Dogs are People Too
Social structure and memory have huge competitive advantages. When one can watch the other guy get mauled by a lion, it helps the survival of the group to know that lions are dangerous, and to be able to pass that knowledge down to descendants. "Education" in early societies would have rested primarily on observation and imitation. But dogs do that, so do deer, and prairie dogs. So that isn't particularly human.
The ability to remember and learn from others mistakes is something which brings you above the the realm of reptiles, and into league with mammals and birds. Look at humans and canines. Dogs' sensory world is completely different from ours, being based primarily on scent, secondly on hearing, and only thirdly on vision. Humans are vision oriented, and much higher above the ground. Humans have hands, where dogs are stuck using their snouts for carrying and investigation. We clearly come from very different places in terms of species survival strategy.
I love my dog, and dogs are great creatures to study for figuring out what is human, because they are clearly a case of convergent evolution. Both dogs and humans are pack hunters, and the social/emotional equipment to deal with pack life is obviously similar in both species. Dog societies are probably very similar to that of very early hominids, before spoken language developed. There is a rudimentary language, via posture and sounds, with the ability to communicate rank, and a wide variety of emotions: affection, excitement, sympathy, fear, subservience, dominance, frustration, desperation, stubbornness, jealousy, aggression are all clearly observable in any pet dog. From the point of view of having an awareness of self, feelings that can be hurt, or egos that can be flattered, dogs are people too.
However, dogs do not experiment when attached by a chain to a post, to determine how to unravel it to get back to full length. They have achieved the level of observation and imitation, they also have all the social emotions required for living in a pack, but they don't construct a world view with abstraction.
Thought experiment: Place a bowl of food beyond a grating. the dog can smell the food. The smell of the food is strongest near the grating. On one side of the grating, there is a perpendicular wall. It proceeds a six to eight feet backward, but on the other side of that wall, there is no grating. So if the dog were to go far enough back from the grating, it would be able to go around the wall and get the food.
Place the dog in front of the grating. Prediction: A pet dog will smell the food, and sit in front of the grating because it expects the human to solve the problem for him. Try a wolf. Will the wolf sit in front of the grating and gnaw at it interminably, or will it search to find an alternate route to the food? A wolf might have better problem solving skills for not having been domesticated.
Repeat the experiment (with other subjects), have the subject observe another dog find the solution (say, by being given hints, or being led). Prediction: dogs and wolves will learn the solution readily. Canines have mastered imitation and learning, but problem solving is very limited and direct. They will gnaw at a problem with great intent, but without much abstraction or comprehension.
Repeat the initial experiment months later, with the dogs who know the answer. Will they still know the answer? Prediction is that most higher mammals have pretty well developed memory, especially where food is concerned, and they will solve the problem if they have seen the solution before.
It is credible to suppose that early hominids started hunting game in packs. The bigger packs of homids were able to tackle bigger game. The bigger packs were harder to control using traditional tactile grooming much like dog language. To scale to bigger packs, language was essential for the ability to groom and determine rank in a more energy economical way. There would also be natural pressue to select for abstraction to better understand and predict what other pack members or prey are going to do.
I can find no documentation on language or communication used by wolves during the hunt. I know of no species other than humans, that communicate intent during a hunt. It would appear that individuals in a dog pack learn by observing other pack members hunt, and adopt logical positions around prey, but there is little to indicate a dominant pack member communicating any change in strategy during a hunt.
It would be interesting to see if the ability to communicate while stalking is uniquely human. It would be a natural application of the need for language to manage larger groups of humans. This would be a very simple application of the language ability pre-adapted for living in larger groups, toward another sort of problem that would explain a good part of why language in humans got more complex than it is in wolves.
So complicated language evolved to allow large packs and more effective hunting. Another thing that happenned to differentiate us from dogs was that we started using tools. Chimpanzees use tools too. They're social too. So tools have likely always been around, but it was the brain development, the increased abstraction, and the ability to experiment based on those abstractions that lead us to better and better tools. So we were evolved better brains to cope with language needed to live in bigger groups that could hunt bigger game, and tool use trailed along as an existing minor trait. Eventually, the packs got big enough that we can start calling them tribes, and tool use developed enough, that we can see specialization happening in societies. When the language becomes sufficiently complicated, we see evolution begin to act on memes rather than physical traits (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme) and then the whole evolutionary process is accellerated many fold, but was still essentially a natural selection process. In the period of 16th and 17th century or so, the enlightenment started, and the explicit description of how to experiment (scientific method) took hold, so we began able to artificially select memes for survival value, and the rate of our ability to understand and modify natural objects has advanced in leaps and bounds since then.
So pretty much the only things which differentiate us from dogs are that we share and develop physical and mental technology in large groups. To do science is to be human.
The ability to remember and learn from others mistakes is something which brings you above the the realm of reptiles, and into league with mammals and birds. Look at humans and canines. Dogs' sensory world is completely different from ours, being based primarily on scent, secondly on hearing, and only thirdly on vision. Humans are vision oriented, and much higher above the ground. Humans have hands, where dogs are stuck using their snouts for carrying and investigation. We clearly come from very different places in terms of species survival strategy.
I love my dog, and dogs are great creatures to study for figuring out what is human, because they are clearly a case of convergent evolution. Both dogs and humans are pack hunters, and the social/emotional equipment to deal with pack life is obviously similar in both species. Dog societies are probably very similar to that of very early hominids, before spoken language developed. There is a rudimentary language, via posture and sounds, with the ability to communicate rank, and a wide variety of emotions: affection, excitement, sympathy, fear, subservience, dominance, frustration, desperation, stubbornness, jealousy, aggression are all clearly observable in any pet dog. From the point of view of having an awareness of self, feelings that can be hurt, or egos that can be flattered, dogs are people too.
However, dogs do not experiment when attached by a chain to a post, to determine how to unravel it to get back to full length. They have achieved the level of observation and imitation, they also have all the social emotions required for living in a pack, but they don't construct a world view with abstraction.
Thought experiment: Place a bowl of food beyond a grating. the dog can smell the food. The smell of the food is strongest near the grating. On one side of the grating, there is a perpendicular wall. It proceeds a six to eight feet backward, but on the other side of that wall, there is no grating. So if the dog were to go far enough back from the grating, it would be able to go around the wall and get the food.
Place the dog in front of the grating. Prediction: A pet dog will smell the food, and sit in front of the grating because it expects the human to solve the problem for him. Try a wolf. Will the wolf sit in front of the grating and gnaw at it interminably, or will it search to find an alternate route to the food? A wolf might have better problem solving skills for not having been domesticated.
Repeat the experiment (with other subjects), have the subject observe another dog find the solution (say, by being given hints, or being led). Prediction: dogs and wolves will learn the solution readily. Canines have mastered imitation and learning, but problem solving is very limited and direct. They will gnaw at a problem with great intent, but without much abstraction or comprehension.
Repeat the initial experiment months later, with the dogs who know the answer. Will they still know the answer? Prediction is that most higher mammals have pretty well developed memory, especially where food is concerned, and they will solve the problem if they have seen the solution before.
It is credible to suppose that early hominids started hunting game in packs. The bigger packs of homids were able to tackle bigger game. The bigger packs were harder to control using traditional tactile grooming much like dog language. To scale to bigger packs, language was essential for the ability to groom and determine rank in a more energy economical way. There would also be natural pressue to select for abstraction to better understand and predict what other pack members or prey are going to do.
I can find no documentation on language or communication used by wolves during the hunt. I know of no species other than humans, that communicate intent during a hunt. It would appear that individuals in a dog pack learn by observing other pack members hunt, and adopt logical positions around prey, but there is little to indicate a dominant pack member communicating any change in strategy during a hunt.
It would be interesting to see if the ability to communicate while stalking is uniquely human. It would be a natural application of the need for language to manage larger groups of humans. This would be a very simple application of the language ability pre-adapted for living in larger groups, toward another sort of problem that would explain a good part of why language in humans got more complex than it is in wolves.
So complicated language evolved to allow large packs and more effective hunting. Another thing that happenned to differentiate us from dogs was that we started using tools. Chimpanzees use tools too. They're social too. So tools have likely always been around, but it was the brain development, the increased abstraction, and the ability to experiment based on those abstractions that lead us to better and better tools. So we were evolved better brains to cope with language needed to live in bigger groups that could hunt bigger game, and tool use trailed along as an existing minor trait. Eventually, the packs got big enough that we can start calling them tribes, and tool use developed enough, that we can see specialization happening in societies. When the language becomes sufficiently complicated, we see evolution begin to act on memes rather than physical traits (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme) and then the whole evolutionary process is accellerated many fold, but was still essentially a natural selection process. In the period of 16th and 17th century or so, the enlightenment started, and the explicit description of how to experiment (scientific method) took hold, so we began able to artificially select memes for survival value, and the rate of our ability to understand and modify natural objects has advanced in leaps and bounds since then.
So pretty much the only things which differentiate us from dogs are that we share and develop physical and mental technology in large groups. To do science is to be human.
posted by philobyte at 8:12 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home