushing our babies’ heads through the birth canal, and their skulls at birth are still soft and collapsible in places to facilitate the birth process. In the few months after birth, the baby’s head has to be supported until it becomes used to carrying that great bony weight on its shoulders all by itself. The average dolphin brain is slightly larger than ours, but so is its body, so its brain body ratio averages out at about the same, or a little less than ours.
The real key to human intelligence, however, is the growth of a specific part of the brain, the neocortex. In most mammals, the neocortex takes up between 10 and 30% of the total brain mass. In primates in general, it takes up 50%. For humans, though it has climbed to a very impressive 80%. So big is our neocortex that is has to be folded in on itself to fit inside our heads.
So what about the dolphin neocortex? Well, it was John Lilly, the sixties researcher, who first discovered that it was even bigger than our own, a fact that led him to to the quite understandable conviction that dolphins were, at the very least, our equals, intelligence-wise.
However, size isn’t everything, especially when we compare land mammals with their underwater cousins. Mammals on land all have about the same nerve cell density, that is, the same number of neurons per square centimetre. Aquatic mammals have far less densely packed neurons in their brains. In fact, their brains are only a quarter as densely packed with neurons as land mammals, and that’s a big difference. It seems that, because dolphins have evolved in water and don’t have to contend with gravity the way we do, their brains have been able to spread out over a larger area, without necessarily increasing complexity. Which isn’t to say that the dolphin brain isn’t extremely complex. We’re only at the beginning of understanding a small fraction of it.
Some of this research has highlighted that the neocortex in dolphins, which naturally reflects more recent evolutionary development, is used for very different purposes, such as breathing, which is regulated by more primitive brain processes in land mammals. Hearing in dolphins requires a far larger proportion of grey matter than in humans, and it’s likely that their complex sonar system is regulated by the neocortex.
In recent years it’s been discovered that spindle neurons, previously only found in higher primates, exist in large numbers in many whale and dolphin species. These neurons are associated with the processing of emotions and social interaction. They’re relatively large and allow for high-speed communication and response across the large brains of hominids, so the fact that many cetaceans [the order that whales, dolphins and porpoises belong to] have some three times the number that humans do, is certainly food for thought.
“The discovery of spindle neurons in cetaceans is a stunning example of neuro-anatomical convergence between cetaceans and primates,”
says Lori Marino of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
“The common ancestor of cetaceans and primates lived over 95 million years ago, and such a highly specific morphological similarity as the finding of spindle cells is clearly due to evolutionary convergence, not shared ancestry,”
she says. The term ‘convergence’ refers to a similarity in adaptive structures and behaviours in unrelated or only distantly related species.
Exactly how these spindle cells function in cetaceans is still unclear, but it’s believed that they’ve been present in these mammals for some thirty million years, compared to 15 to 20 million years in our primate ancestors.
The term ‘intelligence’ is really quite fuzzy, even when we’re applying it only to humans, let alone comparing humans to such vastly different creatures as dolphins, but years of studying the social interactions of cetaceans in general are gradually revealing a world much worth exploring. However, it isn’t necessarily the playful world we associate with the bounding, squealing, apparently perpetually laughing and eagerly performing creatures formerly associated with marinelands the world over.
Some years ago, beginning in 1997, a growing mystery developed when dead porpoises and juvenile dolphins were found washed up on beaches in Scotland and on the other side of the world in Virginia. The animals had suffered massive internal damage, as it turned out, from dolphin attacks. They had literally been beaten to death. A well-known documentary, ‘the Dolphin Murders’, relates the story. Researchers are still unclear as to the motive for these murderous attacks, but they remind us that evolutionary pressures and brutality are just as much a part of life in the oceans as on land, and that even dolphins, who’ve often been reported as saving human lives at sea, can turn themselves into killers.
Dolphin-hugging, metaphorically speaking, has been all the rage in recent decades, but for all its positivity, it risks obscuring what dolphins really are. They’re not always playful and cute, but they’re certainly among the most fascinating creatures on our planet, and the best compliment we can pay them is to try to get to know them a whole lot better.
just touching base
Just to say that I’m currently quite busy, under pressure to come up with good teaching for my Certificate 4 in TESOL, and under pressure to present evidence for my accredited teaching at the community centre I’m attached to, so blogging and my future podcasting projections are taking a back seat for a while, but I’ve been thinking a bit about my lifelong learning project, which I planned to associate with a new blog. I’ve decided that’s a bad idea and I need to keep everything under the umbrella of this blog. I’ve also been thinking that the title ‘lifelong learning’ is a bit naff, and I need a more lively one for the podcast. My current thought is for ‘A fountain of good stuff’, which might attract more young people, and has a kind of casual enthusiasm about it. Such a title might also encourage me to be more casually enthusiastic in my presentation. So, when I get a bit more time, I’ll transfer the lifelong learning stuff I’ve already done, podcasts and transcripts, to this blog, with a bit of enthusiastic tweaking. I’ve done two podcasts, which I’ll re-record, and I’m halfway through writing up a third. When that’s all done I plan to submit them to itunes, and we’ll see what happens.
All this by way of apology…
atheism plus comes to town, perhaps
The other day I attended my first local atheist meetup here in Adelaide for quite some time. Not that I was particularly avoiding them, they’ve just been clashing with other commitments, but it turned out to be an interesting time to return, because it was posted that we might like to have a semi-formal discussion on the ‘atheism plus’ push which is causing a bit of a stir on Free Thought Blogs and elsewhere, and if and how we want to incorporate it.
Controversy! Flying Sparks! Noses out of joint! Death threats! Trolls! Witches! Indifference!
In other words I wasn’t at all sure what to expect. What I did find pleasantly surprising was that the topic got a reasonably good airing and the group came to a more or less loose consensus about behaviour at meet-ups, in order to maintain the sorts of standards that might be expected at club meetings, gabfests and the like. That’s to say, no blatant sexism, racism, intimidation or offensive behaviour, with the convenor, presumably after consultation with the respective parties, or having witnessed the abuse, making an executive decision about behaviour having crossed the line sufficiently far as to require intervention, such as politely but firmly asking the offender to desist, or to leave, or even imposing a ban. Doubtless none of this is particularly binding or enforceable, but it’s only a pub meet-up group after all, Amazing tho’ our Meetings might be.
All of this is certainly Good Progressive Stuff, and it might open up an avenue of complaint for some who have avoided meetings because of one or two blowhards who’ve behaved offensively in the past, but does it put as all in the Atheism+ camp? In other words, is Atheism+ anything more than a movement to encourage or impose civility?
This issue was discussed at the meeting, as were the origins of this movement, or proto-movement; the experiences of Jen McCreight, the elevator affair [not so much a storm in an elevator as a storm outside one], the Dawkins response, and harrassment in general, with a variety of views expressed and criticised. Also discussed was the general issue of the way men treat women, and vice versa. I detected plenty of underlying tensions between some males and some females [for the record, though I can’t recall all the conversation, I can say with some certainty that seven males and two females spoke up on this issue, which is almost more revealing than what was said], with the ‘males don’t have an easy time of it either’ line featuring heavily.
We’d just about reached a positive conclusion on the matter, despite the slightly grumbling note of one or two men, when a late male arrival was asked his opinion of the whole A+ thing. He announced to us all that he considered feminism ‘a travesty’, a remark obviously intended to create a splash. A moment later, he added ‘I mean academic feminism’. Needless to say, academic feminism, and whatever reaction one might have to it, was not at issue at the meeting. What was at issue was civility, particularly between men and women, and the creation of an atmosphere that would make everyone, but particularly women, comfortable and enthusiastic and willing to go on attending and contributing – especially given that the group, like most atheist meet-up groups – was dominated by males. To arrive late to a meetup in which he knew that Atheism+ was to be discussed [the same individual had earlier posted a response to the convenor’s announcement about the topic, which clearly mocked the whole thing], thus indicating his lack of interest, and then to state, as his first contribution to the meetup, that feminism is a travesty, was clearly a deliberate provocation, and it had the obviously desired effect of upsetting at least one of the female minority attending, who was passionately concerned to raise the issues around A+, civility and inclusiveness, precisely because she’d been avoiding meetups in which these kinds of arrogant and bombastic statements were being aired.
There are a few lessons to be drawn from this. First, that it only takes one or two insensitive males, or one or two insensitive comments, to spoil a whole evening, or even a whole movement, for those who feel targeted by them. We should all be aware of this, as we all remember the nasty comments directed at us more clearly than a thousand compliments. Second, it’s very important not to let those comments go unchallenged, as silence will feel like assent to those who feel offended by them.
And to describe feminism as a travesty is offensive. I felt personally affronted, and I’m only a male, but a male who grew up in the seventies, at the height of second-wave feminism, with its vital historical perspective on patriarchy’s distortion of female value. It profoundly influenced my intellectual development, and still does. Of course I didn’t agree with all feminist discourse, just as I disagreed with some of the discourse on black power that was prevalent at that time, but I fully agreed with the prime thrust of both these movements, equality. Equality of opportunity, equality of treatment, equality of power. How could anyone object to that?
It seems to me that a job of empowerment, in gender terms, still needs to be done within the atheist community, if we’re to call ourselves a community. That might need more than just civility, but it’s a damn good place to start.
animals r us
I felt a bit disheartened a while back when a teenage lass I know and love declared to me that she ‘hated animals’. Worse, one of her aunties chimed in enthusiastically with, ‘yeah, I hate them too’. I wasn’t sure about taking these assertions seriously, especially the fifteen-year-old’s, but my suppressed response, apart from WTF???, might’ve been, uhh but you do know that you’re animals, right?
In fact I didn’t respond at all, being too taken aback, but I’m sure they knew they were animals, and yet…
Us and them thinking is commonplace. It’s a feature of any species of living thing that they’re concerned with other members of their species, both positively and negatively. We compete with members of our own species for resources, and we also share resources with our own species. We mate, and fight, with our own species. We try to impress our own, either by our scariness or our attractiveness, depending on circumstances. Other species just don’t matter so much to us, except insofar as we need them, or need to avoid them, for our survival.
I’m speaking for species in general here, but humans have learned something about other species that should make a big difference to us, and that is that all species are more or less related. We even have techniques which can tell us just how related we are. We know that we’re a bit more closely related to chimps than we are to gorillas, and that we’re a bit more related to gorillas than we are to gibbons, and that we share a much more common ancestor with tree shrews than we do with lungfish, but the important point is that we know that we’re related to every other organism in the biosphere, without which not, as they say. So to hate animals, if you really mean it, is to be self-defeating in a big way.
And hatred, or dismissiveness, towards other animals, surely comes from an unthinking us-and-them position, a position that needs to be continually questioned and challenged.
I recently read the excellent Shadows of forgotten ancestors by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. Much of it, especially the second half, is devoted to demolishing claims to human specialness, our separateness from ‘animals’. They do so mainly by examining the lives and behaviour of other primates. Much of the following will derive from their book. I will start with the most general claim, and then look at some specific ones
Humans are different from all other animals, not just in degree, but in kind.
This ultimate us-versus-them claim is questionable in many respects. It usually comes with particular examples: we are the only ones who have x, or can do x, therefore…
But are we the only ones with property x, and if we are, where does this property come from? Humans, we know, are primates. We share a common ancestor with chimps and bonobos going back six million years. Are we different in kind from that common ancestor? If, for argument’s sake, we say that we are, at what point did that qualitative, rather than quantitative, difference emerge? We are still unable to clearly trace our descent back to that common ancestor, but we have plenty of example of earlier hominids to chose from – this site offers some 20 distinct species that might have been along the line of descent. Which one, if any, represented a qualitative transformation? Or do incremental quantitative changes somehow amount to a qualitative transformation? If so, how many changes, and, again, when exactly did the quantitative become qualitative? I don’t think these are fruitful questions, and the more we learn about other species, the more these questions dissolve away.
We share the properties of other animals in many ways, but I’ll pick on sex as one of the clearer examples. Humans long ago realized that the castrating of war captives rendered them less aggressive – though they would’ve had little idea why. They did of course know why such a practise rendered then incapable of producing offspring, another signal benefit. The removal of the testes, whether in humans, cats, dogs, sparrows or quails, has much the same effect; aggression is reduced, as are various other male traits governing behaviour towards females and towards other males. The reason is that the testicles produce most of the androgens – that’s to say the steroids or sex hormones, such as testosterone. The action of testosterone and other sex hormones is strikingly similar across all animal species. Experimenters have added or removed the hormones with increasingly predictable results, not only in mammals and birds, but lizards and fish as well. This isn’t to say, though, that the males of all these species, when their sex hormones aren’t interfered with, are always the more aggressive or dominant gender, for that depends on how much, and what types, of the sex hormones are naturally produced or released. Male and female wolves, gibbons and tree squirrels are about equally aggressive. Species have, over time, developed the ‘right’ hormone levels for their kind – that’s to say, the most adaptive. Give certain birds too much sex hormone, and the males sometimes end up killing each other, and overall numbers fall. In all of this humans are no different.
Of course patterns of sexual behaviour vary among mammals. Most mammals only mate when the female is ‘in heat’, during a particular phase of the estrous cycle, the estrus phase, which precedes ovulation. Menstruating females, though – the menstrual cycle is a subset of the estrous cycle, in which endometrial material is shed during menstruation – including a number of primate species, are not confined in their sexual activity to a particular period [so, no, we’re not the only ones with that ‘freedom’]. Interestingly, though, human societies often have prohibitions against sex during the menstrual period, whereas in other primates, sexual activity actually increases at this time. One of the wonders of human culture.
Humans are the only creatures that make tools
We only need one solid counter-example to demolish these general claims, and in this case we have several to choose from, but I’ll opt here for a very well-attested one; the use of reeds, straws or vine branches by chimps to catch termites. Not all chimps are able to do this, and few are able to do it really well (we tend to forget, with other species, apart from the domestic ones we deal with every day, that they have their bright sparks and their half-wits just as humans do), but it’s a highly developed skill which human researchers haven’t been able to develop. What’s more, it’s a skill that takes years to develop, and older chimps teach it to the young. What chimps have to do is find just the right kind of tool for the job – that is, to be manipulated down a termite hole and retrieved from the hole with as many termites clinging to it as possible, to serve as a dish worthy of the effort and expertise. This requires matching the tool to the termite burrow, which means knowing the characteristics of the various mounds in the neighbourhood, and then having the dexterity, not only to get the tool into the hole with the minimum of disturbance to the termites but, more importantly, to be able to twist it and move it to attract termites to the ‘intruder’, and then withdraw it without knocking all the termites off. If chimps can’t find the right shape and size of tool, they can and do modify it to suit the job, which is no different in kind from early humans modifying stones for cutting and for use as weapons. Such stones are our first well-attested tools, though only, of course, because stone outlasts other materials. This activity is far from simply opportunistic. It requires planning and foresight, and it’s certainly not the only example of tool use in chimps or in other animals, including birds.
Humans are the only self-aware animals
We have to be careful, of course, not to define ‘self-awareness’ and other related concepts in such a way that they can only apply to humans. Similarly, I can think of ways of defining the term which would make it inclusive of a great many species. Because of the great difficulty of accurate definition here, it’s quite useful, as a first approximation, to use a crude, behaviourist approach to the problem, such as the well-known mirror test – first applied, though in a non-rigorous way, by Charles Darwin. All of the great apes can pass this test, as can elephants, some cetaceans, and, probably most surprisingly, European magpies. They all fail the mirror test initially, but soon learn that they’re looking at their own reflection. Humans don’t pass the mirror test before the age of eighteen months, on average – though there are some problems with the reliability of that measure because of possible flaws with the classic mirror test which I won’t go into here. Suffice to say that learning to use mirrors for grooming, etc, is pretty solid evidence of self-awareness in other species.
Humans are the only species able to conceptualize
‘It would be senseless to attribute to an animal a memory that distinguished the order of events in the past, and it would be senseless to attribute to it an expectation of an order of events in the future. It does not have the concepts of order, or any concepts at all.’ [Stuart Hampshire, philosopher]
The above sort of observation, though it wasn’t actually an observation, was commonplace in philosophy well into the 20th century, but research into ‘comparative cognition’ has largely blown this bias away, as you might expect, with a bit of thought. After all where does conceptualisation come from if it isn’t an evolutionary development over time and species? Of course the concept of concepts is a bit murky, but researchers have been able to distinguish three types of concept learning – perceptual, associative and relational – and a more sophisticated type of concept-formation called analogical reasoning. A 2008 survey of the research found that many non-human species were capable of the first three types, with only the higher primates showing evidence of the fourth.
Humans are the only species with language
‘Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross it.’ [Max Muller, 19th century linguist]
There has long been a great debate about this one, and much research and effort put in to trying to teach the rudiments of language to chimps and bonobos. Sagan & Druyan dwell at length on this work, though well-known linguists such as Charles Hockett and Steven Pinker suggest that there is a bigger divide than sometimes admitted between other primates and humans in this area. Again, this depends on how tight, loose or technical your definition of language is. Still, no matter how language is defined to exclude non-humans – such as arbitrariness between sound and meaning, and discreteness in the construction of terms – researchers manage to find evidence of it in other creatures. Nobody denies that language has reached a pinnacle of sophistication with humans, but again there are many traces of complex communication in many other species, and it’s of no value to us to try to reduce their import. The Muller quote above indicates how our preoccupation with our own superiority can lead to a hostile attitude to any knowledge that dares to threaten it.
Humans are the only creatures who know they will die.
We know from an early age that we will die largely because of our sophisticated communications. We learn of the history of our culture, peopled with dead contributors, we see monuments to the dead everywhere, the disappearance of aged pets and relatives is patiently explained to us. Other animals, without these communications, may still feel it in their bones as the time approaches. There’s certainly evidence for mourning in elephants, chimps and many other animals.
Humans are the only ethical animals.
Ethics and social living are an almost essential pairing. The Biblical commandments that still make sense to us are all about making society more predictable and therefore more bearable to us as individuals, which is why they’re common to most religions and cultures. Whilst it may be argued that humans are more consciously and explicitly ethical than other social animals, some recent research has cast doubt on our freedom to choose our ethics. We appear to be driven, genetically, to preserve ourselves and our own, and to rationalise an ethical system around that drive. Other creatures have evolved the same drives and act in similar ways to ourselves.
Humans are the only animals that possess culture
If you think of culture as a process, rather than working back from cultural products, it would be hard to deny that this process exists in many other species. I’ve already pointed out that simple tool-making is passed down from adult chimps to children. This is cultural transmission, and is a basic factor in all culture. Basic tool-making and teaching were presumably the first forms of cultural transmission in humans.
Humans are the only creatures who explore their own origins, and the origins of all else
This may well be the last bastion, but again it doesn’t represent a difference in kind – even supposing that such explorations don’t occur to non-human minds. These types of explorations are the culmination of increasingly sophisticated concept-formation, meme-transmission and theoretical and technological development. With all this, knowledge, ideas and speculations are converging on us at an ever-increasing pace. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the idea of a ‘singularity’ has captured our imagination, tenuous though the idea might be. Interestingly, the idea of the singularity is another instance of quantity building up to a sudden ‘flip’, a qualitative transformation. Another self-serving and self-congratulatory idea perhaps?
We humans are quite fascinating, the more so the more we examine ourselves, but we are learning that what we’re made up of is the same stuff that other life forms are made of, and the similarities are every bit as instructive as the differences. We’re a distinct species, no doubt, but it is counter-productive to think of ourselves as a species apart.