If animals were "uplifted" to high intelligence, would they behave like humans?

Albedo said:

Yes, all of the above.

And don't forget that tigers are solitary animals, unlike humans, who evolved from highly social primates. That difference in sociality alone would make a sapient tiger act very differently to us.

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this, times a thousand million percent

Humans are great apes. We are so "great ape" it's not even funny. When you look at generalised primate social systems and more specifically at chimp and bonobo social systems, then watch humans interact in pretty much any context, you can see clearly just how much of our ways of behaving come from the fact we're apes. Office politics? It's because we're apes. Flame wars on the internet? It's because we're primates.

If humans go extinct and leave our evolutionary niche vacant*, it's definitely possible that another intelligent animal steps in and eventually becomes technologically advanced like us. I like to think it'd be the corvids as they have the vocal capacity to imitate human speech and can manipulate objects very adeptly with their beaks and can build stuff like nests already. To be honest, I think they probably already have a lot more language than they get credit for. But even if/when they become intelligent enough, they'll retain the characteristics of the group they evolved as.

*to be honest though, I can't see that happening without us taking vast numbers of other species with us. If our civilisation completely collapses, then the isolated hunter-gatherers that never abandoned their traditional ways will still be able to survive unless we've fucked up the environment that badly that they can no longer hunt and gather anything (which brings us back to taking huge numbers of other species with us). I think the scenario in one of the Red Dwarf books - where cockroaches are the only thing that survived and an adaptive radiation of cockroach descendants has led to large, intelligent cockroach descendants being the dominant species - is probably the most likely outcome.

Ravioli said:

I never denied they were capable of good, but I refuse to do the whole warm fuzzy lovey-dovey "animals are so much better than humans" thing. Humans are capable of good, too and yet we insist on inflicting cruelty on the world.

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Totally agree. For starters, humans are animals. We have an animal nature because we're animals. Human evolution over the last couple of million years has favoured co-operation and reciprocal altruism (there's evidence that humans from 1.8 million years ago looked after vulnerable members of their group), but primates generally can be nasty bullies. You know that horrible thing where all the kids in a class gang up against one kid? That's dyed in the wool primate behaviour. The one being picked on is called the "omega" by primatologists.

Baboons are nasty, evil bullying gits. I'm so glad I'm not a baboon. If you take what's nasty about humans but remove what's good, you're kind of left with baboons.

Humans are probably the kindest and most altruistic of all the primates. We're good at keeping our primate nature in check and adults will usually try to step in and stop kids from making some poor kid the omega (notably not always though, it depends how well educated and confident the adults are). So ingrained is our altruistic nature that we are shocked and horrifed by all the humans who aren't altruistic, hence getting things out of proportion and saying things like "I've lost all faith in humanity" and believing that everyone is basically horrible. Someone's personal experience (e.g. if they've been forced into omega status most of their life) will obviously have a massive effect on how they view other people. But don't lose sight of how much good is done by so many people, like the emergency services workers and volunteers who risk their life to save people and the fact most people will help others in most situations, and fears for their own personal safety is the usual reason for not helping and not stepping in, rather than just plain not caring. And when it comes to psycopaths, their lack of humanity (the word for that is so fundamentally connected to human nature that we call it "humanity" and the opposite "inhumane") makes them stand out.

That's not to say that humans don't do evil things as well... a saying from prophet Muhammad comes to mind "humans can be better than the angels or worse than the animals" (commenting on humans capacity to do amazing good or horrific evil, with the implication that humans can choose between the two and understand the effect their actions has on the world, but angels and animals can't - Muslims believe that angels and animals don't have free will and angels can only obey God (therefore always good, but not by free will) and animals obey instinct (so can't be considered responsible if they do bad things)).

Highly intelligent animals probably will develop a similar capacity to understand the impact their actions have and choose between doing things that help rather than harm. It's also likely that some degree of altruism is necessary in order to develop to the level we're at. Solitary animals don't have the same level of intelligence as social animals, because being social demands higher cognitive functions (remembering individuals and past social interactions) and there's no reason at all for solitary animals to evolve language. Things that are good for maintaining a cohesive society in which knowledge is shared will be selected for. So if another animal goes down the same evolutionary path as humans then becoming somewhat more altruistic may well be part of that.

I chose option 3. Though I would agree that it's tough to even talk about what we mean by "increasing intelligence" when it's applied to non-human species. Intelligence is such a vague and multi-faceted concept.

Much of what we mean by "human intelligence" is tied up in the concept of verbal or written language. Some species, like dolphins, do have languages which are learned (rather than instinctive) to some degree, but they're so different from our own languages that it's hard to judge them by the same standards or determine how complex they are.

Another question might be, "What would happen if non-human animals suddenly had the capacity to learn, understand and communicate in human languages as fluently as humans do?"

As an aside, the "humans are uniquely evil and capable of higher levels of cruelty" thing has always struck me as just another form of anthropocentrism. We're animals. We're not morally better or morally worse than other species. We are, arguably, not even the most powerful or most successful species on the planet, depending on how you define "powerful" or "successful." The tardigrade is tougher than us. Cockroaches are more prolific. Bacteria keep mutating and getting smarter than our latest antibiotics; they may beat us in the end.

You could argue that because of our technology, humans can cause planetary devastation on a level that most other species couldn't, which is probably true. But I think if it gets to that point, we'll wipe ourselves out long before we ruin the entire planet. Tardigrades can live for like ten years with no food or water and can survive for days in outer space. They can surely survive anything we can dish out.

I often wonder what we'd be like if we were genetically and/or socially closer to Bonobos than Chimpanzees (minus the pedophile component of course).

The Otter said:

I chose option 3. Though I would agree that it's tough to even talk about what we mean by "increasing intelligence" when it's applied to non-human species. Intelligence is such a vague and multi-faceted concept.

Much of what we mean by "human intelligence" is tied up in the concept of verbal or written language. Some species, like dolphins, do have languages which are learned (rather than instinctive) to some degree, but they're so different from our own languages that it's hard to judge them by the same standards or determine how complex they are.

Another question might be, "What would happen if non-human animals suddenly had the capacity to learn, understand and communicate in human languages as fluently as humans do?"

It'd be just like if grey parrots existed?

As an aside, the "humans are uniquely evil and capable of higher levels of cruelty" thing has always struck me as just another form of anthropocentrism. We're animals. We're not morally better or morally worse than other species. We are, arguably, not even the most powerful or most successful species on the planet, depending on how you define "powerful" or "successful." The tardigrade is tougher than us. Cockroaches are more prolific. Bacteria keep mutating and getting smarter than our latest antibiotics; they may beat us in the end.

Just because we're animals doesn't mean we can't be worse than others.

You could argue that because of our technology, humans can cause planetary devastation on a level that most other species couldn't, which is probably true. But I think if it gets to that point, we'll wipe ourselves out long before we ruin the entire planet. Tardigrades can live for like ten years with no food or water and can survive for days in outer space. They can surely survive anything we can dish out.

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MaeZe said:

I often wonder what we'd be like if we were genetically and/or socially closer to Bonobos than Chimpanzees (minus the pedophile component of course).

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I thought we are closest to bonobos, no?

cornflake said:

I thought we are closest to bonobos, no?

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All three species are extremely close genetically to each other with both ape species equally close to us and even closer to each other. But there are significant differences in behavior which is yet to be determined if it is more nature or nurture.

Since the descent comes from a common ancestor and not humans descending from chimps or bonobos, if our behavior is more similar to chimps, then it is logical bonobos took a slightly different evolutionary turn.

Bonobos Join Chimps as Closest Human Relatives

An international team of researchers has sequenced the genome of the bonobo for the first time, confirming that it shares the same percentage of its DNA with us as chimps do. The team also found some small but tantalizing differences in the genomes of the three species—differences that may explain how bonobos and chimpanzees don't look or act like us even though we share about 99% of our DNA. ...

The analysis of Ulindi's complete genome, reported online today in Nature, reveals that bonobos and chimpanzees share 99.6% of their DNA. This confirms that these two species of African apes are still highly similar to each other genetically, even though their populations split apart in Africa about 1 million years ago, perhaps after the Congo River formed and divided an ancestral population into two groups. Today, bonobos are found in only the Democratic Republic of Congo and there is no evidence that they have interbred with chimpanzees in equatorial Africa since they diverged, perhaps because the Congo River acted as a barrier to prevent the groups from mixing. The researchers also found that bonobos share about 98.7% of their DNA with humans—about the same amount that chimps share with us.

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But in terms of behavior, chimps are more aggressive, fight territorial wars, males control females with violence in addition to using violence to maintain their dominant status.

Are humans more like chimps or bonobos? The correct answer is changing.

Conventional evolutionary wisdom has human beings branching off from a common ancestor shared between humans, chimpanzees and bonobos about 6.5 million years ago. Chimps and bonobos split from their common ancestor about 1.5 million years ago. Which makes modern humans about equally related to both species. But that doesn't seem to be the popular narrative.

Why? Well, let's not pussyfoot around. Chimpanzees are horrible animals. They are. They're dominated by violent males. They engage in bloody boundary disputes during which patrols of several large males will gang up and kill stray male members of an opposing tribe. They'll kill and eat infant chimpanzees they find, and grab any females. They fight among each other constantly and violently.

Sound familiar?

Bonobos, meanwhile, are cooperative, relatively non-violent, and respond to unfamiliar problems, social stress, or conflicts by initiating wild bonobo sex parties. In theory, they're as like us as chimps are, but let's put it this way - there have been several brawls that have broken out on the floor of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, but no orgies.

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People that write these articles in popular science magazines need to make a story of it. 'More like, less different than we thought', those are phrases that make a story.

In addition researchers are going to report in similar terms because they want to emphasize any new discovery.

Then you have the tendency to look at biology (nature) as our physical selves and nurture as our socio-psychological selves. But identical-twins-raised-apart studies suggest we have less free will when it comes to our personalities than we'd like to believe. (That doesn't mean nurture can't completely muck with nature, but I digress...)

Bottom line, we seem to have more social tendencies like chimps. It suggests bonobos took an evolutionary turn that humans and chimps didn't take.


Caveat: this opinion is based on more speculation and hypothesis than yet to be proven genetics.

It'd be just like if grey parrots existed?

Touche. I do think birds don't get enough attention. There seem to be a lot of studies about chimps' abilities to learn sign language but not a whole lot about parrots, who in certain cases seem to be able to learn hundreds or even thousands of words. And crows can solve fairly complicated logic problems. Primate bias, maybe.

Just because we're animals doesn't mean we can't be worse than others.

"Worse" in what sense though? We can only judge ourselves by our own, human moral standards. If any criteria by which we deem ourselves to be more special or exalted are limited by human biases and a tendency to see our own strengths as inherently more impressive, then any criteria by which we judge ourselves to be uniquely evil are flawed in the same way.

If the world is Eden, we're neither Adam and Eve nor the serpent; we're one of the trees.

The Otter said:

... If the world is Eden, we're neither Adam and Eve nor the serpent; we're one of the trees.

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I found this sentence intriguing but I don't know what it means.

As for good or evil, my observation is that most people are mostly good. The few that are mostly bad however, often get more attention making it seem like people are mostly bad.

MaeZe said:

I found this sentence intriguing but I don't know what it means.

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I guess just that there's a tendency to see humans as somehow existentially separate from the rest of nature, and I don't think that we are. Depending on whether people have a generally positive or generally negative impression of humans, we see humankind as either godlike--uniquely creative, resilient, elevated, etc.--or as an unnatural and destructive force that corrupted the natural, perfect balance of the world with our hubris. Either way, there's an implication that humans have some special power (like the ability to make choices) that opens up greater avenues of goodness or cruelty.

I think that in reality we're just another part of nature, acting in accordance with our nature, and we tend to overestimate how powerful we really are.

I mean, it's also totally natural for humans to have an anthropocentric viewpoint; because we are human, we see the world in a human-centric way much as squirrels probably see the world in a squirrel-centric way. To the extent that they're conscious of such things, I'd guess that squirrels also see themselves as existing at the center of creation, because that's their vantage-point.

MaeZe said:

As for good or evil, my observation is that most people are mostly good. The few that are mostly bad however, often get more attention making it seem like people are mostly bad.

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I have generally the same impression but that's also largely a matter of perspective and one's personal definition of good and evil. I think most people are pro-social and have a desire to be liked, to have mutually beneficial relationships, and to be part of a community, etc. Most people aren't cruel for the sake of being cruel. But I also think most people are pretty self-centered; we're pro-social and compassionate in self-serving ways, because it gives us those pleasant warm fuzzies and because we recognize it as beneficial to us, rather than out of some abstract desire to be good. But I also don't view that as an inherently bad thing.

Long, thinky post incoming.

I think humans tend towards being mostly "good" (and by good, I mean tending towards altruism. empathy and being reasonably honest) within their own communities or within circles of people to whom they are fairly close and to whom they relate. Another potentially "good" trait is curiosity, which drives us to seek out novelty and to try and understand the how and why of things (and animals and other people). People seem to develop these qualities as a part of normal development.

What follows is totally my opinion, as I'm no sociologist.

I think people who live in complex, modern societies strongly prioritize their attachments. We really have to in a world where we typically encounter hundreds (at least) of strangers each day, not to mention read about people who "aren't like us" in the media, and (in recent years) navigate through an online world with people who may not always feel real and where we never truly know how common certain attitudes and views are (does a flood of racist posts mean there are tons of racists out there, or is it just a few racist trolls multi posting).

Empathy falls off in that sort of setting, as and there's a tendency to retract and only associate with people with whom one mostly agrees. In a world where people feel like they are outnumbered, and where they're constantly bombarded with new information that opposes what they've always been taught or distracts them from the things they have to do to get by, lack of empathy, not to mention incuriosity, can start to feel like virtues. We start to otherize and to justify callous, even abusive, behavior towards "outsiders."

There are true pathologies that lead to cruel, sadistic, selfish or "evil" behavior in some (I think it's a minority) of individuals, of course--people who can't form caring attachments, even within their inner circle, or who are gratified by the infliction of pain on the unwilling. But I think a lot of people's everyday cruel, selfish, callous acts and attitudes stem from the fact that we're not really "wired up" to empathize with people or entities we don't know personally, and that we're programmed to prioritize our own wants and needs, and those of our inner circles, over those of people further from us. It's also common to assume one's own experiences are universal and a tendency towards confirmation bias.

I wonder if this might be the reason why society is becoming collectively more selfish and un-empathetic than it once was, with more and more people unwilling to pay for things like health care, education, infrastructure, environmental regulations and so on. When inconveniences or sacrifices are seen (rightly or wrongly) to be helping people we don't know or relate to, we start to act like a bunch of starving dogs in that proverbial "dog eat dog" world and to jealously guard our precious institutions from "outsiders," however we define them. It's particularly bad during periods of belt tightening, whether they be due to a true economic crisis or due to the system being manipulated by those on top so it always feels like resources are scarce.

It's a huge challenge facing democracy in an increasingly diverse and (supposedly) inclusive and interconnected world.

I don't think other species are inherently more virtuous than we are, though. By their nature, they're more likely to live in worlds where they interact mostly with those from the same population. As far as we know, wolves, crows, and chimps have no mass media or ability to communicate with members of their species that are far away from their current location, or to perceive the ways the behavior of populations on the other side of a continent might affect them.

Social species are often very territorial, violently excluding rival groups from their territories in behaviors that seem like rudimentary forms of warfare, and some other animals can engage in behaviors that seem to be very cruel to individuals within their own populations who don't quite fit in for some reason.

The issue is that humans, existing in the billions and wielding a greater influence on the planet as a whole than other species do, are in a position that allows our the limitations in our natural capacity for empathy to do unprecedented harm to members of our own, and to members of other species. We're effectively a global population, but we're not equipped to deal empathetically with so many who seem so different from us.

So, to conclude a very long point, I don't think "uplifted" wolves, crows, parrots, dolphins, chimps, pigs, lions, mongooses, elephants etc. would act just like humans (or like each other). Their social systems and biology would remain fundamentally different, as would their sensory capabilities and the resources they need to survive. But uplifted species with high social intelligence might develop something analogous to our systems of economics and warfare, and there would likely be individuals within their societies who victimize or take advantage of others.

Of course, if they were forced to live within the human centered world we have already created, they'd have to adapt to that too, and they might have to adopt behaviors more like ours to do so.

This is all just speculation on my part, not based on more than my general understanding of social behavior.

The Otter said:

It'd be just like if grey parrots existed?

Touche. I do think birds don't get enough attention. There seem to be a lot of studies about chimps' abilities to learn sign language but not a whole lot about parrots, who in certain cases seem to be able to learn hundreds or even thousands of words. And crows can solve fairly complicated logic problems. Primate bias, maybe.

Just because we're animals doesn't mean we can't be worse than others.

"Worse" in what sense though? We can only judge ourselves by our own, human moral standards. If any criteria by which we deem ourselves to be more special or exalted are limited by human biases and a tendency to see our own strengths as inherently more impressive, then any criteria by which we judge ourselves to be uniquely evil are flawed in the same way.

If the world is Eden, we're neither Adam and Eve nor the serpent; we're one of the trees.

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There's tons of research around parrot speech/communication/intellect. Dr. Pepperberg has a book for lay people 'Alex and Me,' I think it's called, as well as endless published studies over the past decades. She's the pioneer in her field, and the partner of the most famous subject, but there are plenty walking in their path. Read some of her work and doubt no longer.

Also yeah, there's plenty of work with chimps and gorillas who have extensive sign language vocabularies, and have communicated in sign for decades. There's also research into other types of language.

There was the fun study in which horses very quickly learned iconograpic symbols (and some used them for amusement's sake and carrot profiteering, until that was no longer an option, then just used them for their intended purpose), studies using iconographic or pictographic symbols or other language type things with many other species.

MaeZe said:

Bottom line, we seem to have more social tendencies like chimps. It suggests bonobos took an evolutionary turn that humans and chimps didn't take.

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I disagree (in the nicest possible way ).

I also got sick of the popular media portrayal of bonobos as hippies, because they can be nasty, bullying shits when they want to be. They're not that matriarchal either. They get called that because people have patriarchy so ingrained in them that they see egalitarianism and call it matriarchy. The only thing that nudges bonobos slightly into matriarchal (only marginally) rather than egalitarian is that a male's position in the dominance hierarchy comes from his mother's position (if your mother's the alpha female then you're the alpha male). So much so that male bonobos whose mothers die are at risk of being bullied by the other males (i.e. omega status kind of bullying) because like I said they can be bullying shits when they want to be just like every other species of primate. (Baboons are still way worse.)

The main reason for disagreeing with you though is that just because western society (I mean that in the widest sense and include Islam, Judaism and a lot of Asia and North Africa in that, due to being culturally descended/significantly influenced by the Indus Valley/Mesopotamia/North Africa neolithic cultures circa 6-10kya) is very male dominated, it does not mean that this is true for the whole of human society. There are Native American (as in from the North and South American continents) and African cultures that are egalitarian rather than male chauvinist, and human societies that have no history of warfare* such as the Native Australians (who aren't particularly male chauvinist either).

*definition: one tribe/city/nation going to war against another, with soldiers/warriors and weapons designed for war... hunters (or farmers, etc) having small scale fights using hunting (or farming, etc) weapons isn't warfare. All humans do the small scale squabbles/fighting, as do chimps and bonobos (though not with weapons but only because they don't have any). Not all humans do warfare. Bonobos don't do warfare. There was one incident in common chimps that some researchers called warfare but it's not really. It was more like a gang fight. Not all humans do gang fights.

In other words, while I'd agree that there's a tendency in so-called "western civilisation" for common chimp kind of behaviour, particularly in males, this is by far not the default for humans. Look at the whole entire range of human cultures and the assertion that we're more like common chimps than bonobos falls apart.

Both bonobos and humans have followed trajectories that have led to increased co-operation and decreased violence. Humans have gone way further down this path than bonobos. There's evidence of humans caring for injured and vulnerable tribe members as early as 1.8 million years ago (a toothless old woman who survived 2 years with no teeth - someone fed her, very likely chewed food for her, most likely her children) - Like Roxxsmom said, this tendency is very much more a "look after your own" thing than a "care just as deeply about strangers miles away that you've never met.

There is evidence that both ancient and modern human altruism is limited to those that are seen as "one of us" and in the modern world systematic dehumanisation of a group of people can and does lead to mass genocide (that's exactly what Hitler did to the Jews and other groups he didn't like, which resulted in the holocaust). But humans are inherently co-operative and peaceful, moreso than other animals. You have hundreds of thousands of years of small, fairly isolated tribes living in low population density across Europe Asia and Africa relying on each other to survive. We wouldn't have evolved at all without high levels of co-operation and one war (inter tribal or factions within the tribe fighting each other) could wipe out the entire tribe... it probably happened but those tribes wouldn't have left their genes in the next generation because they'd be dead.

Human warfare didn't really take hold until the bronze age due to higher population density and large agricultural communities whose survival depended on their ability to defend the land they grew their crops on. Male chauvinism didn't really exist until the late neolithic era and came about because of economic conditions in that era. You can't say that these things are the result of human nature itself. Circumstances play a massive part. Go to Australia pre European settlers and they had a system whereby tribes settled their disputes without the need to go to war against each other. They also had low population density and access to a huge amount of land (moving away to get away from people rather than fighting) and they could hunt and gather on whatever bit of land they found themselves on, rather than relying on growing crops then defending them to the death (because losing your crops means a slower, nastier death). War is circumstantial, as is male chauvinism. It's not human nature. Confine any animal species to insufficient space and resources and they'll fight to the death to survive.

I think mostly this question comes about because humans hold ourselves and animals to very different standards. From the point of view of building a good human society, that's a good thing. "Yeah but there wasn't enough food to go around so I grabbed as much as I could to make sure I'd survive and sod everyone else" isn't a viable defence in a court of law if you're charged with theft, but that's exactly what animals do. And society is all the better for insisting that humans don't behave like animals. But it does lead to bullshit like "humans are evil and animals are noble".

Roxxsmom said:

Long, thinky post incoming.

I think humans tend towards being mostly "good" (and by good, I mean tending towards altruism. empathy and being reasonably honest) within their own communities or within circles of people to whom they are fairly close and to whom they relate.

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This is so very true.

I don't agree that humans have got worse recently. Humans have stayed the same, but circumstances have got much worse. There's been a global recession which has led to people have less access to resources and feeling more marginalised financially, and in some cases socially as well. There's always been an upturn in far right ideology following economic hardship, because it forces people more into a "dog eat dog" way of thinking, and "why is my country letting foreigners come in when there's no jobs for the people who are here already?" kind of questioning.

Brexit happened because of so many working class Brits suffering directly due to a lack of affordable housing, scarily long NHS waiting lists and a lack of school places - things that are having a direct, negative impact on their lives. Our lives I should say, because I've been affected by these things (I voted to remain because I blame the Tories for these things, not immigrants). Politicians throw the blame on immigration rather than admitting that they fucked it all up by failing to invest the taxes paid by immigrants back into the communities that were being affected by the population increasing too fast for the resources available. Or whatever other economic policies they pursued that didn't involve sharing the wealth of the nation with its most vulnerable people. So the vulnerable turn on the even more vulnerable because it's easier than turning against the people in power. And the far right exploit this to the max. It happens every bloody time but no-one learns from history because they'd rather belief that Hitler had this quality called "evil" like some kind of dark force that possessed him, rather than trying to understand the economic and political background that led to him rising to power, or the tactics (systematic dehumanisation of the Jews and others he didn't like - making them* "other" and "not us") that led to him turning an entire people against another people and ultimately murdering 8 million people.

*maybe I should say "making us" as my dad's mum was from a Jewish family

Looking for some evidence bonobos go to war, all I see are articles in publications like The Daily Mail. I'll have to get back to you on that, neandermagnon, after I have a bit more time to look into it. In the meantime if you have a scientific citation it would be helpful.

MaeZe said:

Looking for some evidence bonobos go to war, all I see are articles in publications like The Daily Mail. I'll have to get back to you on that, neandermagnon, after I have a bit more time to look into it. In the meantime if you have a scientific citation it would be helpful.

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I didn't say that bonobos do war* I said they didn't do warfare. My point was that they sometimes fight and can be bullies, which is a very different thing - counter to the claim in popular press that they're pacifist hippies (i.e. implying that they never fight). There is one incident in common chimps that was considered by some researches to be a bit like a war. I don't have the academic citations for that but it was reported in the press at the time and I read about it from a more academic source. Probably the New Scientist but I won't be able to remember the issue number. I, personally, would not consider the incident to be warfare, but the researchers who observed it did.

*I edited one bit in the post in case it wasn't 100% clear what I mean. I'm making a distinction between small scale fighting (like a punch-up/squabble/scrap type thing that all animal species do and happens in all human societies) and warfare (that some humans do in some circumstances but not all human societies do, and it's debatable whether common chimps do).

Unfortunately there's a tendency for people, especially journalists, to polarise everything. Like portraying common chimps as aggressive, warlike, male chauvinist bastards and bonobos as hippie liberal never fighting matriarchal good guys. The reality is that neither species is like those extremes. Bonobos are somewhat less aggressive than common chimps. Both species are co-operative a lot of the time. Bonobo females have higher status within their society than common chimp females. Homosexual behaviour is more common in bonobos but exists in both species. Common chimps sometimes use m/m sex to avoid m/m conflict/confrontation, just not as often as bonobos do. Bonobo females are interested in sex all through their cycle but common chimp females only want sex when they're ovulating, and sex for bonding/social cohesion is used more than it is in common chimps, and is also why bonobo females have higher status (f/f bonding through sex). Human females are potentially interested in sex all round their cycle, but for different evolutionary reasons to bonobos and it evolved separately. Human females have hidden ovulation, which neither bonobos or common chimps have.

I don't have access to academic references beyond what I can look up on google (I don't have any access to paid journals) though I studied all the above at uni as part of a human sciences degree (massive amount of emphasis on human evolution, hence doing a lot about generalised primate behaviour especially apes and especially chimps and bonobos). Most of what I've read on the subject in the last few years comes from various blogs of evolutionary biologists, primatologists and the New Scientist. Most of the information can probably be found in first year university textbooks on the subject, albeit that the common chimp warfare incident would only be in anything publised in the last couple of years because I don't think the article came out much more than a year ago (sorry I'm so crap at remembering dates).

With all due respect, neandermagnon, you are doing to me just what you are accusing is done in the "popular press", drawing assumptions broader than I posted.

I notice you used the wording The Daily Mail used, "'Hippie' apes like to make war as well as love, reveals new study of human-like bonobos".

This was my original statement:

MaeZe said:

I often wonder what we'd be like if we were genetically and/or socially closer to Bonobos than Chimpanzees (minus the pedophile component of course).

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Then I expanded on that saying this:

MaeZe said:

But in terms of behavior, chimps are more aggressive, fight territorial wars, males control females with violence in addition to using violence to maintain their dominant status.

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Is there anything in those statements you think contradicts what you believe the evidence supports about bonobos?

The Daily Mail article essentially says research found bonobos were more carnivorous than previously believed.

From the article:

He said the new findings, by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, challenge the widely held view that male dominance and aggression is directly linked to hunting behaviour.

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That's not a conclusion I made, was talking about, or in fact, even knew was an hypothesis.

They also note:

‘We always have this view that hunting is a male business,’ said Dr Hohmann. ‘What our study shows is this is not necessarily the case.

‘This has implications for models on early humans that people have proposed how humans have evolved.’

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Hah, 'we have always hunted'.

That bonobos were observed hunting chimps is interesting (and news to me) but also not a contradiction to what I posted.


So let's get back to where we should have been in the first place. Chimps have many aggressive behaviors more closely akin to human behavior and while bonobos may have a few human-shared behaviors like hunting and a little more aggression than previously thought, wouldn't it be nice if we were more like bonobos than chimpanzees?

cornflake said:

There's tons of research around parrot speech/communication/intellect. Dr. Pepperberg has a book for lay people 'Alex and Me,' I think it's called, as well as endless published studies over the past decades. She's the pioneer in her field, and the partner of the most famous subject, but there are plenty walking in their path. Read some of her work and doubt no longer.

Also yeah, there's plenty of work with chimps and gorillas who have extensive sign language vocabularies, and have communicated in sign for decades. There's also research into other types of language.

There was the fun study in which horses very quickly learned iconograpic symbols (and some used them for amusement's sake and carrot profiteering, until that was no longer an option, then just used them for their intended purpose), studies using iconographic or pictographic symbols or other language type things with many other species.

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I remember that the research with Alex suggested that gray parrots (at least, and possibly other kinds) can sort and assign properties to objects they haven't been specifically taught. For instance, once they learn what a circle is, and what blue is in separate contexts, they can successfully name a "blue circle" the first time they see one. This may seem pretty basic, but very few animals can do this. I don't know if they've tested crows and ravens for this ability yet, but they seem to pass most of the cognition tests with flying colors.

I went to the eclipse up in Salem last month, and one thing that was interesting during totality is that every crow at the park started yelling at the top of their lungs when the sun went behind the cloud. I've heard that birds will sometimes act like it's night time and bed down during totality, but these crows were all perched on top of the school building behind the park during the show, and crows don't usually start cawing when the sun goes down. I have no idea why they were doing this, but it really did look like they knew something was *wrong* and that it shouldn't be getting so dark at that time of day. It's a shame eclipses are so rare that it would be impossible to test different hypotheses about this behavior during natural eclipses. Maybe if groups of crows could be housed in large planetarium domes and eclipses were simulated...

Of course, they could have just been yelling at us humans to shut up, since we were all oohing and ahhhing. Or maybe the crows were saying (in crowish), "Wow! That's AMAZING!"

There's been a recent olfactory version of the mirror recognition test that's been applied to dogs (and they do appear to recognize and respond to their own scent in different contexts) btw. It's not completely conclusive, because it's hard to create a perfect olfactory parallel to the white dot on the forehead thing with the mirror test. It makes sense, though, that an animal that recognizes much about their world via olfaction would be less inclined to have a visually centered sense of self-ness.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/science/dogs-smell-recognition.html?mcubz=1

A society where all social problems are solved w/ sex rather than violence sounds like an absolute nightmare to me, fwiw.

Re: discussion over whether or not we're more 'evil' than other animals, I'll just say that while a lot of animals are violent, not many have the theory of mind sophisticated enough to know the creature being hurt is suffering (and the capacity to rationalise it away/not care/enjoy it). That's mostly a human thing. Maybe chimps can be sociopathic. Does a dolphin battering a porpoise to death actually know that the porpoise is terrified, or is it just another small flighty object like the fish it eats? How would you tell?

If we had the science to uplift animals, we could probably engineer the potential for sociopathy out of them.

Oh, Alex (and some of his pals, but he was the first), have gone much further than that in that area, yes. He can do what you describe looking at a set of dozens and dozens of objects, old and new, with, I think he had six or more material categories (wool, paper, wood, plastic, etc.), lots of colours, shapes, etc., and could find a green wool triangle, even if he'd never been presented with a green wool triangle, from among like 50 items, because he knew what green, wool and triangle were.

He also -- this is explained in the book and in a peer-reviewed journal article (that's easily google-able, but behind a paywall, so not linking but it's easy to find on Google Scholar) -- spontaneously expressed an understanding of the concept of zero. As noted in this article on the finding, it's thought the Greeks didn't even come up with that spontaneously. Alex, however...

Pepperberg's most recent research with Alex, co-authored with Brandeis graduate student Jesse D. Gordon, is detailed in the current issue of the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

It not only shows that Alex can count jelly beans, colored blocks, and other objects but also hints that he may have spontaneously come up with a "zero-like concept."

During one experiment Alex was presented with blocks in differently colored sets of two, three, and six. When researchers asked Alex which color group had five blocks, he answered, "None." This prompted Pepperberg to set up a series of tests in which the parrot consistently identified zero quantities of objects with the label "none."

Alex had been taught the term "none" to indicate when neither of two identically sized objects was larger than the other. He had also used it to indicate when there was no difference in other qualities, such as color or shape, among a set of objects.

But Alex had never been taught to use "none" to indicate an absence of a quantity—that idea he apparently came up with by himself.

"That Alex transferred the notion from other domains to quantity, without training or prompting by humans, was unexpected," Pepperberg said.

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ETA: Just in case, because some may not be familiar, Alex was a grey African parrot who worked with Dr. Pepperberg in her research into animal intellect/communication/etc., for decades.

He became her partner when she went into a pet shop that sold birds and had a worker select a young African Grey, randomly, for her -- she did not interact with him or any of the birds, in order to not influence the selection of a research partner/animal. Alex was lauded for his brilliance, but was a randomly selected parrot from a shop. She's worked with other birds, who have also learned to communicate similarly in English, and has had many students under her who now run their own, similar labs.

So while he seems an exceptional bird, nothing suggests his intellectual or communicative capacity was exceptional for his species.

Maybe birds are just maths intuitives? Supposedly pigeons are better at solving the Monty Hall problem than humans.

Alex was also generally conversational, as are the other birds.

One, N'Kisi, Jane Goodall had read about and wanted to meet. His research people showed him a video of Goodall, before the visit. In the video, Goodall was in the jungle working. When she came to the lab, the bird turned, saw her, and said, 'Got a chimp?'

He also had this exchange: I've mentioned some of this stuff to people, who think I or the people involved are making it up. They're researchers. This stuff is on tape.

The conversation that most astonished Aimee Morgana came after she and N’kisi went for a drive in her car:

N’Kisi: “Remember, we went in a car”
Aimee: “Yes! Did you like it?”
N’Kisi: “I like that – wanna go out in the car”
Aimee: “We can’t, wo don’t have a car now”
N’Kisi: “Wanna go in a car right now”
Aimee: “I’m sorry, we can’t right now – maybe we can go again later”
N’kisi: “Why can’t I go in a car now?”
Aimee: “Because we don’t have one”
N’kisi: “Let’s get a car”
Aimee: “No Kisi, we can’t get a car now”
N’kisi: “I want a car”
Aimee: “I’m sorry, baby, not today”
N’kisi: “Hurry up, wanna go in a car. Remember? We were in a car”

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cornflake said:

Alex was also generally conversational, as are the other birds.

One, N'Kisi, Jane Goodall had read about and wanted to meet. His research people showed him a video of Goodall, before the visit. In the video, Goodall was in the jungle working. When she came to the lab, the bird turned, saw her, and said, 'Got a chimp?'

He also had this exchange: I've mentioned some of this stuff to people, who think I or the people involved are making it up. They're researchers. This stuff is on tape.

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I love that. Reminds me when my son was first learning to talk and I had forgotten his banky (blanket). His answer to learning that was, "go home get it". This was his very first sentence.

Roxxsmom said:

... I went to the eclipse up in Salem last month, and one thing that was interesting during totality is that every crow at the park started yelling at the top of their lungs when the sun went behind the cloud. I've heard that birds will sometimes act like it's night time and bed down during totality, but these crows were all perched on top of the school building behind the park during the show, and crows don't usually start cawing when the sun goes down. I have no idea why they were doing this, but it really did look like they knew something was *wrong* and that it shouldn't be getting so dark at that time of day. It's a shame eclipses are so rare that it would be impossible to test different hypotheses about this behavior during natural eclipses. Maybe if groups of crows could be housed in large planetarium domes and eclipses were simulated...

Of course, they could have just been yelling at us humans to shut up, since we were all oohing and ahhhing. Or maybe the crows were saying (in crowish), "Wow! That's AMAZING!"...

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You might enjoy this (be sure to also read the comments):

How will crows respond to the eclipse?

Albedo said:

.... Re: discussion over whether or not we're more 'evil' than other animals, I'll just say that while a lot of animals are violent, not many have the theory of mind sophisticated enough to know the creature being hurt is suffering (and the capacity to rationalise it away/not care/enjoy it). That's mostly a human thing. Maybe chimps can be sociopathic. Does a dolphin battering a porpoise to death actually know that the porpoise is terrified, or is it just another small flighty object like the fish it eats? How would you tell?

If we had the science to uplift animals, we could probably engineer the potential for sociopathy out of them.

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You might be interested in the research on the evolution of empathy. It didn't magically start with the evolutionary step of becoming human.

The Otter said:

I have generally the same impression but that's also largely a matter of perspective and one's personal definition of good and evil. I think most people are pro-social and have a desire to be liked, to have mutually beneficial relationships, and to be part of a community, etc. Most people aren't cruel for the sake of being cruel. But I also think most people are pretty self-centered; we're pro-social and compassionate in self-serving ways, because it gives us those pleasant warm fuzzies and because we recognize it as beneficial to us, rather than out of some abstract desire to be good. But I also don't view that as an inherently bad thing.

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I think that's a good way of putting it. I think we also all have a sort of push/pull thing going with regards of how much we want to be part of a community versus being our own people who call our own shots too. Cultures vary in their views on individualism versus collectivism, of course. Still, even within a culture, there do seem to be personal differences in prosocial tendencies. Why does one kid take great delight in playing games and in role playing with careful attention to sharing and cooperation, while another (maybe even within the same family, will automatically say "no" to any suggestion anyone else makes in a group activity? Why does one kid who watches Star Wars idolize the "good guys," while another kid idolizes Darth Vader, the villain (I know, because one of my friend's kids was like this. He always related most to the bad guys in movies and TV shows).

Why do some people, even as adults, get furious at the idea that they might have to rein in their behavior in some situations for the sake of getting along and not hurting feelings (and they will rail about political correctness or about how nice guys finish last when called on it), while others naturally try to be tactful and sensitive and feel horrible if they learn they've hurt someone's feelings?

Even within the realm of behavior most would agree is "not evil," there's a lot of variation in "niceness." And even people most would consider evil can be "nice" in some situations. I'm not saying all people who like to march to the beat of their own drummer are callous, selfish, or insensitive. I'm pretty quirky and individualistic, but I feel terrible if I hurt someone's feelings or discover that someone is angry at me (even when logic tells me the issue may be more about them than about me), or if I've let someone down. But I know people who positively sneer at the idea that they're supposed to be "nice." It's almost as if the concept of "supposed to" anything, no matter how reasonable, gets their backs up.

It's complicated.