Atomic Nerds

A German researcher has managed to prove that magpies at least are capable of recognizing themselves in a mirror.

In case you’re wondering why that’s a big deal, it’s sort of become a standard test in animal behavior circles to see if an animal is bright enough to recognize that an image it sees is actually itself. This first requires the quick leap in reasoning in realizing that an image is a reflection at all, and second implies some limited capacity of the critter to distinguish a “self” in the first place- the most basic level of self-awareness. Until the magpie study, only bottlenose dolphins and great apes had been demonstrated to pass the mirror test.

Outside the realm of pure speculation and philosophical maundering, this proves what we already had hints of- that corvids (the bird family of which magpies are a member- also crows, jays, ravens, rooks, and jackdaws) are among the most intelligent of birds, perhaps as intelligent if not moreso than parrots, the group from which the most advanced research on animal cognition and language use not done on great apes has been done. Crows have been known to ornithologists and people who have to cope with them as pests as uncannily intelligent for a long time now, but more and more research is coming in to show that it’s not just a perception, they really are smart little buggers, more than capable of outwitting humans on a regular basis.

Personally, however, I’ve always had an issue with the test, because it depends rather heavily on something humans take for granted- vision as the dominant source of sensory information. The fact that dogs never pass the mirror test is something that is frequently mentioned in dog behavior literature as proof that dogs have no self-awareness, no conception of “I” and “you”, that they just learn from stimulus and response. It’s extremely important for humans to bear in mind that dogs don’t think or feel or remember the way humans do, but I really wonder first if a total absence of self-awareness is a logical assumption to make of a complex social animal, and second if the test is a fair measurement of an animal like a dog. (Or, for that matter, a horse or any other complex social animal that has failed the test but doesn’t put much reliance on its eyes compared to other senses.)

For a dog, smell is the ruling sense, the chief and most reliable source of information. Not only is the sense of smell of the average dog (let alone a hound) at least a hundred times more powerful than it is for humans, it’s gives them even more information than vision does for us, because scent is the only three-dimensional sense- it doesn’t just tell them what’s going on now, it also tells them what happened then. We can approximate it by taking clues from our vision and reasoning through them, but we can’t tell that someone was standing someplace an intermediate period of time ago (but is gone now) without going through that reasoning process and doing CSI tricks. For a dog, this is standard information, part of the way they hunt naturally.

Likewise, a dog’s hearing is far more sensitive and covers a greater range than ours does. Humans who have disciplined themselves very well can hear well enough to be better hunters, but only a dog can know that his owner is coming home at an unpredicted time because the characteristic sound of their car’s engine has entered their awareness from a mile away. Dog vision, by contrast, is terrible- they have a great eye for motion and are good at identifying individuals by the way they move, but their visual acuity is very poor, about as bad as mine is without my glasses. (Which is atrocious.) In one of the ironies of life, it was discovered that some dogs are nearsighted, and that certain breeds- such as German Shepherds- are particularly afflicted. In a bit of apocrypha I can’t source here but distinctly remembered, it first occurred to anyone to investigate this because a number of GSDs were washing out of certain guide dog tests for no apparent reason, the reason being that the dogs were, functionally speaking, nearly blind themselves.

The question of the mirror test and dogs then becomes, secondary to whether or not the dogs could recognize themselves, but that even if they did have some capacity to recognize “self”, why should they particularly notice or care about their mirror image? Anybody who’s raised a puppy knows that often, they’ll bluster or try to play with the strange “other puppy” they see in a mirror, but that they usually quickly realize it’s just a reflection and lose interest completely. Do they recognize themselves and conclude that it’s an irrelevant local phenomenon, do they completely fail to, and would or should they even care about something with no scent that doesn’t make a sound?

If a human were to notice a strange, sourceless smell- not a BAD smell, just a smell, and a subtle one at that- that they can’t attach to a source, would they first recognize the scent as their own if that’s what it was, and how much time, effort, and thought would they spend on it? I know that if I had no reason to suspect something was up otherwise, I’d never think it was my own scent, and I probably wouldn’t care enough to be very persistent about checking it out. As a tertiary sense, things I smell just aren’t very important to me unless I have cause to attach meaning to them- and since it’s one of my poorest senses, I’m aware my nose often plays tricks on me that I should pay no heed. (One of the quirks of my hormonal cycles is that at the right times of the month, I will often smell things that aren’t there, or smell innocuous things as though they stink, or noxious things as though they smelled a bit appetizing.) Dogs frequently see things that are unusual or alarming or just odd- partly because they live in a human world with all sorts of things they have no capacity to understand (like a human with an artificial limb, or a statue), and partly because their visual acuity is so poor compared to ours.

The second aspect of the conclusion “dogs have no self-awareness at all” that bothers me is that it doesn’t make sense to me. Not because I think the Yard Wolves are brilliant and deep souls who could philosophize like Socrates or even a stoned college student if they could but speak, but because there’s a logical breakdown for me. Dogs are transparently capable of recognizing individuals; they have their people, friends, strangers, and they treat individuals differently based on past interactions with them. They fear individuals that cause them pain, form bonds with members of their families, and remember family friends that tend to have biscuits or just plain know how to scratch in that ecstasy-producing way. Likewise, they recognize other dogs the same way- as, indeed, all complex social animals that do complicated things like hunting together or cooperating to raise young do. It’s a necessary feature, in order to keep track of the others’ behavior and shun or cooperate as appropriate; sociobiologists are seeing this cheater/cooperator distinction- the ability to track multiple relationships with multiple individuals- as more and more important to the very essence of BEING a functional social animal with each study.

And that’s my question: how can any creature have a detailed conception of a “you” with strong individual identification, and the ability to also keep track of “him” and “that other guy” and how it’s appropriate to treat them, without an “I”? How would it even be possible to have detailed external referents without the internal referent to relate it all to?

As I said, I’m not suggesting that dogs- or horses, or prairie dogs, or scrub jays- are self-aware in the same way that humans are, in the sense of being able to make detailed self-evaluations and introspections, or to think about either “I” or “you” in so advanced a fashion in order to make a conclusion like “Fucker went on vacation, I’ll piss in his shoe, that’ll teach him.”

However, in evolution, advanced features do not appear without simple predecessors, and things that are useful are often innovated several times independently. Eyes are a good example- they seem to have appeared independently in several different lineages rather than having been derived from a single early possessor of vision, so great are the advantages of advanced visual capabilities. (The independence of innovation of this feature is also why cephalopod eyes are a so much better design than the vertebrate eye.) It’s convergent evolution, and it’s ridiculously common.

Why, then, should we conclude that self-awareness- not the detailed internal world humans are accustomed to, but the basic concept of “I” versus “you” versus “someone else”- is so unique to only the very most intelligent of animals, and leave this as our automatic default assumption until a heavy body of firm proof otherwise? Because we are really so afraid of the potential for anthropomorphism… or because we are still afraid of finding out that we’re not quite as super-special as we have always loved to believe we are?

Probably some of both.

Posted Dogblogging, Science: we'll fuck you up, omphaloskepsis |