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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.