Smart animals (Animals)
In yesterday's Sunday Times, there was a review of Frans de Waal's book ARE WE SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW HOW SMART ANIMALS ARE? - which David had already drawn attention to - and BEYOND WORDS What Animals Think and Feel by Carl Safina. Here are a few quotes from the review: - “…a feeling of triumphant relief, among many animal scientists, that the battle to dissolve the artificial dividing line that has long been drawn between humans and other animals over questions of thinking and feeling might now, definitively, have been won. We are different in degree, goes the new consensus, not in kind.” - “Only this month, a study in Russia announced that dolphins' clicks operate as a language….hundreds of different click sounds were already recognised…” - “A wolf jumps a fence, and then digs back in to release his comrades. A killer-whale mother pushes her calf onto a gently sloping beach, thus safely teaching it how to wriggle back into the sea. A herd of elephants frantically vocalises when played a record of a deceased mother's call. (The daughter continued to respond for days; the dismayed researchers never tried the experiment again.)” - “…it forces you to think about animals in a new way, demonstrating vividly how they have feelings, complex social relationships, personalities - how they are not “just like us”, but not alien either. As Safina puts it (cheesily), “beneath the skin, kin”. - “Behaviourists, in particular, insisted that animals were creatures of instinct or conditioned responses without significant mental or emotional lives. They invented categories of human uniqueness such as toolmaking, self-awareness or “theory of mind”…De Waal demolishes the pedestal on which we have placed humanity.” - “Self-awareness? Elephants will take advantage of a mirror to inspect inside their own mouths…Empathy? A chimpanzee offered a range of tools will choose the one that works best for another chimp who cannot reach offered food. Planning? The evening whooping calls of Sumatran orang-utans as they go to bed in their high nests predict their direction of travel the next day. They are agreeing a route.” - “But some readers, particularly those that live with animals, may feel that science is catching up with what was long obvious. Emotions, intentions, empathy and consciousness are not exclusive to humanity. What took you so long?” - My comment: It remains a source of amazement to me that anyone can believe that emotions, intentions, empathy and consciousness began with humans. How could communities of animals, birds, insects have survived without cooperating, without nurturing their young, without relationships, without taking decisions to cope with their environment, without actually knowing what they were doing? You would have to believe they were all automatons that had somehow been preprogrammed, and only humans suddenly came on the scene with minds of their own. Human hubris - and with all the tragic consequences associated with the term.
Smart animals
by David Turell 
, Monday, September 19, 2016, 15:31 (2986 days ago) @ dhw
> dhw: My comment: It remains a source of amazement to me that anyone can believe that emotions, intentions, empathy and consciousness began with humans. How could communities of animals, birds, insects have survived without cooperating, without nurturing their young, without relationships, without taking decisions to cope with their environment, without actually knowing what they were doing? You would have to believe they were all automatons that had somehow been preprogrammed, and only humans suddenly came on the scene with minds of their own. Human hubris - and with all the tragic consequences associated with the term.-I have a different view in the area of emphasis. De Wall's presentation is true, of course, of animal emotion and cooperation, all of which preceded the appearance of humans. When humans appeared the gap in these characteristics as pertains to humans is huge. We are different in kind. Evolution is a continuum with a giant leap, which could not be expected based on the history of advances up to that point.
Smart animals; dolphin speak?
by David Turell , Monday, September 19, 2016, 18:39 (2986 days ago) @ David Turell
There are a group of folks, dhw included, who try to show that humans are only a little special. Therefore there is an article, with very questionable interpretations, that tell us dolphins have a language:- http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/09/dolphins-conversation-explained-words-senten... of dolphin communication patterns, including the animals' familiar whistles, clicks, and body postures, have been fascinating scientists for years. But one big question has remained frustratingly elusive: Do these highly intelligent mammals possess their own spoken language?-"This week, headlines have been swirling about a paper published in the St. Petersburg Polytechnical University Journal: Physics and Mathematics that seemed to offer tantalizing signs of dolphinese. Two Black Sea bottlenose dolphins were recorded exchanging a series of sounds that resembled “a conversation between two people.” The dolphins took turns producing the sounds and did not interrupt each other, according to study author Vyacheslav Ryabov,-***-"It is complete bull, and you can quote me,” says Richard Connor, a marine biologist at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth and a researcher of dolphin social interactions for more than 30 years. “The biggest problem,” says Connor, “is that now when people make real scientific discoveries on dolphin communication, the public, having been exposed to this nonsense, will not be impressed because they will think Russian researchers already showed that they have language.” -***-"scientists who have spent decades studying dolphin communication point instead to a poorly devised experiment. “Dolphin clicks are highly directional, with the energy focused in front of the animal, much like a flashlight,” says Marc Lammers, an expert in dolphin acoustics and an associate research professor at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. In Ryabov's study, the sounds produced by the dolphins were measured at about a 90-degree angle, which Lammers says is the very edge of the flashlight's beam. This in itself would have a dramatic effect on the data recorded, since this angle would produce a decreased amplitude and different waveforms and frequencies than if the sounds had been measured straight on. “It's difficult to make a simple human analogy, but it might be somewhat similar to recording a conversation by people in the other room speaking into pillows,” says Lammers. “Probably not how you would try to learn a new language!”-***-"The Ryabov paper effectively ignores most of what is currently known about the properties of dolphin clicks, how to measure them correctly, and how they are used by animals in various contexts, and instead lays out the author's own ideas for how dolphin communication might work by weaving together some simple observations with various disconnected notions of acoustics, cognition, and language research,” says Lammers.-***-"To be clear, many researchers believe that dolphins are capable of complex communication. It's just that we've been searching for signs of something like language for decades, and the evidence is still lacking.-***-"We know dolphins are capable of understanding artificially created language, both acoustic and gestural, and abstract concepts,” says Herzing. “However, we simply do not have the data to suggest that they use words or labels in the wild.” And the fact that the dolphins in Ryabov's experiment did not seem to interrupt each other? Herzing says we've known dolphins can exchange sound back and forth without overlap since 1979.-***-"Several researchers also expressed frustration at the way the story percolated through cyberspace without enough of a critical eye. “This type of research and the resultant media coverage does an extreme disservice both to the animals, by anthropomorphizing their behavior, and other scientists, who have spent years painstakingly studying dolphin communication and who base their conclusions on well-designed methods and experimental techniques,” says King."-Comment: Good try, but most bone fide researchers are unimpressed. Do animals communicate. Of course. Is it anything like our level (?); no way!
Smart animals
I am once again telescoping several threads as they all deal with the same subject.-dhw: ...It remains a source of amazement to me that anyone can believe that emotions, intentions, empathy and consciousness began with humans… DAVID: I have a different view in the area of emphasis. De Wall's presentation is true, of course, of animal emotion and cooperation, all of which preceded the appearance of humans. When humans appeared the gap in these characteristics as pertains to humans is huge. We are different in kind. Evolution is a continuum with a giant leap, which could not be expected based on the history of advances up to that point.-So long as you agree that the animals from which we are descended (assuming you still believe in common descent) had emotions, intentions, empathy, consciousness long before we did, as far as I am concerned the question of degree versus kind is a non-issue. You have said you regard human specialness as proof of God's planning or intervention, but since you believe every innovation and natural wonder is proof of God's planning or intervention, why keep harping on about humans? QUOTES (under “dolphins”): "To be clear, many researchers believe that dolphins are capable of complex communication. It's just that we've been searching for signs of something like language for decades, and the evidence is still lacking." “Herzing says we've known dolphins can exchange sound back and forth without overlap since 1979.” David's comment: Good try, but most bone fide researchers are unimpressed. Do animals communicate. Of course. Is it anything like our level (?); no way!-Once more: if you define language as human language, then language is unique to humans. If you define language as means of communication (“animal language” is a perfectly acceptable term), then each species has its own language. It is well known that dolphins communicate through a variety of sounds. I doubt if anyone would assume that their language is on anything like our level. So what? They have devised a form of language that is sufficient for their needs. See above for the non-issue of degree (level) versus kind.-David's comment (under “tap dancing”): Stamp your foot to get attention? I don't understand what just-so story would explain why this instinct develops in evolution. Nothing demands this appear.-What “just-so” story are you thinking of? That God taught them how to tap dance? If we regard evolution as a process in which different organisms do things in their own particular way, and if we stop imagining that God has planned everything or that only humans know what they're doing, the whole higgledy-piggledy history of life on earth begins to make sense. DAVID (under “tree communication”): This article describes how trees react to danger and communicate, and much more:-http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3792036/Do-trees-brains.html QUOTES: "There's increasing evidence to show that trees are able to communicate with each other. More than that, trees can learn.” "It sounds incredible, but when you discover how trees talk to each other, feel pain, nurture each other, even care for their close relatives and organise themselves into communities, it's hard to be sceptical. David's comment: I view these reactions as automatic and amazing. They require some biochemical planning, not as complex as speciation. I'm not sure if God helped or they learned to do it on their own.-Trees are cell communities, just like every other organism, but you view all manifestations of intelligence as being automatic unless they are performed by a cell community with a brain (although paradoxically you believe that consciousness can exist independently of the brain, as in NDEs). On the other hand, your last sentence seems to open the door to autonomous intelligence: how do you learn to do something on your own if you don't know what you're doing? Perhaps you will once again trot out something about God guiding them, which of course is the opposite of “on their own”.-dhw (under “Video”): But now you try to fudge the issue again by replacing guidance with “guidelines”. (Presumably something like: Thou shalt not do what thou canst not do.) Once more, “working things out for themselves” entails autonomous cellular intelligence. Either you agree that this is possible or you don't. -BBELLA: Might not the guidelines be Sheldrake's morphogenic field? -I thought we had all agreed that Sheldrake's morphogenic field preserves forms but does not explain innovation - it comprises what already exists, and is then added to by whatever is new. (That is why I objected to the term “morphogenetic”.) -DAVID: I've never changed my stance. An onboard inventive mechanism is possible, but it will always contain guidelines or guidance. No need to go round and round. -If you want us to stop going round and round, then please state once and for all whether you believe it is or is not possible that your God endowed organisms with autonomous intelligence enabling them to work out their own innovations without any divine preprogramming or divine dabbling, though staying within the bounds of what environmental conditions and their own capabilities allow.
Smart animals
by David Turell , Tuesday, September 20, 2016, 19:28 (2985 days ago) @ dhw
dhw:You have said you regard human specialness as proof of God's planning or intervention, but since you believe every innovation and natural wonder is proof of God's planning or intervention, why keep harping on about humans?-Because you keep denigrating the leap to humans, which is part of my conclusive evidence for me. > > David's comment (under “tap dancing”): Stamp your foot to get attention? I don't understand what just-so story would explain why this instinct develops in evolution. Nothing demands this appear. > > dhw: What “just-so” story are you thinking of? That God taught them how to tap dance? If we regard evolution as a process in which different organisms do things in their own particular way, and if we stop imagining that God has planned everything or that only humans know what they're doing, the whole higgledy-piggledy history of life on earth begins to make sense.-No, I'm referencing Darwinists invention of just-so stories to explain something which has no explanation.God gave them tap-dancing? Who knows? Perhaps a learned instinct. It is not a complex weaver nest issue. > > DAVID (under “tree communication”): This article describes how trees react to danger and communicate, and much more: > > http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3792036/Do-trees-brains.html > QUOTES: "There's increasing evidence to show that trees are able to communicate with each other. More than that, trees can learn.” > "It sounds incredible, but when you discover how trees talk to each other, feel pain, nurture each other, even care for their close relatives and organise themselves into communities, it's hard to be sceptical.-> David's comment: I view these reactions as automatic and amazing. They require some biochemical planning, not as complex as speciation. I'm not sure if God helped or they learned to do it on their own. > > dhw: Trees are cell communities, just like every other organism, but you view all manifestations of intelligence as being automatic unless they are performed by a cell community with a brain (although paradoxically you believe that consciousness can exist independently of the brain, as in NDEs). On the other hand, your last sentence seems to open the door to autonomous intelligence: how do you learn to do something on your own if you don't know what you're doing? Perhaps you will once again trot out something about God guiding them, which of course is the opposite of “on their own”.-I honestly don't know but my inclination is that it is coded in their genome with God's help. > > dhw: dhw (under “Video”): But now you try to fudge the issue again by replacing guidance with “guidelines”. (Presumably something like: Thou shalt not do what thou canst not do.) Once more, “working things out for themselves” entails autonomous cellular intelligence. Either you agree that this is possible or you don't. -I'm not fudging. I've always consistently thought of inventive mechanisms as having guidance or guidelines, which are one and the same to me. > > BBELLA: Might not the guidelines be Sheldrake's morphogenic field? > > dhw: I thought we had all agreed that Sheldrake's morphogenic field preserves forms but does not explain innovation - it comprises what already exists, and is then added to by whatever is new. (That is why I objected to the term “morphogenetic”.) > > DAVID: I've never changed my stance. An onboard inventive mechanism is possible, but it will always contain guidelines or guidance. No need to go round and round. > > > dhw: If you want us to stop going round and round, then please state once and for all whether you believe it is or is not possible that your God endowed organisms with autonomous intelligence enabling them to work out their own innovations without any divine preprogramming or divine dabbling, though staying within the bounds of what environmental conditions and their own capabilities allow.-Only with guidance or guidelines. I have never insinuated anything different.
Smart animals
dhw: You have said you regard human specialness as proof of God's planning or intervention, but since you believe every innovation and natural wonder is proof of God's planning or intervention, why keep harping on about humans? DAVID: Because you keep denigrating the leap to humans, which is part of my conclusive evidence for me.-I have never denied the vast gap between human capabilities and those of our fellow animals. However, I see it as the product of a natural progression through our enhanced consciousness, which has enabled us to develop on a massive scale attributes we have inherited from them: the need to eat, reproduce, educate, communicate, explore, protect ourselves etc. Every innovation and natural wonder is “conclusive evidence” for you, though you can't reconcile the need for your God to design each one either with your theory that his purpose was to produce humans or with the higgledy-piggledy history of life on Earth. David's comment (under “tap dancing”): Stamp your foot to get attention? I don't understand what just-so story would explain why this instinct develops in evolution. Nothing demands this appear. dhw: What “just-so” story are you thinking of? That God taught them how to tap dance? If we regard evolution as a process in which different organisms do things in their own particular way, and if we stop imagining that God has planned everything or that only humans know what they're doing, the whole higgledy-piggledy history of life on earth begins to make sense. DAVID: No, I'm referencing Darwinists invention of just-so stories to explain something which has no explanation.God gave them tap-dancing? Who knows? Perhaps a learned instinct. It is not a complex weaver nest issue.-Please tell us the Darwinists' just-so story concerning tap-dancing. As far as I know, the Darwinist theory is that any form of behaviour which conveys some sort of advantage will survive. If tap-dancing gets you a mate, then that's just as good as a bunch of flowers or a love poem. -David's comment on “tree communication”: I view these reactions as automatic and amazing. They require some biochemical planning, not as complex as speciation. I'm not sure if God helped or they learned to do it on their own.-dhw: Trees are cell communities, just like every other organism, but you view all manifestations of intelligence as being automatic unless they are performed by a cell community with a brain (although paradoxically you believe that consciousness can exist independently of the brain, as in NDEs). On the other hand, your last sentence seems to open the door to autonomous intelligence: how do you learn to do something on your own if you don't know what you're doing?... -DAVID: I honestly don't know but my inclination is that it is coded in their genome with God's help.-I wish you would stick to this tentative inclination instead of categorically refusing to accept the possibility of autonomous cellular intelligence.-dhw (under “Video”): But now you try to fudge the issue again by replacing guidance with “guidelines”. -DAVID: I'm not fudging. I've always consistently thought of inventive mechanisms as having guidance or guidelines, which are one and the same to me.-An inventive mechanism already provided with your God's instructions (guidance/guidelines) telling organisms what to do, is the polar opposite of organisms having the ability to invent for themselves, on their own, of their own accord, autonomously, i.e. without instructions or guidance or guidelines. But you have categorically agreed that you ONLY believe in preprogramming and/or dabbling, and so there really is no point in your making statements like: “I couldn't agree more that God may have given organisms the ability to ‘work it out for themselves'.” Working it out for themselves does not mean being guided by God. That is fudging.
Smart animals
by David Turell , Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 20:01 (2983 days ago) @ dhw
dhw: Every innovation and natural wonder is “conclusive evidence” for you, though you can't reconcile the need for your God to design each one either with your theory that his purpose was to produce humans or with the higgledy-piggledy history of life on Earth.-You did not accept my reconciliation of the h-p bush with a required balance of nature to provide food energy for all of life to continue, as a constant energy supply is a solid requirement for life to continue, allowing time for humans to evolve.-> DAVID: No, I'm referencing Darwinists invention of just-so stories to explain something which has no explanation.God gave them tap-dancing? Who knows? Perhaps a learned instinct. It is not a complex weaver nest issue. > > dhw: Please tell us the Darwinists' just-so story concerning tap-dancing. As far as I know, the Darwinist theory is that any form of behaviour which conveys some sort of advantage will survive. If tap-dancing gets you a mate, then that's just as good as a bunch of flowers or a love poem. -Good just-so story. Might be correct. > > David's comment on “tree communication”: I view these reactions as automatic and amazing. They require some biochemical planning, not as complex as speciation. I'm not sure if God helped or they learned to do it on their own. > > dhw: Trees are cell communities, just like every other organism, but you view all manifestations of intelligence as being automatic unless they are performed by a cell community with a brain (although paradoxically you believe that consciousness can exist independently of the brain, as in NDEs). On the other hand, your last sentence seems to open the door to autonomous intelligence: how do you learn to do something on your own if you don't know what you're doing?... -Same answer, onboard IM with guidelines. > > DAVID: I honestly don't know but my inclination is that it is coded in their genome with God's help. > > dhw: I wish you would stick to this tentative inclination instead of categorically refusing to accept the possibility of autonomous cellular intelligence.-I won't because I don't believe early life can invent intelligence by itself. > > dhw (under “Video”): But now you try to fudge the issue again by replacing guidance with “guidelines”. > > DAVID: I'm not fudging. I've always consistently thought of inventive mechanisms as having guidance or guidelines, which are one and the same to me. > > dhw: so there really is no point in your making statements like: “I couldn't agree more that God may have given organisms the ability to ‘work it out for themselves'.” Working it out for themselves does not mean being guided by God. That is fudging.-I see nothing wrong with looking at it as activating a mechanism with guidlelines, the activation being triggered by the organism under their own volition. This is how 'they work it out for themselves'. They have the choice of triggering the mechanism or not.
Smart animals
dhw: Every innovation and natural wonder is “conclusive evidence” for you, though you can't reconcile the need for your God to design each one either with your theory that his purpose was to produce humans or with the higgledy-piggledy history of life on Earth. DAVID: You did not accept my reconciliation of the h-p bush with a required balance of nature to provide food energy for all of life to continue, as a constant energy supply is a solid requirement for life to continue, allowing time for humans to evolve.-We know that all forms of life require food to supply energy. That does not explain why God had to specially design them all so they could come and go until humans arrived.-DAVID: No, I'm referencing Darwinists invention of just-so stories to explain something which has no explanation.God gave them tap-dancing? Who knows? Perhaps a learned instinct. It is not a complex weaver nest issue.-dhw: Please tell us the Darwinists' just-so story concerning tap-dancing. As far as I know, the Darwinist theory is that any form of behaviour which conveys some sort of advantage will survive. If tap-dancing gets you a mate, then that's just as good as a bunch of flowers or a love poem. DAVID: Good just-so story. Might be correct.-Certainly no more “just-so” than your God teaching weaverbirds to build a nest, or monarchs to migrate in order to provide a balance of nature allowing time for humans to evolve - though apparently they didn't “evolve” as such anyway, because God had to intervene in order to produce them.-David's comment on “tree communication”: I view these reactions as automatic and amazing. They require some biochemical planning, not as complex as speciation. I'm not sure if God helped or they learned to do it on their own. dhw: Trees are cell communities, just like every other organism, but you view all manifestations of intelligence as being automatic unless they are performed by a cell community with a brain (although paradoxically you believe that consciousness can exist independently of the brain, as in NDEs). On the other hand, your last sentence seems to open the door to autonomous intelligence: how do you learn to do something on your own if you don't know what you're doing?... -DAVID: Same answer, onboard IM with guidelines.-They learned to do it on their own with God telling them how to do it because they couldn't do it on their own.-DAVID: I honestly don't know but my inclination is that it is coded in their genome with God's help. dhw: I wish you would stick to this tentative inclination instead of categorically refusing to accept the possibility of autonomous cellular intelligence. DAVID: I won't because I don't believe early life can invent intelligence by itself.-My hypothesis does not entail early life inventing intelligence. It entails the possibility of your God inventing intelligence, and intelligence working out means of communicating etc.-dhw: ...so there really is no point in your making statements like: “I couldn't agree more that God may have given organisms the ability to ‘work it out for themselves'.” Working it out for themselves does not mean being guided by God. That is fudging. DAVID: I see nothing wrong with looking at it as activating a mechanism with guidlelines, the activation being triggered by the organism under their own volition. This is how 'they work it out for themselves'. They have the choice of triggering the mechanism or not.-So God supplies the first cells with computer programmes for weaverbird nest-building, tree communication, monarch migration, cuttlefish camouflage, and these get passed down till there are weaverbirds, trees, monarchs, cuttlefish, and then they all decide whether to switch the programme on or not, and if they do, we can say they worked out for themselves how to build the nest, communicate, migrate, camouflage themselves. And you think the survival of advantageous behaviour is a just-so story.
Smart animals
by David Turell , Thursday, September 22, 2016, 20:13 (2982 days ago) @ dhw
DAVID: Good just-so story. Might be correct. > > dhw: Certainly no more “just-so” than your God teaching weaverbirds to build a nest, or monarchs to migrate in order to provide a balance of nature allowing time for humans to evolve - though apparently they didn't “evolve” as such anyway, because God had to intervene in order to produce them.-Your comment is not at the level of just-so stories (Kipling), which are made up tales to explain evolution, like the giraffe stretching its neck to eat tree leaves.-> DAVID: I won't because I don't believe early life can invent intelligence by itself. > > dhw; My hypothesis does not entail early life inventing intelligence. It entails the possibility of your God inventing intelligence, and intelligence working out means of communicating etc.-I like the way you use your agnostic position to blithely drag God in when you need him!-> DAVID: I see nothing wrong with looking at it as activating a mechanism with guidlelines, the activation being triggered by the organism under their own volition. This is how 'they work it out for themselves'. They have the choice of triggering the mechanism or not. > > dhw: So God supplies the first cells with computer programmes for weaverbird nest-building, tree communication, monarch migration, cuttlefish camouflage, and these get passed down till there are weaverbirds, trees, monarchs, cuttlefish, and then they all decide whether to switch the programme on or not, and if they do, we can say they worked out for themselves how to build the nest, communicate, migrate, camouflage themselves. And you think the survival of advantageous behaviour is a just-so story.-Advantageous behavior is not a just-so story. It is necessary for life to survive.It is the convoluted contorted explanations of how the behaviour might have developed which are the just-so stories.
Smart animals; pigeons recognize words
by David Turell , Thursday, September 22, 2016, 21:19 (2982 days ago) @ David Turell
Like the clever corvids, pigeons have some brain power identifying words on computer screens: - http://www.agnosticweb.com/index.php?mode=posting&id=22940&back=entry - "These pigeons were living in a lab in New Zealand where, over a span of two years, they learned to distinguish four-letter English words from nonsense words. For their training, a computer screen would flash words like “DOWN” or “GAME”, and non-words like “TWOR” or “NELD”, along with a star symbol. Each time the pigeons made a correct identification — pecking the word if it was a real one, or pecking the star symbol beneath a non-word — they were rewarded with a portion of wheat. - "After the pigeons built up decent vocabularies (the star pupil acquired 58 words), the screen began flashing new words that they had never seen before. And even when faced with these novel words, the pigeons continued to pick out the real words from the non-words with impressive accuracy, according to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. - *** - "It appears that the pigeons are paying attention to pairs of letters in the words,” explains study lead author Damian Scarf, a lecturer in psychology at the University of Otoga, New Zealand. Letters that appear side-by-side are known as bigrams, and some bigrams occur more frequently than others. For example, “TH” is a high-frequency bigram, whereas the “CB” combination is far less common. Over time, the pigeons came to pick up on these statistical properties of words. - *** - "But what these birds did manage to learn is remarkable, and it might even explain why humans have an entire brain region devoted to recognizing written words, despite the fact that writing was only invented around 5,400 years ago. As Scarf and his colleagues note, that's far too short a period for a new specialized brain area to have evolved from scratch, but more than enough time for an old neural mechanism to get repurposed. (my bold) - "This process of “neuronal recycling” involves brain cells that were once devoted to spotting everyday objects, like rocks or trees, gradually learning to key in to new visuals, like the written word. Some scientists believe this is precisely how ancient people first developed reading skills, and a recent study revealed that monkey brains can be trained to visually process written words in much the same way. - "But according to this latest study, visual word recognition is not limited to the realm of the primate brain. Indeed, bird brains, which are “neither genetically nor organizationally similar to [those of] humans,” are quite capable of taking an existing neural circuit and recycling it to process a visual word — or, as Scarf describes it, a “two-dimensional stimulus that's not relevant in the real world.” - "Though the capacity to recognize a series of printed strokes may be of little consequence to a pigeon, the research shows that a visual system separated from ours by more than 300 million years of evolution can be co-opted to perform a very human function." - Comment: This bird training is very instructional. Note the bold. Humans learned reading in a short period of time. Brain plasticity.
Smart animals; pigeons recognize words
by BBella , Friday, September 23, 2016, 19:02 (2982 days ago) @ David Turell
Like the clever corvids, pigeons have some brain power identifying words on computer screens: > > http://www.agnosticweb.com/index.php?mode=posting&id=22940&back=entry - > > "But what these birds did manage to learn is remarkable, and it might even explain why humans have an entire brain region devoted to recognizing written words, despite the fact that writing was only invented around 5,400 years ago. As Scarf and his colleagues note, that's far too short a period for a new specialized brain area to have evolved from scratch, but more than enough time for an old neural mechanism to get repurposed. (my bold) > - Shines new light on the term "bird brain".
Smart animals; pigeons recognize words
by David Turell , Friday, September 23, 2016, 19:28 (2982 days ago) @ BBella
Like the clever corvids, pigeons have some brain power identifying words on computer screens: > > > > http://www.agnosticweb.com/index.php?mode=posting&id=22940&back=entry &... > > > > David: "But what these birds did manage to learn is remarkable, and it might even explain why humans have an entire brain region devoted to recognizing written words, despite the fact that writing was only invented around 5,400 years ago. As Scarf and his colleagues note, that's far too short a period for a new specialized brain area to have evolved from scratch, but more than enough time for an old neural mechanism to get repurposed. (my bold) > > > > BBella: Shines new light on the term "bird brain". - Different brain but similar result. Convergence.
Smart animals; pigeons recognize time and space
by David Turell , Tuesday, December 05, 2017, 00:48 (2544 days ago) @ David Turell
Pigeons can understand the concepts of space and time:
https://phys.org/news/2017-12-pigeons-discriminate-space.html
"New research at the University of Iowa shows that pigeons can discriminate the abstract concepts of space and time—and seem to use a different region of the brain than humans and primates to do so. In experiments, pigeons were shown on a computer screen a static horizontal line and had to judge its length or the amount of time it was visible to them. Pigeons judged longer lines to also have longer duration and judged lines longer in duration to also be longer in length.
"What that means, says Edward Wasserman, Stuit Professor of Experimental Psychology in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the UI, is pigeons use a common area of the brain to judge space and time, suggesting that these abstract concepts are not processed separately. Similar results have been found with humans and other primates.
***
"'Indeed, the cognitive prowess of birds is now deemed to be ever closer to that of both human and nonhuman primates," says Wasserman, who has studied intelligence in pigeons, crows, baboons, and other animals for more than four decades. "Those avian nervous systems are capable of far greater achievements than the pejorative term 'bird brain' would suggest."
"Humans are able to perceive space and time, even without the aid of inventions such as a watch or a ruler. The region of the brain that helps humans make those abstract concepts more tangible is the parietal cortex, part of the cerebral cortex and the outermost layer of the brain. The cerebral cortex is known to be a locus of higher thought processes, including speech and decision-making, and the four lobes that comprise it, including the parietal cortex, process different types of sensory information.
"But the pigeon brain doesn't have a parietal cortex, or at least one developed enough to be distinct. So, the birds must employ another area of the brain to discriminate between space and time—or perhaps there's a common evolutionary mechanism in the central nervous system shared by early primates and birds.
***
"The researchers found that the length of the line affected the pigeons' discrimination of line duration, and the duration of the line affected the pigeons' discrimination of line length. This interplay of space and time paralleled research done with humans and monkeys and revealed the common neural coding of these two physical dimensions. Researchers previously believed that the parietal cortex was the locus of this interplay. However, because pigeons lack an apparent parietal cortex, Wasserman's findings suggest this isn't always the case."
Comment: Even simple brains are very complex and what they can produce at the animal level is truly amazing, but it also tells us how the human brain is able to pack in so many more activities at the same time
Smart animals
DAVID: Good just-so story. Might be correct. dhw: Certainly no more “just-so” than your God teaching weaverbirds to build a nest, or monarchs to migrate in order to provide a balance of nature allowing time for humans to evolve - though apparently they didn't “evolve” as such anyway, because God had to intervene in order to produce them. DAVID: Your comment is not at the level of just-so stories (Kipling), which are made up tales to explain evolution, like the giraffe stretching its neck to eat tree leaves.-This is a linguistic digression. You have used the expression to suggest that Darwin's explanation is pure fiction. The claim that your God taught the weaverbird to make its nest in order to balance nature in order to leave time for humans to evolve strikes me as considerably more “just-so” (fictional) than my Darwinian-type suggestion that an avian tap-dance originated as a way of impressing the female of the species, and survived because it worked. DAVID: I won't because I don't believe early life can invent intelligence by itself. dhw; My hypothesis does not entail early life inventing intelligence. It entails the possibility of your God inventing intelligence, and intelligence working out means of communicating etc. DAVID: I like the way you use your agnostic position to blithely drag God in when you need him!-The issue is whether evolution is run by divine preprogramming/dabbling, or by the intelligence of organisms. This is not an issue concerning God's existence, because God fits in with either proposal. I do not think that as a theist you have any more ability to interpret God's modus operandi than I do when I put on my theist hat. And once more, I have never claimed that early life or cells invented intelligence.-DAVID: I see nothing wrong with looking at it as activating a mechanism with guidlelines, the activation being triggered by the organism under their own volition. This is how 'they work it out for themselves'. They have the choice of triggering the mechanism or not. dhw: So God supplies the first cells with computer programmes for weaverbird nest-building, tree communication, monarch migration, cuttlefish camouflage, and these get passed down till there are weaverbirds, trees, monarchs, cuttlefish, and then they all decide whether to switch the programme on or not, and if they do, we can say they worked out for themselves how to build the nest, communicate, migrate, camouflage themselves. And you think the survival of advantageous behaviour is a just-so story.-DAVID: Advantageous behavior is not a just-so story. It is necessary for life to survive. It is the convoluted contorted explanations of how the behaviour might have developed which are the just-so stories.-And your just-so explanation is that God preprogrammed the first cells to pass on the behaviour, or personally intervened to teach the weaverbird, tree, monarch, cuttlefish, so that they would provide a balance of nature, leaving time for humans to evolve. My suggestion is that these organisms worked out for themselves forms of behaviour that suited their own special needs. However, this is a diversion from the point at issue, which is that choosing whether to switch on God's computer programme giving instructions on how to build a nest is not my idea of the weaverbird working things out for itself.
Smart animals
by David Turell , Friday, September 23, 2016, 16:00 (2982 days ago) @ dhw
> dhw: The claim that your God taught the weaverbird to make its nest in order to balance nature in order to leave time for humans to evolve strikes me as considerably more “just-so” (fictional) than my Darwinian-type suggestion that an avian tap-dance originated as a way of impressing the female of the species, and survived because it worked. - My point is that the weaver nest construction is so complex it cannot be explained by a just-so story, most of which are feeble attempts to explain evolution. - > DAVID: I like the way you use your agnostic position to blithely drag God in when you need him! > > dhw: The issue is whether evolution is run by divine preprogramming/dabbling, or by the intelligence of organisms. .... And once more, I have never claimed that early life or cells invented intelligence. - So how did they develop the intelligence you claim they have. > > DAVID: Advantageous behavior is not a just-so story. It is necessary for life to survive. It is the convoluted contorted explanations of how the behaviour might have developed which are the just-so stories. > > dhw: However, this is a diversion from the point at issue, which is that choosing whether to switch on God's computer programme giving instructions on how to build a nest is not my idea of the weaverbird working things out for itself. - Understood.
Smart animals
dhw: The claim that your God taught the weaverbird to make its nest in order to balance nature in order to leave time for humans to evolve strikes me as considerably more “just-so” (fictional) than my Darwinian-type suggestion that an avian tap-dance originated as a way of impressing the female of the species, and survived because it worked. - DAVID: My point is that the weaver nest construction is so complex it cannot be explained by a just-so story, most of which are feeble attempts to explain evolution. - What feeble just-so story are you talking about? What is “feeble” about the hypothesis that organisms work out their own ways of building nests, surviving different weather conditions, defending themselves against predators - as opposed to your God having to provide each and every one of them with instructions so that life can go on in order for humans to arrive? DAVID: I like the way you use your agnostic position to blithely drag God in when you need him! dhw: The issue is whether evolution is run by divine preprogramming/dabbling, or by the intelligence of organisms. .... And once more, I have never claimed that early life or cells invented intelligence. - DAVID: So how did they develop the intelligence you claim they have. - Nobody knows the origin of intelligence or consciousness, but it may have been provided by your God. However, the issue is whether evolution is run by divine preprogramming/dabbling or by the possibly God-given intelligence of organisms…I may have said that before!
Smart animals
by David Turell , Saturday, September 24, 2016, 16:01 (2981 days ago) @ dhw
> DAVID: So how did they develop the intelligence you claim they have. > > dhw: Nobody knows the origin of intelligence or consciousness, but it may have been provided by your God. However, the issue is whether evolution is run by divine preprogramming/dabbling or by the possibly God-given intelligence of organisms…I may have said that before!-My viewpoint fully explained in today's entry 'Explaining natural wonders'
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
by David Turell , Wednesday, October 05, 2016, 02:00 (2970 days ago) @ David Turell
The amazing part is the colony of bees learn by watching a trained bee. Now will it become an inherited instinct-http://phys.org/news/2016-10-problem-solving-socially-culturally-bumblebees.html-"Chittka and colleagues attached strings to artificial flowers laden with sugar water, put these "flowers" under Plexiglas, and trained bumblebees to pull strings to access the sugar water. "What I like about the work," said Chittka, "in addition to the experimental and intellectual challenges and insights, is the sheer absurdity of seeing bees solving a string-pulling puzzle. When lead author Sylvain Alem first showed me a bee successfully pulling on the string, I just couldn't believe what I was seeing. And even now, looking at the videos still makes me laugh."-"The trained bees served as innovators. To see if other bees could learn from them, the researchers put 25 untrained bees in transparent cages where they could watch trained bees demonstrate their string-pulling prowess. Untrained bees rarely learned this skill on their own. But 60% of the untrained bees solved the problem after watching other bees do it, showing that these insects can learn socially.-"To test whether string pulling would also be transmitted culturally in bumblebees, the researchers added a single trained bee to each of three colonies of untrained bees. Then the researchers assessed string pulling in pairs of bees. After 150 of these bouts, roughly half of the untrained bees in each colony had learned to pull strings to get sugar water (53, 58 and 42 percent, respectively, for the three colonies). Moreover, even though the trained innovator died after only about a third of the test bouts in one colony, string pulling continued to spread, underscoring the strength of this cultural transmission.-***-"But it was even more of a surprise that not only could bees be trained to solve this task in a step-by-step manner - but a small minority of bees actually solved the task by themselves, without gradual training or observing a skilled bee. The final big surprise came in the context of social learning: we discovered that naïve individuals that would observe, from a distance, a skilled string-pulling bee, could subsequently solve the task by themselves."-"This work shows that social learning and cultural transmission can occur with a cognitive toolkit far simpler than that of humans. "-Comment: I'm not surprised by this finding and have always thought animals could figure out simple tasks or mimic the actions of other members of their group and these behaviors might become instinctual. Weaverbird nests are too complex for this methodology.
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
DAVID: The amazing part is the colony of bees learn by watching a trained bee. Now will it become an inherited instincthttp://phys.org/news/2016-10-problem-solving-socially-culturally-bumblebees.html - Thank you for another absolutely superb article, vividly illustrating the reasoning powers of even tiny organisms. Yet again, we see how autonomously intelligent they are, some more than others (as in our human world). Then we see how they learn from one another: “60% of the untrained bees solved the problem after watching other bees do it, showing that these insects can learn socially.” - Then we learn how the learning spreads “culturally”: “…even though the trained innovator died after only about a third of the test bouts in one colony, string pulling continued to spread, underscoring the strength of this cultural transmission.” - The reasoning power was not even confined to the innovators: “a small minority of bees actually solved the task by themselves, without gradual training or observing a skilled bee.” - And in due course even the less intelligent ones could perform the task: “…we discovered that naïve individuals that would observe, from a distance, a skilled string-pulling bee, could subsequently solve the task by themselves." - The conclusion is devastatingly direct. Quite apart from the autonomous intelligence of individual bees, "this work shows that social learning and cultural transmission can occur with a cognitive toolkit far simpler than that of humans." - David, your comment that weaverbird nests are too complex for this methodology is a saddening assumption. What a shame that you cannot countenance the possibility that clever individuals might work things out for themselves, and others might learn from them. Bees, wasps, termites build nests of great complexity, but in spite of all the tests and observations of scientists who specialize in all these fields, proving over and over again how intelligent all these organisms are, you insist that the weaverbird is too dumb to have designed its own nest. - The admirable method of testing intelligence through setting problems, and then observing how organisms not only solve them but can also learn and copy from one another, echoes the equally mind-boggling example BBella gave us: - BBELLA: The footage depicts a strain of the gut bacterium E. coli evolving to be 1,000 times more resistant to an antibiotic in a matter of 11 days, starkly visualizing the speed with which diseases can adapt to the drugs we throw their way. https://www.wired.com/2016/09/gorgeous-unsettling-video-evolution-action/?mbid=nl_91216... - The researchers set the bacteria a problem analogous to that with which the bees were presented. They solved it, and even passed on the solution. Apparently bees prove their intelligence by solving a problem, but bacteria can only solve a problem if they are preprogrammed by God (although many obviously weren't because they died).
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
by David Turell , Wednesday, October 05, 2016, 15:59 (2970 days ago) @ dhw
DAVID: The amazing part is the colony of bees learn by watching a trained bee. Now will it become an inherited instincthttp://phys.org/news/2016-10-problem-solving-socially-culturally-bumblebees.html... > dhw: Thank you for another absolutely superb article, vividly illustrating the reasoning powers of even tiny organisms. Yet again, we see how autonomously intelligent they are, some more than others (as in our human world). Then we see how they learn from one another: “60% of the untrained bees solved the problem after watching other bees do it, showing that these insects can learn socially.” - You are welcome. > > dhw: David, your comment that weaverbird nests are too complex for this methodology is a saddening assumption. What a shame that you cannot countenance the possibility that clever individuals might work things out for themselves, and others might learn from them. Bees, wasps, termites build nests of great complexity, but in spite of all the tests and observations of scientists who specialize in all these fields, proving over and over again how intelligent all these organisms are, you insist that the weaverbird is too dumb to have designed its own nest. - I suggest you look up an article on the nest, and make your own copy of the nest using straw for the knots. It will take you longer than the birds take, by far. > > dhw:The admirable method of testing intelligence through setting problems, and then observing how organisms not only solve them but can also learn and copy from one another, echoes the equally mind-boggling example BBella gave us: > > BBELLA: The footage depicts a strain of the gut bacterium E. coli evolving to be 1,000 times more resistant to an antibiotic in a matter of 11 days, starkly visualizing the speed with which diseases can adapt to the drugs we throw their way. > > https://www.wired.com/2016/09/gorgeous-unsettling-video-evolution-action/?mbid=nl_91216... > dhw: The researchers set the bacteria a problem analogous to that with which the bees were presented. They solved it, and even passed on the solution. Apparently bees prove their intelligence by solving a problem, but bacteria can only solve a problem if they are preprogrammed by God (although many obviously weren't because they died). - The bees started with humans running training sessions. The bacteria had some individuals with partial immunity already on board as I have previously explained and you have forgotten or ignored. Eleven days means 792 generations of bacteria to begin slowly moving forward against the antibiotics as the partially immune population took over..
Smart animals: capuchin monkeys remember food sites
by David Turell , Wednesday, October 05, 2016, 20:19 (2969 days ago) @ David Turell
A careful study shows that capuchin monkeys remember where to find food:-http://phys.org/news/2016-10-wild-capuchin-monkeys-food-hidden.html-"Charles Janson, a professor of biological anthropology, zoology and evolutionary biology at the University of Montana, has found that capuchin monkeys have memory abilities that are far more complex than has been realized. In his paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, he describes experiments he designed and carried out with monkeys in the wild, what he observed and why he now believes that the monkeys have integrated memories regarding food sites including where they are located, how much food is likely to be at a particular site and an awareness of how much time has passed since they last visited each site.-"Janson notes that prior research showed that capuchin monkeys were able to remember the location and amount of food at patches they had previously visited—in this new effort, he sought to discover if they remembered other things about the places where they get their food. To learn more, he set up eight feeding sites in Iguazu´ Falls National Park in northeastern Argentina, which allowed him to vary the amount of food the monkeys would find at a given site. He simulated the maturing process that fruit goes through naturally by putting more food at sites that had been there longer and observed the behavior of the monkeys visiting the sites and eating what they found there.-"He found that over a period of 68 days, which corresponded to two fruit maturation cycles, a group of monkeys that visited his test patches had to make 212 choices regarding where to eat. He then compared their choice making with simulated movements and against statistical models to provide a means for judging whether the choices were random or were made intentionally by the monkeys. He reports that the choices made by the monkeys indicated they were using dynamic memory to keep track of elapsed time specific to each of the feeding sites. What this meant was that the monkeys were able to keep track of not only where the food would be, but how much to expect at each patch based on how much time had passed. And this means that they possess memory skills that up till now, only humans were believed to have."-Comment: Squirrels do the same thing in nut storage. I'm not surprised at the findings.
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
dhw: … in spite of all the tests and observations of scientists who specialize in all these fields, proving over and over again how intelligent all these organisms are, you insist that the weaverbird is too dumb to have designed its own nest. DAVID: I suggest you look up an article on the nest, and make your own copy of the nest using straw for the knots. It will take you longer than the birds take, by far. - I have seen the articles and do not doubt the complexity of the nest, or of the nests of bees, wasps, termites, or of the monarch's lifestyle, or of the behaviour of the parasitic wasp and the parasitic fly. The fact that I can't do things that other organisms do so easily suggests to me that they have a different kind of intelligence from mine. And I wonder why your God should have found it necessary to give them all special tuition in order to balance nature to keep life going until humans arrived. - dhw: The admirable method of testing intelligence through setting problems, and then observing how organisms not only solve them but can also learn and copy from one another, echoes the equally mind-boggling example BBella gave us: - https://www.wired.com/2016/09/gorgeous-unsettling-video-evolution-action/?mbid=nl_91216... - dhw: Apparently bees prove their intelligence by solving a problem, but bacteria can only solve a problem if they are preprogrammed by God… DAVID: The bacteria had some individuals with partial immunity already on board as I have previously explained and you have forgotten or ignored. - Your comments on partial immunity were on a different thread and concerned the Tasmanian devil. The first few colonies in the E.coli experiment actually died. Not much immunity there. Here is your comment, and I stand by my response: - DAVID: “Research has shown that bacteria have more than one metabolic pathway at their command to stay alive when attacked by antibiotics….Those that stay alive simply switch over and use them. It takes some effort and time so the colonies pause…” - Dhw: “Those that stay alive simply switch over…It takes some time and effort”. Hardly “simply” if it takes time and effort and lots of them die, and what sort of “effort” do the survivors make? How do you apply effort if you haven't a clue what you're doing because God has organized it all for you? And if your God preprogrammed all the different “metabolic pathways”, why do some bacteria die and others survive? Did the first cells faill to pass on the right instructions to the unlucky ones? Or if God dabbled, was it HIS time and effort, and he only spent it on the lucky few? - You did not answer any of these questions, but preferred to concentrate on the fact that life is a miracle.
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
by David Turell , Thursday, October 06, 2016, 16:12 (2969 days ago) @ dhw
DAVID: I suggest you look up an article on the nest, and make your own copy of the nest using straw for the knots. It will take you longer than the birds take, by far. > > dhw:I have seen the articles and do not doubt the complexity of the nest, or of the nests of bees, wasps, termites, or of the monarch's lifestyle, or of the behaviour of the parasitic wasp and the parasitic fly. The fact that I can't do things that other organisms do so easily suggests to me that they have a different kind of intelligence from mine. And I wonder why your God should have found it necessary to give them all special tuition in order to balance nature to keep life going until humans arrived. - Because the balance of nature provides the energy for life to continue to evolve. - > dhw: Apparently bees prove their intelligence by solving a problem, but bacteria can only solve a problem if they are preprogrammed by God… - > DAVID: The bacteria had some individuals with partial immunity already on board as I have previously explained and you have forgotten or ignored. > > dhw: Your comments on partial immunity were on a different thread and concerned the Tasmanian devil. The first few colonies in the E.coli experiment actually died. Not much immunity there. - In e. coli experiment advances paused. If all colonies died there would have been no experiment. My memory may not be reliable about my previous responses. I have trouble finding previous statements on this site. Tell me how do you do it? - > dhw: Here is your comment, and I stand by my response: > > DAVID: “Research has shown that bacteria have more than one metabolic pathway at their command to stay alive when attacked by antibiotics….Those that stay alive simply switch over and use them. It takes some effort and time so the colonies pause…” > > Dhw: “Those that stay alive simply switch over…It takes some time and effort”. Hardly “simply” if it takes time and effort and lots of them die, and what sort of “effort” do the survivors make? - If alternative pathways are on-board switching is not difficult, just like changing gears in your car. Main response blocked, use the secondary backup. Not all bacteria contain them due to individual variability, but some do and survive, and in the end all have the ability to survive. - > dhw: How do you apply effort if you haven't a clue what you're doing because God has organized it all for you? And if your God preprogrammed all the different “metabolic pathways”, why do some bacteria die and others survive? Did the first cells faill to pass on the right instructions to the unlucky ones? Or if God dabbled, was it HIS time and effort, and he only spent it on the lucky few? - Simply explained above. Alternative metabolic pathways are a proven fact.
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
dhw: Your comments on partial immunity were on a different thread and concerned the Tasmanian devil. The first few colonies in the E.coli experiment actually died. Not much immunity there. DAVID: In e. coli experiment advances paused. If all colonies died there would have been no experiment. - I presume the researchers replaced the first colonies with new ones. DAVID: My memory may not be reliable about my previous responses. I have trouble finding previous statements on this site. Tell me how do you do it? - The Tasmanian devil fiendishly burrowed its way into my memory, as did our exchanges on partial immunity. I actually remembered your E.coli explanation and my own scepticism, though it took me a while to find it. I have as much trouble as you locating statements. Ah, David, we are getting old! 
- dhw: Here is your comment, and I stand by my response: DAVID: “Research has shown that bacteria have more than one metabolic pathway at their command to stay alive when attacked by antibiotics….Those that stay alive simply switch over and use them. It takes some effort and time so the colonies pause…” Dhw: “Those that stay alive simply switch over…It takes some time and effort”. Hardly “simply” if it takes time and effort and lots of them die, and what sort of “effort” do the survivors make? - DAVID: If alternative pathways are on-board switching is not difficult, just like changing gears in your car. Main response blocked, use the secondary backup. Not all bacteria contain them due to individual variability, but some do and survive, and in the end all have the ability to survive. - Obviously they vary since some die, obviously some survive, and obviously when all the dead are dead and all the survivors have survived, the survivors must have the ability to survive. Bearing in mind that they are all supposed to be following built-in instructions from your God, this doesn't explain why automatons have to make an effort and why God failed to preprogramme all those that died. DAVID: Simply explained above. Alternative metabolic pathways are a proven fact. Too simple for me. But I do understand that there has to be more than one way to approach a problem, and it could even be that it requires intelligence to work out the right solution. And I love your image of mindless bacteria not having a clue what they're doing but somehow knowing that they need to change gear (though apparently it takes some time and effort). Especially when they're driving along a route they've never taken before.
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
dhw: Your comments on partial immunity were on a different thread and concerned the Tasmanian devil. The first few colonies in the E.coli experiment actually died. Not much immunity there. DAVID: In e. coli experiment advances paused. If all colonies died there would have been no experiment.-I presume the researchers replaced the first colonies with new ones. DAVID: My memory may not be reliable about my previous responses. I have trouble finding previous statements on this site. Tell me how do you do it?-The Tasmanian devil fiendishly burrowed its way into my memory, as did our exchanges on partial immunity. I actually remembered your E.coli explanation and my own scepticism, though it took me a while to find it. I have as much trouble as you locating statements. Ah, David, we are getting old! -dhw: Here is your comment, and I stand by my response: DAVID: “Research has shown that bacteria have more than one metabolic pathway at their command to stay alive when attacked by antibiotics….Those that stay alive simply switch over and use them. It takes some effort and time so the colonies pause…”-Dhw: “Those that stay alive simply switch over…It takes some time and effort”. Hardly “simply” if it takes time and effort and lots of them die, and what sort of “effort” do the survivors make?-DAVID: If alternative pathways are on-board switching is not difficult, just like changing gears in your car. Main response blocked, use the secondary backup. Not all bacteria contain them due to individual variability, but some do and survive, and in the end all have the ability to survive.-Obviously they vary since some die, obviously some survive, and obviously when all the dead are dead and all the survivors have survived, the survivors must have the ability to survive. Bearing in mind that they are all supposed to be following built-in instructions from your God, this doesn't explain why automatons have to make an effort and why God failed to preprogramme all those that died. DAVID: Simply explained above. Alternative metabolic pathways are a proven fact. -Too simple for me. And surely there must be more than one back-up to cover all those millions of problems. And it could even be that it requires intelligence to work out which switch to press. However, I love your image of mindless bacteria not having a clue what they're doing but somehow knowing that they need to change gear (though apparently it takes some time and effort). Especially when they're driving along a route they've never taken before. I'll assume that they change gear before they die, but how do they know they must do it? Do they learn from watching their mates die? Or do they realize they're not feeling too good, and switch over before too much damage is done? No, can't be - those would be signs of intelligence, wouldn't they?
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
by David Turell , Friday, October 07, 2016, 22:02 (2967 days ago) @ dhw
dhw: Your comments on partial immunity were on a different thread and concerned the Tasmanian devil. The first few colonies in the E.coli experiment actually died. Not much immunity there.-> DAVID: In e. coli experiment advances paused. If all colonies died there would have been no experiment. > > I presume the researchers replaced the first colonies with new ones.-No, the colonies paused and then advanced. > > DAVID: My memory may not be reliable about my previous responses. I have trouble finding previous statements on this site. Tell me how do you do it? > > dhw:The Tasmanian devil fiendishly burrowed its way into my memory, as did our exchanges on partial immunity. I actually remembered your E.coli explanation and my own scepticism, though it took me a while to find it. I have as much trouble as you locating statements. Ah, David, we are getting old!
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
DAVID: In e. coli experiment advances paused. If all colonies died there would have been no experiment. Dhw: I presume the researchers replaced the first colonies with new ones.DAVID: No, the colonies paused and then advanced. - I have found the quote: “It took some doing (the first few colonies succumbed to contamination and water condensation) but eventually they had the movie you see here.” Did I misunderstand something? - DAVID: …what the E. coli story shows is minor adaptation in an existing species. All we know so far is epigenetic adaptation against the problem of speciation. - Yes, I know. We do not understand how innovation leading to speciation takes place. Epigenetic adaptation suggests that there is a mechanism by which organisms can change themselves, and my hypothesis is that this same mechanism may also be capable of innovation. It is a hypothesis, just like your 3.7-billion-year-old divine computer programme. - dhw: I love your image of mindless bacteria not having a clue what they're doing but somehow knowing that they need to change gear (though apparently it takes some time and effort). Especially when they're driving along a route they've never taken before. DAVID: Cute analogy. Bacteria have the capacity to try the alternate pathways as they strive to live, a characteristic of life. - I wonder how many alternative pathways there are, bearing in mind the millions of problems bacteria have had to solve over the last 3.7 billion years. As for their “capacity”, one possible description of it is “intelligence”.
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
by David Turell , Saturday, October 08, 2016, 15:30 (2967 days ago) @ dhw
DAVID: In e. coli experiment advances paused. If all colonies died there would have been no experiment. > Dhw: I presume the researchers replaced the first colonies with new ones.DAVID: No, the colonies paused and then advanced. > > I have found the quote: “It took some doing (the first few colonies succumbed to contamination and water condensation) but eventually they had the movie you see here.” Did I misunderstand something?-Yes. 'Contamination and water condensation' are problems with experimental design, not at all the issue of the experiment, response to antibiotics. - > > dhw: I wonder how many alternative pathways there are, bearing in mind the millions of problems bacteria have had to solve over the last 3.7 billion years. As for their “capacity”, one possible description of it is “intelligence”.-These are alternative biochemical processes which have been found to exist in bacteria.
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
DAVID: In e. coli experiment advances paused. If all colonies died there would have been no experiment. Dhw: I presume the researchers replaced the first colonies with new ones. DAVID: No, the colonies paused and then advanced. I have found the quote: “It took some doing (the first few colonies succumbed to contamination and water condensation) but eventually they had the movie you see here.” Did I misunderstand something? DAVID: Yes. 'Contamination and water condensation' are problems with experimental design, not at all the issue of the experiment, response to antibiotics. -Thank you. I did misunderstand it. However, this makes me wonder if it wouldn't be worth studying the sources of the contamination and the powers of water condensation in our quest to be rid of E.coli!-dhw: I wonder how many alternative pathways there are, bearing in mind the millions of problems bacteria have had to solve over the last 3.7 billion years. As for their “capacity”, one possible description of it is “intelligence”.-DAVID: These are alternative biochemical processes which have been found to exist in bacteria.-I do not doubt that bacteria are capable of using different biochemical processes to deal with all the different problems they have faced during their 3.7 billion years of existence. All organisms use biochemical processes! Every action we humans take entails biochemical processes. And when we have problems to solve, the biochemical processes are set in motion by thought. But according to you, when bacteria have problems to solve, the biochemical processes are set in motion by a divine dabble or by a 3.7-billion-year-old computer programme which God installed in the first living cells, along with programmes for every evolutionary innovation and natural wonder. Hard to believe.
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
by David Turell , Sunday, October 09, 2016, 21:42 (2965 days ago) @ dhw
> dhw: I do not doubt that bacteria are capable of using different biochemical processes to deal with all the different problems they have faced during their 3.7 billion years of existence. All organisms use biochemical processes! Every action we humans take entails biochemical processes. And when we have problems to solve, the biochemical processes are set in motion by thought. But according to you, when bacteria have problems to solve, the biochemical processes are set in motion by a divine dabble or by a 3.7-billion-year-old computer programme which God installed in the first living cells, along with programmes for every evolutionary innovation and natural wonder. Hard to believe. - Not hard and not current God intervention.. Given alternative pathways that can be turned on automatically, and these pathways are shown to exist, and are used by bacteria without God intervening. Automaticity of choice.
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
dhw: I do not doubt that bacteria are capable of using different biochemical processes to deal with all the different problems they have faced during their 3.7 billion years of existence. All organisms use biochemical processes! Every action we humans take entails biochemical processes. And when we have problems to solve, the biochemical processes are set in motion by thought. But according to you, when bacteria have problems to solve, the biochemical processes are set in motion by a divine dabble or by a 3.7-billion-year-old computer programme which God installed in the first living cells, along with programmes for every evolutionary innovation and natural wonder. Hard to believe. - DAVID: Not hard and not current God intervention.. Given alternative pathways that can be turned on automatically, and these pathways are shown to exist, and are used by bacteria without God intervening. Automaticity of choice. - Then we can leave out divine dabbling. That's easy. The hard bit is to accept that if God does not intervene and has provided bacteria with solutions to every single problem for the last 3.7 billion years (“alternative pathways that can be turned on automatically” is a neat way to minimize the range of environments and problems that bacteria are able to cope with), then these solutions can only have been preprogrammed in the very first cells. And according to your concept of evolution, the same very first cells were also provided with every single innovation and natural wonder in the history of life on Earth (apart from those that were dabbled). THAT is what I find so hard to believe, not to mention that it is a totally unnecessary strain on credulity when there is the far simpler option of God providing the first cells with a form of evolvable intelligence.
Smart animals: bees trained to pull strings for treat
by David Turell , Monday, October 10, 2016, 17:57 (2965 days ago) @ dhw
DAVID: Not hard and not current God intervention.. Given alternative pathways that can be turned on automatically, and these pathways are shown to exist, and are used by bacteria without God intervening. Automaticity of choice. -> dhw: And according to your concept of evolution, the same very first cells were also provided with every single innovation and natural wonder in the history of life on Earth (apart from those that were dabbled). THAT is what I find so hard to believe, not to mention that it is a totally unnecessary strain on credulity when there is the far simpler option of God providing the first cells with a form of evolvable intelligence.-Your 'form of evolvable intelligence' is the original provision of alternative pathways. Bacteria can solve problems of survivability on their own.
Smart animals: bees trained to push a ball for food
by David Turell , Thursday, February 23, 2017, 20:35 (2828 days ago) @ David Turell
In this study bees were trained to do something totally unrelated to their normal lives:
https://phys.org/news/2017-02-ball-rolling-bees-reveal-complex.html
"The experiment required the bees to move a ball to a specified location to obtain a reward of food. The insects were first trained to know the correct location of the ball on a platform. Subsequently, to obtain their reward, the bees had to move a displaced ball to the specified location.
"To learn the technique, the bees were trained under one of three conditions: some observed a previously trained bee move the furthest ball to the centre to gain reward, others received a "ghost" demonstration, where a magnet hidden underneath the platform was used to move the ball, and a third group received no demonstration, where they found the ball already at the centre of the platform with reward.
"The bees that observed the technique from a live or model demonstrator learned the task more efficiently than those observing a "ghost" demonstration or without demonstration.
"Joint lead author Dr Olli J. Loukola, said: "The bees solved the task in a different way than what was demonstrated, suggesting that observer bees did not simply copy what they saw, but improved on it. This shows an impressive amount of cognitive flexibility, especially for an insect."
"During the demonstrations, the researchers placed three yellow balls at varying distances from the centre. The "demonstrator" bees always moved the furthest ball to the centre, and always from the same spatial location, since they had been trained under conditions where the closer balls were immobile. Untrained bees were given three opportunities to watch a skilled bee perform the task in this manner.
"In later tests, when these untrained bees were tested without the presence of a skilled demonstrator, bees moved the closest ball instead of the furthest ball, which they had seen the demonstrator moving. In another experiment, the bees also used a differently coloured ball than previously encountered.
"Dr Loukola added: "It may be that bumblebees, along with many other animals, have the cognitive capabilities to solve such complex tasks, but will only do so if environmental pressures are applied to necessitate such behaviours.'"
Comment: A tiny brain can still learn with training. But the untrained bees could not innovate, showing that training is required.
Smart animals: bees trained to push a ball for food
QUOTES: "Joint lead author Dr Olli J. Loukola, said: "The bees solved the task in a different way than what was demonstrated, suggesting that observer bees did not simply copy what they saw, but improved on it. This shows an impressive amount of cognitive flexibility, especially for an insect."
"Dr Loukola added: "It may be that bumblebees, along with many other animals, have the cognitive capabilities to solve such complex tasks, but will only do so if environmental pressures are applied to necessitate such behaviours.'"
DAVID’s comment: A tiny brain can still learn with training. But the untrained bees could not innovate, showing that training is required.
Yet more evidence that insects are intelligent. Not as intelligent as humans, of course, and applying their intelligence only to what is useful for survival. For innovation, we would have to go back to the origins of bee society and bee behaviour – long, long, long before humans came on the scene. Either they worked it all out for themselves, or your God provided the first cells with a special bee-behaviour programme, or your God dabbled with an existing species (wasp?) to show them what to do. I wonder which you think is most likely.
Smart animals: bees trained to push a ball for food
by David Turell , Friday, February 24, 2017, 22:36 (2827 days ago) @ dhw
DAVID’s comment: A tiny brain can still learn with training. But the untrained bees could not innovate, showing that training is required.dhw: Yet more evidence that insects are intelligent. Not as intelligent as humans, of course, and applying their intelligence only to what is useful for survival. For innovation, we would have to go back to the origins of bee society and bee behaviour – long, long, long before humans came on the scene. Either they worked it all out for themselves, or your God provided the first cells with a special bee-behaviour programme, or your God dabbled with an existing species (wasp?) to show them what to do. I wonder which you think is most likely.
Animals with brains can have intelligence as bees show. The hexagonal forms in their hives are shown to be due to physical properties of the materials they create. They don't know geometry. To answer your question I wish I knew how instinctual behavior is developed or how much God does to create it.
Smart animals: bees trained to push a ball for food
DAVID’s comment: A tiny brain can still learn with training. But the untrained bees could not innovate, showing that training is required.
dhw: Yet more evidence that insects are intelligent. Not as intelligent as humans, of course, and applying their intelligence only to what is useful for survival. For innovation, we would have to go back to the origins of bee society and bee behaviour – long, long, long before humans came on the scene. Either they worked it all out for themselves, or your God provided the first cells with a special bee-behaviour programme, or your God dabbled with an existing species (wasp?) to show them what to do. I wonder which you think is most likely.
DAVID: Animals with brains can have intelligence as bees show. The hexagonal forms in their hives are shown to be due to physical properties of the materials they create. They don't know geometry. To answer your question I wish I knew how instinctual behavior is developed or how much God does to create it.
The experiment has proved that their behaviour is not confined to instinct. They can solve problems, and there is no reason to suppose that their intelligent ability to cope with and/or exploit new conditions was not the creative force that first invented the now established social, architectural and behavioural patterns that have enabled them to survive.So although of course we all wish we knew the answers to all the difficult questions, since you are generally opposed to fence-sitting, do please tell us which of these options you think most likely (you don't have to believe it). Bee behaviour: preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, personally dabbled by your God, or the consequence of autonomous intelligence?
Smart animals: bees trained to push a ball for food
by David Turell , Saturday, February 25, 2017, 14:45 (2827 days ago) @ dhw
dhw: The experiment has proved that their behaviour is not confined to instinct. They can solve problems, and there is no reason to suppose that their intelligent ability to cope with and/or exploit new conditions was not the creative force that first invented the now established social, architectural and behavioural patterns that have enabled them to survive.So although of course we all wish we knew the answers to all the difficult questions, since you are generally opposed to fence-sitting, do please tell us which of these options you think most likely (you don't have to believe it). Bee behaviour: preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, personally dabbled by your God, or the consequence of autonomous intelligence?
Bees are an integral part of the balance of nature. They are raised as pollinators to help in agriculture, and because of bee hive decline are in short supply right now. God may well have paid special attention to them. The complexity of their 'dances' signaling information suggests that. God obviously played a role.
Smart animals: play objects become useful
by David Turell , Monday, October 02, 2017, 20:48 (2607 days ago) @ David Turell
Crows and parrots play with objects that they then use as tools once familiar with them:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171002105204.htm
"Researchers have discovered that New Caledonian crows and kea parrots can learn about the usefulness of objects by playing with them -- similar to human baby behaviour.
"The study, led by researchers at the Universities of York and St Andrews, demonstrated that two types of bird were able to solve tasks more successfully if they had explored the object involved in the task beforehand.
"It has long been thought that playful exploration allows animals to gather information about their physical world, in much the same way that human infants learn about their world through play.
"In one of the first direct tests of this hypothesis, scientists studied two bird species, the New Caledonian crow and the kea parrot, to understand how they interact with objects before, during and after a task involving that object.
***
"'We found that both species were better at selecting the correct tools to solve a task if they had the opportunity to explore them beforehand, suggesting that they were learning something about the properties of them as they interacted with them."
"The team presented the birds with blocks and ropes of different colours, weights and patterns to explore and play with, before presenting a task where they had to collapse a platform with a ball and retrieve a reward from a pipe with a stick. The ball and stick where later replaced with the blocks and ropes to see whether they could choose the right tool from their earlier play session to complete the task.
***
"Megan Lambert, PhD student at the University of York, said: "This type of 'latent learning', which occurs without any reinforcement, is thought to be particularly important for animals to be able to use objects as tools in a variety of contexts for creative problem-solving.
"'Although the birds appeared to learn from their exploration, we found no evidence that the birds changed the way they interacted with the objects after learning they could be used as tools.
"'This means that the birds did not appear to explicitly seek information about the objects, but rather learned about their properties incidentally through exploring them.'"
Comment: These birds did some type of simple analytic thought process to see the usefulness of the objects of play that might then be used as tools. This is their brain at work, which means adaptations require brain work. I do not believe this type of adaptation can happen without a brain.
Smart animals: animals think, use zero
by David Turell , Tuesday, August 10, 2021, 18:04 (1200 days ago) @ David Turell
Based on experiments:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/animals-can-count-and-use-zero-how-far-does-their-number...
"...rigorous experiments during the past two decades have shown that even animals with very small brains can perform incredible feats of numerical cognition. One mechanism common to all of them seems to be a system for approximating numerosity that’s correct most of the time but is sometimes imprecise in specific ways. Animals are most effective, for instance, at distinguishing numerosities far apart in magnitude — so comparing a group of six dots to three dots is easier than comparing six to five. When the difference between two numerosities is the same, it’s easier to deal with smaller quantities than larger ones: Discriminating 34 items from 38 is much more difficult than discriminating four from eight.
***
"In the prefrontal cortex of monkeys, researchers found neurons that were selectively tuned to different numerosities. Neurons that responded to three dots on a screen also responded weakly to two and four, but not at all to more distant values, such as one or five.
***
"That observation seems to imply that a “sense” of number is innate and deeply rooted in the brains of animals, including humans. “Underlying the sense of number, there is a very ancient, fundamental psychophysical law,” Vallortigara said.
"Once “you realize that almost every animal, or maybe even every animal, has some ability to do a numerical task, then you start wanting to know … what’s the threshold? What’s the limit?” said Scarlett Howard, a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University in Australia who studies numerical cognition in honeybees. If animals had this natural, hard-wired ability for telling quantities apart, scientists wanted to determine what other abilities might emerge with it.
"First up was arithmetic. Several species have demonstrated that they can essentially add and subtract.
***
"Honeybees, meanwhile, can be taught simple arithmetic.
***
"Insects, birds and primates have also been trained to link symbols to numbers of elements. “We took the bees and taught them as if they were in primary school: this symbol represents this number,” Dyer said. “And they got the association.” Chimpanzees that have been trained to link numerosities to number symbols could also learn to touch the digits in ascending order.
***
"Over and over again, she and others are finding evidence not just for a relatively simple, ubiquitous sense of numerosity in animals, but also for a growing inventory of much more abstract and complex forms of numerical cognition. That’s why for some neurobiologists, the current great frontier is in learning whether some animals’ grasp of numerical abstractions extends to the slippery concept of “nothing.”
***
"...the researchers uncovered a familiar numerical understanding of zero: The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a single dot than they did with images of two, three or four dots. Recordings of the crows’ brain activity during these tasks revealed that neurons in a region of their brain called the pallium represent zero as a quantity alongside other numerosities, just as is found in the primate prefrontal cortex. “From a physiological point of view, this fits in beautifully,” Nieder said. “We see exactly the same responses, the same type of code, represented in the crow brain as in the monkey brain.”
***
"Why should animals have to recognize specific quantities at all? Why has evolution repeatedly made sure that animals can understand not just that four is less than five but that “four squares” is in some way conceptually the same as “four circles”?
"According to Vallortigara, one reason might be because arithmetic ends up being so important. “Animals continuously have to do arithmetic. Even simple animals,” he said. “If you have an abstract representation of numerosity, this is very easy to do.” Abstracting numerical information allows the brain to perform additional computations much more efficiently.
"That’s perhaps where zero fits in as well. If two predators enter an environment and only one leaves, the area remains dangerous.
***
"Nieder hopes that his work on zero can help demonstrate how an abstract sense of number might emerge from a more approximate and practical one. He is currently conducting studies in humans to explore the relationship between non-symbolic numerical representations and symbolic ones more precisely.
"Vallortigara, Butterworth and some of their colleagues are now collaborating with Caroline Brennan, a molecular geneticist at Queen Mary University of London, to pin down the genetic mechanisms underlying numerical ability."
Comment: An enormous article filled with summaries of research. Simple counting is necessary, but these animlas are nowhere near human math.
Smart animals: female wrasse cheat
by David Turell , Thursday, September 30, 2021, 19:35 (1148 days ago) @ David Turell
They hide from the males:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2292064-female-cleaner-fish-can-judge-when-to-chea...
"Female cleaner fish are sensitive to what their partners can and cannot see while working on client fish. This means they may have theory of mind, a concept built on awareness of other’s perspectives, often associated with humans and other primates.
"Cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) typically work in male-female pairs to “clean” client fish by eating their dead skin cells and skin parasites. The wrasse actually prefer to eat the mucus produced by these client fish, but the clients can react to this by terminating the relationship – leaving the cleaners without food.
"This means a lot is at stake when a male-female cleaner wrasse pair work as a team. If one fish cheats by attempting to eat mucus while their partner is cooperating with the client, this may leave both fish without food. If a male cleaner fish knows his female partner has cheated, he will sometimes punish her by chasing and even attempting to bite her, says Katherine McAuliffe at Boston College in Massachusetts.
"But this made McAuliffe and her colleagues wonder whether females had developed ways to cheat without the knowledge of the males. “Because punishment is on the line and females would benefit from getting away with cheating, we had reason to suspect that they might show this sensitivity to what their male partner can and cannot see,” she says.
"In an experimental set-up, females had the choice of feeding in a tank with transparent or opaque barriers while their male partner was in a separate part of the tank with either a transparent or opaque partition. The researchers demonstrated that female cleaner fish are indeed more likely to cheat when their male partners are out of view. The team also found that females paired with more punitive males cheated more strategically by moving behind the opaque barriers.
"This sensitivity suggests that cleaner wrasse have evolved cognitive abilities that allow them to find solutions to their problems on a par with other animals, such as corvids and primates.
“'It’s controversial because in many people’s scheme of the natural world primates can do things that are impossible for other animals, in particular fishes,” says Alex Jordan at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany. “The greatest message of this paper is that there is no ladder which humans sit at the top of and then there’s primates and then there’s something else.'”
Comment: I know dhw will enjoy this. I ignore the final obligatory comment that humans aren't worth any more than anyone else. The last rung on the animal ladder is huge.
Smart animals: schools of fish swim better
by David Turell , Monday, June 10, 2024, 16:54 (165 days ago) @ David Turell
In rough water:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/06/240606152109.htm
"Swimming through turbulent water is easier for schooling fish compared to solitary swimmers, according to a study published June 6...
***
"In this study, Zhang and colleagues propose the "turbulent sheltering hypothesis," which suggests that traveling in schools allows fish to shield each other from disruptive water currents, thus making it easier to swim through rough waters.
***
"High-speed cameras allowed researchers to observe the movements of the fish as they swam, and a respirometer allowed for measurements of fish respiration rates and energy expenditure.
"These trials revealed that schooling fish expended up to 79% less energy while swimming in turbulent water compared to solitary fish.
"Schooling fish also clustered more closely together in turbulent water compared to steady water, while solitary fish had to beat their tails much more vigorously to maintain the same speed in more turbulent currents.
"These results lend support to the "turbulence sheltering hypothesis," indicating that locomotion efficiency might be a driving factor behind the evolution of schooling behavior.
"This information is valuable for understanding fish ecology, fundamentals of hydrodynamics and it might also be applied to the design and maintenance of habitats meant to harbor protected fish species or to hinder invasive ones."
Comment: grouping together in herds is common for protection and may play a role in schooling of fish.
Smart animals: insects are conscious, make decisions
by David Turell , Sunday, February 09, 2020, 16:35 (1748 days ago) @ David Turell
This paper whimsically wonders if we should eat them, as is done in many parts of the world, to start the discussion, which covers the fact that insects think and make choices:
http://wise.nautil.us/feature/514/if-bugs-are-sentient-should-we-eat-them?utm_source=Na...
"'In fact, humans eat over 1,600 species of insects. “The Western abhorrence of eating insects is unusual on a global scale,”...
***
"In the training phase, these wasps did learn to discriminate faces. Presumably, this ability had not been directly selected for in this species over evolutionary time. The mental capacity is there but doesn’t emerge under natural conditions. Reviewing studies of wasps and bees in general, Tibbetts and Dyer conclude that “there is ever so much more going on their teensy brains than we could have imagined possible.”
***
"...fruit fly subjects were first trained to avoid a certain strong smell, then offered a choice between two samples of that smell whose intensities varied by degrees. The insects took longer to make their choice when the difference in smell was subtle (or minimal) than when it was pronounced (or maximal). Neuroscientist Shamik DasGupta and his team concluded that the experimental outcome “bears the behavioral signature of evidence accumulation.” In other words, these insects wait until they have gathered enough information to make a reasonable choice when presented with options that complicate decision-making. This weighing of variables according to context is linked in the fruit flies to one specific gene (FoxP) and about 0.1 percent of the flies’ total neuron count—right around 200 neurons.
"Far more famous an example of insect learning is the honeybees’ waggle dance. In this case, the acquiring of new information happens socially. Performing in the dark hive, the dancers, experienced forager bees, clue in younger, naïve bees about how far to fly, and in what direction, to find suitable flowers. Thanks to scientific experiments, we know that the dances do not operate like the GPS devices that send us, via detailed driving instructions, to a pinpoint location. Instead, they convey information that directs the observer bees to the right general region. There, the flowers themselves provide sight and smell cues; the bees zero in on these beacons and begin to forage.
***
"The ecologist Jonathan Pruitt found that studiosus individuals can be categorized as more aggressive or more docile. He became a sort of arachnid matchmaker, creating in the lab 90 spider couples; some paired an aggressive male and an aggressive female, some a docile male and a docile female, and others one of each. The next generation’s temperaments were consistently (but not completely) predictable: An aggressive pair’s offspring were nearly all aggressive, and so on.
***
"Generalizing about an enormous taxonomic group of animals is risky. Nonetheless, writing in 2014, Oliver Sacks felt confident enough to offer a summary that resonates with the material reviewed in this chapter: “We often think of insects as tiny automata—robots with everything built-in and programmed. But it is increasingly evident that insects can remember, learn, think, and communicate in quite rich and unexpected ways. Much of this, doubtless, is built-in—but much, too, seems to depend on individual experience.” It’s precisely that unexpected angle that we need to keep our eye on. While it’s far less easy to offer a definitive statement about sentience in insects than about intelligence or personality, insects are surprising us." (my bold)
Comment: Insects can show just as much purposefulness as my dog does. Note the bold. Much of this is instinct, but as the article shows insects can be trained. However, note the following entry today, on spider research retractions.
Smart animals: spider social studies retractions
by David Turell , Sunday, February 09, 2020, 16:47 (1748 days ago) @ David Turell
What is described in teh preceding entry may not be true:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00287-y
"A complex web is unravelling in the field of spider research. On 5 February, McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, confirmed that it was investigating allegations that behavioural ecologist Jonathan Pruitt fabricated data in at least 17 papers on which he was a co-author.
"Since concerns about his work became public in late January, scientists have rushed to uncover the extent of questionable data in Pruitt’s studies. Publishers are now trying to keep up with requests for retractions and investigations. According to a publicly available spreadsheet maintained by Daniel Bolnick, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, seven papers have been retracted or are in the process of being retracted; five further retractions have been requested by Pruitt’s co-authors; and researchers have flagged at least five more studies as containing possible data anomalies.
***
"Laskowski and Pinter-Wollman say that although the wave of retractions deals a blow to behavioural ecology, they are heartened by how quickly the community has acted to set the scientific record straight. They acknowledge that researchers have lessons to learn about making data publicly available — by one estimate, more than 60% of Pruitt’s data-containing papers are in journals with no data-sharing requirements — and about carefully checking data that they receive from colleagues. But they are both optimistic that these lessons will ultimately strengthen the field.
“'Despite all I’ve gone through, I’m going to continue to trust collaborators,” Pinter-Wollman says. “It’s hard to grow in a vacuum.'”
Comment: Research scientists make their living by getting grants. Self-aggrandizement is a human tendency and fraudulent study results are not uncommon. Always check to see if the required confirmatory studies are available, before accepting conclusions.
Smart animals: more bee training
by David Turell , Saturday, July 29, 2023, 14:18 (482 days ago) @ David Turell
Playing soccer:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bees-can-learn-play-soccer-score-one-inse...
“Now, Perry and his colleagues have released the results of a creative new experiment in which they essentially taught bumblebees how to play "bee soccer." The insects’ ability to grasp this novel task is a big score for insect intelligence, demonstrating that they’re even more complex thinkers than we thought. Moreover, they did it all not just in spite of their tiny brains—but because of them.
“For the study, published in the February 23 issue of Science, researchers gave a group of bees a novel goal (literally): to move a ball about half their size into a designated target area. The idea was to present them with a task that they would never have encountered in nature. Not only did the bees succeed at this challenge—earning them a sugary treat—but they astonished researchers by figuring out how to meet their new goal in several different ways.
“Some bees succeeded at getting their ball into the goal with no demonstration at all, or by first watching the ball move on its own. But the ones that watched other bees successfully complete the game learned to play more quickly and easily. Most impressively, the insects didn't simply copy each other—they watched their companions do it, then figured out on their own how to accomplish the task even more efficiently using their own techniques.
“The results show that bees can master complex, social behaviors without any prior experience—which could be a boon in a world where they face vast ecological changes and pressures.
“’Even more complex tasks like communication or navigation are genetically preprogrammed and not really flexible,” he says. “What we really wanted to do is to test something unnatural, as far removed as we could outside what they would normally do.”
“Scientists gained some insight on just how the bees learned by changing up the conditions of the game. For some bees, researchers provided no demonstration at all of the game’s objective, but merely a reward if the insect somehow succeeded. Two individuals still figured out the task, but most struggled. Other bees were shown a “ghost demonstration,” in which the ball moved to the goal controlled by a magnet. Around 80 percent of the bees learned to complete the task this way.
“The most effective method was having bees learn by watching a previously trained bee perform the task. Every single bee that was taught this way learned the game correctly, and learned more quickly than the others. But the bees not only copied their companions—they also improved on what they'd seen and added their own flair to complete the task more efficiently.
“There was one cognitive leap that especially impressed Perry and colleagues. In the bee demonstrations, demonstrator bees were trained with a setup in which only the farthest away of three balls was mobile, meaning they always moved that most distant ball. Untrained bees then watched a demonstrator perform the task in this same way, three times. Yet when they were given a chance to perform it on their own, they moved the closest ball—even though they'd never seen it moved before.
“The new study helps demonstrate that how an animal thinks depends on its lifestyle, says Felicity Muth, a bumblebee researcher at the University of Nevada, Reno. Although the ball-rolling behavior isn't part of a bee's life, the cognitive powers that make it possible are a product of that environment, she says.”
Comment: Bee brains can correlate even if most of their activities are instinctual. That one bee teaching others is an obvious advantage since this is how bees are taught.
Smart animals: clever caracaras
by David Turell , Tuesday, November 21, 2023, 14:16 (367 days ago) @ David Turell
In the Falklands:
https://vinbaza.com/news/freakishly-smart-falcons-run-these-islands/44521/
"...travel to the Falkland Islands near the Argentine coast, and you’ll find not parrots or crows but freakishly smart falcons called striated caracaras.
***
"By adapting a series of tests originally designed to assess cockatoo cognition, Ms. Harrington found that the caracaras can problem-solve as well as parrots. The results were published Monday in the journal Current Biology.
"Ms. Harrington leads the Johnny Rook Project, an effort to study the Falkland falcons that got its name from the birds’ local nickname. To compare the caracaras with other brainy birds, she adapted eight tasks from a prior experiment that studied innovative problem-solving in Goffin’s cockatoos.
"Of the 15 Johnny rooks that Ms. Harrington tested, all solved at least one puzzle, and 10 of them figured out all eight — without any prior training.
“'These caracaras actually solved tasks that some of the tool-using parrots couldn’t solve,” Ms. Harrington said.
"Some animals are understandably skittish around scientists and their strange equipment, which can make testing their intelligence difficult. With the caracaras, Ms. Harrington had the opposite problem. “I had to literally run defense,” she said, keeping curious birds away while another was being tested with a plexiglass puzzle box that challenged the caracaras to pull, push, swipe, poke or do whatever else they needed to do to access tasty bits of meat.
"Given how well they performed in this experiment, and their general boldness, striated caracaras represent a promising new model species for studying bird cognition. “They’re absolutely worth studying,” said Rachael Miller, a comparative psychologist at Anglia Ruskin University in England who was not involved with the research.
"Ms. Harrington suspects that caracaras evolved their cunning to cope with the tough life of the Falkland Islands, especially in winter, when curiosity and ingenuity could help a hungry caracara find a meal in lean times.Credit…Katie Harrington
"Not many scientists have investigated the brainpower of falcons, which are closely related to parrots and crows, the most famous feathered geniuses. Ms. Harrington attributes this to their bird of prey label, which implies a simple lifestyle of “perch, hunt, sleep, repeat.” But those who spend time with caracaras quickly learn that they don’t have just meat on their minds.
“'Falconers share these stories of how striated caracaras aren’t like the other birds that they’re trying to train,” she said. “You have to give striated caracaras dog toys to play with.”
***
"Ms. Harrington suspects that the caracaras evolved their cunning to cope with the tough conditions of life on the Falkland Islands. In the summer months, caracaras can feed on seabird colonies. But when those birds migrate in the winter, the falcons are “kind of like, out of luck,” Ms. Harrington said. Curiosity and ingenuity could help a hungry caracara find a meal in lean times.
"Their daring ways have gotten the falcons in trouble with the sheep farmers of the Falklands. “They have historically faced persecution,” Ms. Harrington said. “There actually used to be a bounty on their beaks.”
"These days, public perception has motivated legal protections for the birds. This is important because, while their brilliance may make them seem poised for world domination, striated caracaras have a limited range — they’re found only on the outer islands of the Falklands and Tierra del Fuego, at the southern end of South America."
Comment: another set of brilliant birds. And I thought I should see the penguins there.
Smart animals: dolphins steal crab bait
by David Turell , Wednesday, November 22, 2023, 18:46 (365 days ago) @ David Turell
The beat the trap's set p:
https://www.sciencealert.com/world-first-footage-shows-dolphins-pulling-off-a-clever-ba...
"Underwater cameras have captured a unique dolphin behavior off the coast of Western Australia in what scientists suspect is a world-first.
"For decades now, bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) and local crabbers in the Bunbury area, roughly 160 kilometers south of Perth, have been locked in a battle over bait.
"When a crab pot is dropped in Koombana Bay, the local dolphins swoop in to snag the dead fish, usually before any pincered arthropods can come crawling along.
"When wildlife conservationist Rodney Peterson heard of the problem, he feared for the dolphins' safety, given the risks of net entanglement.
"Peterson approached the Dolphin Discovery Center in Bunbury – a non-profit organization that funds education, research, and ecotourism projects – about the possibility of filming the thieves in action.
"Over two years, a team of filmmakers, conservationists, and researchers put their heads together to reveal "the secrets of the crab bait thieves" in Koombana Bay.
"Under the turquoise waves and on the sandy seafloor, local dolphins were caught on camera using their long snouts, jaws, and teeth to pull bait out of crab pots.
"Even when bait was attached underneath the pots or tucked away in boxes, it didn't take long for the dolphins to start flipping the traps over or opening the latched boxes.
"'We were stunned by what we saw," reads the Dolphin Discovery Center's caption posted along with the video on their social media, "and so were researchers Dr Simon Allen and Dr Delphine Chabanne."
***
"Alex Grossman, a volunteer filmmaker on the project, told Live Science that because only some dolphins partake in the behavior, stealing crab bait may be more for 'fun' or 'convenience' than for reasons of hunger.
"Two dolphins, in particular, seem to be leading the clever gang of bait thieves: a mother and her calf.
"'Calypso and Reggae, yeah, if it wasn't for those two, crabbing would be pretty simple, really," laughs Peterson in an explainer video shared by the Dolphin Discovery Center.
"Peterson and others are concerned that these dolphins are too clever for their own good. If the behavior continues to develop and spread, it may have more downsides than upsides for the local population.
"The crab bait that the dolphins are stealing is not all that nutritious and the risk of getting entangled or hurt by gear is high, especially as crabbers wrap their bait in more intricate ways.
"Luckily, researchers working in Western Australia have figured out a method that seems to be 'dolphin-safe', at least for the moment.
"'The bait is placed inside a strong mesh connected to the pot by metal hook," explains the Dolphin Discovery Center.
"'The animals scan the pot with echolocation and eyesight, learn it cannot be opened, and swim off. Leaving healthier dolphins, happy crabbers, and proof that coexistence can work."
"Hopefully that will stop Calypso and Reggae for good."
Comment: pretty brainy! See the photos.
Smart animals: parrots amazingly bright
by David Turell , Monday, January 29, 2024, 17:31 (298 days ago) @ David Turell
A review:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/parrot-intelligence-smart-brain-behavior
"Tool use is just one of parrots’ many talents. The birds are famous for emulating, and perhaps sometimes even understanding, human speech. Some species can also solve complex puzzles, like how to invade a secured trash bin, or practice self-control. Such abilities, on par with some primates, have earned parrots a place alongside members of the crow family as the “feathered apes.”
***
"Parrots’ most well-known talent is their affinity for spoken words. Proficiency varies among species, but African grays (Psittacus erithacus) are particularly good at picking up words and speaking clearly, Pepperberg says.
"These parrots can repeat up to 600 different words, researchers reported in 2022 in Scientific Reports. While some parrots simply mimic words, it is possible to train birds such as Alex, who had a vocabulary of more than 100 words, to communicate with people.
***
"Overall, 11 of the nearly 400 parrot species, or about 3 percent, have been documented in scientific studies using tools. Crowdsourcing from YouTube videos, Bastos and colleagues uncovered 17 more tool-using species, bringing the total to 28. After plotting the known tool users onto an evolutionary tree, the team estimates that 11 to 17 percent of parrot species may use tools.
***
"By the early 2000s, scientists had discovered that, in fact, parts of the avian brain are akin to the mammalian neocortex, the largest part of the cerebral cortex. Subsequent work has found that, compared with mammals, avian brains have “a higher total number of neurons for the same amount of skull space,” says neurobiologist and geneticist Erich Jarvis of Rockefeller University in New York City.
"Parrot brains are especially densely packed. Some species even have more neurons than some large-brained primates. This density may facilitate the formation of brain circuits not found in other animals, Jarvis says.
***
"Human brains transfer information from the cerebral cortex to the cerebellum — a “little brain” at the back of the skull that in part coordinates movement — through clusters of neurons known as the pontine nuclei. This connection is crucial for cognitive functions like learning how to talk or making tools.
"In birds, the similar pathway connects the avian equivalent of the neocortex to the cerebellum, Gutiérrez-Ibáñez and colleagues reported in 2018 in Scientific Reports. In addition to the pontine nuclei, birds shunt information through a second conduit, the SpM. It’s unclear what info gets transmitted via the SpM, Gutiérrez-Ibáñez says. But among birds, the parrot SpM is particularly large in size — a tantalizing hint that it may contribute to parrot intelligence.
***
"Parrots have acquired duplicate copies of various genes, some of which are known to be important for brain development and speech in people, says Mello, of Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. More copies could mean more ability. But parrot smarts may come down to how genes in the brain are regulated in addition to gaining more or new genes. Unlike other studied birds, parrots have genetic mutations in regions of DNA that provide instructions to switch genes on or off, perhaps to activate certain genes crucial for brain function and cognition.
"This is reminiscent of humans, Mello says. We have mutations in these same gene regulators while other apes don’t. In us, the changes allow the regulators to kick-start genes related to growing big forebrains, a region important for complex cognition. If the same is true in parrots, it could point to a shared evolutionary process for humanlike intelligence.
***
"A large brain relative to body size is one indication, albeit imperfect, that an animal might be intelligent. Parrots, as well as members of the crow family, ended up with some of the largest brains of any birds.
***
"It’s also possible that scientists are just missing the cognitive feats of wild parrots. It’s difficult to get wild parrot studies off the ground because the birds can fly away, and researchers can’t easily follow. (New Zealand’s kākāpō, the only flightless parrot, is the exception.) “Researching these highly mobile animals is a challenge in the wild.'”
Comment: I had to condense a huge article. This is far more than 'basal cognition' since it involves real brains.
Smart animals: parrots amazingly bright
by David Turell , Wednesday, January 31, 2024, 22:23 (295 days ago) @ David Turell
Another trick newly invented:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/parrots-move-branches-beakiation-animals-physics
"Parrots can move along thin branches using ‘beakiation’ The sidestep involves shuffling across the underside of a branch using both feet and the beak.
"To move along narrow branches, a parrot can hang from a branch with its beak, swing its body sideways and grab hold farther along with its feet. The newly described gait, dubbed beakiation, expands the birds’ locomotive repertoire and underscores how versatile their beaks are, researchers report January 31 in Royal Society Open Science.
"Parrots “are specialized for climbing and moving around in the trees,” says biomechanist Michael Granatosky of the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury. But, he wondered, “what would happen if you flip a bird upside down or make them go onto the tiniest [branch] possible?”
"So Granatosky and colleagues put four rosy-faced lovebirds (Agapornis roseicollis) to the test. Birds placed on a suspended bar just 2.5 millimeters in diameter realized that the best way to shuffle along it was to use their beaks and feet in a cyclical side-swinging motion. The birds traveled 10 centimeters per second on average during each stride (beak touchdown to beak touchdown).
“'This wasn’t something that the parrots were trained to do,” says NYIT biomechanist Edwin Dickinson. “This was an innovative solution to a novel problem.” Parrots are known to be brainiacs, after all (SN: 1/26/24).
"The bar was segmented into three pieces, with the central bar hung from an instrument that measures force. Using those readings and other measurements across 129 strides, the researchers calculated beakiation’s energy efficiency. The birds lost most of the energy they put into a swing: The exchange of potential and kinetic energy during the slow but pendulumlike movement recovered, on average, about 24 percent of the energy expended.
"For comparison, gibbons (Hylobatidae) recover nearly 80 percent of the energy put into a stride when they swing between branches using their arms. This movement, called brachiation, is fast and smooth. Beakiation, on the other hand, consists of careful movements that start and stop.
“'I see this as one of many different beak-assisted gaits that parrots use,” says biomechanist David Lee of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who was not involved in the study. The birds typically live in dense forests where flying can be difficult, so sometimes vines and fine branches provide the only paths, he says. “They’re navigating complex 3-D environments all the time.'”
Comment: As clever as ever. I view this as thoughtful, not instinct.
Smart animals: hornbills concepts ability
by David Turell , Monday, February 19, 2024, 16:12 (277 days ago) @ David Turell
Up to a stage five:
https://www.sciencealert.com/these-birds-score-as-high-as-primates-in-a-puzzling-cognit...
"Oriental pied hornbills (Anthracoceros albirostris) are one of the few with an advanced understanding, a new study confirms. It's a clever skill that comes in handy when nesting females seal themselves out of sight in tree hollows, relying on their mate to bring them food.
"To lay and tend to their eggs in safety, female Oriental pied hornbills brick themselves into their refuge with dollops of mud, poop, saliva, fruit, and bark. They leave only a narrow slit for the males' food deliveries.
"For any offspring inside to survive, male hornbills must understand that their mate still exists even when they can't see them.
"'From an evolutionary perspective, the ability to represent other animals and objects when they are out of sight provides great adaptive advantages in activities such as foraging and avoiding predation," National University of Singapore psychologists Ruitong Yao and Elias Garcia-Pelegrin explain in a new paper.
"Yet, aside from notoriously clever corvids and cheekily smart parrots, no other birds were previously known to have object permanence to the same extent as primates. While other bird species have been tested, they only made it to stage four of the six developmental stages seen in human children.
***
"At stage five, the birds watched a reward get placed under one cup, then moved to another cup. By indicating the cup that the treat ended up in, the birds demonstrated an understanding of visible displacement.
"All six birds tested by researchers were able to achieve this level of object permanence, receiving the treat as a well-deserved reward.
"But only three of the hornbills made it to stage six: invisible displacement. For this stage, the birds did not get to see the treat move from one cup to another. Instead, the treat was hidden under a small, red box and then moved underneath a larger cup. When the red box was taken out from underneath the cup and shown to be empty, some birds figured out that the treat must have been left behind under the last cup, even though they didn't directly see it happening.
"'Understanding invisible displacement is more intricate, involving the integration of various cognitive skills, including memory, spatial reasoning and logical inference," write Yao and Garcia-Pelegrin.
***
"'To the best of our knowledge, Oriental pied hornbills are the first bird species outside of the corvid and parrot families to display object permanence levels comparable to apes," Yao and Garcia-Pelegrin confirm.
"The team's findings suggest that hornbills may be an overlooked group of highly intelligent bird species. Further research is now required to see if this species of bird has other cognitive abilities that also rival those of parrots and corvids."
Comment: a small brain, packed with neurons, can handle amazing feats of cognition. The incidental event described in this story is their advanced form of protected nesting. That is quite a complex adaptation or instinct requiring a very inventive mind. No wonder their cognitive abilities tests so advanced.
Smart animals: bumblebees train each other
by David Turell , Wednesday, March 06, 2024, 18:43 (260 days ago) @ David Turell
From the review:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2420960-bumblebees-show-each-other-how-to-solve-co...
"Bumblebees can show each other how to solve a puzzle so hard they could not crack it alone. The finding suggests these insects might use advanced social learning that has previously only been demonstrated in humans.
"Prior research by Alice Bridges at Queen Mary University of London suggested bumblebees could show each other how to open a lever-based puzzle to access a sugary treat. And they preferred the solution learned from peers to one they figured out independently, as if the technique were a cultural trend.
"Now, Bridges has challenged the bees to a harder puzzle box that required them to manoeuvre a a blue lever and then a red one in sequence. On their own, no bees from three different colonies could figure it out – even after 12 to 14 days of trying.
"Then, the researchers taught nine of the bumblebees the key – although training them was so hard the critters initially refused to participate, says Bridges, until the humans provided extra sugary rewards along the way. When reintroduced in the colony, the upskilled bees passed their new knowledge onto five other bees that had never seen the puzzle box before.
“'Suddenly, [naive bees] were able to learn the whole thing from the trained demonstrator,” says Bridges. “When we could barely train [the demonstrators] to do it.”
"Before this, there was little proof that non-human animals could have cumulative culture, defined as the ability to learn skills from others that they wouldn’t be able to pick up over a lifetime of independent trial and error. This feat is what allowed humans to create complex knowledge systems such as modern medicine.
***
"But we shouldn’t laud bees for cumulative culture just yet, says Elisa Bandini at The University of Zürich. She’s not convinced this experiment shows a behavior so complex that individual bees could not develop it on their own: if the untaught bees had also received an extra reward like the trained bees did, they might have solved the puzzle solo."
Comment: Still an amazing skill.
Smart animals: spiders mimic ants
by David Turell , Saturday, March 23, 2024, 17:27 (244 days ago) @ David Turell
Partial orientation of body parts:
https://phys.org/news/2024-03-uncovers-rare-resin-fossil-spider.html
"'Ants are particularly good creatures for spiders to pretend to be—many animals find ants distasteful or dangerous to eat," said Poinar, who has a courtesy appointment in the Oregon State University College of Science. "Ants are aggressive in their own defense—they have a strong bite as well as a stinging venom, and they can call in dozens of nestmates as allies. Spiders, meanwhile, have no chemical defenses and are loners, which makes them vulnerable to being hunted by larger spiders, wasps and birds—predators that would rather avoid ants. So if a spider can be like an ant, it's more likely to be unbothered."
"Spiders that disguise themselves as ants live in many locations around the globe but until now most have been able to avoid detection from fossil researchers as well as predators. The specimen that Poinar describes, which he named Myrmarachne colombiana, was entombed in a type of fossilized resin known as copal.
"Copal is a less mature form of fossilized resin than amber, which is routinely dated to be 25 million or more years old. Still, copal can be up to 3 million years old.
"The age of the resin in this case, however, could not be determined, said Poinar, an international expert in using plant and animal life forms preserved in amber to learn about the biology and ecology of the distant past.
The resin block he was working with, which came from Medellin, Colombia, was too small to age-test without risk of damaging the spider inside. Poinar notes there is no record of any currently living ant-mimicking spider making its home in Colombia.
"'It is a challenge for spiders to accomplish this magical transformation to ants," he said. "Ants have six legs and two long antennae, while spiders have eight legs and no antennae."
"To get around those anatomical differences, Poinar said, spiders typically position their two front legs in a way that approximates the look of antennae. But number of legs and absence/presence of antennae are not the only characteristics differentiating an ant's appearance from a spider's.
""The abdomen and cephalothorax of spiders are closely attached, while in ants the equivalent of these body parts are separated by a narrow segment called the petiole," Poinar said. "And there are many other lesser structures that need to be modified in spiders for them to closely resemble ants. How is this accomplished? Most scientists say it begins with spider mutation, adaptation and then natural selection.
"'However, I think there is some spider reasoning and intelligence involved too since the spiders often model their body changes after specific ants in the same environment," he said. "In the early days, we were told that all habits of insects were the result of instincts, but that is no longer the case."
"Several groups of spiders have developed the ability to look and behave like various types of ants, he added. There are also spiders that try to blend in as other insects, such as flies, beetles and wasps.
"Most of the copycat spiders belong to a few families of hunting spiders, including Salticidae or jumping spiders. The specimen in the Colombian copal appears to be a jumping spider."
Comment: dhw will be pleased with Poinar's theory. I think it is a developed instinct over time with trial and error involved.
Smart animals: sperm whale poop defense
by David Turell , Monday, March 25, 2024, 15:41 (242 days ago) @ David Turell
Used against Orcas:
https://www.livescience.com/animals/whales/sperm-whales-drop-bubble-of-poo-off-western-...
"Sperm whales blasted a "big dark bubble" of poop to prevent an impending orca attack off the southern coast of Western Australia.
"Scientists witnessed the clever defense strategy unfold Tuesday (March 19) during a tourist excursion in Bremer Canyon, a whale-watching hotspot off the coast between Albany and Hopetoun. They described seeing a "cloud of diarrhea" permeate the water, and this rarely seen defense mechanism seemed to help the sperm whale pod escape what could have been a fatal attack by at least 30 killer whales, ABC News Australia reported.
"'It's called defense defecation," Jennah Tucker, a marine biologist with Oceans Blueprint, a marine and environmental sciences research organization, who was on the charter boat, told ABC. When the animals defecate, she said, they pass their huge tails through their poop to drive away or confuse attackers.
"As the event unfolded, onlookers noticed a large, "dark bubble" pop up to the water's surface. At first, they thought it was blood from one of the sperm whales, potentially a small calf. But when the team later reviewed footage of the plume, they realized it was actually whale poop.
"'Because [a] sperm whale's diet consists mostly of squid, they actually have this really reddish colored poo," she said.
"In this demonstration of defense defecation, the pod formed a circle with their heads together, and the whales fanned their tails in unison — forcing their excrement toward the unsuspecting orcas.
"'This is called a rosette, another defensive mechanism they use when they're under attack," Tucker said.
***
"There have been only a few documented instances of orca attacks on sperm whales, largely due to the sheer size differential between the two species.
"'Sperm whales are considered an apex predator, and historically, it was thought that they were pretty much immune to killer whale attacks," Tucker said. "It's actually pretty adventurous for orcas to try to take on sperm whales. They're punching above their weight.'"
Comment: this type of coordinated behavior looks certainly like a learned reaction which became an instinct.
Smart animals: fluttering wings send signals
by David Turell , Monday, March 25, 2024, 18:52 (241 days ago) @ David Turell
In Japanese tit pairs:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/fluttering-wings-bird-body-language
"Researchers have observed Japanese tits making what they call an “after you” gesture: A bird flutters its wings, cuing its mate to enter the nest first. The finding, reported in the March 25 Current Biology, “shows that Japanese tits not only use wing fluttering as a symbolic gesture, but also in a complex social context involving a sender, receiver and a specific goal, much like how humans communicate,” says biologist Toshitaka Suzuki of the University of Tokyo.
***
"Suzuki and Norimasa Sugita, a researcher at Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science, observed eight mated pairs make 321 trips to their nests. A pattern quickly emerged: Females fluttered their wings far more often than males, with six females shaking it up while only one male did. Females almost always entered the nest first — unless they fluttered their wings. Then the males went first.
"The birds also “never flutter their wings when they visit the nest alone,” Suzuki says. Fluttering happens only when birds are in the company of their mates, and they seem to direct their fluttering at their mate rather than at the nest entrance. This observation suggests that the Japanese tits aren’t pointing — a simple gesture that’s been seen in birds, like magpies and ravens, before, and is meant only to direct attention — but rather are communicating a complex message.
“'I might think of this as an imperative gesture – a movement that communicates to another individual that they need to do something,” says primatologist Kirsty Graham of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
“'It’s really exciting to uncover meaningful gestures in another species,” she adds. “I expect that we’ll probably find gesturing to be more widespread than previously thought.”
"'Gesturing by the nest instead of calling may help the birds avoid attracting predators, Suzuki says. He next wants to find out how wing fluttering fits into the tits’ larger communication repertoire.'"
Comment: these guys are not "bird brains". Once again this appears to be a learned practice which became an instinct.