Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests
sydney.edu.au
sydney.edu.au
I don't understand the insistence of the article to place quotes around the word pain when referring to what insects feel. These are animals that can sense their surroundings and react to stimuli. How else would they be convinced to avoid dangerous situations, than by an unpleasant sensation?
In any case, the simplest hypothesis is that all animals can feel pain. The null hypothesis should be the opposite. And it has to be a complex hypothesis that explains why some animals can feel pain while others don't (which is tricky).
If you build a robot which senses dangerous stimuli and avoids them, does it feel pain?
Equating reaction to stimuli with pain is too sinplistic.
On the other hand, I don't see why we have to assume that an animal does not feel pain. Have we designed them? No. Don't we, who are also animals, feel pain? And isn't it reasonable to assume that pain is one mechanism by which we learn to avoid dangerous situations? Yes.
So, no good reasons to assume animals don't feel pain. Animals don't need to not feel pain just because robots don't need to feel pain.
That is to say, I'm not convinced: pain is a perceptual result.
Insects on the other hand are what we've scientifically classified as biological things. Creatures that share some of the same biological qualities we have. Unfortunately, humans don't understand all parts of their own biology to even recognize how similar another living thing is.
What I'm saying is that if pain is a perceptual result, we have no way of saying insects cannot perceive it the same way we do. All we know is that they have brains, like most other biological creatures, and that the base assumption should be that they do have pain.
Take any other creature like a dog. Why would a dog feel pain? Their brain's may be more complex than something like an ant, but who's to say the rise in brain complexity has brought about the emergence of pain? Humans know too little about the world but a lot of people insist on taking the opinion most convenient to them. If they don't have to think about the fact that they inflict pain on insects, they can keep killing them in a variety of ways without any moral apprehension in the slightest.
Animals avoid dangerous behaviours because they cause them pain. Robots, including self-driving cars avoid dangerous behaviours, because they are programmed to do so. Why is the existence of robots programmed to avoid dangerous behaviour indicative of whether animals feel pain?
We don't know a priori whether these are in fact two distinct sets or just two descriptions of the same set. That is, nature may have "programmed" the insect to avoid dangerous stimuli without any conscious awareness of it, similar to how my hand starts to move from a hot stove before I consciously feel the pain. Or, our programming of accident avoidance might in fact endow a conscious experience of pain for all we know.
I find this unlikely. The set of stimulus-response behaviours necessary to avoid every possible danger that might arise in an animal's environment would be immense. It seems much more economical to "program" behavious that avoid any painful stimulus (e.g. by setting some "pain threshold" and programming the animal to avoid anything that causes a sensation of pain above that threshold). This is particularly so for insects that have a limited number of neurons in which to store their stimulus-specific programs.
This is taking the claim I made too far. My point was that reacting to noxious stimuli does not a priori require the conscious experience of pain (which includes a suffering component). When it comes to analyzing sets of possible behaviors, that provides more evidence with which to decide between nociception and pain. I do think that most "animals" (excluding insects) probably experience pain due to, as you said, the varieties of possible behaviors being too large to be merely reflex based. But it's not obvious to me that this holds for insects.
Further, while we separate negative stimulus into say thirst and pain, the fact you can torture people with either means the difference is ethically more semantic than meaningful.
So, no what you’re describing does not mean learning to avoid stimulus. Learned avoidance behavior really requires a negative perception not just a neutral reflexive one.
The issue here is regarding the capabilities of a reflex network. I have established that learning can happen in such networks, as shown by common examples. You have not established that learning avoidance behaviors requires conscious networks.
Reflexive behavior is a predefined response to a stimulus over some predefined limit and thus on it’s own it’s reactive not predictive. In a purely neutral context there is no reason to increase the response based on the external stimulus.
Avoidance requires the ability to predict before a negative response occurs. Without the negative association there is no impetus to increase avoidance.
Aka, don’t put your hand in fire is inherently different than how quickly you remove your hand from fire.
PS: Reducing sensitivity with exposure is a rather different thing as it helps deal with edge cases. At a meta level, strong constant uncontrollable spasms is extremely unlikely to be an ideal response to a given stimulus.
>Avoidance requires the ability to predict before a negative response occurs
The article discusses the mechanism by which the "avoidance behavior" they describe is learned. It mentions that the downregulation of inhibitory neurons causes heightened sensitivity to stimuli. But downregulation of inhibitory neurons is the same species of process involved in desensitizaion of reflex arcs, i.e. make a certain set of neurons require a higher threshold for activation. Your assumption that "avoidance behavior" requires something beyond reflex activation doesn't follow.
And lets be clear, all learning is predictive. A reflex being upregulated or downregulated is a mechanism of prediction by which an organism's response is modified to more closely correlate with the environment. What you seem to be going for when you use prediction is an organism's mental model of the environment that is detailed enough to associate certain states with negative valence, and behavior planning to avoid entering into such states. In organisms with that level of processing, I agree that an experience of pain is required. But it doesn't follow that any behavior that can be described as predictive requires such mental models.
“more closely correlate with the environment” that’s leaning.
A tree that grows to light will physically reflect information in learned about the environment. It’s encoded in it’s physical form rather than neurons, but it’s still encoding information. In that case lack of sunlight is clearly not what we would associate as pain and I would not say it has ethical implications, but it is a negative stimulus from a tree’s perspective.
Anyway, avoidance is assumed to already happen as a separate system. “it’s already been shown in lots of different invertebrate animals that they can sense and avoid dangerous stimuli that we perceive as painful.“ Fruit fly’s have 250,000 neurons they can encode quite a bit to their mental model. This is simply changing the thresholds before learning occurs, or updating the system that updates their mental model.
As to the encoding, I think physical damage as a negative stimulus is kind of obvious.
I don't think the distinction between behavior carried out by reflex networks and behavior carried out by planning involving mental models is arbitrary. We have no reason to think reflex networks involve experience whereas we do have reason to think behavior involving mental models does. So it seems like this distinction is the critical distinction in terms of determining if some organism experiences pain.
>Anyway, avoidance is assumed to already happen as a separate system.
You're projecting more onto the term "avoidance" than is warranted, and you haven't defended your reading of the term. I take something like the withdraw reflex as an example of an avoidance behavior. Clearly you don't, but since your argument rests on your different understanding of the term, and your assumption that the authors of the article intend your reading of the term, its the key disagreement and deserves more attention.
Continuing the quote from the article you started "...In non-humans, we call this sense ‘nociception’, the sense that detects potentially harmful stimuli like heat, cold, or physical injury". So it doesn't seem like the authors are intending to reference predictive behavior, but simply protective behavior in response to noxious sensory perceptions, what you called reactive behavior.
Which is why I am saying learn avoidance behavior is simply not the topic of this research.
PS: That also includes some examples of complex behaviors.
Like Retric says, this leaves open the question of how noxious stimuli (thanks) lead to avoidance behaviours, if they are not unpleasant.
My explanation is that the unpleasant sensation of pain makes the animal try and avoid the stimulus that causes the pain. What is the alternative?
Edit: also, why most animals but not insects? What is different about insects?
It triggers networks that are designed to cause avoidance behaviors, for example the withdraw reflex[1]. Reflex networks do not require any conscious experience of the stimuli that triggers the specific action.
>why most animals but not insects? What is different about insects?
The size of the set of possible unique behaviors, complexity of brain, existence of higher order brain processes.
For now, most robots's decision-making apparatus isn't anything like yours. So it really doesn't make much sense to use the same vocabulary. But that could change if we use neural-network computing in a way that appears to more directly simulate the functioning of living organisms. Maybe building an ant-robot that's really a functional copy of a biological ant isn't that far off, and in that case, sure, it might feel pain.
I don't see anything simplistic about this.
If you mean that insects are more similar to humans than they are to robots, I'm actually not convinced.
When we are deciding what kind of mental mechanism to attribute to insects to explain their behaviour, there are two desiderata we need to satisfy:
- Our hypothesis has to be strong enough to explain the behaviour
- It has to be plausible given insect hardware
YeGoblynQueenne has suggested our starting point should be the hypothesis that "that all animals can feel pain." This is certainly strong enough to explain the behaviour, but it's implausible given the size of an insect's brain.
A fruit fly's brain has O(10^5) neurons; ours have O(10^10). Modern artificial neural network architectures typically fall somewhere in the middle. Now, certainly both human brains and insect brains have sophisticated architectural features that we haven't figured out yet. But given that robots, ANNs, etc can exhibit the same sorts of behaviours as insects given similar hardware constraints, I don't think we need to attribute pain (or any sort of mental life) to insects in order to explain their behaviour.
It would be cool if a neuroscientist could weigh in on this.
2. A neuron in the brain and a neuron in a neural network are totally different things.
That's a fair point, I shouldn't have said "typically." But some of the larger models probably have that many linear filters.
> 2. A neuron in the brain and a neuron in a neural network are totally different things.
There are certainly disanalogies between biological neurons and neurons in a vanilla feed-forward network, but A) there are analogies as well and B) a lot of interesting work is being done to make deep learning models stdp compatible.
At any rate, I think it's a reasonable claim that an insect brain has representational power closer to a SOTA ANN than it does to a human brain (though I welcome anyone here who knows about biologically plausible deep learning and/or insect brains to prove me wrong)
Just because neural networks are tech's Zeitgeist, doesn't make them the perfect explanation for all physical phenomena. Fifty years ago there were people equating thought and consciousness with artificial intelligence programs; and 200 years before it was the watchmaker's clockwork holding that regard.
Yes, as a man of science I subscribe to reductionism. Brains are made of neurons which are made of molecules which are made of atoms and so on, all governed by the laws of physics. But there's no reason to believe ANNs have the required intrinsic complexity to behave like ganglia.
I've made an argument - it's essentially a functionalist one. The intelligent things insects do - object detection, maze navigation - are all things that ANNs are really good at.
To put things in perspective: the reason that I don't think that ANNs are anywhere near as expressive as the human brain is that there are countless behaviours that humans perform that ANNs simply can't - generalizing to novel viewpoints in vision, for example. (Or if you want to go whole hog, natural language understanding.)
AFAICT The same is not true of insects. To dissuade me, you'd have to specify an insect behaviour that ANNs are fundamentally unequipped to perform. I'm not an entomologist so I'm totally open to the possibility that there is one. I also imagine there is significant neural diversity within the insect kingdom - presumably some bugs are smarter than others, and maybe some of the bigger-brained ones can do stuff that would necessitate an explanation that invokes consciousness. But you have to tell me what it is.
I had a pastor once attempt to teach me that all animals are basically robots, and that this justifies treating them however we want. In his mind, we're the only ones actually 'awake'. I suspect a whole lot of people think like this on some level in order to justify all the ongoing barbaric treatment they willingly endorse or carry out.
Hearing that shook me up for a bit, but in the long run it accelerated the process of me abandoning religion.
For that matter, if you take a human being, and cut the fibers connecting the two hemispheres, you end up with two separate minds, as demonstrated in experiments. Presumably you end up with two separate consciousnesses too.
If you replaced the neurons in your head one by one (say, 1% per day, over 100 days) with tiny machines functionally equivalent to neurons, what would be the effect from your point of view? To the outside, you would remain the same.
But, this argument has also been extensively reapplied to brains, bodies, and minds as well. The Chinese Room thought experiment is one common reference for this, where a functional system is trained to translate Chinese texts but framed in a way to cast doubt on whether there is any understanding of Chinese.
There are 2 differences to speak of but they still don't change the above statement imo: 1. You have knowledge of the experience of pain within yourself. You then extrapolate that other people probably have the same internal experiences because they look like you and their external behavior matches your external behavior. But of course, that is just a thought and cannot be proven. Maybe some people feel pain differently to you or not at all (like the idea of "is my blue the same as your blue")
2. The robot was programmed but the nervous system wasn't. Therefor one might say, we know the robot doesn't feel anything but at least I know that I do. If you don't believe in a divine element of being, then a brain is itself merely a computer in the broad sense of being 100% governed by the same laws of physics as a CPU (and everything else). So any experience or behavioral response in you or anybody/thing else has a physical casual link to the stimuli (with a quantum RNG in the mix).
Therefor I'd say that rationally, every feeling of pain, is equally valid, even if it's a program. But we have decided, for emotional and practical reasons, to give more validity to the pain of some creatures than others on an almost continuous scale.
Just to clarify this- my comment says that animals react to stimuli and that pain is a stimulus that they use to avoid dangerous situations (or behaviours). Not that reaction to stimuli entails the ability to feel pain.
So I'm asking: if (some) animals don't feel pain, then how do they know to avoid dangerous behaviours? What is the mechanism that keeps them from, say, jumping into the fire?
Does that help clarify what I mean?
This is exactly why the robot analogy originally raised by Hendrikto is so powerful. Robots/neural nets/etc illustrate that it is possible for an agent to avoid dangerous behaviours without being motivated by feelings.
I agree that this doesn't prove that insects don't have feelings - it shows that an agent doesn't need to be conscious to exhibit these sorts of behaviours.
Where I disagree is your claim that it has no bearing at all on the argument. It does bear on the argument, because it presents an alternative hypothesis that doesn't involve attributing mental life to insects. Very (very) roughly speaking the alternative is something like "an insect brain is a neural network, which, while not created by conscious designer, was chiseled by evolution to respond to stimuli in such a way that dangerous behaviours are avoided - in much the same way that an atari-playing artificial neural network trained by reinforcement learning avoids dangerous behaviours that will end the game - and just like the ANN playing atari, no consciousness is required - just the right model parameters. And similarly, no conscious designer ever explicitly told the neural network what to do. The programmer just set up the right incentives, in the same way that nature set up the right incentives for the insect."
I can see the arguments on both sides, but I think the "insects are kinda like robots" hypothesis is more plausible because an insect brain has a more similar number of model parameters to a deep q learning network than it does to a human brain.
This conclusion requires an understanding of what endows something with consciousness. (I won't use the word agent, because the relationship between consciousness and agency isn't clear. Agency may require consciousness, but consciousness needn't necessarily require agency.)
We do not know what part of the human brain is responsible for human consciousness. Anything which we create may also, as a byproduct or an emergent property, create consciousness. Perhaps the only thing consciousness needs is an ability to sense and respond to stimuli.
Consciousness as we understand it is defined in an ineffable way. We have individual experiences which we call 'consciousness' which roughly coincides with our subjective experience. As it stands, the term is fairly useless. Where we use it, we generally make the assumption that it applies or doesn't apply; almost exclusively in a self-serving way.
If a doorbell is conscious and we can prove it, we will necessarily have a much greater understanding of consciousness and will have refined the term consciousness, making it more useful.
In the same way we can talk about a spectrum and study of consciousness, but if the definition is to sense and respond to stimulus then the yes/no of "conscious" is always yes and therefore useless.
I'm not sure what you mean by "prove it". A doorbell very clearly responds to a stimulus. ...if you mean the definition of the word, no word's definition has ever been "proven". People assign definitions to words.
> if the definition is to sense and respond to stimulus then the yes/no of "conscious" is always yes and therefore useless.
This isn't the definition. This is a hypothetical cause. The cause might be anything; we don't know (yet?) what objective indicators there might be of subjective experience.
Consider seeing. In order for a thing (be it robot, animal, or human) to see, it must possess some type of sensory organ and a method to interpret the signals from that organ. So, to test for the ability to see, we can look for those things. We can be pretty sure that fish can see, because they possess eyes, brains, and respond to visual stimuli. That doesn't mean the properties has_sight_organ and has_brain are seeing.
In the same way that physical matter is all made of atoms (loosely; let's not be pedantic), we might find that all things possess consciousness. We might not. But in neither case is the term made useless. Sure, if we find that to be the case, then describing a thing as conscious or not becomes similar to describing an object as atomic. But then we're just moving goalposts.
Either you mean A) a "full" understanding or B) a partial understanding. If you mean A then I disagree. We can talk sensibly about markets even though we don't fully understand them. If you mean B, then I think we have it. I'll be the first to admit that it's pretty shoddy, but its not unusable. I love Dylan16807's point:
> If a doorbell is conscious then we've made "conscious" into a useless term.
Following the interpretation that "The null hypothesis is generally assumed to be true until evidence indicates otherwise." I'd argue for H° being that all living beings feel pain until evidence indicates otherwise. That approach wouldn't be very economical though which is why do the opposite.
Is it reasonable to assume a bacteria has the same internal emotion responses to sensation?
Because they're acknowledging that they didn't actually establish that they feel pain in the sense of a conscious experience of suffering.
Moderate heat and cold, certain textures, a feeling of resistance against my movements... I react to many kinds of potentially-harmful stimuli that aren't pain. Unpleasantness is not a synonym for pain.
> surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.
It's unknown where the consciousness starts (the hard problem sense) is but it's not unreasonable to assume that sentience (ability to feel pain and pleasure and experience subjectively) and ability to suffer that comes with it happens long before the ability to form long term memories, object permanence, or other any other cognitive abilities.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/07/28/when-babies-fel...
Otherwise you're making the unproven assumption that an infant's mind responds to pain differently - why would you think that? And which other subgroups of humans could you make evidence-free assumptions that they are different from the default (however chosen) human?
That’s what OP said, emphasis mine. I agree with you: that infants experience pain in the same way as adults should be the default hypothesis. That they remain psychologically scarred by it for decades, however, should not be.
"Early life stress may have a lasting impact on the developmental programming of the dopamine (DA) system implicated in psychosis." [1]
I highly recommend Gabor Maté's book "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts" for a deeper discussion of how various types of pre- and postnatal stress impact a person's proclivity towards addictive behavior and ADHD.
But even for adults extreme and overwhelming stressful experiences can cause long-lasting and even multigenerational psychological consequences through epigenetic mechanisms.
Also, there is essentially zero evidence for hereditary epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetic changes are common in the somatic cell lineages (which make up the entire organism except for the sperm and eggs), but there are very few plausible mechanisms by which epigenetic changes in somatic cells can somehow make their way back to the germ line cells (eggs and sperm) and, thus, exert an influence on subsequent generations. On top of the theoretical underpinnings being essentially implausible, there is no good evidence that hereditary epigenetic mechanisms exist. The only evidence I am aware of in humans are the children of Dutch women who went through a famine in 1944. However, that evidence has since evaporated. Here's a quote from the Wikipedia[0]:
"Moreover, the children of the women who were pregnant during the famine were smaller, as expected. However, surprisingly, when these children grew up and had children those children were thought to also be smaller than average.[11] This data suggested that the famine experienced by the mothers caused some kind of epigenetic changes that were passed down to the next generation. Despite this, a subsequent study by the same author failed to find a correlation between maternal exposure to famine and birth weight of the next generation."
Babies are very bad at remembering things. It might be that remembering isn't a big factor, but it's a pretty obvious basis for the idea.
> And which other subgroups of humans could you make evidence-free assumptions that they are different from the default (however chosen) human?
So you're not only going to associate everyone that disagrees with you with racism, you're going to say it's "evidence-free" that babies are different from the default human?
The idea that infants nervous system is more fragile should be the starting point.
From a quick search: "Only 45% of doctors who do circumcisions use any anesthesia at all. Obstetricians perform 70% of circumcisions and are least likely to use anesthesia - only 25% do."
From https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-landscapes/201...
Their findings are well worth a read:
> Rethink Priorities reviewed the scientific literature relevant to invertebrate sentience. We selected 53 features potentially indicative of the capacity for valenced experience and examined the degree to which these features are found throughout 18 representative biological taxa. These data have been compiled into an easily sortable database that will enable animal welfare organizations to better gauge the probability that (various species of) invertebrates have the capacity for valenced experience. This essay details what we’ve done, why, and the strengths and weaknesses of our approach.
https://www.rethinkpriorities.org/blog/2019/6/7/invertebrate...
(The Economist | Grub’s up https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/07/06/...)
http://www.polar-systems.co.uk/industries-applications/seafo...
> Entomophagy (eating insects for food) is sometimes proposed as an alternative to factory farming because it has lower environmental impact. But entomophagy is not necessarily more humane than factory farming of livestock all things considered, and along some dimensions it's actually worse, because it involves killing vastly more animals per unit of protein. Rather than promoting insect consumption, let's focus on plant-based meat substitutes.
https://reducing-suffering.org/why-i-dont-support-eating-ins...
It will even vary from culture to culture; for example, cows are revered in much of India, and in much of the west we seem to place more value on values we perceive as "cute", such as dolphins, or "magnificent", such as whales.
Where does it do that?
I personally do not advocate anyone to eat plant-based meats because of the harmful effects on health (this coming anecdotally from myself after eating them for 2+ years). The phytates in almost all grains / legumes / beans bind to almost all free zinc copper and iron which has a very negative effect on health.
Insects (similar to ruminants) are able to naturally assimilate the high protein foods and filter out the phytates. Eating a half-pound per day of insects helped me to greatly recover my health after following a vegan diet for almost three years.
Hero asks the gods for gift of healing. Gods grant the gift along with pain so that we know when we are injured (and of course, in need of the gift.) No gift from the gods comes free.
I'll be sure to be more careful with my insect friends. And I'll be more vigilant in compassionate killing.
> We amputated the right middle leg of wild-type Canton S flies, allowed the animals to recover, and then evaluated escape responses at different temperatures. While intact animals displayed minimal escape attempts when exposed to a 38°C surface, after amputation, flies showed significantly more escape behaviors.
It's such a superior attitude to even consider that only humans could feel pain.
It's also obvious that any complex organism feels pain... It the most basic evolutionary protection mechanism. Anything that didn't feel pain would soon be evolved out.
And to risk sounding crazy, people didn't believe babies felt pain. Only within the past few decades did humanity realize the obvious fact that, no shit, of course babies feel pain. [1]
[1]: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2017/07/28/when-babies-fel...
its semi relevant to me because I accidentally stepped on a bug (weevil) yesterday and felt bad about it. I hoped that it might not feel pain after the step, but that that hope was in vain.
So actually it’s not obvious that animals perceive the world as we do. Maybe you can only generalise our experience to warm blooded vertebrates.
Insects have a much, much simpler nervous system. They don't even have a spinal chord, and they have an exoskeleton.
I think maybe only cnidarians have a simpler (or similarly complex) nervous system.
Pain on a chordate might be comparable to pain in humans, with some exceptions like the Octopus (maybe) but that's about it.
But pain in humans (or other more complex animals) is more complicated than that
I am not a biologist, but from working in labs that do research with model organisms (like drosophila) what I understood is that there is little evolutionary advantage of being able to feel pain if you cannot heal it anyway. Also if there are no nerves in some regions feeling of pain is unlikely. I remember that someone told me that experiments show that drosophila with servered legs don't change their way of walking, and do not limp as animals do that feel pain. So the notion got adopted that they cannot feel pain and experiments on them are ethically save as they do not suffer.
Who thought this? White people?
> While some doctors didn’t trust anesthesia, Sims’s decision to not use it—or any other numbing technique—was based on his misguided belief that black people didn’t experience pain like white people did.
See also https://www.pnas.org/content/113/16/4296.full
> These findings suggest that individuals with at least some medical training hold and may use false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites to inform medical judgments
>Today, many laypeople, scientists, and scholars continue to believe that the black body is biologically and fundamentally different from the white body and that race is a fixed marker of group membership, rooted in biology (26⇓–28). //
Okay, I'd fit there.
I've never heard the concept of different pain tolerance (only across the sexes), but black and 'coloured' people are clearly morphological distinct in a way that suggests genetic differences ... are they saying light and darked skinned people are genetically and biologically identical?
That doesn't correspond at all with things like sickle-cell disease / malaria insensitivity which are reported to be found more in people with a long ancestry in sub-saharan Africa.
FWIW suffering from pain signals appears at least in part social and learned -- toddlers can often be tricked in to not finding something painful. I certainly don't feel the identical physical stimulus of nettle stings in the age way as my older children. The v toddler doesn't know it's supposed to hurt and carries on, the older child seems to be hurt with very little damage because they anticipate the pain. I feel the pain as I've always done (maybe my reception of pain stimulus is weakened?) but can easily ignore it because I know a few nettle stings isn't really anything to bother with.
Personally I'd expect almost everything to show some variation with "race", and also with geographical heritage, and also with societal tradition in groups you assosiate with. (Eg maybe diet affects pain perception and historical cultural background affects die, maybe?)
The idea that we're all identical is silly. I see where the desire to say that comes from: but ignoring reality doesn't get us further forward because it doesn't fit reality.
Like if you have ginger hair and freckles then you sunburn easily, it's a fundamental heritable difference [it doesn't of course mean you deserve lesser/greater rights or opportunities].
Human races are certainly more than just skin colour, if your race can affect your healthcare requirements - which seems to me to be true - then it seems to me more fundamental than it is, let's say, superficial.
Fundamental differences aren't necessarily large; they're fundamental, I feel, because they're operative (the differences demand adjusted action in some way). Maybe blood-type is an analogue? It's not always relevant but I'd still a fundamental aspect that need consideration in health situations? (Though AFAIK it's a much stronger factor.)
No.
http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-resh...
> Thus, there is no evidence that the groups we commonly call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities.
> Ultimately, there is so much ambiguity between the races, and so much variation within them, that two people of European descent may be more genetically similar to an Asian person than they are to each other
> In the biological and social sciences, the consensus is clear: race is a social construct, not a biological attribute
etc.etc.etc.
That's just linguistic spin.
>Ultimately, while there certainly are some biological differences between different populations, these differences are few and superficial. //
So Cystic Fibrosis and Sickle-Cell disease are superficial?
>For instance, alt-right proponents have stated, correctly, that many people with European and Asian descent have inherited 1-4% of their DNA from Neanderthals ancestors, and those of African descent do not have Neanderthal heritage. //
Hang on, they said earlier that we share 99% of our DNA with all other humans -- that being proof there are no races (according to the piece) -- but if we share 99%, how can Europeans/Asians have up to 4% Neanderthal that Africans don't have.
Now add in things like "we share 99% of our DNA with chimps" (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tiny-genetic-diff...) and we have a simplistic analysis suggesting we're much farther from other humans than we are from chimpanzees. I don't think that's what the authors wanted their piece to be suggesting.
The piece is unconvincing, badly written IMO, and lacks rigour.
Something they might have addressed is how the likes of 23andMe can give you a ethno-geographic background profile if it's impossible to tell from someone's genes what "race" they are.
They probably are concious in some form but their pain might be so much simpler than ours as their conciousness is.
They lack a lot of hardware to expeirience what we expeirience.
The risk of using a word like 'pain' is because it's a very sharply defined word for most people. While in fact expeiriencing pain evolved and your pain might be very different than fish pain or insect pain or nematode pain.
If they don't require a conscious experience of pain to thrive in their environmental niche, then we can reasonably assume they wouldn't have it. It's a good reason why we don't expect plants to experience pain.
>Anything that didn't feel pain would soon be evolved out.
You have to distinguish between nociception and a conscious experience of pain. Nociception is required for just about any multicellular organism. But the experience of suffering due to noxious stimuli only serves a purpose in the context of conscious planning of behavior.
I think the point of the non toxic chemical approach is more about human health, or being organic...
I think every kid in the midwest pulled a leg off a daddy long legs[1] at some point. They would keep moving afterwards, and to a kid this was fascinating (and reinforced the belief they were not like animals and could not feel pain.)
Regardless, now that I'm older I think most living things have a purpose and try not to bother anything that doesn't bother me, but yes, reading this I feel guilty :(
I'm probably an outlier. My mother tells me that from the time I could walk I captured bugs in the house and carried them outside to prevent them being killed.
I've continued the habit of rescuing animals from bad situations into adulthood and rapidly-oncoming old age. Once I caught a hummingbird in an Apple building in Cupertino and let it go outside. It was a beautiful iridescent green and so light that I couldn't feel its weight in my hand.
Or maybe not. Joseph Campbell claimed that a common feature of tribal mythology is ceremonial apologies and restitutions to animal spirits to make restitution for the need to kill them.
We don't boil cows/pigs/chicken alive.
As the link says, this research indicates that we can use insects to do basic research on Neuropathic pain. Insects, being easy and fast to breed, and easy to manage in large quantities, makes this especially useful for research.
Now they can try all sorts of methods of tackling the problem, from drugs to gene therapy.
It's not, of course, proof that successes will translate to mammal or human models, but it's an excellent way to do some initial concept filtering.
If we found a species of aliens that clearly suffered like us but bred as fast as insects and were as easy to manage, would the moral implications of experimenting on them still be irrelevant compared to the utility of experimenting on them?
Article tries to balance between biting the audience with insect pain but then trying to not be completely false calls it 'pain' and nociception which is the only scientifically accurate term for what is observed.
On the other hand, I've been dabbling with hydroponics. Most suggestions say to plant 2-3 seeds per growing block, so that you are protected against the risk of seeds not sprouting. If multiple seeds sprout, you just snip the tiny seedlings and leave the biggest, hardiest one to grow. A few days ago I killed 3 small seedlings and felt incredibly guilty. About a third of the way to crying over it. Next time I will only plant one seed per spot, even though that means I will get average plants instead of big ones, and it will take longer to replant seeds that don't sprout. The feeling of killing those beautiful young plants was just too much to bear.
On the other hand I have never felt bad for the millions of plants that have died to feed me.
Nature is a dog-eat-dog world. Ultimately we've got to kill to survive and to have a livable habitat. I had seen the spider I was hunting this morning walking around my window a few times over the last few weeks, but I left it alone until it bothered me. Sure, it's sad to kill another living being, but spiders are much less conscious than us and we've got to eventually rationalize the fact that a human is worth thousands of plants and spiders and bugs (if not, then the only logical action would be to commit suicide, unless you dedicated your life to saving plants and spiders and bugs). Even if you don't kill them directly, you do so indirectly by participating in our modern economy.
Tldr it sucks, too bad :(
I suggested that we need to just believe that we are more important than those dumb(er) lifeforms, but we should still avoid unnecessary killing whenever possible. Like not killing bugs/spiders unless they are actually annoying you, and not planting so many plants that you'll need to kill the extra ones.
I guess the plant example also showed that our sense of morality can be very illogical - the parent has qualms over hurting bugs, I really disliked killing plants needlessly, yet we all go and eat vegetables (and meat) every day, and our society has committed many, many genocides to nonhuman species.
Parents should have to sign a statement like this before it's performed. It should no longer be the default, and parents should understand that they don't have to be railroaded into the decision.
Source? Especially that this risk reduction outweighs the risks of the procedure is not proven as far as I know.
"Male circumcision reduces the risk of HIV infection among heterosexual men in sub-Saharan Africa [..] The effectiveness of using circumcision to prevent HIV in the developed world is unclear;" [2]
Since newborns are unlikely to have sex [3], there should be no harm in waiting until puberty, and getting the boy's input on what is an irreversible change.
[1] http://www.cirp.org/library/statements/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision
[3] C'mon man.
Parents have autonomy to make medical decisions for their infant children, and many are forced to make significantly more difficult decisions than a routine circumcision.
I was curious about the CIRP site you linked to and the policy statements they are referencing. I double checked just the first referenced policy statement, which is from the Australian College of Paediatrics. [1]
Interestingly, they reference a statement from 1996 which is no longer the current position. Evidence for the medical benefits of circumcision have gotten stronger, and the procedure has gotten safer and more likely to be performed with anesthesia. The updated statement [2] while still not advocating for routine circumcision for all male children, is, in particular, missing the passage which CIRP specifically highlighted in the 1996 position.
This calls into question whether CIRP is interested in presenting a factual list of current statements, or if they have a particular agenda they are attempting to serve in presenting cherry-picked out-dated statements with a specific viewpoint.
[1] - http://www.cirp.org/library/statements/acp1996/
[2] - https://www.racp.edu.au/docs/default-source/advocacy-library...
Parents do make medical choices -- these would be situations where there is a benefit to treatment and where there is medical consensus that the treatment is worthwhile.
That's not the case for circumcision where most doctors agree it shouldn't be performed other than for actual medical reasons like phimosis.
The WHO states, “There is compelling evidence that male circumcision reduces the risk of heterosexually acquired HIV infection in men by approximately 60%.”
Here’s what the abstract does say;
> Following the three randomized trials in Africa demonstrating the protective effects of male circumcision on HIV infection, studies have reported other benefits of circumcision including protection from certain STIs, including human papillomavirus and herpes simplex virus 2. With data accumulating on the public health benefits of circumcision and the endorsement of circumcision from WHO, investigators have begun to evaluate the feasibility, safety and cost of implementation of large-scale circumcision programs. Limitations of circumcision have also been explored.
So the child is being exposed to risk of death or disfigurement for a hypothetical benefit for one STI where there are existing better protections for that, and other STIs.
Here’s another one that appears after a quick Google search;
Male Circumcision Reduces Risk of Genital Herpes and HPV Infection, but Not Syphilis
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/male-circumcis...
When you google for circumcision risk of death, on the one hand is CIRP claiming over 100 infant boys die each year from complications arising from circumcision, and in the other hand the CDC saying they looked at every single infant death in 2010 and could not find a single one related to circumcision.
So I’ll be done with this topic for the day!
The broader application of this procedure to other areas of the world with different population, infrastructure and disease characteristics warrants further investigation.
Similar to the HPV vaccine which is given to 9 year olds, presumably long before they have started having sex.
I’m really not interested in ideological battle here.
> I’m really not interested in ideological battle here.
You're defending zero-benefit mutilation of children, in the face of overwhelming medical advice. It's hard to see that as anything other than ideological.
They reference both current and historical statements, I assume on purpose to show how the position has evolved. For the case of Australia, the newest statement is on top, and the statements are clearly dated, so there is no room to confuse a newer one with an older one.
It takes very motivated reasoning to conclude they are biased just because they present a historical timeline.
It appears the link to the most recent statement is broken (404) which could be why I missed it.
However, the way the timeline is presented also raises eyebrows;
> In September 2002, under the lead of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (RACP), Paediatrics and Child Health Division, six major medical societies of Australasia developed a unified position statement on male circumcision. All six medical societies (...) have now corroborated the Canadian Paediatric Society, declaring that circumcision of newborn males should not be routinely performed. The new statement firmly declares: "There are no medical indications for routine male circumcision." This statement was slightly revised in September 2004. This statement was retired in 2010.
“All six have now corroborated...” is a peculiar way to describe historical statements which are no longer considered medically accurate.
That’s a particularly odd way to conclude that new studies have provided compelling evidence of important health benefits of circumcision in certain contexts.
The fact that many commenters here seem to be entirely unaware that there do exist some demonstrable medical benefits in terms of resistance to and transmission of STDs and STIs reflects this.
What are those studies? It is very uncommon to cut off parts of children in Europe, Russia, South America and China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_circumcision) and such serious deseases should be much more common there. So what are they? On this scale we should see a pattern.
I have no deep trauma, no lingering issues. I'm just a normal boring guy, kind of like most guys who are circumcised too.
Personally I've only known women and uncircumcised men to have a problem with. I've never met a circumcised man who cared.
I think for people the equation is a bit different. We care about individuals in general and have limited number of kids. That's not the case for ants for example which seem quite replaceable / not able to recognise individuals (or even if they're alive).
The seeming clarity or obviousness doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to study it, test the assumption, prove or disprove, figure out what creatures are subject to it and to what extent, etc. I imagine we could learn a lot trying to explain it.
Also, who the f is flagging my every post and downwoting me to the point of shadow ban?