A man who was raised by wolves | Hacker News Reader

A man who was raised by wolves

theguardian.com

108 pointsjohnny31336 comments

Janer says the young boy would have projected his social needs on to the animals and imagined relationships with them. “When Pantoja says the fox laughed at him, or that he had to tell off the snake, he gives us a version of the true reality, what he believes happened – or how, at least, he explained the reality to himself,” Janer told me. “Marcos’s mind was desperate for social acceptance,” he told me, “so instead of understanding the animals’ presence as incentivised by the food, he thought they were trying to make friends.”

I continue to be perplexed as to why otherwise intelligent people deny the possibility of personality and social relations among other species, or that of interspecies communication. Then again this is just the mildest example in this story of people's capacity for being awful.

Yeah, I think that Rodríguez absolutely has the right of it here. Animal communication is "simple" in human terms, but is quite rich on its own terms. To anybody who spends quality time with animals in their own comfort zones, it is utterly damned obvious that many animals experience and are entirely competent at communicating love, friendship, curiosity, jealousy, covetousness, and many other thoughts/feelings -- and, also, that they are just as able to blur species boundaries as we are. There are varying levels of complexity to this: snakes are too simple-minded to have a sense of humour, for example, but foxes definitely do. Fox humour isn't the same as human humour, but when you anthropomorphize them, and they foxopomorphize you, there's enough overlap for an intersubjectively meaningful exchange to take place.

I think that science's unwillingness to acknowledge this has multiple roots.

The first is a religious relict of wanting to put Man at the centre of the universe. Descartes, deeply religious, believed that humans were the only beings endowed with a soul, and that therefore animals were necessarily mere automata. This became the default "scientific" dogma, to be considered true unless proven otherwise. But it really is just dogma, with no basis in either rationality or observation.

The second is the scientific requirement for experimental controls and reproducibility, which is easiest to do in a laboratory. If animals really were automata, running on instinct, then that would be fine. But they're (mostly) social creatures, formed through interaction as much as we are. If your understanding of human psychology was formed wholly through the observation of humans who spent their lives trapped in Skinner boxes, you'd form some rigorously incorrect notions of what humans are capable of. Ultimately, there's no way to to get a proper understanding of humans in a non-subjective capacity. Same goes for animals.

"If your understanding of human psychology was formed wholly through the observation of humans who spent their lives trapped in Skinner boxes, you'd form some rigorously incorrect notions of what humans are capable of."

My comment's a tangent, but I suspect that's a significant reason why social media is so ridiculously hard for people to healthily use.

Interesting. Yeah, there's something to unpack in that.

> Descartes, deeply religious, believed that humans were the only beings endowed with a soul, and that therefore animals were necessarily mere automata.

Note that the belief that animals do not have a soul is relatively recent in Christianity -- it originated in roughly the 18th or 19th century around the time of the enlightenment. And still, not all Christians or Christian thinkers espouse this view.

> This became the default "scientific" dogma, to be considered true unless proven otherwise.

I would argue that instead of taking the cue from recent Christian thought, science owes this view to a strict materialist worldview arising out of 18th century philosophy, which underpins most of its inquiry and rules out non-material hypotheses a priori. Prominent atheist scientists regularly praise materialism as the enabler of successful science.

> But it really is just dogma, with no basis in either rationality or observation.

Indeed.

> when you anthropomorphize them, and they foxopomorphize you

The op is actually part of the word for human, anthrop·os.

Substituting "fox" in for "human", you'd get "alopecomorphize".

Heheh -- I'm almost as much as a pedant as you! :-) I actually did realise that "op" went with "anthro", and agonised for a bit over whether to include it or do something that was more technically correct. Eventually decided that this would sacrifice comprehensibility for correctness, and that it was actually okay to make a somewhat whimsical point with whimsical language. But, yes, you're entirely correct.

You know, you are undoubtedly technically correct, but I really love the use of foxopomorphize. Something about it just so perfectly encapsulates the OP's point about foxes and humans sharing a joke across species boundaries, in the way that "alopecomorphize" does not. I say leave it.

Alopecomorphize suffers from the fact that nobody knows the ancient Greek word for fox. I had to look it up. (And I left the comment for other people like me, who might wonder.) You could put the whole thing into a more recognizable Latinate form, "vulpiformify", but then you completely lose the parallel to "anthropomorphize".

I doubt "arachnomorphize" would have the same issues, though.

Although I still prefer OP’s version, I do appreciate you leaving your comment, because there was a small part of me that did wonder what the correct version of foxomorphize was, and now I don’t have to. Also, points for “vulpiformify” as a mid-grade poor man’s alopecomorphize.

foxomorphize would sound better though.

> it is utterly damned obvious that many animals experience and are entirely competent at communicating love, friendship, curiosity, jealousy, covetousness, and many other thoughts/feelings

I have definitely observed such sentience in cats and even crows, and many other examples are apparent in numberous animal videos on YouTube etc.

There’s generally a large pushback against over-anthropomorphization in the scientific community I think frequently to push back a bit on the public only focusing on the most charismatic animals, and in the general public especially when people are confronted with the meat industry.

The problem is that field researchers who study almost species (especially mammals) tend to differentiate personalities and a lot of human like traits.

Understandable, but caution doesn't validate his own alternative claims. I was already in s skeptical mod from the mention by another person in the article of the 'alpha wolf', a ethological concept which has been discredited for a while now but which refuses to die.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-everything-you-know-about-wolf-p... has a good summary of the rise and fall of this animal behavior theory.

Certainly over-anthropomorphization can lead people to make foolish assumptions, but the notion that animal behavior is fundamentally different from our own rather than existing on some spectrum of cognitive complexity is not really scientific either.

That exact passage struck me too.

The word "com-pan-ion" literally means sharing food together.

Science has long established friendship as a distinctly human-human interaction consisting only of the purest non-incentivized intentions.

And yet scientific studies have shown that some animals will reliably prefer to help other animals even if it loses them a reward. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/rats-forsake-chocolat...

Some scientists, perhaps. But it sure sounds to me like a "no true friend" argument. [1]

Of course one could define "friendship" in a way that only human friendship qualifies, but that is certainly not the common definition.

We have three dogs and three cats, and every day I see behavior and interactions among them that I can only describe as friendship. Yes, between the cats and the dogs too. I think anyone watching them would call them friends, at least by any everyday meaning of the word. [2]

Scientists don't get to redefine a word that means something else in common discourse. That's not how language works. Next thing you know, they will say Pluto is not a planet!

Oops, they did, some scientists anyway. But not the science team that sent New Horizons there and brought back better pictures and more information than we ever had before. They call it a planet. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship#In_animals

[3] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pluto-rsquo-s-sec... (Full article is behind a paywall, but the subtitle has the relevant quote.)

[citation needed] (unless it is written purely ironically)

I think this is one of the consequences of Carnism[1]. For most people, it's a lot harder to eat or exploit someone with a personality and rich emotional life, than something that has no feelings or desires. This creates all sorts of cognitive distortions and biases.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnism

I would definitely not say "raised". He lived, and interacted with, humans until he was 7, which is around the age you enter school. At 7, I suspect the average human is far more intellectually advanced than the average grown wolf, so I very much doubt that there was much "raising" going on.

I doubt most modern 7 year olds can forage for food effectively and provide effective shelter for themselve etc. So, he could have learned some extremely valuable skills for living in the wild from interacting with wolves. IMO, a reasonable proxy for being raised by.

Personally, I find his story extremely unlikely, but taken at face value it does not seem to be impossible.

As interesting everhing of this is; I actually doubt that is the absolute truth as long there is no evidence.

And now the wolf is extinct in Sierra Morena, ruthlessly killed by the hunting lobby in the last decades. It makes you think.

I think it's interesting to understand how feral children/adults adapt into society, as this gives a glimpse of what people are actually capable of learning in extreme niche cases.

I had done a fair bit of research on this topic in the past, out of sheer curiosity. Mostly to see determine what animalistic instincts are retained, if any at all, and how well someone can acclimate learning a language like English in different age brackets. Also to determine what the fine line between what human/animal instincts /intuition actually were. As you get older, it becomes much more difficult to learn new things, due to new stigmas associated with things you had learned previously. You have to unlearn just as much as you have to learn (e.g. smarter everyday, riding bike backwards). I would watch videos on this topic, gauging effectiveness of speech information rate VS years of learning based on how long someone has lived in animalistic captivity.

I compared this with people who had been born without vision or sight growing up, or if it was lost later in life. Whether learning to speak without ever hearing a word spoken was possible. Extreme examples would be things like Helen Keller, amongst others. Using niche cases like these is one of the best ways to validate a theory, as there are less unknowns and its in a more controlled environment. Its qualitative research over quantitative

On the other end of the spectrum, I would research things on child prodigies. People who were austic savants and prodigies in music, or were off the scale in what was considered average.

On another spectrum would be prisoners of war, during WWII and the effects of solitary confinement / deprived senses for extended periods of time and its effect on human psychology. I wanted to compare the effects of PTSD studies and how this compares to feral humans / PTSD research here.

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The research was mostly just my obsession over optimization of learning patterns & discovery of learning antipatterns. I wanted to validate what was truly effective and what was not, based on actual research with extreme examples, and narrowing it to down what I personally found works for me, and basing it on different personality traits found in myer-briggs/disc/etc.

I don't even remember all the impliciations of this research I did. I would read psychology papers/books on these topics and compare it with things in DSM. Learn about linguistics, etc. Spent 2 months interested on this given topic. I narrowed it down to 2 distinctive methods of thinking, with potential subsystems inside of those. The first being fast, e.g. recognizing someone you've seen before, simulated mostly by sensory information. The latter being triggered as a result, based on "slower" iterative thought processes.

And I would test to see the limitations of expanding the "slower" approach by seeing how much information I could cram in short term, e.g. how many words could I memorize short term with a memory palace. It was only like 10 words/locations at best, for one given type of application. Meaning I could remember at most, 10 todolists for a given day if I really made an attempt, but it became extremely difficult to do.

With this system of (faster) thinking, I was curious how someone who lacks one sensory resource (sight) and is able to compensate elsewhere (sound). People who are blind generally process audio information at a much higher rate, if you ever watch a programmers NVDA speech program the number of words it spits out is incomprensible to most people to understand.

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I would conduct studies on myself, seeing if I could apply these same principles, in speedwatching youtube videos with captions, podcasts, audiobooks, etc. I would be obsessed with learning about speedreading, shorthand notetaking, incremental reading, among other things. I ran tests on myself to see if I would watch 2 videos at the same time, one with captions at 2x speed, the other at normal playback rate with audio, and see if I could comprehend both well enough.

I have always been interested on how people like Tom Scott are able to do a 5 minute video shot in one take, without ever reading a script. Or how book writers like stephen king or brandon sanderson are able to generate these unique works of worldbuilding art, in book format. I would also learn things like memory palaces/competitions, chess champions, speed math competitions, and space repetition learning.

I'm starting to read a book called "Thinking fast and slow". It describes everything that I had tried to formulate in words.

I would also recommend reading Why We Sleep from Matthew walker. It has a lot of in depth information about how are memory works.

What clickbait nonsense. Do people really believe this? Are people this naive?

He was raised by humans at least to the age of 7. Then he was "abandoned" and he lived by "himself" in heavily populated spain? A few miles from cordoba, madrid and other spanish cities? He wasn't raised by wolves. He lived near wolves. Using this logic, everyone in spain was "raised by wolves".

Aren't journalists supposed to be skeptical? Aren't extraordinary claims supposed to demand extraordinary evidence?

This article is on par with history channel's aliens built pyramids.

I walked through central park when I was younger. I guess that means I was raised by squirrels.

Rural and urban worlds were much more isolated then than now. Only a few people had cars and the roads were very bad. All distances were much more wider then.

It seems that he was not only tolerated, but also feeded by wolves occasionally. He played, sleeped and gave food also to wolves for many years.

I can see why you'd be skeptical given your fondness for specious arguments.

I especially doubt so much the anecdote about the she-wolf that fed him like Mowgli (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNcBAI6iOn0). That's just what people want to hear and is totally in tune with the guy that seeks social acceptance.

Not to mention that people are in strong demand with "nature is so cool", and "human are evil" narratives where it totally fits.

Yeah, the mother wolf feeding him story obviously didn't happen.

Yeah. It's obvious that these claims are lies or at the very least exaggerated. And if they aren't lies, then we should be demanding real evidence. I don't get why people are downvoting me. Of all places, you would think that HN would be where skepticism reigns supreme.

That's not how skepticism works. A cursory search reveals that his case is quite well-attested to since the early 1970s, and the verifiable facts are not in dispute. What happened when he was alone in the wilderness is not verifiable, so "I won't believe it without evidence!" is a hollow and useless bellow. There are many situations in which evidence will never be available -- there were no webcams set up to observe wolf-child interactions in the mountains of Spain in the 1950s -- but that doesn't mean its untrue. A skeptical mind, in such cases, needs to rely on other faculties rather than complain about a lack of evidence.

I agree the lack of evidence doesn't mean it's untrue. But it doesn't mean it's true either. So here we have to believe the story of a man. Some people do, some don't...

This is a quite well known story in Spain. It made the news at a time when everything to watch on TV was the same news program, so everybody talked about it. The general belief is that his story is indeed exaggerated, but there is no consensus if he really believes all of it or is exaggerating on purpose, or maybe he exaggerated at the time because they wanted a better story and he was just a child and it is too late to know what really happened.

However, calling people naive and comparing yourself with him because you have been in Central Park is not going get you many upvotes. Expecting otherwise is naiver than believing the raised-by-wolves story word by word.

Was hoping it was Eddie Izzard - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKF_H_9AnAY

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