"Zi is not a fish, anzhi fish is happy", "Sub is not me, Anzhi I do not know the joy of fish", this passage of Haoliang's argument, if we only make sophistry, it will be a bit disappointing the philosophical wisdom of Hui and Zhuang's second son; it involves the important issue of the demarcation of the subject-object boundary. This problem is particularly evident in the study of animal behavior: dichotomy helps to establish an objective perspective free from subjective thinking, and it also creates unhelpful thinking barriers due to artificial demarcation. It is difficult to say to what extent it embodies a psychological superiority or sense of superiority of man; to what extent it promotes people's understanding of animal behavior, or hinders the judgment of the consistency of animal and human behavior, and there is no clear conclusion. Frans de Waal's Book of All Wisdom presents various methodological concepts and value judgments in the study of animal behavior, and may provide us with some clues to get rid of the artificial limitations of the corner.
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Written by | Frans de Waal
There was a time when scientists thought that behavior arose either because of learning or because of biological principles. They attribute human behavior to learning, animal behavior to biological principles, and the middle ground between the two is almost nothing. This dichotomy is false (in fact, in all species, behavior is the result of both). But gradually, a third explanation emerged: cognition. Cognition is about the type of information a creature collects and how that organism processes and applies that information. For example, star crows can remember that they store thousands of nuts, wolf bees will make a positioning flight before leaving their holes, and chimpanzees can learn the availability of what they play with effortlessly. Without any reward or punishment, the animal gathers knowledge that will be used in the future, from how to find nuts in the spring, to how to return to their own holes, to how to get bananas. The role of learning is obvious, but what makes cognition special is that it puts learning in the right place. Learning is nothing more than a tool that enables animals to gather information. And the world is like the Internet, with an unbelievable amount of information that makes it easy for animals to drown in the swamp of information. Biological cognition narrows the scope of the information flow, so that biology knows the specific correlations it needs to know. These needs are determined by the natural history of the creature.
Many organisms have similar cognitive abilities. The more scientists make discoveries, the more ripple effects we can notice. Some abilities were thought to be unique to humans, or at least to humans (a small family of primates, including humans and apes). But eventually people often find that these abilities are widespread. Fortunately, apes are clearly intellectual, and the traditional discovery was made first and foremost in studies of them. After the apes broke the dike between humans and other animals in the animal kingdom, the floodgates kept opening, encompassing one species after another.
Paper-making wasps live in small, hierarchical populations. This hierarchical life is the price at which they can identify each individual. They distinguish between different individuals by the dark and yellow markings on the face. Another venomous species that is very closely related to them does not have such a hierarchical social life and does not have facial recognition capabilities. This suggests that cognition is quite dependent on ecological needs.
Ripples of cognition spread from apes to monkeys, to dolphins, elephants and dogs, and then to birds, reptiles, fish, and sometimes invertebrates. We cannot confuse this historical process with the step-by-step view of putting humanities at the top. I prefer to see this historical process as a pond of possibilities that is constantly expanding. In this pond, some animals, such as octopuses, may be as cognitive as mammalian or bird-like.
Think of facial recognition, which was initially thought to be a unique human capability. Today, both apes and monkeys have joined this "non-face-blind upper class." Every year when I come to The Bugle Zoo in Arnhem, some chimpanzees who have seen me more than 30 years ago still remember me. They recognized my face from the crowd and screamed with joy to say hello to me. Primates not only recognize faces, but faces also have a special meaning to them. Just like humans, they exhibit an "inversion effect": when a face is placed upside down, they are unrecognizable. This effect is specific to the face. The orientation of a map does not affect their ability to identify other objects, such as plants, birds, or houses.
When we tested the monkeys with a touch screen, we noticed that they clicked on various images at random, but when the first faces appeared, they were frightened. They hugged themselves tightly, whimpering, unwilling to touch the portrait. Could it be that putting their hands on their faces violates some kind of social taboo, so they treat this face with more respect than other pictures? When they recovered from this period of hesitation, we showed them some portraits of their companions and some strange monkeys. To inexperienced humans, all of these portraits look similar, because the monkeys in the portraits are of the same species. But the monkeys easily distinguished the portraits. They tap the screen gently to tell which monkeys they know and which are unfamiliar. We humans take ourselves for granted that we have facial recognition capabilities, but these monkeys have to connect two-dimensional graphics of pixels to a living individual in the real world, and they do. The scientific community concludes that facial recognition is a cognitive skill that primates specialize in. But soon after that conclusion, the first ripples of cognition arrived: crows, sheep, and even venomous were found to have facial recognition capabilities.
What a face means to a crow is unknown. In the natural life of crows, they have many ways to distinguish each other, such as how they call, how they fly, how they are sized, and so on. Therefore, faces are not necessarily the way they use to distinguish between different individuals. But crows' eyes are extremely sharp, so it's likely that they'll notice that the easiest way to identify humans is through faces. Lorenz recorded crows harassing specific people and was convinced of crows' ability to take revenge. So whenever he tried to catch his jackdaws and tie them up, he would disguise himself with special clothing (jackdaws and crows belong to the same family of crows. Birds in this family are very intelligent and also include jays, magpies and ravens). John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, has captured many crows, so the birds have little respect for him. Whenever he walked around, the birds would scream at him and "airdrop" bird droppings, echoing their "murder" name Translator's Note: In English, a flock of crows is also called "a murder of crows," which literally translates to "murder of crows."
"We don't know how they chose us among more than forty thousand people who scurried along bare paths like two-legged ants. But they can tell us apart. And the nearby crow slipped away after making a cry of disgust that we heard. But these crows are different, and they walk wildly among our students and colleagues—people who have never captured, measured, chained, or otherwise humiliated them. ”
Mazluv is preparing to test the crow's facial recognition ability. The tool he uses is a rubber mask, similar to the one we wear on Halloween. After all, crows may also identify specific people by their body shape, hair, or clothing. But through masks, you can move one person's "face" to another, thus separating out the specific role of the face. Mazluv's "Angry Birds" experiment consisted of catching crows with one mask and then having colleagues walk around wearing that mask or another control mask that was not involved in the capture. The crows easily remembered the trapper's mask and apparently didn't like it. Interestingly, the contrast mask we used was the face of Vice President Dick Cheney, which caused a much stronger negative reaction among students on campus than among crows. Not only will birds that have never been caught be able to recognize the "hunter" mask, but they will harass the person wearing it a few years later. They must have noticed the hateful reactions of their companions, and thus led to a great distrust of specific human members. As Mazluv explains: "Almost no eagle treats crows kindly, but for humans, crows have to classify us as individuals." And they are clearly capable of doing that. ”
Crows often impress us, and sheep go a step further – they are able to remember each other's faces. British scientists, led by Keith Kendrick, taught sheep to recognize the differences between 25 pairs of sheep faces. For each pair of faces, the sheep receives a reward when they choose one of them; when they choose the other, there is no reward. To us, all of these faces look strikingly similar, but the sheep learned and remembered these 25 distinctions and remembered them for up to two years. When sheep do this, they use the same brain regions and neural circuits as humans, with some neurons responding specifically to faces but not to other stimuli. When sheep see the contrasting pictures they remember—they make calls at those pictures as if the individuals in the pictures were present—the neurons are activated. The scientists published the results of the study under the subtitle "Sheep are not stupid after all." I'm against that title because I don't believe any animal is stupid. The researchers have compared sheep's facial recognition abilities to this ability of primates, and have speculated that a flock of sheep is nothing more than a featureless mass in our eyes, but in fact different sheep are very different. It also means that sometimes people mix multiple flocks of sheep together, and this can cause more pain to sheep than we realize.
After making primate chauvinists cramped and uneasy, the scientific community used wasps to further advance the research process. The Northern Paper Wasp, common in the American Midwest, has a well-organized society. The society has a strict hierarchy, in which queen bees have a higher status than all worker bees. Because of the fierce competition in society, every wasp needs to know exactly what it is about its social status. The first queen lays most of the eggs, followed by the second queen, and so on. In this small population, population members were aggressive not only on wasps outside the population, but also on the females in the population whose facial markings had been altered by the experimenters. They distinguish each other by the black and yellow markings on each female's face, which vary greatly from one individual to another. American scientists Michael Sheehan and Elizabeth Tibbetts tested individual identification in paper-making wasps and found that paper-making wasps have the same specializing abilities as primates and sheep. Paper wasps can recognize the faces of their kind at a great distance, but they are not so well recognizable for other visual stimuli. There is a wasp that is closely related to them, and there is only one queen in one of its populations. This wasp is much less able to distinguish the face than the paper wasp. This kind of wasp, which has only one queen bee, has basically no hierarchy in its society, and the faces of different individuals are more similar. They do not require individual identification.
If these so different species in the animal kingdom have evolved facial recognition capabilities, then you may wonder how the abilities of these species are related to each other. Wasps don't have brains the size of primates and sheep, they have only a few small groups of ganglia, so the way they can identify faces is certainly different from that of primates and sheep. Biologists have been tireless in emphasizing the difference between mechanism and function: it is extremely common for animals to achieve the same function through different ways (mechanisms). But out of respect for cognition, when people question the thinking abilities of animals with larger brains and point out that "lower animals" can do similar things, this difference in mechanism and function is sometimes forgotten. Skeptics like to ask, "If wasps can do it, then what's so great about it?" "This competition to the bottom has given us pigeons trained to jump into small boxes.
Evolutionary chemistry distinguishes between homology (traits of both species derived from their common ancestors) and homogeneity (two species independently evolving similar traits). The human hand and the bat wing are homologous , as can be discerned from the same arm bones and five phalanges , both derived from the forelimbs of vertebrates. In addition, insect wings and bat wings are the same. They have the same function, but have different origins and are the result of convergent evolution.
To disparage Koehler's experiments with chimpanzees; it also hinders the recognition of intelligence in animals other than primates, in order to question the continuity of minds between humans and other humanoids. The underlying idea behind all this is a linear cognitive ladder, and the idea that since we rarely assume that "lower animals" have complex cognitions, it is unreasonable to make such a hypothesis in "higher animals." It's as if there's only one way to achieve a particular outcome!
This is not the case. Nature is full of counterexamples. One example I've seen firsthand is the Amazonian lidfish, also known as discus fish, in pairs. They have behaviors similar to mammal feeding. Once the juveniles have absorbed the nutrients in the yolk, they will gather on the sides of the parent's body and gnaw at the mucus of the parent's body. This pair of adults secretes more mucus than usual to feed the juveniles. For a period of about a month, juveniles enjoy this nutrient supply and protection until their parents "wean" them — every time they get closer, they avoid it. No one would use this fish to illustrate how complex or simple mammalian breastfeeding behavior is, because it is clear that the fish behaves very differently from the mechanism of mammalian breastfeeding, and the similarity between the two is only in the feeding and nurturing of young offspring. In biology, mechanisms and functions are always as yin and yang: they interact and are inseparable, but to confuse them would be a great mistake.
To understand how evolution exerts its magic in evolutionary trees, we usually use a pair of concepts: homology and analogy. Homology refers to similar traits derived from the same ancestor. Human hands and bat wings are homologous because both derive from the forelimbs of their common ancestors. The number of bones in both is exactly the same, and this is where the evidence lies. Homogeneity, on the other hand, occurs when animals that are very distantly related independently evolve in the same direction, an evolution called convergent evolution. The parental feeding behavior of discus fish and the breastfeeding behavior of mammals are the same, but certainly not homologous, because fish and mammals do not have any common ancestors that feed offspring. Another example is the fact that dolphins, ichthyosaurs (an extinct marine reptile) and fish are all very similar in appearance because they are in environments that require streamlined bodies and fins to provide speed and maneuverability. Since dolphins, ichthyosaurs, and fish do not share a common ancestor in aquatic life, their appearances are of the same kind. This line of thinking can also be used to study behavior. The sensitivity of wasps and primates to faces evolved independently of each other, out of the need to identify each partner in the group. This synergy is breathtaking.
The power of convergent evolution is staggering. It installed echo positioning systems for bats and whales, wings for insects and birds, and parabidos for primates and possums. Convergence has also led to species that are geographically distantly separated by striking similarities, such as armadillos and pangolins wearing hard armor, hedgehogs and porcupines both defending themselves with thorns, and Tasmanian tigers and coyotes using hunting weapons that are very similar. There is even one primate that looks a lot like an alien E.T., and that's the Malagasy finger lemur. They have extremely long middle fingers (used to knock on wood, find holes and dig out bugs from them). This trait is also found in marsupial mammals in New Guinea, the long-toed possum. These species are genetically separated by 18,000 miles, but they have evolved the same function. Therefore, we should not be surprised to find similar cognitive and behavioral traits in species of different eras and continents. Precisely because the diffusion of cognitive ripples is not limited by the evolutionary tree, it is common—the same ability to appear almost anywhere it is needed. This is not a counter-evidence of cognitive evolution, as some have claimed, but rather a complete fit with the way evolution occurs—either through the inheritance of a common ancestor or through adaptation to similar circumstances.
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