Humans are Unique Among Living Creatures

These notes from [AnotherPrimate]:

• How much are we just another animal/mammal/primate?
• Saw a lecture a few years back from a fly geneticist, saying that everybody with a brain should be studying flies
  • General argument was that flies and humans are the same at a very low level of genes, neurotransmitters, types of brain cells, etc.
  • “As far as I was concerned, he had just proven why genetics and neurotransmitters etc tell us nothing about what makes humans human.”
• The Range of our uniqueness: domains where we’re just like any another animal; domains where we have the same basic design, but make novel use of it; domains where there is no animal precedent/analogue
• [5:20] Ways we’re just like every other animal
  • A female hamster in a cage ovulates every 4 days
  • Put another female in there and cycles lengthen and synchronize
  • Put a male in and their cycles desynchronize and de-lengthen
  • This is purely pheromonal, completely communicated by smell. Which you can prove by closing the female hamsters' noses, or by piping in air from a male hamster’s cage instead of actually putting a male in there.
  • The socially dominant female is the one who drives the synchronization
  • It works the same in us, where it’s known as the Wellesley Effect
  • “This is well studied enough that like biologists brag about it. I remember during college we’d sit around the dinner table and someone would be saying ‘when we roomed together this summer, I had her synchronized by August first’. That’s how bad it is to hang out with biologists, because in us as well it tends to be the more extraverted, more socially dominant person who synchronizes”
• [8:18] Same machinery, completely novel use
  • People sitting at a table doing nothing apparently physically strenuous
  • “If these were the right two human chess grandmasters in the middle of a tournament, they are maintaining the blood pressure of a marathon runner for hours and hours on end, simply thinking, simply doing stuff that no other animal can do, which is drive function in every cell in the body with thoughts and emotions and memories.”
• [9:35] Stuff we do, for which there is no precedent out there
  • Human couples come home, have dinner together, talk a bit, have sex, talk a bit more, go to sleep, do the same thing again the next day. Do the same thing for 30 days in a row.
  • “Hardly anybody in the animal kingdom has non-reproductive sex like that, and nobody talks about it afterward.”
• [10:45] Same basic design, novel use
  • Since Jane Goodall discovered chimps using tools in the 1970s, we’ve had to get more rigorous about all the behaviors we think are unique about humans
• [11:25] Same basic design, novel use: Aggression
  • What is now known not to be unique to humans: killing a member of your own species; organized, violent genocide
  • Baboon who joined his troop and had “horrible political skills”, meaning he was harrassing a bunch of the local high-ranking babboons. One night the locals got together a group and just killed him outright, leaving a brutalized corpse in the morning.
  • Chimps making up a ‘border patrol’, will wander the edges of their territory and kill any chimp they find who doesn’t belong. Usually made up of a group of related males who get into an agitated and emotionally contagious state.
  • Goodall found an example of a group of males getting into such a state, and going further, to eradicating an entire neighboring group.
  • Humans' novelty lies in expressing aggression in subtler manners: passive-aggression, damning with faint praise, etc.
  • People who live just outside of Las Vegas, seemingly entirely normal, with houses, families, etc, but then their dayjob, at Nevis Air Force Base, is to remotely control drones and kill people in Iraq with Hellfire missiles.
  • “These are people who, in the morning they get up and they make sure they get their kids off to school and as they head out they’re reminded don’t forget to pick up the dry cleaning and they get caught in a traffic jam and they’re all anxious that they’re getting to work late and then the traffic clears and they get there just on time and it all works out okay and then they start their job, which is sitting in a little cockpit simulator and controlling a drone bomber in Iraq, running on bombing runs. This is done at Nevis Air Force Base, just outside Las Vegas. What people there do is, they sit and they operate sort of drones in Iraq releasing Hellfire missiles there, and they spend the day killing people on the other side of the planet. And at the end of the day they pack up and they drive on home and they’re in a rush because they want to get to their little girl’s ballet performance. And afterward they hug her and can’t believe they can love somebody this much and the next day they are off sending hellfire in Mesopotamia. And, no surprise, there are astonishingly high rates of psychiatric problems among these people. This is like no other species out there.”
• [15:45] Same basic design, novel use: Theory of Mind
  • Understanding that another individual has different information than you, and that they will behave strategically in a way reflecting that
  • “Typically, theory of mind starts appearing between, like, ages three and five. Both of my kids got it on their 3rd birthday.”
  • It turns out not to be unique to humans.
  • Take two chimps who have a known rank difference, both watching a large central chamber from different vantage points (and able to see each other). In the central chamber a human experimenter places a banana, and there’s a shield, either transparent or opaque, such that the placement of the banana is seen by only one, or both, of the chimps. Then release one of the chimps into the chamber.
  • If the barrier is transparent, both saw the banana, and the low-ranking chimp will avoid the banana
  • If the barrier prevents the high-ranking chimp from seeing the banana, the low-ranking chimp will grab the banana quickly
  • If the high-ranking chimp sees the banana, it will grab it no matter whether the low-ranking chimp saw it or not.
  • Additionally: if a transparent screen is used when placing the banana, but the original high-ranking chimp is not let into the chamber (but another high-ranking chimp is let in instead), the low-ranking chimp will go for the banana.
  • Humans are unique in secondary theory of mind: where you know what someone knows about some other third individual
• [19:05] Same basic design, novel use: Golden Rule
  • What’s not unique: Tit-for-tat reciprocity
  • Vampire bats out “drinking blood” are actually storing it up in their throat sack, so they can go back and disgorge it to feed their babies. There are big communal nests, and in fact when a single female hunts, she feeds the whole community’s kids. And there’s stable reciprocity.
  • In an experiment, grab a bat in a net as it’s flying out, and get a syringe to fill its throat sack with air. Push the bat back into the nest and everyone sees this bat with the huge throat sack not sharing with any of the children, and next time the community hunts they do not feed that bat’s children.
  • Stickleback fish are territorial. Put a mirror against the side of its tank and immediately it’ll start attacking the intruder (its own image).
  • Put a 2nd mirror perpendicular and every time it lunges at the attacker, it sees some coalitional partner also attacking the intruder.
  • Angle the 2nd mirror so that the “partner” appears to be holding back, and it looks like the partner is slacking. The next time this stickleback sees the intruder reflection, he won’t attack it.
  • What is unique: the platinum rule - what if one individual has different preferences/goals than another, and therefore a different idea of reciprocity
  • No animal out there could understand what’s goin' on in this quote (“Beat me,” said the masochist. “No,” said the sadist.)
• [23:30] Same basic design, novel use: Empathy
  • What’s no longer unique: de Waal’s chimps and the innocent bystander
  • Franz de Waal has captive animals. And observes, sometimes high-ranking chimps are just in a bad mood and beat up a low-ranking chimp for no reason. Some other times, a low-ranking chimp makes the mistake of challenging a high-ranking chimp and gets beat up. What he finds is that in the case where the low-ranking chimp was an innocent bystander, the other chimps are much more likely to groom them than the guy who was “asking for it”.
  • This suggests that chimps understand intentionality
  • Humans are unique in the level of abstraction/extension of empathy.
  • we feel badly for real individuals of other species, and hardly any other animal does that (photo of injured dog)
  • we feel badly for fictionalized individuals of other species (the horse in Guernica)
• [27:30] Same basic design, novel use: Pleasure in anticipation, and gratification postponement
  • What people used to think: dopamine is all about reward and pleasure, and the onset of dopamine release happened when the reward happens
  • “Now set up an experiment as follows. This monkey has been trained that when the little light comes on, it’s one of those sessions where I can now get food, and it knows that if I press this lever ten times, after a little bit of a delay I’ll get some food. If I press the lever ten more times, I’ll get some more food. It understands the task. So what do we have here? We have first a signal–the light coming on saying it’s one of those sessions, we’re starting one of those. Then, the monkey does the work. And then with a delay, it gets the reward. And what everyone initially thought was dopamine would go up after the reward. That’s not when it goes up. It goes up when the signal comes on. What’s this? This is the monkey there sitting and saying I know this, I knwo the drill, I know this, I’m on top of this, this is gonna be great, I know what I do now, this is completely perfect, 100% I’m goin' for it today. Dopamine is not about pleasure, it’s about the anticipation of pleasure. It’s about the pursuit of happiness rather than happiness itself. And what’s most remarkable is experimentally if you block that rise of dopamine from occurring, you don’t get the work, you don’t get the behavior. This is not only the anticipation, but this is what is capable of eliciting goal-directed behavior.”
  • “Now instead shift to where you get the reward only fifty percent of the time. You do the work and only about half the time you get the reward. So what happens to dopamine levels there? This is what they do. They go through the roof. Because what have you just done. You introduced the word maybe to the equation. And maybe is addictive like nothing else out there. ‘Cause the light comes on and you’re doing the I know how this works/this is gonna be great but I screwed up last time because I didn’t get the food but this time I’m feeling good today but I’m a total screw-up and I’m inadequate in junior high school and it was terrible and I kept on but maybe this time this is my lucky day and just vacillating all over the place. And what we see is dopamine comes pouring out like mad. It’s the uncertainty of the reward. And here’s the really elegant thing they did in that study. Now, instead of a 50% reward rate, either a 25% or 75%. These are diametrically opposite states: worse news/better news. The only thing they have in common is you’ve decreased the level of unpredictability. And the rise in dopamine ends up being halfway between the 50% and the 100%.”
  • What’s unique about humans? The time element
  • The time between putting in the work and getting a reward can be huge (think “getting good grades” → “getting a good job”)
  • More than that, this long delay means that you can motivate relgious martyrdom (difficult actions during life for rewards supposedly occurring after death)
• [33:15] Same basic design, novel use: Culture
  • What is no longer unique: cultural transmission of tool-making and use, of vocalizations, of group temperament
  • “Now, if you’re a primatologist and anywhere in the past if you ever said the word culture they would instantly deny you tenure. Because you obviously were not serious and couldn’t understand the difference between a disney wildlife cartoon and the real world. And these days, the two hottest words in primatology are culture and personality”
  • Culture: the non-genetic transmission of learned behavior, either intra- or inter-generationally
  • There are chimps who know how to make and use 20-25 different tool types, and learn from their mothers. And daughters learn these techniques faster
  • Sapolsky & Share, PLoS Biol 2004
    • troop of baboons in East Africa.
    • the neighboring troop had a tourist lodge in its territory, and the neighbor troop would spend most of its day foraging the leftover food in the lodge’s garbage pit.
    • the animals in the neighboring troop, incidentally, had all the symptoms of a westernized diet: elevated cholestorol levels, insulin levels, triglycerides, tooth decay, and the markers of metabolic syndrome
    • a subset of males in their troop would go over and do the same
    • at some point there was an outbreak of tuberculosis in the baboons, which turned out to be from contaminated meat in the tourist lodge’s garbage dump.
    • TB is a fast killer in non-human primates. So all of the males from their trip who made visits to the dump died (and most of the neighboring troop as well), aka half of the males of the troop
    • The subset males who did the foraging were not random. For one, they were the ones aggressive enough to invade the feast of the neighboring troop. Secondly, the morning is both the time when baboons normally groom and gossip, and is also the time they would have to leave to start their foraging expedition, so these were also the least socially-affiliated baboons.
    • “So suddenly, what you have is a troop where the surviving males are the least aggressive, most socially-affiliated ones. And this transformed the atmosphere of this troop. They became far more social. The average distance between them decreased a whole lot. Far less aggression. You see males carrying infants around every place. These good-guy males. You see something extraordinary. If you’re a primatologist, a baboonologist, this picture is mroe shocking than if this was like showing baboons flying or being photosynthetic or…. These are two male baboons socially grooming each other. Male baboons do not groom each other, they try to rip each others’ faces open. In this troop, the males groom each other. And, you have this completely different atmosphere, and what qualifies this as a culture is, as new males join the troop, males growing up elsewhere and transferring in as adolescents, it takes them about six months to take on this behavioral style. It is this transmission of culture.”
  • What’s different about humans: the complexity of culture
  • “Chimps may eradicate their neighbors, but chimps will not do so because the neighbors have a different economic system or believe there’s a different sort of god listening to their prayers. And in that realm, our cultural attributes are absolutely unique.”
• [38:45] Realms where there is no precedent in the animal kingdom whatsoever
  • Personification, symbols, metaphors, parables, analogies, figures of speech
  • How does the brain handle that kind of stuff
• When you eat something rotten, your insula cortex (part of your brain) activates, and you feel disgust.
  • The insula activates when the bad thing is experienced by taste or smell (in animals), but also when you think about tasting or smelling a gross thing (in humans only)
  • But in humans, it also activates if you see a photo of a lynching
  • If you get someone thinking about some act they consider immoral, the same part of the brain activates.
  • “When we evolved this capacity for moral disgust, we didn’t come up with a new brain region, we just forced this insula to expand its portfolio and in some way the brain handled this very abstract concept in this totally literal way.”
• [43:10] The Anterior Cingulate
  • If your finger is pricked with a pin, a lot of parts of your brain activate to tell you where it happened, what kind of pain, how much pain, etc.. The anterior cingulate is more involved in evaluating what the pain means.
  • If you even think about your finger being pricked (or even the finger of your partner), the anterior cingulate will activate.
  • “When we came up with this metaphor of psychic pain, we jammed it into the same old place where we had callouses. It’s sending information up to our pain centers.”
  • “Very interestingly, this part of the brain is hyperactive in people with major clinical depression–people who are chronically feeling the pains of everything. Fascinatingly, there’s a neurotransmitter called substance P, and substance P has a whole lot to do with anterior cingulate function and it’s got something to do with pain pathways and everyone’s known this for centuries, and there are drugs which will block the action of substance P, and they often have antidepressant action.”
• [45:30] More examples about disgust
  • Bring in people for a psych study, ask them to tell you some innocuous story (tell me about your high school). And after, say we can’t pay you, but we can offer you your choice of a pen or some handwipes, and it’s 50/50 which they take.
  • Same thing, except ask them to tell you a story of some time they had some big moral failure. And way more often, they will take the handwipes. So they’re feeling dirty afterward.
  • Okay, similar priming: you have people come in and tell you about some moral failure. Afterwards, give half of the subjects an opportunity to go to the bathroom and wash up before returning to a testing room. Once back, some assistant comes in holding a stack of the papers and stumbles and drops them all. If you’ve just washed your hands after talking about sins, you’re less likely to get up and help them pick up the papers. It seems to indicate that talking about sins makes a person feel residually penitent, and the physical act of handwashing removes that penitence/guilt.
• [47:15] Hot vs Cold
  • You’re supposed to go somewhere for some psych experiment, but the real experiment happens beforehand. You get in the elevator with someone who’s struggling to hold onto a bunch of stuff. In half cases, the subject is asked to hold either a cup of hot coffee or a cup of cold coffee. Then they do the trivial puzzle solving experiment, and afterwards they’re interviewed about the personality of the experimenter.
  • The ones who’d held a cold drink were more likely to view the experimenter as cold, the ones who’d held a hot drink were more likely to view the experimenter as warm
• [48:30] Hard vs Soft
  • Subjects were participating in a study where they’re asked to make assessments about some job applicant based on their CV, with half in some cozy armchair, and half in a hard simple chair. The ones sitting in the hard chair are more likely to view the applicants as serious and focused.
• [49:15] Immigrants as pathogens
  • People read a passage about American history, which was written either in a conventional way or in a way that personified the country as an organism. Before you’ve read this, you either read something neutral or something that had the health risks of bacteria. If you were thinking about the US as a person and you’ve read about bacteria, in questionnaires afterward you were more hostile to immigration.
• “This is an absolutely wild way in which this metaphor stuff, as abstract as you can get, is inadvertently being processed by the brain in the most concrete little ways, and out comes all sorts of ways in which we are subtly being shaped by this phenomenon.”
• You can imagine this kind of mechanism is being exploited, e.g. in the lead up to Rwanda’s genocide by the Hutus of the Tutsis, on all public media the Tutsis were never referred to as anything but cockroaches.
• [51:15] Sometimes we can use that for a better outcome
• Robert Axelrod has written about the powers of symbols and symbolic concessions to solve world problems
  • e.g. getting quotes from leaders of Hamas and of Israel discussing the prerequisites of peace being symbolic (signs of religious respect or compassion) rather than concrete concessions
• [52:30] No precedent: Gaining the strength and will to do X from the irrefutable evidence that X cannot be
  • Kierkegaard quote: “Christian faith requires that faith persists in the face of the impossible, and that humans have the capacity to simultaneously believe in two contradictory things.”
  • Sister Helen Prejean (famous as the subject of the book/movie Dead Man Walking) ministered to the needs of men on death row. Spent her life solacing people who have done terrifying, evil things. She always has the same answer about how she does it: “The less forgiveable the fact, the less forgiveable what the person has done, the more we must find the means to forgive them. The less loveable the person is, the more we must find the means to love them.”
  • “As a strident atheist this strikes me as one of the most irrational nutty magnificent things we’re capable of as a species: the more something cannot be, the more we have to make sure it is.”
  • “In lots of ways, that is the realm where we can do our most uniquely human things, built out of the danger of a certain human wisdom. You sit there, and you look at enough about what’s going on with the world and you learn enough about it and you become wise about it, and there’s almost an inevitable conclusion about it that you have to reach, which is: none of us can make things better. Because we’re too small. And they’re too big and they’re too powerful and it’s not going to matter anyway and none of us can make things change. And what we have to deal with is the notion that the more clearly irrefutably, inarguably it’s the case that you cannot make a difference, the more that must be the motivation to make a difference and have that as a moral imperative.”
• [56:15] What would you call that last group of things that makes humans unique?
  • “Our ability to constantly confuse the real with the metaphorical (our brains' evolutionary challenge to have come up with something as novel as moral abstractions and have duct-taped it into some part of the brain that lizards use), and the ability for us to flip back and forth and the ability to build entire worlds of good or bad acts out of that.”
• [57:25] How can all of that be cultivated?
  • “Let’s see. I think for starters it suggests we should give tubercular meat to all of the aggressive males on this planet. Beyond that I’m not willing to be quoted.”
• [1:00:00] How many of the things we’ve pinpointed as uniquely human are probably only labelled as such because we can have language and can articulate that it’s happening? In particular as Sue Savage-Rumbaugh has been able to teach American sign language to bonobos.
  • Until we get past concrete verbs and nouns, we can’t start to tease this effect apart and start testing the theories of language and cognition from folks like George Lakoff
• [1:01:45] Where do you put hypocrisy in the human/animal divide?
  • “In lots of ways, you know, the really scary individuals for this planet are not the ones who say everybody says X is a criminal thing to do but I disagree. What’s really scary is the person who says everybody says X is a criminal thing and I agree, but here’s why I’m a special case right now. And what humans are magnificent at is setting up sets of rules and then deciding why you are justified in being freed from them.”
• [1:03:00] What’s the role of passive entertainment? Do you see any different entertainment needs across different animals?
  • Environmental enrichment to avoid primates going nuts in captivity is important to certain biologists' work
  • They mostly seem to enjoy National Geographic wildlife documentaries. But other species won’t cry about the death of Bambi’s mom.
• [1:05:55] As we better understand what functions in the brain are coupled, should we worry about advertisers exploiting it?
  • “Here’s a word that should give all of us shivers. A new word, it used to be that people would be neuroscientists. But now you can be a neuroeconomist, and study human decision-making, economic decision-making. You can be a neurolinguist, you could be a neurophilosopher, you could be studying neuromarketing. And there are people who now study why Pepsi people prefer Pepsi, yet because of certain types of advertising everybody believes they actually prefer Coke.”
  • “People are soon going to be making livings understanding how you get marketing things to work on people and it’s not going to be anything new. We’ve done it forever, it’s just going to be more scientific, more syllables in the name.”
• [1:09:20] You talked a lot about how we behave as individuals, but is there any science on ‘collective consciousness’, insofar as it may exist?
  • Complex systems (a cell, an individual, a society) are too big and non-linear/non-additive. You can’t just decompose them into their component parts, understand those component parts, and believe you will understand the behaviors of the system.
  • “What it should caution against is this extreme faith in reductionism. And in my world, what that translates to over and over again is don’t be overly impressed with what genes have to do with the brain.”
• [1:11:55] What, if anything, of our uniqueness seems to come from our genetic difference with animals?
  • After estimations in the 1980s, genomes got sequenced and we do, in fact, share about 98.9% of our DNA with chimps
  • “About half the differences in gene expression have to do with genes coding for olfactory receptors. Chimps have a better sense of smell than we do.”
  • Almost all the rest is random stuff that doesn’t relate to the brain.
  • We’ve got ~3x as many neurons, and genetically the difference for that are the genes that dictate the number of rounds of cell division during fetal brain development.
  • “What that tells you is with enough quantity you invent quality. It’s just sheer numbers. And out of that emerges, in this non-linear, non-reductive way, all this stuff that makes us human. What those genes are about is producing a brain, a human brain of a certain sort of level of qualities. But it has nothing to do with what those particular qualities are.”