| | The Birds and the Bees
Spiders and other arthropods such as honeybees exhibit complex purposeful behaviors such as web building, trap-door ambush and the use of sticky bolas – wads of silk thrown on a line as a missile to entrap and drag back prey in the same way a chameleon uses its tongue to catch bugs. Crows and other corvids such a mynah-birds exhibit complex behaviors such as mimicking human speech, using twigs to pry food from otherwise inaccessible crannies, deceiving other birds by acting as if food can be found where there is none only to consume the actual and hidden food unmolested and at leisure while their dupes are distracted, and dropping hard-shelled food items from a height to crack the otherwise impervious shell. Is there any difference between the behaviors of the birds and the bugs?
Arthropod behavior is highly stereotyped. Studies have shown that complex arthropod behaviors such as web weaving and the lardering of a wasp’s nest with grubs and caterpillars or the dances of bees are inborn, hardwired, inflexible and un-innovative. Arthropods do not nurture and teach their young and the young do not stay around their mothers in order to learn the behaviors they use as adults. Many arthropods do take great care in protecting or feeding their young until a certain level of maturity. But this behavior is not acquired or taught. Pregnant queen bees do not sit around observing their mother and watching her lay eggs before setting off to start their own hives. Rather, upon hatching and at some point mating, the princesses either assume control of the hive directly if the elder queen is dead, fly off with some portion of the hive to begin another if the population and resources of the hive suffice, or stay and kill their mother or sisters if the resources are limited and such fertile competitors are present. These activities, while varying in detail between different hive species, are determined in each case by external sensory stimuli such as pheromones and temperature, and by internal factors such as the quality of food they were fed as larvae. There is no observation, no learning, no strategizing, just stereotyped behaviors determined by genetics and environment.
The stereotyped nature of arthropod behaviors has been demonstrated by ingenious experiments which isolate the behavioral steps that they follow. Entomologists interrupt predators in a certain stage of their activities, such as removing a paralyzed prey from the nest, and placing it outside where the mother wasp would first place the prey before entombing it with a fertilized egg. If the already paralyzed animal is removed to a sufficient distance by the experimenter, the wasp will dutifully sting it again with a paralyzing sting, although this has already been done, and the expenditure of toxin is of a finite but real cost to the adult. This can be repeated indefinitely until the experimenter is exhausted. The insect will never vary its actions. Unmoving prey within a certain perimeter will be dragged into the larder without stinging. Prey removed repeatedly outside that perimeter will by re-stung indefinitely. Neither is this behavior learned. The entire capture, paralysis, burial, egg deposition routine has been broken down into a series of such separate determinate steps. When the larval wasps metamorphose and emerge as adults, their mothers are long gone, and almost invariably dead. The young insect never “knows” its parent, or even another of its kind except perhaps to breed.
More advanced vertebrates , especially carnivores and frugivores that live in packs (fruit and meat being concentrated but spotty resources, as opposed to the low-grade but ubiquitous and docile vegetation that herbivores unmindfully masticate) exhibit learned, flexible, and novel behaviors. And not only are these behaviors purposeful in the strictly practical sense. Many such behaviors are engaged in for reasons that can seem almost cultural and psychological, if not recreational. Certain raptorial birds will grasp each others talons while in flight and twirl through the air in an avian ballet. Elephants, which habitually place there trunks in each others mouths upon greeting, where the exquisitely muscled and enervated nerves of their trunks provide them with a detailed knowledge of each others smells and the shapes of their teeth. Because older elephants often die at territorial watering holes where they loiter as they slowly succumb to the ravages of age, their bones remain where the animals fall, in what men call “elephant graveyards.” They say that elephants never forget, and although anecdotal, the claim seems based in fact. The elephants fondle the teeth and bones of their dead, rubbing the bones under their footpads, caressing them gently, without breaking them as they do great trees and small shrubs without compunction. They rub there trunks on the molars of their dead, undoubtedly recognizing their feel, and who cannot believe, imaging their lost kin.
When an elephant or a crow is faced with an unusual situation, it may behave in startlingly original ways. The devotion of elephant mothers who stay with their sick or stranded young and the reactions of their herds which do not move on like witless wildebeest herds but gather around the mother and child pair, fending off lions and helping dig the young from muddy pits by collapsing the banks of the waterhole , at a distance from the calf, and coaxing it with their bellows or pulling with their trunks as necessary to rescue it.
As with the elephants, which pass on their knowledge of watering holes used only once a decade in cyclical droughts or distant resources for times of famine, crows and chimps pass along learned behaviors such as dropping shellfish from heights or using rocks to smash nuts. These behaviors are neither instinctual or universal. Only animals which have observed others in such purposeful behaviors learn to imitate them, although one must infer the original discovery of the behavior, whether fortuitous or intuited. “Cultures” evolve and are passed on, other troops or packs not showing the behaviors or showing other trick such as crushing nuts with logs rather than stones. These behaviors are acquired through mimicry. But they are not stereotyped, they are learned by observation and practice. They do not appear spontaneously and full-blown without tutelage, nor are they repeated mindlessly as a response to stimulus without respect to their contexts.
Animal behavior varies over a spectrum varying from the tropisms of protests to the mournfulness of mammals. Humans, happen to be animals. Our close relatives are extinct, we are an aggressively competitive species. If the spectrum of links between ourselves and the apes were present, we might better understand the emergence of our unique capabilities. Self conscious thought and the recursive ability to use words to discuss and understand the fact that we use words to discuss and understand is, quite literally, miraculous. It is a matter at which to wonder. But wondrous matters have their origins in nature, however obscure. Aristotle, perhaps the greatest mind whose influence we are privileged to inherit, saw nature as a continuum from the physical (not the material – physical substances are a unity of matter and form separable by abstraction, not reductionism) to the vegetal - the self sustaining, to the animate – the self moving, to the rational – the self aware. The radical separation of man from the animals is a relic not of classical thought, but of Judeo-Christian creationism. To ignore biology, to ignore evolution, and to reduce man’s nature to reason alone is rationalist unreason. We cannot ignore the facts of biology and our animal nature as irrelevant to rational egoism. To vacate the field is to surrender to those who would deny our natural origins.
|
|
