wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Comment from Aaron
Date: January 12, 2010, 12:22 am

Hoorah for Radiolab!
This sounds like a thoroughly interesting topic which I am about to listen to.

Comment from m
Date: January 12, 2010, 4:01 am

i heart radiolab!

Comment from Fernando Rosales
Date: January 12, 2010, 5:02 am

Beautiful episode. I’m glad you decided to end it the way you did.

Comment from Tim Maher
Date: January 12, 2010, 3:29 pm

This RadioLab episode touches on the same idea of a news article I read a few days ago:

“Scientists say dolphins should be treated as non-human persons” http://www.physorg.com/news181981904.html

“Scientists studying dolphin behavior have suggested they could be the most intelligent creatures on Earth after humans…The behavioral studies showed dolphins (especially the bottlenose) have distinct personalities and self-awareness, and they can think about the future. The research also confirmed dolphins have complex social structures, with individuals co-operating to solve difficult problems or to round up shoals of fish to eat, and with new behaviors being passed from one dolphin to another.”

Comment from becky
Date: January 12, 2010, 4:19 pm

I love radiolab and I’m delighted to see a new episode! But why is the episode dated April 2, 2010 when I can have it today? This happened with the last couple as well. I’m just confused about the timeline.

Comment from Kath
Date: January 12, 2010, 4:26 pm

Such a wonderful topic! This whole episode reminded me of a book I read a while back; When Elephants Weep, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy, that talks about animal emotions. I’d recommend it to anyone who would like to delve more into these topics.

I would say though that the experiment on the “guilty” dogs is totally bogus. Consider that if you were to yell the same way at a small child, even if they had done nothing wrong, would they not also act submissive and look as if they were guilty? The fact that dog emotions do not correlate-exactly to human emotions does not mean that dogs don’t have emotions; to deny animals emotions is to deny evolution!

Consider the other experiment with dogs that will look in the direction their owner is pointing; dogs who are trained well to not eat a treat will “steal” a treat when they know their owner isn’t looking (such as when a bucket is placed over the owners head). Dogs have been bred to be easily conditioned to our ways of life. (And the other question I would have on that note would be; can chimps who *were* bottle-fed & raised with humans look in the direction a human is pointing?)

Our emotional lives are responses to the chemicals within our brains and bodies, and so emotions too must have evolved with the rest of us. Animals only lack the ability to communicate emotions the same way we communicate them and *that* is where we must be careful when we attempt to interpret their emotions. But that’s really not much different than interpreting body language and gestures from one culture to another. We cannot forget though that at one time, not too long ago, people who did have trouble communicating (those who were deaf, autistic, mentally disabled etc.) were denied the idea that they had emotions simply because it was difficult for them to communicate those emotions to the rest of us.

I also had to laugh at the story about the geese; anyone who has a pet bird can tell you that they’re cantankerous little buggers. They have their own personality, and I believe they express affection in their own way. Especially with birds, since they are such social creatures, it’s almost like they have their own culture with their own rules of society.
And the question I’d have about Paul Nicklen’s seal would be; how much do we know about leopard seal mating behavior? Was the seal trying to care for him or trying to approach him as a mate? Perhaps she fell in love with him just as much as he with her? Of course this leads us to ask; what is love? An emotion, an action, or a chemical response in our brains?

Comment from bob
Date: January 12, 2010, 7:26 pm

Excellent episode except that I think that the anti-anthropomorphic scientists had a bit to loud a voice. This view point was a reactionary school of thought (justified at the time) but my reading of the science is that we have moved on. For social animals, there is the inevitable convergence of key social memes such as gratitude. The only questions are whether it can result in cross species attempts at communication of these memes and whether the kinesics (since we have no common language) will be recognized.
I would argue, as would most post-anti-anthropomorphic observers, that extreme cases should not be dogmatically ignored. In the case of the whale, the idea that it was a case of disorientation completely ignores the very purposeful seeking out of all members of the team.

Comment from Matt
Date: January 12, 2010, 7:37 pm

I’m with Kath and bob. People will bend over backwards to avoid attributing thoughts and emotional states to animals, giving up on Occam’s razor.

Comment from Thomas
Date: January 13, 2010, 1:06 am

Kath,

The point they made w/ the dog experiment was that the emotion the dog felt probably wasn’t guilt. They didn’t rule out some emotion related to the submissive behavior. In fact I’m pretty sure submissive behavior correlates with an emotion motivating submissive behavior. Its a centrally important skill for dogs to display submission at times and emotions are evolutions most reliable way of producing reliable behavior so it stands to reason that there’s emotion going on there. That emotions motivate behavior is probably true for all animals. People like Christoph Koch think that even honeybees might have consciousness and why have consciousness if not to be aware of feelings? So those doggies are surely feeling too.

Comment from Martijn Rijven
Date: January 13, 2010, 5:00 am

First off, I’m a new listener to radio lab, and I absolutely love it… (and so say all of us, I guess).

For the point Clive Win (Wynn?) made about the ‘demeaning’ assumption that all animals are basically like humans the opposite could easily be argued. You could say humans are basically animals and when we (instinctively as animals maybe?) interpret an animal’s behavior as showing gratitude, that’s just what it is. We usually interpret fear and aggression in animals when we’re faced with it pretty accurately in the same way.
I believe whales hang around the corpses of animals from their group that have died for quite some time too, elephants do the same. What would that be? Boredom? Stupidity? No it’s mourning. What else would it be… conventional thinking about animal instinct would dictate it would just be on its way to survive another day…

Here’s a good read on animal and human ‘consciousness’: Straw Dogs, by John Grey.

Comment from Nico
Date: January 13, 2010, 7:50 am

The hyperlink for Paul Nicklen is really also for Paul Theroux.

Pingback from Wednesday Round Up #98 « Neuroanthropology
Date: January 13, 2010, 10:36 am

[...] Lab, Animal Minds What goes on in the minds of animals? An hour long and insightful [...]

Comment from jimB
Date: January 13, 2010, 11:24 am

re Tim Maher
Tim, have you seen ‘The Cove’? http://bit.ly/xqBqQ
Both Sea Shepherd Captain Paul Watson and dolphin trainer Richard O’Barry share similar life changing experiences http://bit.ly/5SnN4n
Also see Polar Obsession (National Geographic)
here http://bit.ly/20DL3W

Comment from Kerry
Date: January 13, 2010, 11:38 am

I loved the piece on the whale hugs.

Comment from Soren
Date: January 13, 2010, 11:48 am

Nico,
Thanks for the catch. The link should be fixed now … so go check out all those beautiful images.

Soren

Comment from Kathy Orlinsky
Date: January 13, 2010, 1:03 pm

My daughter and I have tried the pointing experiment with our dog. It works pretty well.

We saw a similar experiment on TV that compared dogs to wolves. First, they had to figure out how to pull a piece of meat out of a cage using a strip of cloth. Both did equally well.

Next, they were presented with meat that could not be removed from a cage. This time, the wolf worked at the cage until the keepers had to take it away because it was getting overly frustrated.

The dog, on the other hand, gave one or two attempts at the cage, then went and sat by the human. For the next couple of minutes, the dog looked pointedly at the cage, then at the human’s face, then back at the cage.

At the risk of anthropomorphizing the event, it certainly seemed like the dog was thinking, “Hey buddy, a little help please?”

Comment from zac zeller
Date: January 13, 2010, 2:38 pm

Right on! Great show. Keep it up guys.
-Zac

Comment from Barton
Date: January 13, 2010, 3:20 pm

Love the show, as always, and this one was very touching to a member of my species.
I also particularly enjoyed the transition music used for this episode. Who is?

Comment from Ken
Date: January 13, 2010, 3:51 pm

Where can I see the leopard seal photos?

Comment from kath
Date: January 13, 2010, 5:41 pm

Thomas; the point I was trying to make about the dog experiment was that a dog or a person can feel guilty when they’re being scolded even when they know they’ve done nothing wrong, so the experiment doesn’t really prove that the dogs aren’t feeling guilty. Consider that the experiments probably are using well trained dogs, and dogs are trained to know that the human is in charge, and basically to obey human commands and that the human is always right; in that sense, they are left without room to argue even if they wanted to. What else is a good dog to do but say “you’re right, I don’t know what I did wrong, but I’m sorry” (or probably more simply in their heads “you’re angry, I submit to your authority”) when scolded?

And what exactly is the feeling of “guilt” anyways? I would say the fear of being reprimanded for something we’ve done is at least part of what guilt is, and plenty of dog owners can tell you that when they come home to find their couch chewed up or a puddle on the floor that the dog is hiding somewhere “looking guilty.”

I would never say that their feelings of fear, guilt, regret, etc. are equivalent to or as complicated as our own. But do we need to invent a whole other language for the emotions they do experience when their body language is telling us they are experiencing similar emotions to our own?

To Ken looking for photos of the seal; Paul Nicklen has his own website, http://www.paulnicklen.com/ and more images of the specific story found here: http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/news/chiefeditor/2009/11/paul-nicklen.html

Comment from Aaron
Date: January 13, 2010, 6:15 pm

http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/wallpaper/leopard-seal-antarctic-peninsula_pod_image.html

… I think that URL I pasted could possibly be one of the photos. It’s exactly what I envisioned the description of the photo to be, anyway.

Comment from Dan Warren
Date: January 13, 2010, 10:36 pm

One thing that doesn’t come up very often in discussions of animal consciousness is the principle of parsimony – the scientific principle that states that, all other things being equal, the simplest explanation that fits the evidence is the one that we should accept. In the context of evolutionary biology, we interpret this as implying that, absent other evidence, we should minimize the hypothesized number of changes needed to explain a trait. There are definitely problems with applying strict-sense parsimony to every situation, but as a general principle if we see similar phenotypes in two closely related organisms, we do not start from the assumption that those two phenotypes arose independently, nor that they are fundamentally different in kind.

As an evolutionary biologist, I see no reason why we should suddenly abandon this principle when we start talking about animal cognition or emotion. Granted there are differences between what animals perceive and how they need to interact with their environment that almost certainly mean that their perception of the world differs from our own to some extent. However, the evolutionary history that we share with these animals argues that our null expectation should NOT be that the way they experience the world is entirely different from ours. Obviously there are risks involved with anthropomorphizing too much, but if we see a behavior that strikes us as indicative of some emotion, in an animal who shares with us the evolutionary history and physiological mechanisms that produce that emotion in humans, it is simply not parsimonious to assume without further evidence that the experience of the animal is entirely dissimilar from our own. I know that a lot of scientists do this from an abundance of caution about the risks of anthropomorphizing, but from an evolutionary perspective it’s difficult to justify at best. It’s far more reasonable in my opinion to start from the assumption that there will be some commonalities due to common ancestry and function, and some differences due to the different requirements of each animal’s life history, and to look at what those differences are.

Comment from Tim
Date: January 14, 2010, 10:04 am

Love listening – always fascinating!

One thing that immediately struck me when hearing the first dog story was how my dog reacts when she’s been bad BEFORE I even yell at her. I can tell, almost always, when I come home and she’s been bad because she acts completely differently than if she had done nothing wrong while I was gone.

Obviously I can’t tell you what she’s thinking, but it does seem (by her actions) like she clearly knows she’s done something wrong and that I won’t react favorably to it once I discover that.

Not sure what it means exactly, but I think it’s worth considering when thinking about the experiment.

Comment from Jonathan Hudgins
Date: January 14, 2010, 12:52 pm

For more leopard seal photos from Paul Nicklen check out http://www.paulnicklen.com/polar-obsession.html.

I always love the story telling from radiolab. It seems to me there is a balance between anthropomorphizing and finding similar emotional traits. Birds have much smaller brains than mammals and it is our relative brain size that is most distinguishing feature of humans (our vocalization, opposing thumbs, and bi-pedalism are the others).

Comment from Yvonne
Date: January 14, 2010, 1:44 pm

I’m with Tim. The dog “guilt” portion of the episode made it seem that dogs were just acting submissive and not necessarily feeling guilty, I thought of my mom’s beagle who likes to get into trouble often. He’s normally happy go lucky and when you come home he likes to greet you with tail wags and lots of deep bellowing barks, but when he does something bad while everyone is away, his demeanor is completely different as you walk into the house, his tail is between his legs and he won’t look at you directly in the eye. This behavior alerts us that he did something wrong and that’s when the search begins to find what he ate or destroyed. I would love a whole radiolab just dedicated to The Dog, they are so interesting especially in reference to their interactions with humans. I add lib for my dog all the time, since I obviously think I know what he’s thinking, it be nice to hear a deep investigation into the fabulousness that makes a dog what he is but radiolab style

thanks guys, keep up the awesome work and keep the shows coming, i can’t get enough

Comment from Corey
Date: January 14, 2010, 3:19 pm

The Radiolab team is amazing. Thank you for keeping me company during my long commute to work (80mins each way). I only get to listen to your show on days that I drive alone (which is rare), but most times I am brought to tears. You are very powerful presenters.

Comment from Silvia
Date: January 14, 2010, 3:44 pm

One again, the Masters have outdone themselves in this, the latest gem out of their treasure chest of audible bling. You are in for another treat with “Animal Minds”. Sit down, relax, turn off the phone, listen.

Comment from Anonymous
Date: January 14, 2010, 5:45 pm

Thank you for a wonderful program.

I, too, have to join with the rest of the dog owners and say that my dogs always act different even before I find out they’ve done something they shouldn’t have. I also have to say that I am sure they have a very wide spectrum of emotions and that they try to share those emotions among themselves and with me and my family. They also have very distinctive and different personalities that I cannot deny. I do not think they are humans with fur and four legs, but I do think (maybe it’s just wishful thinking) that there is a real connection and communication between the two species.

this episode touched a lot the subject of emotions, which made me wish i could hear a radiolab episode dedicated just to the idea of emotions. why do we feel, and are emotions helping us in any way or just getting in the way?

Comment from Jeff
Date: January 14, 2010, 6:18 pm

Hold on, The segment about the dogs reacting to a scolding whether or not they did something bad only proved that the dogs reacted in a like manner to a scolding.

Like Tim above, I had a dog that would act “guilty” before I even knew she had done something. The most obvious time I recall was when I came home from work and was greeted by a wagging tail, but a lowered head and eyes blinking. I had never seen any dog let alone this dog act like that.

When I went upstairs, I discovered a potted plant had been knocked over, and her odd greeting became clear.

I had only had this dog for a few months and never had scolded her. I also knew the previous owner was very gentle with the dog, so I don’t expect she was anticipating a scolding. Even then, she was clearly not cowering.

It certainly wasn’t a typical submissive gesture either. It was totally unique to anything I’ve seen a dog do before.

The dog clearly knew it had done something wrong, and was anticipating a reaction from me before I had any knowledge of what, let alone if, she had done something. Whether or not she actually felt or was displaying guilt, I’m hard pressed to interpret it in any other way.

Comment from Phil
Date: January 14, 2010, 6:19 pm

My daughter in college put me on to Radio Lab. I love it – it is now on my list of favorites. Great work!

Comment from Jeff
Date: January 14, 2010, 7:24 pm

Folks may be interested in this article in the New York Times Magazine this last summer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/magazine/12whales-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=magazine

Comment from Naga Nataka
Date: January 14, 2010, 10:50 pm

I agree with previous commentators that Alexandra Horowitz’s conclusions are shaky at best. All she has done is to establish a correlation between scolding and submissive behavior. How does this support or negate a hypothesis that such behavior may signify an emotional state of guilt? It seems that she has jumped to conclusions to support her own feelings on the subject.

Moreover, the experiment continues a tradition of cruelty toward animals in the name of gathering knowledge that has endured for too long. It may seem relatively harmless, but consider a similar experiment in which dogs would be beaten instead of scolded to study their reactions. Would we consider it acceptable? It seems to me only a few shades less violent, but violent nonetheless, to yell at a dog for something they haven’t done to see how they’ll react.

Consider that, instead of dogs, the experiment had used children. Their parents would be lied to and told the children had misbehaved. The parents would then yell at the children and accuse them of misbehaving to see what reaction it evoked. After the children cried and the data were collected, the parents would then be told of the ruse, and have to explain to their children that they had falsely accused them and yelled at them in the name of ’science’.

The entire experiment is based on the assumption that dogs are less sentient than children, and therefore less deserving of our respect. Can’t we find a more intelligent and humane way of learning about ourselves and the world around us?

Comment from Rodrigo
Date: January 15, 2010, 1:48 am

I am thinking about what gives the whale an understanding of the vastness of the ocean, its memories of danger and contact, and how its curiosity was propelled, making it analyze what was inherent to the elimination of the threat.

Comment from Eddie Lin
Date: January 15, 2010, 3:59 am

Paul Theroux needs to chill. E.B. White’s writing career and success was based upon talking a talking arachnid, pig, mice and all sorts of other animals. So what. More power to him.

He says, “The writing business should be unsparing.” Who else says that? So basically Theroux frowns on any kind of anthropomorphized animal books? Dr. Seuss? Mother Goose?

Theroux also ridiculously states, “You’re giving E.B. White too much license.” What? Too much license? E.B. White didn’t write science text books. Please, sir! What the world needs now is more talking animals and fewer curmudgeons.

Sorry, just had to rant.

Comment from Olivia
Date: January 15, 2010, 11:59 am

Kath makes some very good points. I completely agree that children would cower even if not guilty.

But one major question for me that has not been addressed in the dog study is whether the animals would have cowered at all if they had come from owners who had not punished them in the past, learned behavior, if you will. To say that dogs specifically feel “guilt” about their actions might be stretching things a bit. However, it seems that something more than simply natural submission is at work. There seem to be some emotions involved.

In many ways, dogs resemble our early selves, before we are completely culturally socialized and our empathy fine-tuned. We are born with some extent of natural empathy, but to fully develop it, we need to witness what sorts of behaviors upset those around us. Dogs seem to be in the stage we are as children. For example, we may not entirely understand why something we’ve done has upset our mother, but we can still feel some negative emotion for being the cause of her displeasure. We may not know why she becomes upset when we do something in particular, but seeing her emotional response, we learn that we do not want to do that again. And even before we are able to truly feel “guilt,” which implies some empathetic ability, we may still respond to scolding by cowering because we know that we have displeased our parent. Dogs probably do not immediately feel any remorse for chewing your favorite pair of shoes. But once they have heard your tone change, they can respond to it, becoming aware that one particular action caused this change. Perhaps they will not do it again, or more likely they will, but they will cower, remembering the response their behavior elicited last time. This could be out of fear, but I cannot see why it would not be an emotional response on the dog’s part. And even if it was fear, that is still an emotion, no matter how instinctual.

Comment from Paul Smaldino
Date: January 15, 2010, 6:57 pm

Fantastic show, as usual. It made me want to re-read Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” – which is a great essay on coming to terms with inherent differences in inter- (and intra-) species perspectives.

I think this show says far more about the way the human mind works (including how we think about other minds) than about how animal minds work, which is fine by me.

Comment from Jai
Date: January 15, 2010, 7:58 pm

Loved the episode, you guys are awesome.

Question about the dog remorse study and interpretation by Horowitz… It occurs we can never know what the animal is experiencing, a philosophical challenge with respect to subjective experience. Of course we can measure things like neurometrics, fMRI, and get a clear picture about what is happening objectively; but this only tells us something about what is happening, not the experience of it. Do we all see yellow the same? We can’t finally answer the question of bridging the subjective and objective with our current way of knowing. But isn’t it the nature of good inductive reasoning to make substantiated correlations until it suffers scrutiny and stands out as the most predictive. Looks like a fish, acts like a fish; probably a fish!

It turns out there’re universal emotion indicators in man, and similar but different ones in animals! These’ve been codified by Dr Paul Ekman like in you cool previous show, and in _Blink_, and also in the Primate Facial Action Coding System. These facial actions are mapped to emotional brain centers in the same way as humans with minor variations. Dogs, similarly.

So back to the doggies: when they display remorse in circumstances that would be appropriate. Even when falsely accused they show this. So are they just trained to respond or are they feeling the remorse? When falsely accused sometimes we do come to believe we are bad, especially children who’s reference is the parent for good and bad. Of course we can react in other ways, and sometimes dogs do as well. If we’re trying to discover whether dogs are similar to humans we need to compare! If we’re faced with the same difficulty with people of knowing the experience, only known by induction, we’d have to compare! To me, the question is, do humans act similarly?

Maybe another question is, what is the adaptive function of emotion? Much research shows it primes adaptive social and survival relevant behaviors like fight / flight / freeze. Packs of animals have the same adaptive pressures, and a triune brain much like our own. Darwin wrote _Emotion in Man and Animals_ about this very thing!

Clyde admits social companionship, but oddly denies social emotion! This seems oddly contradictory. Sociability is mediated in part through emotional exchange. We’d be oddly inconsistent to recognize the same patterns of behavior, the same neural structures, and deny the emotion of animals. Anthropomorphizing is always a danger, but using bears to deny the whale’s gratitude, and ignoring the social care evidenced by mother bears to cubs is just not representing the data and spinning a non representative data set!

I feel sp lucky to have our animal human emotions. And to be able to share them with our animal companions. Maybe this feeling of connection is necessary to relate to our environment with a bit more empathy, seeing nature as a living breathing feeling thing needing consideration.

Thanks for another awesome episode, you guys rock.

Comment from Nick B
Date: January 16, 2010, 2:40 pm

Did the divers take any pictures of the whale?

Comment from Ted Jones
Date: January 16, 2010, 10:38 pm

The imagery in the opening whale story was powerful. I’m left with a couple of questions though. The buoys sank in to the abyss? Buoys sink? Did the divers rig the lines they cut so the crab pots could be recovered? If not, those pots will be be fishing crabs (ie: destroying the crab population) for many years to come. If “ghost” fishing gear was left behind, was freeing the whale really worth the price? Just some thoughts…

Comment from Eric Raymond
Date: January 17, 2010, 2:26 am

Ted,
The bait in crab pots does not last indefinitely. As someone who has fished crab commercially, I can tell you that more than likely the bait was gone by the time the divers cleared the pots from the whale. The buoys themselves cannot float the 100 lb. crab pots. So, yes the buoys sank into the abyss along with the pots. Without bait, the likelihood of crabs being caught in the traps is negligible. So if two or three crabs ended up wandering into the traps by chance, I would consider it “gene pool cleansing” and it would certainly be worth the life of such a magnificent and obviously grateful creature.
Eric Raymond

Comment from Ted Jones
Date: January 17, 2010, 4:40 am

Eric,

Thanks for your response. Not knowing the weight of the pots or the size/make of buoys I was having a hard time picturing. Also, I figured if lines were slashed, the buoys may no longer be tethered to the pots. I’ve heard that derelict pots continue to attract crabs, and the trapped crabs eventually act as bait for more crabs and the cycle basically continues until the pot is defunct (ie: after years of corrosion). The whale is certainly a magnificent creature, but I personally wouldn’t want to make a choice between two species.

Comment from Carla DeMello
Date: January 17, 2010, 4:57 pm

What a great show! But I really wanted more about the dog/pointing thing. Did Clive try raising a chimp and see what happened re pointing? And of course he doesn’t have to because as anyone who has dogs AND cats knows, cats don’t follow your point or if they do I’ve never seen it and I’ve had both dogs and cats for years and years. When I point the dog looks where I’m pointing and the cat sniffs my finger. Needless to say, the dog gets the yummy thing. So that would debunk the “raised with humans” hypothesis but I don’t think it has to do with intelligence or being more or less tuned in to people either.

Comment from jane Sokolow
Date: January 17, 2010, 11:40 pm

I can’t understand why you didn’t consult an animal behaviorist for this podcast. Why turn to a neuro scientist, a writer, and a photographer, when animal behaviorists actually STUDY this subject and you omit them? You spent a whole hour pooh-poohing people anthropomorphizing animals, then end with a leopard seal story, in which you castigate the guy who went through this experience b/c he didn’t handle it as if it were a human interaction.

You say repeatedly that you’re not going to answer the leading question. Well, are you determined NOT to answer it? If so, you’re going about it in the right way… by not talking to people who might actually have relevant answers.

Comment from Luke
Date: January 18, 2010, 12:45 am

RadioLab is the greatest radio show of all time.

More! More!

I once interviewed a researcher in animal cognition for my own (vastly inferior) podcast, Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot.

Comment from Rodger
Date: January 18, 2010, 3:38 am

Thanks for a great show as always.

I’m also curious to know who was playing the transition music at the 22:23 mark during this show.

Comment from Tracy McIntyre
Date: January 18, 2010, 10:10 am

After years of digesting information about animals exhibiting behavior that was once considered the exclusive domain of humans, I have concluded that the only thing that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is the need to use toilet paper.

Comment from sazky
Date: January 18, 2010, 1:34 pm

Thanks for the catch.wish all the best

Comment from Erik Schaumann
Date: January 18, 2010, 10:57 pm

Who on your staff chose the “Angels from on High” men’s chorus transition piece? I loved to hear it. “From in Cumorah’s lonely hill, a sacred record lies concealed” it speaks of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. I’m sure there were no hidden messages, But I was suprised to hear it played on the show. I am a former member of the BYU men’s chorus, so it was exciting to hear a piece I’ve loved for a long time on Radio Lab!

Pingback from Common Sense Atheism » News Bits
Date: January 19, 2010, 2:21 am

[...] series of all time. They just published the first episode of their 7th season. And yeah, it’s awesome. Here are my favorite episodes. Also, Philosophy Talk remains my second-favorite [...]

Comment from Keith
Date: January 19, 2010, 2:09 pm

I would love to have seen the pictures of the seal. You both seem to be looking at them but you don’t post them on the your site. If you can please post these pictures so we all may see.

Thanks much, and love your show!

Comment from Scott
Date: January 19, 2010, 5:45 pm

Hi, another nice show. What really struck me, though, was the underlying assumption that science should be looking for the Building Blocks of this or that phenomena, eg., could spindle cells really be The One Structure that enables empathy.

It’s an old thought habit of ours, but by now: physics got down to “building blocks” and they are mostly empty space and extremely mysterious interrelationships; biology got down to “building blocks” with genes, but it turned out there are way more characteristics than can be accounted for by the number of genes, according to the Human Genome Project, and now the idea is it has something to do with complex relationships between the proteins; etc…..
Animals with gills can breathe underwater – it’s so tempting to look for the analogous feature that allows empathy, but it seems that the last hundred years of science have been steering us away from this kind of question, perhaps toward better descriptions of the relationships that give rise to the world we know.

Comment from Mari Schindele
Date: January 20, 2010, 11:07 am

Wow–another beautiful episode! My kids listen to Radiolab by proxy, because every time I hear an episode, I tell the whole thing to them at dinner. Interestingly, my son (9) is convinced that the leopard seal thought Nicklen was her mate, while my daughter (7) thinks the seal thought Nicklen was her baby.
One question: what was up with the guy who couldn’t tell the difference between Jad’s and Robert’s voices?
Thanks for such a great show.

Comment from hronnsa
Date: January 20, 2010, 1:50 pm

i think this might be my favorite radiolab show ever. you outdid yourselves! thanks and happy new year!

Comment from Anonymous
Date: January 20, 2010, 5:44 pm

AMAZING PICTURES of the the leopard seals!

Goes with the final segment of this radio lab. I wish there were picture galleries associated with each radio lab. I think it would really enhance it.

http://seawayblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/amazing-experience-of-paul-nicklen-and.html

Comment from Raj
Date: January 20, 2010, 8:22 pm

Illuminating episode as always, but I have quite a lot of constructive criticism for anyone that’s interested.

First of all, I feel like RadioLab struggled with this episode because they never put their thumb on the right question to ask. Before we can ask if members of other species have emotions, don’t we first need to ask the simple question: How do I know YOU have emotions? Seems silly, maybe? But it’s just as valid a question—scientifically speaking—for me to ask whether Clive has emotions as it is for him to question whether his dog has emotions (arguably it makes even more sense, because I don’t know Clive, whereas Clive knows his dog very well— it’s only my ASSUMPTION that Clive is just like me that makes that an odd question). In fact, this question is not only scientifically valid, it’s culturally and historically relevant as well. All too often in history humans have determined that other groups of humans do not have emotions, often with tragic results (from our contemporary point of view, that is).

I would have loved to see an exploration of the relationship between communication and perceived emotion… and possibly also between higher-order communication and internal emotions that are not externally exhibited. I rather wonder if our perception of human emotions as being very complex and nuanced is due largely to our very complex and nuanced ability to express those emotions, for example. But to study a relationship between two things, one first has to distinguish between the two, which I feel is where this episode missed the mark.

The next valid question, in my mind, is: What is the relationship between emotions and actions? I want, therefore I act. If my desire is my motivation for my actions, then what does that say about how I interpret the actions of others? Is it preposterous to presume that an ant or a bumblebee is full of desire? This question may seem like it’s wandering slightly off topic, but to me it’s central to understanding the motivation behind a creature’s actions (and that motivation is the big question mark that this whole podcast revolves around).

Regarding the whale, I very much like the idea of the whale thanking its rescuers, but the first scientific question that has to be asked is: Was the whale attempting to communicate at all? Intention seemed clear due to the fact that its behavior was methodological, but it’s more logical to assume that it was collecting information than it is to assume that it was communicating (not to say that it was exclusively doing one thing or another).

Clive seemed to confuse functional communication with emotional communication/perception in his story about dogs and wolves and its relevance to the whale. The test demonstrates that dogs and wolves are both capable of developing the ability to interpret basic, functional human communication… to extrapolate anything more from the test would be unscientific (Clive, man, I’m sorry, you are not getting a passing grade on this episode).

Theroux’s criticism of White strunk me as silly. Human language is for human communication and human emotions. If any author wants to communicate anything about animal emotions in a human language, it necessarily involves human interpretation… Even a scientific method is a form of human interpretation— one based on rigid rules that are often bent to conform to human biases and preconceptions (there’s plenty of proof of that in this podcast). Clearly White was not attempting to be purely scientific with his writing… he is an author adept at writing compelling works by attributing strong emotions to his characters… and who is he to say that the defeated goose didn’t feel dejected or ashamed? Just because it has the tenacity (yeah, that’s right) to try again another day doesn’t say one thing or another about its emotions at that point. Not to mention that human language is subject to cultural and personal interpretation… I might be more liberal with my use of the word ‘malice’ than Theroux, for example.

The Paul Nicklen part about the leopard seal was amazing, including the photo links (thanks Anonymous). Paul seemed in some ways to be the least opinionated person interviewed in this episode, so that was a nice way to end the show.

If anything, this episode was about how humans struggle to interpret animal behavior and relate that behavior to our own. I think our difficulties in analyzing ourselves from a strictly scientific point of view is only exacerbated when we add other species into the mix.

Please forgive my rambling!
Raj

Comment from frank rice
Date: January 21, 2010, 2:28 am

Brilliant simply Brilliant!! LOve it

Comment from Margie
Date: January 21, 2010, 12:59 pm

Oh, Radiolab, I love you. This episode was such a fun one!

Comment from frank rice
Date: January 22, 2010, 8:17 am

U ROCK!!

Comment from joe
Date: January 22, 2010, 3:43 pm

I appreciate many of the other comments. Communication is the issue more than emotion. Context is everything. All energy, and all life is a continuum that thrives on understanding and harmony. Our humanity needs to answer these questions for the hope of the future.

To many other commentors’ point – our ability as humans to experience emotion, understand our emotion, express that emotion or interpret others emotions, on any level of accuracy or conistency, is itself a highly complex, variable and most uncertain process. And we do a pretty lousy job of teaching or using best practices anyway (why do i need to go to therapy to learn active listening? :0 )

I believe that “emotion” is a wildly misunderstood, poorly defined concept that means very different things to each of us. The only chance we have to make sense of it all is CONTEXT.

The context of behaviors, expressions, past experience, history, etc. all build the framework from which any interpretation of our experience (my simple definition of emotion), and I believe that this emotional context allows all creatures, virtually all life, to share emotion, accepting that some will be more simplistic and some more complex. I have seen a wild animal shot and suffer in agony before death – plenty of emotion being expressed there. I’ve have dog and cat friends. Yes, friends. They know me, behave differently with me than with others, understand my gestures and share certain behaviors with me that they don’t often share with others. They get excited to see me, and i really look forward to seeing AND being with them. Sometimes more than their owners!!!

Context: Had the whale behaved this way at a random meeting 18 miles out to sea, then interpreting behavior might be a little more challenging. But to have her so carefully, patiently and deliberately encounter each diver after they saved her from a most painful, and precarious situation makes me feel (yes, experience my own emotion) sort of stupid for seeing her behaviour as anything by consciously expressing something along the lines of gratitude. It may not be what the pope thinks of as gratitude, or Rush Limbaugh or even my high school football coach, but i’m willing to bet its close enough to what i consider one organic creature’s sense of being helped by another, and wanting to say “thanks” to the one that helped it. These stories are common, and not just from non-humans to humans – sometimes it’s the critters that pull our ass out of the fire, literally.

Our human experience is part of the continuum of life. I hope that we continue to ask these great questions, and that Radio Lab continues to bring together as many perspectives on these great topics as possible. I might even suggest they spend less time with the Clive’s of the world (not that his perspective wasn’t worthy, it was) but use the precious minutes of their show to bring in even more perspectives. I think parents could have a lot to say on this topic. Little children can’t talk early on, and can’t express themselves very well until many years later. But parents can interpret emotions being expressed quite well. Conversely, many adults struggle to experience or express emotions EFFECTIVELY and misunderstanding is at the heart of most conflicts. Our relationships and our communities struggle to maintain unity, connectedness and to harvest our true potential because we fail to interpret or understand each others’ emotions.

Believing in the life force, emotional experience and relational capacity of our animal friends may well be a very important part of seeing how much we still have to learn about our human brothers and sisters, and the opportunity we have to make life better for all through effective communication and appreciation for the value each life brings, human or not.

Pingback from Chest-bumping Whales on RadioLab « Lexiecom
Date: January 24, 2010, 9:01 pm

[...] a comment » This podcast on WNYC’s RadioLab choked me up on a drive home from Santa Fe. Listen for yourself and see [...]

Comment from JMB
Date: January 25, 2010, 4:12 pm

One of the top 3 RadioLab episodes to date. Thanks guys!

Comment from PC
Date: January 25, 2010, 11:20 pm

I’d also like to know who performed that music–sounds like a banjo down in a hole (with drums).
thanks.

Comment from ben tillotson
Date: January 26, 2010, 5:42 am

wonderful show, they are all wonderful for that matter. A small correction. E.B. White didn’t write The Elements of Style. William Strunk Jr. wrote it. White was a student at Cornell in 1919 where strunk taught a course called English 8. In 1957 Macmillan commissioned E.B. White to revise it. I doubt Strunk would care and imagine White would be tickled.
THANKS

Comment from Ashley M
Date: January 27, 2010, 5:12 pm

I found it incredibly interesting that hand rearing wee baby wolves taught them to be friendly to humans, and view us as companions. I think of human babies & child development- When a child is in the care of a guardian & then abandoned or made to feel unsafe, the emotional reaction & ability to trust & view humans as “companions” seems to be affected similarly. From there, is a behavioral pattern that can cause problems with human relationships, where pointing or even “I care for you” just does not register as with the chimpanzee. And I heard the brain is a little resistant to change. Peace, Love,

Comment from Peter
Date: January 27, 2010, 9:21 pm

Hi
Have to agree with Jad and Robert and other posters that sometimes you dont answer the questions you put forward. Which can be a bit annoying, but it DOES PROMPT ME TO THINK FURTHER about the issues and stories you tell-which is why I’m a fan! I agree with several posters above that the question of OUR EMOTIONS could have been delved into deeper, and are they just evolutionary physiological responses, and WHY WOULDN’T other animals possess similar “feelings” if it gave them an evolutionary edge. Imagine the fate of a species of defenseless mammal like us if we did not have the feeling of love for our babies, and didnt have the urge to protect them. Maybe the protective instinct we observe in other animals for their young is the result of similar feelings of “love” the animal actually experiences inside their brains, but we just see it as mechanical instinctive protection. I dunno, and I doubt anyone does. Thanks for a great series of shows over the years.

Comment from Charlie
Date: January 28, 2010, 4:21 am

This is a compelling episode, especially the anecdotes, but also incredibly frustrating to me for two reasons, both mentioned in other comments:

1) The bias against accepting animal emotions shown by those interviewed. Their requirements seemed so high, I’d be curious how they’d prove to themselves that other humans have emotions – it reminds me of the Problem of Other Minds, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_other_minds

2) Much more relevant people could have been interviewed! Radiolab, how could you go to a break after making a joke about a bottle-fed dolphin and then just move on WITHOUT TALKING TO SOMEONE AT SEAWORLD?!

It seems very arrogant to put a burden of proof on emotions in other animals. Even from a layman’s point of view, based on the information presented in the podcast: we understand that emotions cause useful behaviors that would not be easily executed out of logic (i.e. defending loved ones = propagating genes); and we were told that spindle cells connect the highest-evolved parts of our brain to the inner, older brain where emotions lie. So how could it be that other animals lack this mechanism for eliciting critical survival behaviors, and lack a part of the brain we know to be evolutionarily very old? We suddenly grew emotions when we came out of the trees, and animals might have primitive passions but are ‘emotionally disconnected’?

The question would make more sense, and have a less obvious answer of YES, if it were framed as asking what interspecies communication is possible, and how our emotions map to those of other species – a similar problem to that of inter-cultural (mis)understanding.

Comment from Bryant
Date: January 28, 2010, 4:26 pm

When biologists see a similar physical structure from two different species, the first assumption is that they evolved from the same source. In most cases, the chances of the same structure evolving independently is unlikely. Likewise, I believe that similar behaviors exhibited by animals not so far away on an evolutionary scale likely result from similar reasons. For example, if we see a dog lovingly caring for her puppies, the behavior probably results from feelings of love. I think this explanation is a simpler one than saying that the dog evolved completely different psychological structures that result in the same behavior.

Pingback from Radiolab’s Animal Minds « Arius Eats Crickets
Date: January 28, 2010, 9:33 pm

[...] interested in the content of my King Sapiens lecture should definitely download/stream WNYC’s Radiolab episode about the sentience of animals (or, specifically, animals that aren’t us), and whether we can ever truly experience the same [...]

Comment from Sara
Date: January 29, 2010, 10:03 am

In regards to the “guilty” dog experiment. I s there a possibility that the dogs reactex in the same way that most people do to cops or authoratative figures. If you think about it we (people) generally act submissive around authority figures whether we’ve missbehaved or not. Its just a thought

Comment from Andrew
Date: January 30, 2010, 11:42 am

Great show (as always). This show remided me of a story about two elephands in at the Tennesee Elephant Santuary. Jenny & Shirley had been separated for 22 years, but showed amazing emotion when reunited in 2006.
http://www.elephants.com/shirley/shirleyPhotos2.php

Comment from Jojo
Date: January 30, 2010, 9:36 pm

I enjoyed listening to this episode of Radio Lab, but it did at times have me yelling at my radio! Like Dan Warren above, I’m an evolutionary biologist, and I second everything he said.

It is far more likely (parsimonious) to propose that animals experience the similar emotions when exhibiting similar behaviours as humans than to insist that similar behaviours are accompanied by completely different emotions! The burden of proof would then fall onto those who insist that humans are “special”, not onto those of us who are simply following Occam’s razor.

I have a good friend who is a cognitive psychologist and I have had arguments about this very issue with him. His major point seems to be that psychologists have constructed tests that only humans can pass, and therefore humans are “different” and the only ones with “true cognition”. These tests are incredibly contrived, and over interpreted – much like Dr. Horowitz’s experiment.

Comment from Ivey
Date: February 4, 2010, 3:16 pm

Are Spindle Cells visible in our DNA? I wonder how and when these cells evolved. Did early hominids have spindle cells?

Pingback from Animal Minds – RadioLab Podcast « funny blog pageslap
Date: February 19, 2010, 7:05 pm

[...] Minds – RadioLab Podcast Check out at least the first 15 minutes of this RadioLab podcast on Animal Minds- great story about a trapped whale. Thanks to Kelly for the [...]

Pingback from tabs I can’t seem to close
Date: February 20, 2010, 10:36 am

[...] p.s., listen to this episode – animal minds – of the great podcast RadioLab, for a great story about a man’s relationship with a [...]

Comment from Ryan
Date: February 23, 2010, 8:41 am

Thanks for this show! One quick question/correction: With the tale of Paul Nicklen and the leopard seal – this is NOT an Arctic predator. It is an ANTARCTIC predator. Paul is well known for working in both polar regions. I’ve had good fortune to work with him briefly on board an expedition ship in both polar regions and have always enjoyed this story of his. This story occurs in the Antarctic and not the Arctic ocean. It’s a pretty significant difference!
I presently work along the Antarctic Peninsula supporting science research at Palmer Station and have constant encounters with these animals. Despite the mistake, however, thank you so much for this fun animal episode of Radiolab! I must say that your show is terribly addicting to listen to while working in the boathouse down here.
Best! Ryan

Comment from Greg
Date: February 24, 2010, 7:34 pm

Music at 22:30 is
“Danelectro 3″
Yo La Tengo / Danelectro EP
Itunes doesn’t have it but I got it from Rhapsody.com

If you like this song you would also like;
“Makambo”
Geoffrey Oryema

Comment from Lindsey
Date: February 26, 2010, 11:06 pm

Wow, I want a friend from another species. I thought I was cool because I did study abroad in college.

Pingback from loving the wrong person… or species. « Emily Nagoski :: sex nerd ::
Date: March 1, 2010, 12:44 pm

[...] or species. Jump to Comments I just came across this and I had to share it. So, go download this brilliant Radiolab episode and fastforward to minute [...]