Actually, surprisingly, I recently had a text on topic during my English studies, and it actually describes a useful perspective:
"Is play the new tool to use? A recent paper recounts bumblebees rolling tiny wooden balls, not for
a reward, but apparently just for fun. The authors conclude that the behavior fulfills the criteria for
play, with one noting: “It goes to show... that despite their small size and tiny brains, they are more
than small robotic beings.” Put another way, bees just wanna have fun, and that presumably makes
them more like people.
This discovery underscores a long-standing conflict in our view of animals. On the one hand, we
want to find the features that distinguish humans from other animals: tools, language, a theory of
mind (in which animals can infer the mental states of others). On the other, we delight in finding
animals that breach those boundaries: chimps, crows and now bees that use tools, dolphins with
signature whistles. But what do those boundaries mean?
Not much, or at least not what people sometimes think. As an evolutionary biologist who studies
animal behavior, Lam is bemused by this effort to rank animals by their capabilities. The ranking
is wrong not because animals lack amazing abilities, but because evolution doesn't produce an
organization like the military, with the equivalent of amoeba privates and primate generals.
Instead, everything that is alive today is just as evolved as everything else. Some species
(crocodiles and cockroaches, for instance) look more like their ancient ancestors than others and
may well behave more like them, but that doesn’t mean some creatures are more or less highly
evolved than the rest.
You might think that calling attention to bees and other animals that do things we didn't think they
could do would be a way to circumvent this ranking and make our view of nature more realistic.
But it isn’t. It is pointless to elevate creatures, whether bumblebees or chimps, so that we can put
them in an exclusive club that used to only contain humans.
Underpinning these efforts is a desire to show that animals, even tiny ones with lots of legs, are
like us and shouldn't be dismissed as automatons. I applaud that desire. But we can recognise
animals for what they are, and be awestruck at their abilities, without having to make their behavior
mirror that of humans. Bees may play, but that doesn’t mean they are like children with
exoskeletons.
Once we get out from under the tyranny of those rankings, of thinking that animals have to be like
people with human motivations and feelings, we are freed up to consider the mechanisms behind
the behaviors. Often, that involves convergent evolution. For example, the same neurotransmitter
— serotonin — influences anxiety in humans and maze exploration in crayfish. In a tank divided
into well-lit and shadowy areas, crayfish explore both, but prefer the dimmer areas, consistent with
their nocturnal lifestyle. Crayfish stressed by mild electrical shocks avoided the light sections of
the maze, a response that was linked to their serotonin levels and that could be altered by a
serotonin inhibitor.
If we can let go of the impulse to rank animals, we might find out that our intuition is wrong. And
being wrong is one of the most productive things about science."
TL;DR Animals evolve to have all sorts of traits we may perceive as "humanlike", but that's just a product of our fallacies that drive us to put animals into an exclusive "human club" - in fact, they just evolve to have various traits we see in ourselves, just like animals with other unique properties.
Scored some wishlist plants! ( lemmy.ca )
Don't know if there's any Canadians on Lemmy that have ordered from Crystal Star Nursery but this is my third order and I'm so excited!
Scientists push new paradigm of animal consciousness, saying even insects may be sentient ( www.nbcnews.com )