Dolphins Show Self-Recognition Earlier Than Children | Hacker News Reader

Dolphins Show Self-Recognition Earlier Than Children

nytimes.com

123 pointsdnetesn57 comments

Comments in this thread seem kind of... defensive? Are people really worried that this is going to be extrapolated to "Dolphins are universally and forever smarter than humans" or what?

I'm not sure what to make of the "so what?" comments. Would this discovery only be interestinging if it validated hitchhiker's guide?

I think this is interesting regardless of whether it upends the "intellectual hierarchy" of species.

Development speeds in the animal kingdom aren’t really an apples to apples comparisons. Deer calves run before, chimp babies climb before human babies.

If you’re comparing cars for a race, you need to check both acceleration and top speed. Just calling out one of them is not helpful.

You completely miss the point lamacase is making. He finds it strange that people get defensive about the article, just like you did. He isn't saying that dolphins are smarter than humans.

And if they prove smarter than humans, the first thing I'd think of would be: how do I communicate with them??

It's a defensive reaction to terrible overblown pop science reporting. Not that it's always the right reaction...

To be honest it indicates a personality that is based around intellect, intelligence and science™ as the main pillars of psychological stability. Quite often it is a defensive reaction to a religious upbringing as a child.

I was just talking to my girlfriend about this. I was brought up religious as a child. Going to college was my first experience around a diverse set of religious beliefs, including many non-believers. It only took a few months for me to lose my faith, which came as a shock to me, because I had felt so sure about my world view only a short time before. So I lost my confidence in feelings of confidence alongside my faith. I replaced them both with a very deliberate set of beliefs in things like science and logic.

Same with me and I wish I would have been exposed to philosophy earlier in my life. Science provides us with the tools to denounce certain religious facts but it can not give us our confidence back. This also explains the rise of pseudo-intellectuals (people publicly arguing outside of their field of expertise) who are filling this gap with nonsense.

Though I didn’t exactly loose my faith, I can relate. I am not sure about anything, really. I was exposed earlier in life to science and non-believers.

Part of what's going on is that, as a result of our large brain, if we were fully formed, we wouldn't be able to pass through the birth canal.

As an evolutionary strategy, we're basically born at a stage of development that'd be considered a fetus for other animals in a lot of ways, and rely a lot more heavily on our parents as we continue our development.

Humans are effectively marsupials, we just don't have a pouch.

I remember, back in the heydey of the Discovery channel having real science programming, a Wild Discovery[1] about guanacos in the Andes. Within an hour, the baby guanaco was birthed, licked clean of placenta, and on it's feet scrambling unsteadily up 14k foot mountains after it's mother.

[1] I miss this show, and that era of basic cable documentary television so much...

I mean, we're similar in that regard, but were more closely related to literally all placental mammals than marsupials.

Its hard to imagine that our large brain came first and the birth canal was an afterthought :))

As the case with dolphins, humans rely on social interactions to survive. The more an animal relies on their caregiver, the more it relies on learning and the less it relies on instincts to survive.

The point is that the pelvis (and birth canal) size couldn't keep up with the increase in cranium size, possibly due to other selection pressures like the requirements of bipedal gait. Human females would need ludicrous hips if we were born more developed.

On the other hand skills like object permanence require the development outside the womb. I am sure nature would have found a way if it would be possible otherwise.

I seem to recall reading that this is due to a compromise between infant head size and womens' ability to walk efficiently.

It's quite remarkable the sacrifices that were made for the sake of increasing cranium size. Childbirth became a coin-flip for whether the child and mother even survive the ordeal, infants are born completely helpless for the first few months of life. It goes to show just how critical intelligence was for the survival of our species.

Dominant traits is not always about survival... Could be a sexual preference for intelligence. Nerds might have been cools a few 100 k years before we thought!

If you were smarter you could better tools, weapons and shelter... Or better ways to hunt and prepare food...

That would definitely help your family survive better.

Your parent makes the valid point that difficulty in producing such children does not necessarily demonstrate the value of this trait for survival. Peacock tail confers no survival merit except for sexual selection.

It very strongly demonstrates the value of the trait for gene survival, which is the important thing. The individual matters not.

> we're basically born at a stage of development that'd be considered a fetus for other animals in a lot of ways, and rely a lot more heavily on our parents as we continue our development.

And since parenting such an undeveloped creature requires high intelligence, we get more and more intelligent in a feedback loop [1].

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/113/25/6874.abstract

The book ‘Sapiens’ by Yuval Harari talks exactly to this point. A really excellent read.

yep. many animals are born knowing how to walk and many other skills.

no shittin, a full sized human can't bear a full sized human. I think that's the same for all animals, though and doesn't explain the difference, unless you implied dolphins carry their unborn for way longer. which they don't. (I'll have to check)

Virtually every mammal (marsupials are, IIRC, the main exception) gives birth to young that are much more fully developed and physically capable than human newborns. Dolphins are definitely not exceptions here.

That they’d also be closer to same-species adults in cognitive function is not that surprising.

I wasn't so much disagreeing with the implied statement as I was criticizing your expression. You didn't add anything to the discussion I didn't read better in other comments. Point in case the focus is on the ratio of brainsize at birth and later, in relation to body size I might add.

> I wasn't so much disagreeing with the implied statement as I was criticizing your expression.

Your upthread comment wasn't a response to any expression of mine.

> You didn't add anything to the discussion I didn't read better in other comments.

If you just don't think a comment adds anything, but have no real disagreement with it, that's a good reason to either not respond or downvote.

It's not a good reason to deliberately misinterpret it and respond to that strawman sonthst you have an artificial disagreement.

Study: Precocious development of self-awareness in dolphins

Citation: Morrison R, Reiss D (2018) Precocious development of self-awareness in dolphins. PLoS ONE 13(1): e0189813.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189813

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0189813

Abstract: Mirror-self recognition (MSR) is a behavioral indicator of self-awareness in young children and only a few other species, including the great apes, dolphins, elephants and magpies. The emergence of self-awareness in children typically occurs during the second year and has been correlated with sensorimotor development and growing social and self-awareness. Comparative studies of MSR in chimpanzees report that the onset of this ability occurs between 2 years 4 months and 3 years 9 months of age. Studies of wild and captive bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) have reported precocious sensorimotor and social awareness during the first weeks of life, but no comparative MSR research has been conducted with this species. We exposed two young bottlenose dolphins to an underwater mirror and analyzed video recordings of their behavioral responses over a 3-year period. Here we report that both dolphins exhibited MSR, indicated by self-directed behavior at the mirror, at ages earlier than generally reported for children and at ages much earlier than reported for chimpanzees. The early onset of MSR in young dolphins occurs in parallel with their advanced sensorimotor development, complex and reciprocal social interactions, and growing social awareness. Both dolphins passed subsequent mark tests at ages comparable with children. Thus, our findings indicate that dolphins exhibit self-awareness at a mirror at a younger age than previously reported for children or other species tested.

Humans are one of the slowest developing mammals, so this sounds expected.

It does say they predicted it, so this is "scientists find result everyone expected".

> Dr. Reiss said the timing of the emergence of self-recognition is significant, because in human children the ability has been tied to other milestones of physical and social development. Since dolphins develop earlier than humans in those areas, the researchers predicted that dolphins should show self-awareness earlier.

If you look at dog versus human intelligence, newborn humans have a start (they have functional vision and hearing from the day one), then puppies will pass them (they can run and do many things while infants can't even crawl), but then children will outrun dogs (speech starts to form) and that's forever.

If dolphins show self-recognition earlier, their runway might just be shorter. Doesn't tell us much.

Human babies are pretty helpless compared to most animals, which I think supports your point. Human babies can't walk, crawl, roll, or even lift their heads. Even with your example of vision, newborn humans barely have functional vision, depending on what is meant by "functional."

> The ability to focus their eyes, move them accurately, and use them together as a team must be learned.

Source: https://www.aoa.org/patients-and-public/good-vision-througho...

> At first, the farthest your baby will be able to see is the distance from your arms to your face (about 6 to 10 inches).

Additional source: https://www.whattoexpect.com/first-year/baby-vision

yeah, its kind of silly and pointless. most mammals are born with ~ 90% their adult brain weight, humans is less than 1/3.

Of course, you do realise that dolphins spend practically their entire lives in close proximity to a reflective surface, seeing it from both underneath and above? Of course a surface where they can see clear reflections close up is going to be interesting to them.

In other news, dogs are better than humans at self-recognising the smell of their own urine.

Mirror Self-Recognition is closely linked to social awareness and self-consciousness[0]. Does it mean dolphins are more self-conscious than humans?

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22673374

Nope, that would be one of those leaps you can't make, loosely akin to the schoolyard game of -

Donut consumption linked to economic development... Development of satellite infrastructure linked to economic development... Does this mean that Dunkin Donuts has more satellites in orbit?

Dolphin young also emerge more developed and capable than human young, is it really so surprising they get woke before us?

Even if dolphins are smarter, which depends on metric, we rule the earth and are more successful here than them...Unless it’s dolphins piloting the cigars and discs that shoot out of the oceans.

Behind a login-wall, but an interesting critique of the mirror test nevertheless:

https://www.academia.edu/2525451/A_Critical_Analysis_of_the_...

It's not where you start but where you finish.

the judgment criteria matter, too.

dolphins are a heck of a lot better at swimming than I am; world-building, not so much.

I just imagined myself in a race with dolphin, the two of us at the starting line, me with a wetsuit and swim fins and goggles, and how intense it would be at the countdown to swim all out dive into some sort of dizzying psych-myself-out spiral, and know that I'd be left in the dust and it would only be so fun for about 1.5 seconds before I'm toast.

Dolphins also have a shorter lifespan. I'd wager these two data points aren't completely independent.

When she died in 2014 Nellie (a bottlenose dolphin in Marineland) was 61. No one realy knows what is the maximum lifespan in the wild. Some bowhead whales have the lifespan over 200 years, and we know nothing about their self-recognition or when it emerges.

I, for one, welcome our new dolphin overlords.

better tails, too

Puppies start walking earlier than babies.

Great. The next question should be: so what? And that's what this article fails to deliver on.

It actually does show something interesting. Self recognition is a complex activity that isn’t dictated through a simple instinct. That means dolphins are developing their frontal lobe faster than humans. Puppies walking is an instinct, and isn’t necessarily a complex development

> Self recognition is a complex activity that isn’t dictated through a simple instinct

Source? If anything, this finding increases the odds that self-recognition might be a genetically primed (or even pre-programmed) neuronal circuit.

To me this sounds like an adaption for responding to hostile situations at an early age.

Suppose for a moment that we already have a longer (10 years to even reach puberty) development period for the exact reason of needing more processing capacity. It doesn't seem a stretch to me to think that being self aware later occurs because there is more groundwork development to occur for our complex reasoning.

Kind of hard to hide a baby dolphin in some brush or a cave. Kind of hard to hole up in a cave as an oceanic mammal as well.

Small bits of basic knowledge accumulates to great things over time. I doubt the researchers intended their paper to be as clickbait-y as the title of the NYT article sounds. But this individual contribution is probably not something worth putting too much emphasis on.

But puppies walk on all fours and babies can also crawl on all fours.

Puppies generally start walking about 3wks in, while babies are usually at least 6 months before crawling. So that closes the timeline somewhat, but there's still a large gap.

Yes, but also relative? A dog has somewhat 15-20 years of lifetime.

> Children start showing signs of self-recognition at about 12 months at the earliest

Doesn't match my real-world experience with real-world children. I'd rather trust my own lying eyes than an unsourced citation of "scientists say".

well I am going with the idea that young humans have many more distractions in their life to yield a good test. however I am certainly not an expert in this area but I wonder what a good test would be? Set toddlers in play rooms with mirrors on one wall?

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