h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Apparently bulls are colour blind. And during the first part of the bullfight the matador actually uses a cape that is pink on one side, yellow on the other. He then switches to a red cape to make the kill. All symbolic colours for humans, the bull doesn't know the difference, he'll just attack anything waved in front of his face.


az

Thank you

A rag to a bull, then.

Damn az, I thought I was going to have to day off from serious rants


"pseudoscientific" seems apt to me. The term 'spiteful' has no place being attributed to species, not in science at least.

The use of 'spiteful' by scientists shows the huge degree of bias involved in their thinking, and it amazes me how much they get away with this kind of thing (although it's good to see The Guardian taking the piss).

Mainstream science still thinks that animals don't feel emotion. So how come it's ok for them to see a species as spiteful? I think it's because of the Western reductionist world view that most of us get socialised into, and that mainstream science refuses to acknoweldge as perceptual bias.

Cultures that have different perceptual biases may provide us with a broader understanding of life. For instance some indigenous cultures believe that it is important to honour the animal you are about to kill. What this practice does is keep that tribe grounded in the fact that all life is interconnected and it pays to respect this fact. Compare this to the Western duality of animals don't matter (hence practices like vivisection, factory farming, trophy hunting) and it's wrong to ever kill or hurt animals (veganism).

In case this seems irrelevant to a discussion about science, bear in mind that the interconnectedness that indigenous peoples have been acknowledging for millenia is now starting to be described by science (it's taken us a while to catch up again). Also there are scientists looking at concepts of cooperation in nature (although this hasn't made it to the mainstream yet).

>>When, for instance, E coli bacteria find food is running low some switch to "suicide mode" - they explode in a brief shower of toxins that can kill all bacteria nearby.
<<

I don't see this as being spiteful at all. Spite is an emotion with a motivation to harm for the sake to harm. Bacteria having a capacity to manage their population when stressed makes total sense to me. I only wish humans had adapted their own species "suicide mode" to match our apparent intelligence.

Indigenous culture might see such behaviour of bacteria as being for the good of the species and it fits with the philosophy of the give away (all of life is dependant on the giving away of other life forms).

There has been some science that parallels this philosophy. I'll see it I cna find some links when I get the time.

The important thing is to recognise that one can take a phenomena in nature and look at it in a number of ways, and that this will give us a range of understandings. The reductionist approach of Western science (reducing things to their apparent smallest parts and then assuming we know about the whole) is useful for certain things but it doesn't help us much with understanding life as a whole, or complex systems.

The dolphin article further illustrates just how stupid some science can be. Anyone who has spent involved time with animals knows that they display all sorts of behaviour akin to altruism. The only people who don't seem to know this are those that appear to be disconnected from their own emotional/intuitve/spiritual lives.

Feel better now?

Yes, thanks Although I didn't feel quite as rantful as I did the other day when I first read the link in another thread.

Sorry to interupt your flow of conversation, but why not take a look at this then tell others about it.

"If everyone who wants to see an end to poverty, hunger and suffering speaks out, then the noise will be deafening. Politicians will have to listen."
Desmond Tutu.

If you want to help make poverty history click here: http://www.makepovertyhistory.org/... They're not after your money so do take a look.

Many thanks

Mainstream science doesn't accept that animals feel emotions? Huh? Strikes me that you're just setting up a straw man to knock down. Certainly if there's anything that's gone against "western duality," then its scientific research. What discovery is more profound for our self-understanding than that we're just a bunch of jumped-up chimps?

I don't think there's much in the title 'the spiteful gene'. Perhaps whoever wrote it didn't know the word 'nepotism' or didn't think 'the nepotistic gene' would've been quite so catchy?

Round to Azahar: Humans ourselves get all protective over anything small and fluffy. People go "awwwwww," at plastic ducks. No reason why I can't go the other way (for the live animals, not the plastic stuff), so I like your line of arguement.

Um, which line of argument was that, Bouncy?

I agree with you that kea (hi kea!) was incorrect in stating that mainstream science doesn't accept that animals feel emotions. Heck, anyone who has ever had a cat or a dog knows this to be untrue. In fact, I recently read a 'scientific' article about treating pets for emotional trauma.

Meanwhile, Catholics (and perhaps other religious folk) believe that animals don't have souls. Which is perhaps why bullfighting is considered an 'art form' in Spain, rather than the unfair public slaughtering of a magnificent beast.

The only justification for bullfighting seems to be that these animals are specifically bred for the ring - they wouldn't exist otherwise. Then they live like kings for about five years at great expense to the breeders. And then they have their fifteen minutes of torture before being killed in the ring.

Compared to factory farmed animals, many of which live in tortuous, inhumane situations their entire short lives before being slaughtered, this doesn't seem so bad to me. Mind you, I could never go to see a bullfight myself. Watched one on television once and ended up bursting into tears.


az

We seem to be reserving negatives like "spiteful" for human use only. No other species need apply.

I think that is probably true, Recumbentman. It seems to be only humans who remember past pain and seek retribution. Are there any documented cases of other animals actually taking revenge?

az

An elephant never forgets.

Hmmmm. . .

Most animals can remember past hurts and respond to future acts of kindess with doubt. But taking revenge? Do elephants actually do this?


az

http://itsa.ucsf.edu/~snlrc/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/elephantus.html

In 153 BC, there also was a measure of revenge, as Appian relates in his account of the wars in Spain. The Romans had taken elephants right up to the wall of a besieged town when

"one of the elephants was struck on the head with a large falling stone, when he became savage, uttered a loud cry, turned upon his friends, and began to destroy everything that came in his way, making no longer any distinction between friend and foe. The other elephants, excited by his cries, all began to do the same, trampling the Romans under foot, wounding them and tossing them this way and that. This is always the way with elephants when they are frightened. Then they take everyone for foes; wherefore some people call them the common enemy, on account of their fickleness."

Roman History (VI. 46)

Chimpanzees certainly do cruel and calculating dirty tricks on each other. They also form alliances and then abuse them. Both sexes in many species cheat on their long-term mates.

Revenge may be one of the activities they indulge in, but I've lent my copy of The Blank Slate to Chaiwallah and can't look it up now. But perhaps revenge is not the only spiteful activity to be taken into account.

That description of the elephant sounds not so much like revenge as panic. Calling it revenge is very anthropomorphic. It is hard to tell if the 'friends' referred to are other elephants or the Romans. Maybe the elephants finally had enough of being roped into stupid human activitites and decided to revolt


My statement about animals, emotion and science comes in part from reading some of Jeffrey Masson's work. Masson is a psychologist and academic who now writes general books on animals and emotion. His work has been criticised for his belief that animals feel emotion (although he is controversial for other reasons too). Here is an excerpt from an interview with one of his co-authors, Susan McCarthy:

>>>
KP: Why has there been this long gap that suggests there has been very little study on animal emotions?

SM: There seem to be many reasons. A major one is the fear of anthropomorphism, which is ascribing human emotion to things or creatures that can't feel them. So the word contains an assumption. Scientists speak of committing anthropomorphism as if it were a sin. And to accuse a scientist of being anthropomorphic is very serious indeed. We think that many scientists bend much too far over backward to avoid this sin.

KP: If scientists were reading about the subject of animals and emotions in Darwin's day, wouldn't the natural curiousity of a scientist lead one to further explore the circumstances around animal emotions?

SM: Well, one factor is that when people study the unsuspected capacities of animals, thev're often beguiled by the subject of intelligence and sometimes consciousness, and never get past these subjects to that of emotion. Emotion is also a kind of sticky area. Quite a few scientists find it embarassing. In the matter of weeping, for example, human weeping has been very little studied.

KP: Are you suggesting that there has been some level of professional pressure placed upon scientists, because it would lead one to be castigated in one's own professional field?

SM: I think so. To do research on emotion would make one less liable to receive grant money (emotion in animals, that is). It's not the case that someone has done a study that's supposed to prove that animals don't have emotions. Instead, it's a taboo of scientific culture, a taboo that extends to words, so that when speaking of animals one says "bond" rather than "love", "slight reaction" rather than "fear", and so forth.
>>>

The full arcticle is worth reading, especially for the bits about how Darwin saw emotion in animals.

From what I remember, some scientists accept that animals feel things like fear. But they argue that it's not a real emotion like it is in humans, that it is more of an instinctual behaviour.

And it probably depends on which discipline is doing the studying eg psychology or neurology etc (I suspect the psychoneuroendocrinologists would have an interesting take on this, as they seem to be doing the most pertinent hard science on human emotion and psyche at the moment).

But my understanding is that mainstream scientific thought definitely hasn't accepted that animals feel emotion, which is why Masson's work and other's is still controversial.

I know my statement was a generalisation, and obviously there are individual scientists who don't think like that (or feel like that), and I'm sure there are some research projects looking at animal emotion. They're just not very common.

>> Heck, anyone who has ever had a cat or a dog knows this to be untrue<<

az, I think you'd be quite shocked by what some (probably most) scientists in the field are saying about animals. I know I can't get my head around how anyone can think that animals dont't have emotions, but there are plenty of research scientists who think exactly that.

Part of the problem is that research scientists often do very cruel experiments on animals, and I suspect they have to distance themselves so far from reality in order to not be affect by the animals' suffering. If science accepted that animals feel in a way similar to humans it would be very difficult to justify the way that we treat animals.


In terms of the spite thing, the point I was making was that (a) it's anthropomorphic to ascribe such a concept to bacteria and (b) it's not useful to ascribe it to whole species, and that in doing so it demonstrates an unacknowledged (and therefore undermining) perceptual bias.

I think that animals are much more intelligent than we give them credit for generally, and I have no problem accepting that chimpanzees engage in the kind of behaviour described, although again I think we need to be careful as to how we view what they are doing.

eg >> Both sexes in many species cheat on their long-term mates.<<

Do you mean that they have sex with other than their long term partner? Isn't 'cheating' a value judgement based on human notions of fidelity? How do we know that animals experience this act as something akin to what humans call cheating (eg deceitful, hurtful etc)? Maybe it means something entirely different to them.

I wouldn't be surprised at Appian being old-fashioned in his anthropomorphism; he was writing in the 2nd century.

But I believe that 'emotion' is applicable to animals, and cheating too. Azahar may agree; you can recognise shame and deceptive behaviour in pets. Studies of primates show deception being practised wholesale.

It is too great a generalisation to say what science recognises; there are schools of thought about behaviour that are in fierce conflict, and disagree enormously.

While I personally have little doubt that animals (at least higher animals) experience emotions, this is not in fact something that can be *determined* by scientific study. We can observe behaviour, and we cn observe some changes in brain chemistry/activity, but we can't actually observe the emotions themselves. So this isn't, strictly speaking, a scientific question.

Also, while animals probably experience emotions, it is unlikely that they reflect upon and conceptualise them in the way humans do, so it is a moot (but not scientific) point as to how far we should anthropormorphise animal behaviours. Even in human development I suspect the behaviours come first, and the concepts follow in their wake.

Noggin

"So this isn't, strictly speaking, a scientific question."

Absolutely -- it is a philosophical question. The fact that emotions can only be inferred applies equally to humans. Motivation is very hard to infer in the more interesting cases; in the case of morality and religion I quickly give up altogether.

However it has always been done and no doubt will continue. Evolutionary ethics gives us strong clues for what animals' and peoples' motivation is *likely* to be.

I agree with kea that the elephant's reaction sounds more like panic than revenge to me.

<>

Yes, I do agree with this as I've seen my cats doing something 'naughty' and kind of looking over their shoulder to see if they're about to get caught. My cat Lua used to actually scratch the sofa while looking rather defiantly at me as if to say - 'so, whaddaya gonna do about it, eh?'

Though I wonder if pets end up demonstrating 'human' behaviour simply from living with us and picking up these habits.


az

Animal studies are showing more and more that a lot of what we call "human nature" is just nature.

I think that is probably quite true, Recumbentman. Thing is, us humans are so ego-centric that we think that everything revolves around us.


az