Animal and Human Behavior (quotes go through chapter 5)
American environmentalists, in particular, take the view that practically all human behavior is acquired, and that man can therefore be molded at will by upbringing and education. Animal behavior is likewise attributed almost entirely to learning processes. The European schools of behavioral research, particularly those of Lorenz and the Dutch zoologist Tinbergen, have arrived at quite different conclusions. Exhaustive experiments have shown that many elements in the behavior of animals, even of the most closely related higher mammals, are fixed by heredity. The results of this research suggest that human behavior is probably more predetermined than we realize.
This is a German author writing 50 years ago says that American environmentalists may not know it, but European researchers know that:
Exhaustive experiments have shown that many elements in the behavior of animals, even of the most closely related higher mammals, are fixed by heredity.
I have reasons to disagree with part of his claims about predetermined human behavior and don’t plan to discuss that part. Some of what he says about it is interesting and worthy of analysis, but it’s complicated and somewhat off-topic.
A duckling, for instance, has a whole repertory of actions available and ready for use as soon as it leaves the egg. It can already walk and swim excellently, it already dabbles in mud with its beak and cleans its plumage in a characteristic manner.
It has even been possible to prove, in the case of worms, crickets, bees, and fish, that formulas for the control of movement conform to the Mendelian laws of heredity. If parents which differ in their innate movements – the student of behavior calls them hereditary coordinations – are crossed, all their offspring display either the behavior of one parent or mixed behavior, whereas in the second generation the specific motor characteristics of both grandparents recur.
Controversy with American psychologists was particularly instrumental in stimulating research on this subject. Its special difficulty lies in the fact that many movements which are innate or genuine hereditary coordinations in themselves cannot be performed at birth because the control structure has yet to mature. This may create the impression that a creature has acquired a particular motor pattern by learning, whereas careful experimentation shows that its behavior is probably innate but took time to mature. Grohmann, for example, reared doves, some normally and the rest in cages too cramped to allow them to move their wings. As soon as the normally reared birds could fly well, he released the others. It turned out that the latter could fly with equal ease. This clearly showed that flying, an extremely difficult form of locomotion, does not have to be acquired by these birds and is at their disposal complete, like their organs. Their control structure matures somewhat later, however. The American researchers Carmichael and Fromme carried out a similar experiment with tadpoles. They reared one group normally, the rest under permanent anesthesia so that they did not move and therefore could not learn. When the anesthetic was discontinued, the drugged tadpoles proved to be able to swim almost as well as the others.
That’s interesting science. Similarly:
Grasshopper larvae, by contrast, describe typical “music-making” motions with their hind legs at an early stage but fail to produce any sound because in this case their “instruments” are not yet fully developed.
They do the behavior for the music-making motion before they have the right hind legs for it to work. Evolution programmed them with an algorithm that doesn’t check for mature hind legs before trying to use them.
Anyway, if you want to know what animals are like, you have to pay careful scientific attention, not use anecdotes about pet dogs. I don’t know if researchers have ever studied elephant “mourning”. A PBS article about it isn’t the same kind of thing as drugging tadpoles or keeping birds in very cramped cages in order to test heredity. Similarly, attaching an emotionally-loaded word like “pain” or “mourning” to something is not scientific research about how it actually works.
The toad reacts just as unselectively at mating time when faced with the task of finding a mate. The male leaps indiscriminately at any moving body and embraces it. Should the object of its attentions be another male toad, the latter emits a rapid series of cries, whereupon the former releases its hold. The mating-minded toad sooner or later encounters a female, whose spawn it fertilizes, but it has no innate “image” of a prospective mate. Waggle your finger in front of a male toad and it will mount and embrace it in exactly the same manner.
In order to discover what characteristics go to form a key stimulus, the ethologist uses what he calls a dummy, or decoy. This consists of the simplest possible reconstruction of the appropriate stimulus situation. Judicious alteration of a dummy or the addition of further characteristics enables one to ascertain what the IRM under examination responds to. In young blackbirds, food begging can be stimulated by a dummy consisting of two circular disks of black cardboard, one large and one small. The young birds construe the larger disk as their parent’s body and the smaller one – at which they point their gaping beaks – as the head. In the male fence lizard the blue stripe on the edge of its belly arouses fighting behavior in other males. Females have no such marking and are not attacked, but paint the blue pattern on a female and she will be attacked at once. Paint out the stripe on a male and it will be courted instead of attacked. A bunch of red feathers is enough to arouse fighting behavior in a male robin. Thus the word “mechanism” does possess justification here. The hereditarily fixed nerve structure responsible for recognition reacts like an automaton – in this sense, mechanically.
How little such reactions are associated with intelligence was shown by experiments with turkeys. To the turkey hen, the characteristic cheeping of turkey chicks is the key stimulus which arouses brood-tending behavior. Conceal a loudspeaker which emits this cheeping sound inside a stuffed polecat – one of the turkey’s natural foes – and the turkey hen will take it protectively under her wing. Deprive the turkey hen of her hearing, on the other hand, and she will kill her own young because the appropriate key stimulus fails to reach her IRM.
Lots of good research has been done on what animals are like. Figuring out minimal decoys or dummies to trigger behaviors, like two black circles, is good research. I have not seen any animal advocates discuss this stuff and what it means, though. I’m not saying such discussion doesn’t exist but I don’t know where to find it. Animal advocates ought to be keenly interested in animal research and understanding animals.
Another discovery was that dummies can often be devised which surpass the efficacy of natural key stimuli. Koehler and Zagarus found that a ringed plover will abandon its own eggs in favor of one four times as large, even though it has no hope of hatching it. The cuckoo, as everyone knows, lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, where its young are actually given preferential treatment by the unfortunate foster parents. This is attributable to the young cuckoo’s wider throat, which acts as a stronger feeding release. Tinbergen and his associates established that the male brown butterfly prefers black female dummies to those of natural coloring. And for another species of butterfly, the silver washed fritillary, a rotating cylinder adorned with brown stripes running lengthwise, holds an even stronger sexual attraction than the sight of a female of its own kind. The ethologist refers in such cases to supernormal dummies.
It’s nice to see people testing stuff. A lot of the “science” in the media today is politicized crap.
female rats are in such a strong retrieving mood (“retrieving” is the term applied to the instinctive act of salvaging young which crawl out of the nest) for some days after giving birth that they frequently use their own tail or one of their hind legs as a surrogate. They pick up their tail, carry it into the nest, and deposit it there; or they grip one of their hind legs and hobble back with it on three legs as if it were a baby rat.
The book has many other examples of what animals are like when observed more closely than typical people do.
it is lengthening hours of daylight that put the male stickleback into a procreative mood. The responsible “member” in its parliament of instincts starts to wield influence and causes it to be assailed by a definite restlessness. As yet, the fish neither dons its mating garb nor exhibits any courtship or aggressive behavior. Sticklebacks migrate in shoals from their deep winter quarters to warmer, shallower waters. Once there, every male seeks a weed-stocked spot and establishes its territory. Only then does it put on mating dress and become receptive to other stimuli. If sticklebacks are captured during migration and placed in a basin which contains no plant life of any kind, they remain in a shoal and do not change color, simply because none of the males can mark out a territory of its own. Plant some weed in one corner, on the other hand, and one of the males will soon detach itself from the rest, take up station there, establish its territory, change color, and become procreatively inclined. In this case, therefore, the growth of procreative inclination is brought about by two factors of an external nature: first, lengthening hours of daylight; and second, the discovery of plants which lend themselves to the establishment of a territory (and nest building).
It’s so robotic and inhuman. Anyone who studies animals should be familiar with some stuff like this which has been known for a long time. E.g. “the stickleback has been studied extensively since the 1940s” source. Three researchers brought up in the book were born near 1905 and one was born in 1860.
One example of an internal influence is the operation of hormones. It has been ascertained that when the female collared turtledove sights a displaying male, its ovaries release progesterone into the blood. The effect of this hormone is to arouse a disposition to brood somewhere between five and seven days later. Lehrmann, who experimented with eighty pairs of these doves, injected them with progesterone seven days before bringing the males and females together. When he offered them eggs at the same time as he brought them together, the pairs immediately embarked on brood-tending activities, which they would not normally have done. This was yet another instance of the ease with which instinctive behavior can be distorted and diverted from its natural course-in other words, of its rigidly mechanical nature. In this case, inclination was induced by a hormone. Introduce this into the bloodstream prematurely, and the instinctive member gains ascendancy correspondingly early.
The “rigidly mechanical nature” of animal instincts is a reasonably well known and old idea. Which is why when any animal appears to display some kind of intelligence, that is interesting news to people – their default belief is that animals lack intelligence.
(The connection between suffering and intelligence is a separate matter which we could discuss later.)
Anyway I think animal welfare advocates should use evidence of this quality – which is available for many species – not stuff that’s noticeably worse. Maybe they do somewhere but I haven’t seen it yet.
Experiments with a cuttlefish proved that its memory retained an impression for 27 days. In the case of a trout, memory survived for 150 days, of a rat for fifteen months, and of a carp for as long as twenty months.
They’ve done experiments regarding animal data storage too. Apparently time limits are common. Distributed, redundant data storage also exists:
These small worms were trained to perform a certain task (they are capable of such an achievement) and then cut in half. The regenerative capacity of the planarian is such that the forepart grows a new tail and the hind part a new head. Ensuing experiments seemed to show that both new individuals – the one with the regenerated head included – could accomplish the task in question.
Further experiments indicated the existence of two forms of memory, short term and long term. That totally different phenomena are involved became clear from experiments with cuttlefish, in which the two faculties are located in different areas of the brain. In the case of goldfish, it was possible to prove that their short-term memory changes into long-term memory within an hour, and that the latter definitely depends upon the formation of protein.
Neat.
Chaffinches, for example, have a song with an innately fixed length and number of syllables, but its characteristic division into three strophes must be learned by imitating adult members of the species. If young chaffinches reared in isolation are played recordings of other species of birds, they will accept their song as a model, but only if it resembles that of the chaffinch in tonal quality and strophic form. If they are played various songs including that of their own species, they will recognize the latter and give it preference as a model. In this instance, as in numerous others, the ability to learn is not entirely flexible but innately slanted in one particular direction. The creature has a prescribed curriculum, as it were-in other words, an innate knowledge of what it should learn.
Do you understand how robots could be programmed to do that kind of “learning” without having actual intelligence?