Saturday, May 31, 2008

Six 'Uniquely' Human Traits Now Found in Animals

Six 'Uniquely' Human Traits Now Found in Animals

Kate Douglas

NewScientist.com

17:11 22 May 2008

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn13860-six-uniquely-human-traits-now-found-in-animals-.html

To accompany the article So you think humans are unique?

we have selected six articles from the New Scientist

archive that tell a similar story. We have also asked

the researchers involved to update us on their latest

findings. Plus, we have rounded up six videos of animals

displaying 'human' abilities.

1. Culture

Art, theatre, literature, music, religion, architecture

and cuisine - these are the things we generally

associate with culture. Clearly no other animal has

anything approaching this level of cultural

sophistication. But culture at its core is simply the

sum of a particular group's characteristic ways of

living, learned from one another and passed down the

generations, and other primate species undoubtedly have

practices that are unique to groups, such as a certain

way of greeting each other or obtaining food.

Even more convincing examples of animal cultures are

found in cetaceans. Killer whales, for example, fall

into two distinct groups, residents and transients.

Although both live in the same waters and interbreed,

they have very different social structures and

lifestyles, distinct ways of communicating, different

tastes in food and characteristic hunting techniques -

all of which parents teach to offspring.

Read the original article: Culture shock (24 March 2001)

Hal Whitehead, Dalhousie University writes:

"Since our 2001 review, people have often considered

culture as a potential explanation of the behavioural

patterns that have turned up in their studies of whales

and dolphins.

"Our own work has concentrated on the non-vocal forms of

sperm-whale culture. The different cultural clans of

sperm whales, although in basically the same areas, use

these waters very differently, and are affected very

differently by El Niño events. They also have different

reproductive rates.

"In sperm whales, and likely other whales and dolphins,

culture has the potential to affect population biology,

and so issues as diverse as genetic evolution and the

impacts of global warming on the species."

2. Mind reading

Perhaps the surest sign that an individual has insight

into the mind of another is the ability to deceive. To

outwit someone you must understand their desires,

intentions and motives - exactly the same ability that

underpins the "theory of mind". This ability to

attribute mental states to others was once thought

unique to humans, emerging suddenly around the fifth

year of life. But the discovery that babies are capable

of deception led experts to conclude that "mind-reading"

skills develop gradually, and fuelled debate about

whether they might be present in other primates.

Experiments in the 1990s indicated that great apes and

some monkeys do understand deception, but that their

understanding of the minds of others is probably

implicit rather than explicit as it is in adult humans.

Read the original article: Liar! Liar! (14 February 1998)

Marc Hauser, Harvard University, writes:

"The tamarin work didn't pan out, but there are now

several studies that show evidence of theory of mind in

primates, including work by Brian Hare, Josep Call, Mike

Tomasello, Felix Warneken, Laurie Santos, Justin Wood,

and myself on chimps, rhesus monkeys and tamarins. There

is nothing quite like a successful Sally-Anne test, but

studies point to abilities such as seeing as a form of

knowing, reading intentions and goals."

3. Tool use

Some chimps use rocks to crack nuts, others fish for

termites with blades of grass and a gorilla has been

seen gauging the depth of water with the equivalent of a

dipstick, but no animal wields tools with quite the

alacrity of the New Caledonian crow. To extract tasty

insects from crevices, they craft a selection of hooks

and long, barbed tapers called stepped-cut tools, made

by intricately cutting a pandanus leaf with their beaks.

What's more, experiments in the lab suggest that they

understand the function of tools and deploy creativity

and planning to construct them.

Nobody is suggesting that toolmaking has common origins

in humans and crows, but there is a remarkable

similarity in the ways in which their respective brains

work. Both are highly lateralised, revealed in the

observation that most crows are right-beaked - cutting

pandanus leaves using the right side of their beaks. New

Caledonian crows may force us to reassess the mental

abilities of our first toolmaking ancestors.

Read the original article: Look, no hands (17 August 2002)

Gavin Hunt at the University of Aukland, writes:

"The general aim of our research on New Caledonian crows

is to determine how a 'bird brain' can produce such

complex tools and tool behaviour. Since the New

Scientist article appeared in 2002, our team has focused

on continuing to document tool manufacture and use in

the wild (New Zealand Journal of Zoology, vol 35 p 115),

the development of tool skills in free-living juveniles,

the social behaviour and ecology of NC crows on the

island of Maré, experimental work investigating NC

crows' physical cognition and general intelligence, and

neurological work.

"Some of this work is being undertaken collaboratively

with laboratories in Germany (neurology) and New Zealand

(genotyping). A very similar study is also being carried

out independently at the University of Oxford . This

parallel research has produced findings that are both

confirmatory and conflicting."

Alex Kacelnik, University of Oxford, adds:

"We now know for sure that genetics is involved in the

tool-making abilities of new Caledonian crows. We raised

nestlings by hand and found that chicks that had never

seen anybody handle objects of any kind started to use

tools to extract food from crevices at a similar age to

those who were exposed to human tutors using tools

(Animal Behaviour, vol 72, p 1329). Clearly, observing

others is not necessary for the tool use. However chicks

exposed to tutoring exhibit a greater intensity of tool-

related activity. Not surprisingly, genes and experience

show a complex interaction.

"We have also developed a new technique, consisting of

loading tiny video cameras on free-ranging birds, so as

to see what they see and document the precise use of

tools in nature. We have discovered that they use tools

in loose soil, that they use a kind of tool not

previously described (grass stems), and that they hunt

for vertebrates (lizards). All of this, together with

laboratory analysis of their cognitive abilities is

forming a richer picture of what the species can do."

4. Morality

A classic study in 1964 found that hungry rhesus monkeys

would not take food they had been offered if doing so

meant that another monkey received an electric shock.

The same is true of rats. Does this indicate nascent

morality? For decades, we have preferred to find

alternative explanations, but recently ethologist Marc

Bekoff from the University of Colorado at Boulder has

championed the view that humans are not the only moral

species. He argues that morality is common in social

mammals, and that during play they learn the rights and

wrongs of social interaction, the "moral norms that can

then be extended to other situations such as sharing

food, defending resources, grooming and giving care".

Read the original article: Virtuous nature (13 July 2002)

Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado, writes:

"Work published this year showed that animals are able

to make social evaluations and these assessments are

foundational for moral behaviour in animals other than

humans. Francys Subiaul of the George Washington

University and his colleagues showed that captive

chimpanzees are able to make judgments about the

reputation of unfamiliar humans by observing their

behaviour - whether they were generous or stingy in

giving food to other humans. The ability to make

character judgments is just what we would expect to find

in a species in which fairness and cooperation are

important in interactions among group members (Animal

Cognition, DOI: 10.1007/s10071-008-0151-6)."

5. Emotions

Emotions allow us to bond with others, regulate our

social interactions and make it possible to behave

flexibly in different situations. We are not the only

animals that need to do these things, so why should we

be the only ones with emotions? There are many examples

of apparent emotional behaviour in other animals.

Elephants caring for a crippled herd member seem to show

empathy. A funeral ritual performed by magpies suggests

grief. Was it spite that led a male baboon called Nick

to take revenge on a rival by urinating on her? Divers

who freed a humpback whale caught in a crab line

describe its reaction as one of gratitude. Then there's

the excited dance chimps perform when faced with a

waterfall - it looks distinctly awe-inspired. These

days, few doubt that animals have emotions, but whether

they feel these consciously, as we do, is open to

debate.

Read the original article: Do animals have emotions? (23 May 2007)

6. Personality

It's no surprise that animals that live under constant

threat from predators are extra-cautious, while those

that face fewer risks appear to be more reckless. After

all, such successful survival strategies would evolve by

natural selection. But the discovery that individuals of

the same species, living under the same conditions, vary

in their degree of boldness or caution is more

remarkable. In humans we would refer to such differences

as personality traits.

From cowardly spiders and reckless salamanders to

aggressive songbirds and fearless fish, we are finding

that many animals are not as characterless as we might

expect. What's more, work with animals has led to the

idea that personality traits evolve to help individuals

survive in a wider variety of ecological niches, and

this is influencing the way psychologists think about

human personality.

Read the original article: Critters with attitude (3 June 2001)

For an update on animal personalities and how research

in this area is throwing light on human behaviour read

The personality factor.

Related Articles

* So you think humans are unique?

* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19826571.700

* 21 May 2008

* Culture Shock

* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg16922834.600

* 24 March 2001

* Liar! Liar!

* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg15721215.100

* 14 February 1998

* Look, no hands!

* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17523566.000

* 17 August 2002

* Virtuous nature

* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17523515.000

* 13 July 2002

* Do animals have emotions?

* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19426051.300

* 23 May 2007

* Critters with attitude

* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg17022934.600

* 03 June 2001

* Video roundup: Animals with 'human' abilities

* http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn13958

* 22 May 2008

Weblinks

* Hal Whitehead, Dalhousie University

* http://whitelab.biology.dal.ca/index.html

* Marc Hauser, Harvard University

* http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~mnkylab/HauserPubs.html

* Gavin Hunt, University of Aukland

* http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/crows/gavin-home-page.htm

* Alex Kacelnik, University of Oxford

* http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/people/alexkacelnik.shtml

* Marc Bekoff, University of Colorado

* http://literati.net/Bekoff/

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