After the jump some more from Junger and a nice talk from Robert Sapolsky about similar behaviors in chimps.

Another example from soldiers in Afghanistan is the “blood-in, blood-out” ritual for increasing group cohesiveness and testing individual sacrifice for the group, as Junger describes near the end of this Daily Show clip:

All of these explanations and rituals reminded me of Robert Sapolsky’s and Frans de Waal’s observations of similar behavior that is reported in baboon/chimp groups.

In the clip below (from Stanford’s Class Day 2009 speech), Sapolsky describes several “uniquely human” behaviors (or at least ones that had been thought to be “uniquely human”) which really are shared by these close relatives. Starting around 12:20 (the clip below will auto-start there), he talks about aggression and the organized group killing done by “border patrols”. The entire talk by Sapolsky (~35 mins) is worth watching too!

Watch it online at the TED website.

Also, it looks like Neanderthals share the FOXP2 variant that humans have:

Archaeologists have long debated whether Neanderthals could speak, and they have eagerly awaited Dr. Pääbo’s analysis of the Neanderthal FOXP2, a gene essential for language. Modern humans have two changes in FOXP2 that are not found in chimpanzees, and that presumably evolved to make speech possible. Dr. Pääbo said Neanderthals had the same two changes in their version of the FOXP2 gene. But many other genes are involved in language, so it is too early to say whether Neanderthals could speak.

UPDATE: A few days ago, I heard Wolf Enard, one of Paabo’s postdocs, speak on a fascinating project, where human version of FOXP2 was knocked in to mice (replacing the endogenous mouse version). Although the phenotypic effects were subtle, the approach itself is quite revolutionary: Putting human versions of genes into model organisms to see how the subsequent evolution of the gene changes its function. I wonder what other genes might be amenable to this approach.

Summary after the break.

Summary:

• female vervet monkeys know not just which babies are their own, but which babies belong to which other mothers
• ” ‘Monkey society is governed by the same two general rules that governed the behavior of women in so many 19th-century novels…. Stay loyal to your relatives (though perhaps at a distance, if they are an impediment), but also try to ingratiate yourself with the members of high-ranking families.’ Baboon society revolves around mother-daughter lines of descent. Eight or nine matrilines are in a troop, each with a rank order. This hierarchy can remain stable for generations. By contrast, the male hierarchy, which consists mostly of baboons born in other troops, is always changing as males fight among themselves and with new arrivals. Rank among female baboons is hereditary, with a daughter assuming her mother’s rank. “
• “On two occasions, baboons have attacked animals, a leopard and a honey badger, that threatened their human companions.”

• “For female baboons, another constant worry besides predation is infanticide. Their babies are put in peril at each of the frequent upheavals in the male hierarchy. The reason is that new alpha males enjoy brief reigns, seven to eight months on average, and find at first that the droits de seigneur they had anticipated are distinctly unpromising. Most of the females are not sexually receptive because they are pregnant or nurturing unweaned children.

  An unpleasant fact of baboon life is that the alpha male can make mothers re-enter their reproductive cycles, and boost his prospects of fatherhood, by killing their infants. The mothers can secure some protection for their babies by forming close bonds with other females and with male friends, particularly those who were alpha when their children were conceived and who may be the father. Still, more than half of all deaths among baby baboons are from infanticide.

  So important are these social skills that it is females with the best social networks, not those most senior in the hierarchy, who leave the most offspring.”

• “In some of their playback experiments, Dr. Cheney and Dr. Seyfarth have tested baboons’ knowledge of where everyone stands in the hierarchy. In a typical interaction, a dominant baboon gives a threat grunt, and its inferior screams. From their library of recorded baboon sounds, the researchers can fabricate a sequence in which an inferior baboon’s threat grunt is followed by a superior’s scream. Baboons pay little attention when a normal interaction is played to them but show surprise when they hear the fabricated sequence implying their social world has been turned upside down.”
• “Baboons seem to have a very feeble theory of mind. When they cross from one island to another, ever fearful of crocodiles, the adults will often go first, leaving the juveniles fretting at the water’s edge. However much the young baboons call, their mothers never come back to help, as if unable to divine their children’s predicament.”
• “It is far from clear why humans acquired a strong theory of mind faculty and baboons did not. Another difference between the two species is brain size. Some biologists have suggested that the demands of social living were the evolutionary pressure that enhanced the size of the brain. But the largest brains occur in chimpanzees and humans, who live in smaller groups than baboons. But both chimps and humans use tools. Possibly social life drove the evolution of the primate brain to a certain point, and the stimulus of tool use then took over.”
• “Baboons provide you with an example of what sort of social and cognitive complexity is possible in the absence of language and a theory of mind…”

Ground squirrels not only heat up their tails to deter snake attacks — but they also seem to use the strategy selectively against infrared-sensitive snakes — leading us to the ultimate conclusion that when the bees are gone, the squirrels will inherit the earth…

You can check out an infrared-eye-view of squirrel/snake battles here because I don’t know how to post movies on the internet yet

–Davie

…brainwashing their youth

• Vergoz et al, 2007, Science
• commentary

…and/or mysteriously disappearing from the face of the earth

• Colony Collapse Disorder

Keeping an eye on species poised to take over the world,
Davie

Hof PR, Estel Van Der Gucht E. Structure of the cerebral cortex of the humpback whale, Megaptera novaeangliae (Cetacea, Mysticeti, Balaenopteridae). Anatom Rec Part A. Published onlin 27 Nov 2006.

What part of the brain?

In humans, the cells are in layer Vb of anterior cingulate gyrus (ACC) (Nimchinsky et al., 1995) and in the frontoinsular cortex (FI) (Allman et al 2005; Watson et al., 2006). In humpback whales, the cells are found in the homologous areas, and additionally in the polar portion of the frontal cortex. Also, in humpback whales, a few scattered spindle cells were found in various other parts of neocortex where they are not found in humans.

Which species?

The cells are thought to have evolved by convergent evolution in the great apes and the whales.

The cells have been found in humpback whales, sperm whales, and orcas. The cells are not present in smaller, yet very intelligent bottleneck dolphins. The cells had previously been found in great apes but not in any other primate or mammalian species (Nimchinsky et al., 1999) (humpback whales are mammals but had not been tested).

“This suggests that as shown previously in hominids (Nimchinsky et al., 1999), the presence of these cells is not necessarily related to high encephalization quotient, but rather to absolute brain size. Spindle cells are prevalent in species with the largest brains in primates and in cetaceans, but not in the cetaceans with the highest encephalization levels, as they were never seen in smaller-bodied, yet relatively larger-brained delphinids such as the bottlenose dolphin, the Pacific white-sided dolphin, or the tucuxi.”

However, “Their occurrence should, however, not be deemed a by-product of developmental consequences of increasing brain size (Finlay and Darlington, 1995; Finlay et al., 2001) …. in both cetaceans and hominids, spindle cells are a feature of the largest brains within the orders but not across, as many delphinids do not have spindle cells, yet their brains are substantially larger than the human brain.”

The spindle cells is “remarkable for its discrete distribution in a few, functionally related, cortical regions in a very restricted yet significant number of highly social species, all characterized by a relatively recent evolution, a slow maturation, a low reproduction rate and few offsprings (i.e., K-selective species), a very large brain and a large body size within their groups.”

What do they look like?
(only (b); (a) is a pyramidal cell)

“These neurons are characterized by a very elongate, tapering, large-size perikaryon mostly symmetric about its vertical and horizontal axes, and extensive apical and basal dendrites. Some dendrites may be truncated shortly after the perikaryon, ending in a brush-like pattern. They are usually lightly stained on Nissl preparations compared to the surrounding pyramidal neurons. These studies also demonstrated that the spindle cells represent a class of projection neurons that send an axon to the subcortical white matter and likely contribute to the connectivity of the prefrontal cortex and select subcortical centers”

Function?
“The function of spindle neurons is not understood.” They seem to be projection neurons that send an axon subcortically and possibly callosally (Nimchinsky et al., 1999; Allman et al 2005; Watson et al., 2006). “Current hypotheses based on available data in human state that spindle cells may provide an output from the anterior cingulate cortex and frontoinsular cortex to prefrontal and temporal association cortices involved in theory of mind. …. these neurons may be involved in the control of complex integrations involving emotions, vocalization control, facial expression, or autonomic function as well as regulation of visceral, olfactory, and gustatory functions, as well as visceral functions and alimentary behaviors.”.

NewScientist indicates that Hof’s theory is that these are “express trains” for long-distance connectivity: ““The velocity of the signal is faster, and they miss out junctions on the way,” says Hof. “They are like the ‘express trains’ of the nervous system” that bypass unnecessary connections, enabling us to instantly process and act on emotional cues during complex social interactions.”

One hypothesis is that they help with “rapid intuitive choice in complex social situations” (Allman et al 2005).

Links

• Science Daily article
• Interview with Hof
• AlphaPsy gives a concise summary of the sorts of speculation that spindle cells engender:

“When they were discovered in our line in 1999, they fueled a wealth of speculation about their putative role in breaking the modularity of mind and achieving intermodal integration, that sort of things. The more sobering idea that they may be nature’s way to cope with brain size and complexity while avoiding disrupting the brain’s connectivity is rarely raised (but I am simply a waiter, mind you, our cooks, the Neurophilosopher and the Neurocritic, know better). Their discovery in whales is exciting since these animals seem to show a high degree of tool use, cultural transmission and social complexity (but Monsieur, if I may make a remark, this is the bare minimum for any self-respecting stylish animal species nowadays).”

Relevant weblog posts:

• The Neurocritic
• AlphaPsy

Kevin Lafferty, a parasitologist, has put forth the idea that a fairly ubiquitous parasite (infecting O(10%) of Americans, and up to 2/3 of people in places like Brazil) is responsible for some of the diversity of human culures (1). The parasite uses common housecats to increase its transmission to the next host in the life cycle, and has a subtle effect on human personality, with some studies claiming that it even causes neuroticism, and even schizophrenia. (One clinical report (2) claims that “subjects with latent toxoplasmosis had higher intelligence [and] lower guilt proneness.” Hmm!)

Anyway, Lafferty noted that toxoplasmosis varies in prevalence from world region to world region, and then tries to draw correlates between these prevalences and local cultures:

“Drivers of the geographical variation in the prevalence of this parasite include the effects of climate on the persistence of infectious stages in soil, the cultural practices of food preparation and cats as pets. Some variation in culture, therefore, may ultimately be related to how climate affects the distribution of T. gondii, though the results only explain a fraction of the variation in two of the four cultural dimensions, suggesting that if T. gondii does influence human culture, it is only one among many factors.”

I wonder how one could test this hypothesis? Look for recent immigrants from one culture to another, who have lower Toxoplasmosis incidence? (Preferably finding populations that go in opposite directions, as a control.) Track culture change vs. migration vs. climate change?

Unlikely, perhaps. But nice that people are still thinking big

– Ed

(1) Lafferty, K
Can the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, influence human culture?
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
doi:10.1098/rspb.2006.3641

Picked up by the popular press here

(2) Flegr J, Havlicek J.
Changes in the personality profile of young women with latent toxoplasmosis.
Folia Parasitol (Praha). 1999;46(1):22-8.

Interesting read on the return of personality psych (and the use of the term “personality”) to ethology.

Some tidbits:

It was back in 1991 that Anderson and Jennifer Mather, a psychologist from the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, first decided to undertake a joint personality study of 44 smaller red octopuses at the aquarium as a way to begin to codify and systematize what they thought they had been observing. Using three categorizations from a standard human-personality-assessment test – shy, aggressive and passive – their data would ultimately show that the animals did consistently clump together under these different categories in response to various stimuli, like touching them with a bristly test-tube brush or dropping a crab into the tank.

“The aggressive ones would pounce on the crab,” Anderson told me. “The passive ones would wait for the crab to come past and then grab it. The shy animal would wait till overnight when no one was looking, and we’d find this little pile of crab shell in the morning.”

Anderson and Mather’s resulting 1993 paper in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, entitled “Personalities of Octopuses,” was not only the first-ever documentation of personality in invertebrates. It was the first time in anyone’s memory that the term “personality” had been applied to a nonhuman in a major psychology journal.

And,

Alison Bell has done related experiments with sticklebacks. It has long been clear to researchers that fish that have lived for many generations in the proximity of dangerous predators are less bold and less aggressive than animals that have lived relatively risk-free. What Bell discovered is that those cautious tendencies outlast the presence of risk, even by a generation. When she moved sticklebacks who had always lived in a high-risk environment into a low-risk environment, she found that not only did they retain their cautious tendencies, but so did their offspring. Even fish raised from birth in a low-risk environment behave more fearfully if raised by a particularly vigilant father from a high-risk background.

“There’s definitely the effect of genetic difference,” Bell explained, “but there’s also the effect of what is experienced as they grow up. Genotype and environment interactions make it difficult to detect the effects of genes, because you have to take the environment into account. This is annoying to geneticists.” To scientists like Bell who are studying the interplay of genes and environment, however, it is of profound interest.

Offhand, one might expect a broad range of perceived dangerous ideas, varying by research interests and such. What’s surprising is that many of the luminaries think that the “most dangerous idea” is this particular, same idea: As neuroscience progresses, popular realization that the “astonishing hypothesis” — that mind is brain — will create a potentially cataclysmic upheaval of society as we know and have profound (negative) moral implications as people claim less responsibility for their actions.

Of course, this just isn’t true. But, would you believe that
Paul Bloom,
VS Ramachandran,
John Horgan,
Andy Clark,
Marc Hauser,
Clay Shirky,
Eric Kandel,
John Allen Paulos,
and, in a more genetic context, Jerry Coyne and Craig Venter
are all very worried about this issue? (And I didn’t even read 50% of the Edge dangerous ideas… there might be even more… ) Is this really the most dangerous idea out there to all of these talented thinkers?

I feel strongly that science and morality have always been separate domains and that any worry that, by “debunking” the mind, we automatically become immoral machines is just ridiculous. Through this scientific knowledge, we might gain some humility, maybe better see our close relatedness to nonhuman primates and place in nature, etc., but we’re not going to flip out and become crazed zombies. This just isn’t going to happen.

Does anybody else think that this just isn’t a truly dangerous idea (although certainly an “astonishing” one, in the Crick sense)? Or am I wrong here?

Samples of academic worrying after the jump.

“Free will is going away. Time to redesign society to take that into account.” – Clay Shirky
“In contrast, the widespread rejection of the soul would have profound moral and legal consequences.” – Paul Bloom
“If all this seems dehumanizing, you haven’t seen anything yet.” – VS Ramachandran
“The Depressing, Dangerous Hypothesis: We Have No Souls.” – Paul Horgan
“Revealing the genetic basis of personality and behavior will create societal conflicts” – J. Craig Venter
“Unfortunately, what appears to be a rather modest proposal on some counts, is dangerous on another. It is dangerous to those who abhor biologically grounded theories on the often misinterpreted perspective that biology determines our fate, derails free will, and erases the soul.” – Marc Hauser

Seems like a lot of worrying to me over very little…