I took a basic falconry lesson with my dad last year. Besides being one of the coolest things I did all year, I got to learn all about the species we worked with: the Harris hawk. Native to the Southwest region of North America, they are of the only (the only?) raptors that strategize together and hunt in packs. Apparently if you introduce two groups who have never interacted before, they will play games and talk to each other for a while, and just a couple hours later go out hunting together (with their human trainers).
Also, according to our two instructors, the "universal" (read: they witnessed two Harris hawks do this independently) call for a dog or wolf, their natural predator, sounds like "Dog!"
I witnessed a Harris hawk attack a mockingbird in mid-flight outside my window once. It was brutal, blood and feathers sprayed everywhere, though the mockingbird managed to fly off with the hawk in hot pursuit. At first, I was like WTF!? Then I became curious. I identified the Harris hawk based on my brief sighting, and discovered that they were native to Texas, where I was living, and one of their main sources of prey is the mockingbird.
It's cheap and easy to encourage birds (and other animals) to come by your window more, if you want to see more of their behavior in person.
A coworker has been putting out food for birds for several months, and regularly has something like 20 different species coming by for it, and another 10 or so species that only show up occasionally. It's to the point now that when he puts out food, he regularly has something like a couple dozen birds at once showing up.
This includes some hawk species. He's got a camera running and has shown my some impressive footage of the hawks hunting the other birds.
After seeing his videos and photos, and hearing his descriptions, I decided to give it a try. For the last few weeks I've been going out and putting unshelled unsalted peanuts on the rails of my deck, which I can watch from the window in front of my computer desk. I've since added black oil sunflower seeds to the mix [1].
I haven't seen nearly the variety of birds he has, and have seen no predator birds. I've mostly got Dark-eyed Juncos, Black-capped and Chestnut-backed Chickadees, Steller's Jays, Spotted Towees, and some kind of Crow (either American or Northwestern). A couple of times I've had some kind of gull, and I've seen one or two things about the size of the crows and jays but did not see it long enough to remember enough to look it up.
Besides birds, he's also getting a lot of squirrels, some chipmunks, at least one opossum, and at least one raccoon. His squirrels have gotten to the point that they are not afraid of him. When he goes out to toss peanuts most of them gather at the edge of the bushes and watch him, and then will come get the peanuts while he is there if he doesn't get too close. (I think he also said that the birds have grown much more tolerant of his presence, too, such as eating from a feeder while he is right there filling it).
One, though, actually comes up to his window and jumps around until the squirrel sees that it has been seen, and then runs to the door to wait for my coworker to come out. That squirrel will actually come up and take an offered peanut from his hand.
He's also had the raccoon approach, but was uncomfortable with that and so tossed some peanuts behind the raccoon to get it to move away. A couple evenings ago he went out, and the raccoon was there. It ran away and he thought he'd scared it off and sat down on the porch. The raccoon had actually just circled around the house to come up from the other side. The coworker tossed the raccoon a peanut. It was a weak toss and only went a couple feet. After a few more tosses, the raccoon would hold out his hands palm up, and wait for a peanut to be handed to him. (He (the human, not the raccoon) was wearing protective gloves just in case).
The only thing I've gotten besides birds is squirrels (at least that I've seen). I've seen raccoons in my neighborhood before, but not recently, and a couple of times I put out some seed and peanuts to close too the bird's bedtime, and so there was food on my deck overnight, and it was all undisturbed in the morning.
(I'm only putting out food. The coworker has also added some water features to his landscaping that provide good drinking water for animals. From what he told me and what I've read, that makes a place much more attractive to raccoons, which could be why he's getting them. I do not want raccoons, so will not be providing water to the animals).
I'm pretty sure a lot of the little birds I see live in the bushes and trees in my front yard, because if I put out food near sunrise, I now get up to a dozen of them quickly coming out of those bushes and trees, taking a seed or peanut, and flying back.
If I do the same thing at random times throughout the day, the little birds still mostly come from those trees and bushes, but instead of a dozen or more at once, it is in ones and twos over a longer time.
Finally, if I put out food as sunset nears, it is back to a whole bunch showing up at once.
Thus, I'm guessing that they live in those trees and bushes, and so near sunrise and sunset that are all home. Hence the crowd. In the middle of the day, they are mostly out roaming around looking for food, and so they only find my food when their roaming brings them back home.
I wish I had thought to do some kind of survey of bird population in those trees and bushes before I started putting out food. I'd like to know if they have moved in there because of the regular food, or if they were always there and I just didn't notice them.
[1] ...because they are cheap and birds like them. A 10 pound bag is around $9 at Walmart, and will last for me about 45 days. A 40 pound bag is around $20 dollars.
The "Deserts" episode of Planet Earth 2 (currently on Netflix) has a decent segment on the Harris hawk for anyone curious. It shows a group of them hunting ground squirrels.
Is the Harris hawk also known for being unusually trainable? I've seen them used in London for pigeon control, despite them not being native to the UK.
> Mr Gosford said he had never actually seen a bird at a fire front, intentionally spreading the fire.
> So he said he decided to appeal to people to come forward if they had seen birds behaving in that way.
> Mr Gosford said he received 16 firsthand accounts from people who said they had witnessed birds spreading bushfires to flush out prey.
> ...
> He said he hoped by filming birds spreading fires, others would see how valuable Aboriginal knowledge could be to the broader community.
This is a much more speculative thing than a reading of that abstract makes it out to be. It's not impossible, but there's no hard evidence of it as yet. Certainly, there's no video.
I think that the abstract is clear, and probably they are using the correct terminology in their field. But the first time I read it I didn't notice that they are documenting first hand stories about the events, but not the events themselves (aka videos).
> We document Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and non-Indigenous observations of intentional fire-spreading by the fire-foraging raptors Black Kite, Whistling Kite, and Brown Falcon in tropical Australian savannas. Observers report both solo and cooperative attempts, often successful, to spread wildfires intentionally via single-occasion or repeated transport of burning sticks in talons or beaks.* [..]
In each of those categories we're far and away the best. I really don't understand this feeling that humans need to be modest or that describing ourselves as special is wrong. We are special.
I think among some people that are frustrated with the human world for whatever - either personal or abstract - reason, there's a feeling of misanthropy that colors their thinking, and so they try to belittle humanity.
>I really don't understand this feeling that humans need to be modest or that describing ourselves as special is wrong. We are special.
To simply state that humans are best adapted at certain traits is true, but humans have tended to think of themselves as "special" in that "we're not even animals, but beings made in the image of God and given divine right to conquer Nature and do with it what we will." That anthropocentric bias has led to a multitude of evils and scientific falsehoods, and that's what needs to be corrected. It's got nothing to do with misanthropy.
The point of this, I think, is that we justify our behavior towards animals on the belief that they are not "the same" as us. That is, that they aren't beings capable of the same rich experiences of the world that we are and, therefore, their suffering is less important than ours. This same sort of rationalization has been used throughout history to justify similar behavior towards other human beings.
Evidence is increasingly showing us that the qualities we believed differentiated us from animals, that made our lives more worthy of respect, aren't actually unique to us.
If you're going to come back at that with "we're better at these things than they are", then that philosophy suggests again that there are lesser classes of human being as well, the ones that aren't as good as others at whatever metric you happen to be using.
It is natural that we seek to justify behavior on which our living standards are dependent, but that doesn't make our reasoning sound.
It is often bad tone to assume some (more or less unethical) motives behind a contrary view. Why would you do that? is it because of <insert something bad>? The technique seldom lends itself to a balanced discussion and will tend to deteriorate into ad hominem type arguments (I know, I used to do it a lot :-/ ...) . Anyway to your point: I find it probably that all species will find themselves more special than others, and I could easily imagine a conversation between dogs find that they are the most special of all creatures: tell me who can smell as good as we? Eagles would claim to have better eyesight than most etc. Either we as humans can claim to be better than everyone else at everything (clearly false), or claim that we are best at being us, something we share with every other species. A third position, which evaluates species from species-neutral characteristics doesn't seem to exist. And so the modest attitude which you criticize could at least be said to be guided by logic, not misanthropy at all.
Acknowledging both the blindingly obvious point that we are the apex species on this planet and that we do a lot of complicated, interesting things we have yet to observe in others does not mean observing similarities to other species somehow diminishes humanity. On the contrary, telling ourselves just-so stories that appeal to our arrogance and need to be special discourages research and progress. If I "know" that we're the only species that talks (because some other human convinced me that god, some super-researcher or whoever said so), I'm not very likely to go looking for counterexamples.
Drifting into aesthetic/religious/philosophical territory for a second, I personally feel that humans are deeply interesting because of what an odd mishmash of traits we have. If one is prone to anthropomorphizing evolution, one way to still appeal to human vanity is to view it as a pretty risky slow-burn strategy that, after succeeding, made us our own worst predator/environmental risk[1]. If we were just some toy made by $deity for whatever reason, it becomes a lot less interesting of a story.
[1] Of course, evolution doesn't work that way, but it makes a nice story.
A good read, especially on the last page the paragraph beginning with, “The history of science contains, one after another, a series of blows to mankind’s anthropocentric ego.”
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.
I'd be very interested to see what dolphins could accomplish if they were to have hands and feet.
Maybe one day we will be able to give them robotic limbs controlled through brain function and see if they able able to that utility. My guess is that we would be impressed, especially if the experiment were done on a pack.
Yet the dolphin dies whenever it encounters something it's body can't heal on it's own. The whole "whoever lives the simpler life is smarter" doesn't really hold up when science/medicine/engineering solve life threatening problems.
“Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder 'why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand.”
Perhaps in another 20 million years the birds will go from carrying sticks to discovering antibiotics. Until then... I think we can still consider ourselves special.
We talk about the use of tools because it's a very significant conceptual leap. Once you understand that you can manipulate your environment to accomplish your goals the abilities in your list are comparatively incremental.
Our use of tools isn't the only measure of specialness, but I'm not sure there are many cognitive leaps quite so significant... language would be one but seems trickier to pin down because there are degrees of sophistication.
Don't forget things like emotion, compassion and physical pain too; we're far too quick to decide that animals "obviously can't" experience these things.
One could argue (as Yuval Noah Harari does in the book Sapiens) that the ability to "come up with reasons why we're special", or more generally to reason about things that don't exist in a material form (like limited-liability corporations, deities, nation-states, or the notion that we're special) is exactly what makes humans special.
You can never convince an animal to give it's food in promise of a place in heaven or to die for it's country. That's something only humans are capable of. Beat that!
Sure you can argue semantic about how animals don't have countries, but it's a fact that animals do fight and kill each other to protect their territory.
I think (but I'm happy to be proved wrong on this) that we are the only animal that uses abstract symbols (rather than just vocalizations or other physical displays or gestures) to communicate and build models of natural phenomena, although those abilities are probably of relatively recent origin in our species. However, I've heard that animals like chimpanzees and dolphins can learn to use symbols when taught by humans.
it's striking to see 6-12 month old infants bopping up and down to music. They're not taught to do this and I've never heard of animals responding to music...
Scientists are generally quick to give such vocalisations -- along with bird song, etc. -- purely functional attributes, thereby dismissing any aesthetic or emotional meaning it might have for the animal. "It's a territorial signifier". "It's for mate selection." Etc. This is a mistake: Mozart used his music to get laid; what musician doesn't? We can't know what these sounds truly mean -- subjectively, not functionally -- to an animal, because we can't talk about it with them. But that doesn't mean that it is empty of meaning.
Humans are maybe special in that we can't seem to cope with anything that's not neatly black and white. Our brains tend to halt and catch fire when we have to analyze gray areas. Just look at politics or technical discussions. "Guns are (good|bad)." "It's slightly mathematically possible to compromise this system; we can't possibly ship like this!"
The vast majority of humanity can't accomplish that. I guess we all get credit for the achievements of any of our species? Are we then also burdened with credit for any individual's atrocities?
We are the only mammal with consciousness, which leads to knowledge of the future and the discerning of good and evil.
Despite the fact that we still don’t understand the least about how consciousness arises in our brain, we are nonetheless the only animal that shows this.
Even in cases like monkeys recognizing themselves una mirror, no animal seem to go past that and be aware of the future like we do.
"Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates." [0]
We've found evidence in some animal or another for pretty much everything we've ever thought was unique about human cognitive abilities. So far, the only unique thing about humans is how broad and powerful our cognition is.
Humans don't have such a capacity. The notions of 'good' and 'evil' have historically been in flux and went through many huge changes. Modern humans consider the typical behaviors of past humans as 'evil'.
Vikings - rape after conquering is good. People today: that's evil.
India until 2 generations ago - arranged marriage is good. Today that's evil.
Homosexuality - has oscillated many times between good and evil. In fact, different geographic regions will still have polar opposite views on this today.
This is super cool, if a bit scary. Man Australia has it all though, 8/10 of the deadliest spiders, half the deadliest snakes, crocodiles, rockfish, and now firebirds.
Inhabiting Australia is a testament to man's arrogance.
> Inhabiting Australia is a testament to man's arrogance.
Given that humans inhabited Australia for at least 40,000 years without the benefits of domesticable crops or herd animals, I'd say it's a testament to incredible perseverance.
As a native-born Australian, your last sentence really resonates with me. I was lucky to have been born there, and raised a bit, but when I was old enough to have a religious-like experience out there in the north-western deserts, I realised I couldn't ever feel comfortable for as long as I, a privileged white boy, lived on the Australian continent.
So, I left. 30 years later, I'm taking my kids back for a bit of tourism.
And for sure, we'll be keeping an eye out, back up on those long stretches, for the odd kite or two .. not that there's much to burn where we're going.
Australia is a huge, and most awesome place in the world. It's a pity what its current humans are doing with it.
Meh. Thanks to the technological and cultural advancements of the Afro-Euro-Asian human cluster, we could wipe 99% of these “threats” tomorrow if we wanted to. In fact, we did have comparable dangers in other continents in the past - we just had no qualms with killing every single one of them or burning their ecosystem to the ground, because we had no concept of “ecosystem”: everything in nature was a threat to be dealt with, and that was that. Back in the day, you could be attacked by rabid wolves while sitting in your garden! So we killed them, we hunted them down systematically until they were no longer a threat. We had terrible insects, killing and spreading diseases! So we removed all swamps and invented chemicals to massacre them. Etc etc.
Australia, for geographical reasons, simply started the process too late, when we were already getting cold feet. Now that we understand how Nature works a bit more, it’s become difficult to justify large-scale efforts to remove these threats to human life. We find it more acceptable to suffer a potential spider bite here and there, than to risk irreparable losses to the variety of life and the quality of our planet’s natural state.
If anything, the fact that Australia manages to slowly expand human footprint while still maintaining a balanced truce with our predators, is testament to the level of emotional maturity that our animal race has reached.
>Thanks to the technological and cultural advancements of the Afro-Euro-Asian human cluster, we could wipe 99% of these “threats” tomorrow if we wanted to.
We can be wiped out by some of the simplest lifeforms, and even simpler, not quite lifeforms on the planet.
Haha, this has been a well-trod rant of mine for years. Don't forget scorpions, vampire bats, great white sharks, and the world's top 4 deadliest jellyfish!
So long as I am not doing something dumb like going near an estuarine river filled with invisible deathbeasts, or getting into an ocean filled with transparently-tentacled murder-squigglies, or stomping through grass near logs with dozing fangjectors, I will be fine.
On the flip side of this incessantly boring argument, once you've actually dealt with a swarm of all of these things successfully, i.e. lived to make lunch out of it, then .. pretty much .. everyone elses' zeitgeist seems pretty fucking boring.
The dangers in life are what make it interesting to think about, right at the end of it all...
Hmm. The dangerous animals (say the stats) are humans, horses and dogs (in that order). None are particularly special to Australia, though Homo Sapiens Boganus is a unique local variation (often spotted Queensland).
The so-called 'deadly' animals (some of which, including a variety of snakes, I come across frequently where I live) barely rate a statistical mention.
Hang on a minute. Just because more people die from humans, dogs and horses, doesn't mean that snakes, spiders and jellyfish (in Australia) are not dangerous.
For instance, if you throw me in the sea next to a great white in a feeding frenzy, my chances of dying will have nothing to do with the probability of dying from a dog bite.
The statistics for the probability of dying from specific causes can help predict what one is most likely to die from- but not to how likely one is to die from encountering a spider or a snake.
In other words, people are afraid of, say, black widow spiders, because the probability of dying given one is attacked by a black widow is extremely high. And that is perfectly reasonable and a very good statistic to keep in mind if one is in any situation where encountering a black widow is a possibility (even one with a small probability).
Bird, R. B., D. W. Bird, B. F. Codding, C. H. Parker, and J. H. Jones. 2008. The “Fire Stick Farming” Hypothesis: Australian Aboriginal Foraging Strategies, Biodiversity, and Anthropogenic Fire Mosaics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105:14796–14801. Crossref, PubMed, Google Scholar
Because the fire flushes out small prey that the bird can catch and eat. This applies to snakes, small animals, and insects, all of which this species of bird and others can feed upon.
I’m in the same boat as you, but in the book Sapiens it’s written that bush fires in Australia are started to force animals out of the forest and to create plains where they can be more effectively hunted in the future. Maybe the birds do this too (or learned it from people?)
You may have conflated a couple of things here that I think might be worthy of clarification.
1. Fires will force animals out of the forest for hunting. It sounds to me that this is the most likely reason for animals learning to spread fire.
2. While I expect sufficiently fierce fires will create plains, much of Australia's native flora is adapted to bush fires, and use it as an opportunity to regenerate. Many plants have seed pods that will only open after being burned. Thus, while much of Australia's bushland is dry, bushland that has been burned recently tends to be quite green and full of life, and many of the trees remain - however much furrier for their fresh growth of leaves.
3. Australian Aborigines (to my best recollection) were known for cycling parts of their territories as part of their nomadic lifestyle, farming somewhere, burning the land as the left, moving on, then returning again later when the land is restored and more plentiful.
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Also, according to our two instructors, the "universal" (read: they witnessed two Harris hawks do this independently) call for a dog or wolf, their natural predator, sounds like "Dog!"
A coworker has been putting out food for birds for several months, and regularly has something like 20 different species coming by for it, and another 10 or so species that only show up occasionally. It's to the point now that when he puts out food, he regularly has something like a couple dozen birds at once showing up.
This includes some hawk species. He's got a camera running and has shown my some impressive footage of the hawks hunting the other birds.
After seeing his videos and photos, and hearing his descriptions, I decided to give it a try. For the last few weeks I've been going out and putting unshelled unsalted peanuts on the rails of my deck, which I can watch from the window in front of my computer desk. I've since added black oil sunflower seeds to the mix [1].
I haven't seen nearly the variety of birds he has, and have seen no predator birds. I've mostly got Dark-eyed Juncos, Black-capped and Chestnut-backed Chickadees, Steller's Jays, Spotted Towees, and some kind of Crow (either American or Northwestern). A couple of times I've had some kind of gull, and I've seen one or two things about the size of the crows and jays but did not see it long enough to remember enough to look it up.
Besides birds, he's also getting a lot of squirrels, some chipmunks, at least one opossum, and at least one raccoon. His squirrels have gotten to the point that they are not afraid of him. When he goes out to toss peanuts most of them gather at the edge of the bushes and watch him, and then will come get the peanuts while he is there if he doesn't get too close. (I think he also said that the birds have grown much more tolerant of his presence, too, such as eating from a feeder while he is right there filling it).
One, though, actually comes up to his window and jumps around until the squirrel sees that it has been seen, and then runs to the door to wait for my coworker to come out. That squirrel will actually come up and take an offered peanut from his hand.
He's also had the raccoon approach, but was uncomfortable with that and so tossed some peanuts behind the raccoon to get it to move away. A couple evenings ago he went out, and the raccoon was there. It ran away and he thought he'd scared it off and sat down on the porch. The raccoon had actually just circled around the house to come up from the other side. The coworker tossed the raccoon a peanut. It was a weak toss and only went a couple feet. After a few more tosses, the raccoon would hold out his hands palm up, and wait for a peanut to be handed to him. (He (the human, not the raccoon) was wearing protective gloves just in case).
The only thing I've gotten besides birds is squirrels (at least that I've seen). I've seen raccoons in my neighborhood before, but not recently, and a couple of times I put out some seed and peanuts to close too the bird's bedtime, and so there was food on my deck overnight, and it was all undisturbed in the morning.
(I'm only putting out food. The coworker has also added some water features to his landscaping that provide good drinking water for animals. From what he told me and what I've read, that makes a place much more attractive to raccoons, which could be why he's getting them. I do not want raccoons, so will not be providing water to the animals).
I'm pretty sure a lot of the little birds I see live in the bushes and trees in my front yard, because if I put out food near sunrise, I now get up to a dozen of them quickly coming out of those bushes and trees, taking a seed or peanut, and flying back.
If I do the same thing at random times throughout the day, the little birds still mostly come from those trees and bushes, but instead of a dozen or more at once, it is in ones and twos over a longer time.
Finally, if I put out food as sunset nears, it is back to a whole bunch showing up at once.
Thus, I'm guessing that they live in those trees and bushes, and so near sunrise and sunset that are all home. Hence the crowd. In the middle of the day, they are mostly out roaming around looking for food, and so they only find my food when their roaming brings them back home.
I wish I had thought to do some kind of survey of bird population in those trees and bushes before I started putting out food. I'd like to know if they have moved in there because of the regular food, or if they were always there and I just didn't notice them.
[1] ...because they are cheap and birds like them. A 10 pound bag is around $9 at Walmart, and will last for me about 45 days. A 40 pound bag is around $20 dollars.
> Mr Gosford said he had never actually seen a bird at a fire front, intentionally spreading the fire.
> So he said he decided to appeal to people to come forward if they had seen birds behaving in that way.
> Mr Gosford said he received 16 firsthand accounts from people who said they had witnessed birds spreading bushfires to flush out prey.
> ...
> He said he hoped by filming birds spreading fires, others would see how valuable Aboriginal knowledge could be to the broader community.
This is a much more speculative thing than a reading of that abstract makes it out to be. It's not impossible, but there's no hard evidence of it as yet. Certainly, there's no video.
> We document Indigenous Ecological Knowledge and non-Indigenous observations of intentional fire-spreading by the fire-foraging raptors Black Kite, Whistling Kite, and Brown Falcon in tropical Australian savannas. Observers report both solo and cooperative attempts, often successful, to spread wildfires intentionally via single-occasion or repeated transport of burning sticks in talons or beaks.* [..]
- tool-using animal
- fire-using animal
- language-using animal
- animal which domesticates other animals
- animal which builds complex structures
Aha! I know! We're the only animal which continually comes up with reasons why we're special.
I think among some people that are frustrated with the human world for whatever - either personal or abstract - reason, there's a feeling of misanthropy that colors their thinking, and so they try to belittle humanity.
To simply state that humans are best adapted at certain traits is true, but humans have tended to think of themselves as "special" in that "we're not even animals, but beings made in the image of God and given divine right to conquer Nature and do with it what we will." That anthropocentric bias has led to a multitude of evils and scientific falsehoods, and that's what needs to be corrected. It's got nothing to do with misanthropy.
Evidence is increasingly showing us that the qualities we believed differentiated us from animals, that made our lives more worthy of respect, aren't actually unique to us.
If you're going to come back at that with "we're better at these things than they are", then that philosophy suggests again that there are lesser classes of human being as well, the ones that aren't as good as others at whatever metric you happen to be using.
It is natural that we seek to justify behavior on which our living standards are dependent, but that doesn't make our reasoning sound.
Acknowledging both the blindingly obvious point that we are the apex species on this planet and that we do a lot of complicated, interesting things we have yet to observe in others does not mean observing similarities to other species somehow diminishes humanity. On the contrary, telling ourselves just-so stories that appeal to our arrogance and need to be special discourages research and progress. If I "know" that we're the only species that talks (because some other human convinced me that god, some super-researcher or whoever said so), I'm not very likely to go looking for counterexamples.
Drifting into aesthetic/religious/philosophical territory for a second, I personally feel that humans are deeply interesting because of what an odd mishmash of traits we have. If one is prone to anthropomorphizing evolution, one way to still appeal to human vanity is to view it as a pretty risky slow-burn strategy that, after succeeding, made us our own worst predator/environmental risk[1]. If we were just some toy made by $deity for whatever reason, it becomes a lot less interesting of a story.
[1] Of course, evolution doesn't work that way, but it makes a nice story.
A good read, especially on the last page the paragraph beginning with, “The history of science contains, one after another, a series of blows to mankind’s anthropocentric ego.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Maybe one day we will be able to give them robotic limbs controlled through brain function and see if they able able to that utility. My guess is that we would be impressed, especially if the experiment were done on a pack.
- Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle
-Starting fires
-Using fire to process food
-Using fire to process raw materials into something that can be used for tools, structures etc.
We talk about the use of tools because it's a very significant conceptual leap. Once you understand that you can manipulate your environment to accomplish your goals the abilities in your list are comparatively incremental.
Our use of tools isn't the only measure of specialness, but I'm not sure there are many cognitive leaps quite so significant... language would be one but seems trickier to pin down because there are degrees of sophistication.
Nope, that'd be cats.
Dead Comment
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/likeus/
You don't even need to actually give it this treat every time.
BTW many horses died for their countries.
Sure you can argue semantic about how animals don't have countries, but it's a fact that animals do fight and kill each other to protect their territory.
We're basically sorcerers, by animal standards.
Humanrace represent
If we are not special in our level of intelligence (dolphins maybe?), then this is likely not true either.
-art (cave paintings, etc)
-music
it's striking to see 6-12 month old infants bopping up and down to music. They're not taught to do this and I've never heard of animals responding to music...
And Whales have music: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_vocalization#Song_of_the... -- their singing employs musical rhythm and phrasing, and is culturally transmitted rather than instinctual.
Scientists are generally quick to give such vocalisations -- along with bird song, etc. -- purely functional attributes, thereby dismissing any aesthetic or emotional meaning it might have for the animal. "It's a territorial signifier". "It's for mate selection." Etc. This is a mistake: Mozart used his music to get laid; what musician doesn't? We can't know what these sounds truly mean -- subjectively, not functionally -- to an animal, because we can't talk about it with them. But that doesn't mean that it is empty of meaning.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140723-are-we-the-only-cre...
How do you know any given snarky comment on Hacker News isn't posted by a Harris hawk?
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Despite the fact that we still don’t understand the least about how consciousness arises in our brain, we are nonetheless the only animal that shows this.
Even in cases like monkeys recognizing themselves una mirror, no animal seem to go past that and be aware of the future like we do.
...
"Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates." [0]
We've found evidence in some animal or another for pretty much everything we've ever thought was unique about human cognitive abilities. So far, the only unique thing about humans is how broad and powerful our cognition is.
[0] http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConscious....
For instance, prairie dogs are shown to have a descriptive language: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/prairie-dogs-language-deco...
I highly recommend reading that one because it's funny and fascinating.
Expt:
Also remarkable was the amount of information crammed into a single chirp lasting a 10th of a second.
"In one 10th of a second, they say 'Tall thin human wearing blue shirt walking slowly across the colony.'"
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Many Helens—err....—scientists agree: https://io9.gizmodo.com/5937356/prominent-scientists-sign-de...
And also demonstrably have a sense of morality: http://edition.cnn.com/2013/01/19/health/chimpanzee-fairness...
Humans don't have such a capacity. The notions of 'good' and 'evil' have historically been in flux and went through many huge changes. Modern humans consider the typical behaviors of past humans as 'evil'.
Vikings - rape after conquering is good. People today: that's evil.
India until 2 generations ago - arranged marriage is good. Today that's evil.
Homosexuality - has oscillated many times between good and evil. In fact, different geographic regions will still have polar opposite views on this today.
Uh huh.
Dead Comment
Inhabiting Australia is a testament to man's arrogance.
Given that humans inhabited Australia for at least 40,000 years without the benefits of domesticable crops or herd animals, I'd say it's a testament to incredible perseverance.
So, I left. 30 years later, I'm taking my kids back for a bit of tourism.
And for sure, we'll be keeping an eye out, back up on those long stretches, for the odd kite or two .. not that there's much to burn where we're going.
Australia is a huge, and most awesome place in the world. It's a pity what its current humans are doing with it.
Australia, for geographical reasons, simply started the process too late, when we were already getting cold feet. Now that we understand how Nature works a bit more, it’s become difficult to justify large-scale efforts to remove these threats to human life. We find it more acceptable to suffer a potential spider bite here and there, than to risk irreparable losses to the variety of life and the quality of our planet’s natural state.
If anything, the fact that Australia manages to slowly expand human footprint while still maintaining a balanced truce with our predators, is testament to the level of emotional maturity that our animal race has reached.
We can be wiped out by some of the simplest lifeforms, and even simpler, not quite lifeforms on the planet.
It's really very simple. Here is a diagram:
So long as I am not doing something dumb like going near an estuarine river filled with invisible deathbeasts, or getting into an ocean filled with transparently-tentacled murder-squigglies, or stomping through grass near logs with dozing fangjectors, I will be fine.It's just not difficult.
The dangers in life are what make it interesting to think about, right at the end of it all...
The so-called 'deadly' animals (some of which, including a variety of snakes, I come across frequently where I live) barely rate a statistical mention.
For instance, if you throw me in the sea next to a great white in a feeding frenzy, my chances of dying will have nothing to do with the probability of dying from a dog bite.
The statistics for the probability of dying from specific causes can help predict what one is most likely to die from- but not to how likely one is to die from encountering a spider or a snake.
In other words, people are afraid of, say, black widow spiders, because the probability of dying given one is attacked by a black widow is extremely high. And that is perfectly reasonable and a very good statistic to keep in mind if one is in any situation where encountering a black widow is a possibility (even one with a small probability).
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Bird, R. B., D. W. Bird, B. F. Codding, C. H. Parker, and J. H. Jones. 2008. The “Fire Stick Farming” Hypothesis: Australian Aboriginal Foraging Strategies, Biodiversity, and Anthropogenic Fire Mosaics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105:14796–14801. Crossref, PubMed, Google Scholar
Not quite an aptronym, but close.
File under "nominative determinism"!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
Kidding aside, I'd never heard about "nominative determinism" before. That's rather neat.
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1. Fires will force animals out of the forest for hunting. It sounds to me that this is the most likely reason for animals learning to spread fire.
2. While I expect sufficiently fierce fires will create plains, much of Australia's native flora is adapted to bush fires, and use it as an opportunity to regenerate. Many plants have seed pods that will only open after being burned. Thus, while much of Australia's bushland is dry, bushland that has been burned recently tends to be quite green and full of life, and many of the trees remain - however much furrier for their fresh growth of leaves.
3. Australian Aborigines (to my best recollection) were known for cycling parts of their territories as part of their nomadic lifestyle, farming somewhere, burning the land as the left, moving on, then returning again later when the land is restored and more plentiful.