Gorillas have developed humanlike social structure, controversial study suggests | Hacker News Reader

Gorillas have developed humanlike social structure, controversial study suggests

sciencemag.org

137 pointslaurex76 comments

Why is this controversial? If you buy into evolution (which one would assume is the case with an evolutionary anthropologist), then most of what we do and are did not appear out of the blue and probably existed or exists in some form or another in species that are close to us; including all sorts of aspects of our social behavior. So, not knowing this you would expect to find stuff like this with species like gorilla's rather than being surprised by it.

Exactly, give it a few millennia, and some specie probably will end up like us in their own way.

We had to have bases for our current behaviors, and it's only logical we find it in other species.

I don't understand how people can imagine animals don't have feelings, thoughts, logic or a sense of existing. There is little in us that is so unique. It's like life on other planets, or additional dimensions we can't see. Yes we can't prove it now, but it would be disproving it that would really catch me by surprise given what we know now. The universe kinda like repeating patterns and continuity.

> Exactly, give it a few millennia, and some specie probably will end up like us in their own way.

I'm all for evolution, and I think animals have feelings and emotions and are smarter than they are often considered. But "they will end up like us" is highly unlikely as we know of no other such development in last few billion years.

Sure we do. Neanderthals look to have been far more sophisticated than previously thought, for example.

Neanderthals not only developed along the same evolutionary path as us... they're full blown homo sapiens. There's a high likelihood you have Neanderthal DNA yourself. That's not an example of something else being able to develop like us independently in 5,000 years.

If all humans were wiped out today, _maybe_ over _100,000 years to 1,000,000 years_ the great apes would be able to evolve into creatures as intelligent as modern humans. But if all apes were wiped out today, it wouldn't be surprising if Earth never saw another species go to the moon. Don't forget lots of species thrived for hundred of millions of years without leaving any trace approaching even simple tool making.

> Don't forget lots of species thrived for hundred of millions of years without leaving any trace approaching even simple tool making.

Apes are hardly the only tool makers, though.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/aug/10/crow-that-be...

I think we're up to eight (or is it nine?) species now, including Neanderthals, if the latest pans out.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/04/new-speci...

https://www.ancienthistorylists.com/people/7-homo-species-cl...

That's not independent of us, it still happened once in billions years.

Conveniently ignoring "in their own way".

If their own way doesn't include civilization then it's not really comparable, is it?

While I completely agree with the point that evolutionists should not expect a sharp divide between the capabilities of humans and other animals, I think it is worth noting that it took something over half of the interval, in which complex life will be possible on Earth, for complex language to emerge. Of course, if humans disappear before we have eliminated all other large animals, its re-emergence could be quicker...

I wonder if there is space for only one human-level intelligent specie per world, or if it's a matter of circumstances.

Are there worlds where there are 2 or 3 radically different civilized species sharing the land ?

If we stopped killing everything and taking all the resources for ourselves, would we be able to witness the emergence of one in the next 5000 years ?

More interestingly, would we be able to actually speed up said emergence by providing stimuli to a select number of species to drive them to self-realization ?

> Are there worlds where there are 2 or 3 radically different civilized species sharing the land?

Extremely unlikely. We can barely manage to peacefully share the land with members of our own species. Can you really imagine homo sapiens making significant economic sacrifices in favor of a different species?

> If we stopped killing everything and taking all the resources for ourselves, would we be able to witness the emergence of one in the next 5000 years?

Almost certainly no. Other species are intelligent, but none of them have our innate ability to communicate using complex language. That is a biological trait that would almost certainly take a lot longer than 5000 years to reproduce.

Some primates can use a few signs from deaf language already, and combine them to make almost a sentence. The foundation seems there already. We also have no idea how much the dolphin language can convey. Your conclusion seems very definitive for a question that I meant very hypothetical and so many missing variables.

Yes, I'm well aware of the language abilities of other animals. (I'm a retired AI researcher with a Ph.D.) Animals are quite remarkable, but there is still an enormous gulf between them and us. A human child can learn any human language and form complex sentences well before age 2. Well before age 5 they can reason abstractly about cause and effect. No other animal gets close to that ability over their entire lifetime even with intense training.

What does being a retired AI researcher with a Ph.D. have anything to do with being aware of the language abilities of other animals?

It's something I studied. NLP is a sub-discipline of AI, and animal studies are used to inform NLP research. I'm not saying that this makes me right, only that my speculations are not completely uninformed.

>Cam you really imagine homo sapiens making significant economic sacrifices in favor of a different species?

Miaow?

Good point! :-) (I think in this case we may not be the superior intellect.)

I strongly suspect that cats know sudo for humans.

I wouldn't be surprised if whales or dolphins at some point in time had fairly evolved means of communication. They still might, but it's possible that killing off the majority of their population has significantly curtailed what ever culture they previously had. Just a speculation, there is a lot about alternative forms of communication and intelligence that we don't know.

A few hundred years wouldn't evolve a species out of the ability to use language. Language isn't cultural. If you take a dozen babies from different cultures/language communities, and cut off their tongues, and if their caregivers never speak to them, they will still find a way to use a pidgin language among themselves, because human language is innate.

Language is very much cultural, the instinct to communicate and decipher others utterances is what is inate. Otherwise one could automatically understand other languages without learning them.

Dolphins and whales are already communicating currently. But it's possible that what we are seeing now is a much simpler version of what existed previously, not to mention that we don't have any clue how to decipher what we are hearing now.

> Other species are intelligent, but none of them have our innate ability to communicate using complex language.

That isn't proven. There is plenty of evidence, that "complex" is relative and humans have limited sensory organs, compared to other species. Naturally our vocalizations have had to diversify.

It's important to remember that the vast majority of all interspecies communication is non-vocal (this includes non-written). The ability to write is unique to humans, as far as I know. There are more, but they aren't related to vocalization (or communication at large).

> The ability to write is unique to humans

Yes, and this is crucial. It's what allows us to operate as Turing machines.

I was reminded of another distinguishing characteristic of humans by a recent event [1]: we tell stories.

http://news.mit.edu/2019/patrick-winston-professor-obituary-...

humans feel already threatened by their own. putting them into 'minority' groups etc.... they would be threatened by another intelligent / linguistically advanced species and dominate / destroy them. perhaps they would serve as slaves... otherwis they would not survive. Look what happend when people explored the world and found other humans :S

5000 is still the blink of an eye. Homo Sapiens as a species is something like 300,000 years old and arose from prior species that were already more advanced than any other animal living today.

Sure, and we estimate it took 200 000 years to develop spoken language. However, we had to come up with it by ourselves, without any external influence.

What happened to the “more advanced than any other living animal today” species?

Based on my very limited understanding, it seems like some members of that advanced species would have diverged and eventually become Homo sapiens. But others would have remained members of that species and continued living today, or become some other advanced species that wasn’t homo sapien. Did something cause them to go extinct? Or am I understanding it wrong?

We killed them all as they were competing with us.

Dolphins are pretty smart, I have always thought that they are merely limited in their evolutionary progression by the fact that it is difficult to generate and control fire underwater (and therefore difficult to cook food, smelt metal etc.), and also difficult to domesticate oceanic creatures for agri(aqua?)culture. See also; octopodes.

Comments like these make "fake news" make sense: two people perceiving the same things drastically differently.

It's one word: language. No other animals come close. Animals signal to each other all the time, and none of it is nearly as complex or beautiful as language. You could make an argument for oral language being essentially the same as signaling but writing really blows any other behavior of animals out of the park.

Whether or not you consider that to be "little" makes an insane amount of difference.

Of course. I'm not assuming writting, not even vocal communication. A language doesn't have to be in our form, just complex enough to drive a culture.

Because being anti patriarchy is in vogue

The article doesn't say anything about any kind any kind of sexed hierarchy but I guess you'll take any opportunity to blow that dog whistle.

>Kim Hill, an evolutionary anthropologist at Arizona State University in Tempe, rejects such parallels to humans. “[T]he extreme social brain hypothesis doesn’t claim other primates don’t form hierarchically increasing groupings,” Hill wrote in an email to Science.

I don't see how that makes the study itself controversial. He was simply answering an unseen, possibly leading question from the person writing this story.

> rejects such parallels to humans

The author clearly misunderstands the statement she directly quotes. It's grotesque.

Here's a SMBC Comic that illustrates the conversation that will follow with that scientist: https://smbc-comics.com/comic/2009-08-30

That's because that's only half of Hill's argument. If you read on you'll see the main point is about the size of the largest groupings, which in humans appears larger than what has been found in Gorilla's to date.

> “[T]he extreme social brain hypothesis doesn’t claim other primates don’t form hierarchically increasing groupings,” Hill wrote in an email to Science. “It focuses on the size of the largest human groupings.” Humans recognize and remember details about more than 1000 individuals, he notes, whereas the “highest level groups in the gorillas are not even as big as large chimp communities.”

I'm not sure what to take from this. It would be surprising if animals' internal lives were simpler than we thought, right? So further study should generally suggest that it is more complex than previously known, but not as complex as human social behavior, which seems pretty obvious. Does this say anything else?

One thing we've learned in is that surprisingly simple rules and behaviour can produce complex results. We learnt that our intuitions about the necessarily complexity are often quite poor. We see something complex and tend to think it requires that what produces it is of a similar level of complexity.

Even if further research couldn't show things were simpler, that's no evidence for believing they'll be more complex.

I don't necessarily disbelieve that human social behavior is more complicated than gorilla behavior; but should we compare gorilla social behavior to e.g. 21st century American social behavior, or "uncontacted tribe" social behavior?

And, if there is a difference in the relative (perceived!) complexity of social behavior between "modern" and "undeveloped" humans -- Does that imply undeveloped humans are to modern humans what gorillas are to humans? The notion isn't necessarily incorrect, but historically it's been interpreted in service of the ugliest human social behaviors

> but should we compare gorilla social behavior to e.g. 21st century American social behavior, or "uncontacted tribe" social behavior?

The differences between the social behavior of these types of human societies only look big in a vacuum. For example, all human societies use complex verbal language. No other ape society we know of uses anything like it. There is still a huge gulf between human and other apes' individual and social behavior.

> if there is a difference in the relative (perceived!) complexity of social behavior between "modern" and "undeveloped" humans

The fact that over a few short centuries, many "undeveloped" humans have become "21st century humans" suggests that those groups aren't fundamentally different in their inherent ability to operate within a given social context, whether it is described as "simple" or "complex". A key human trait is social adaptability, especially earlier in life.

> Does that imply undeveloped humans are to modern humans what gorillas are to humans

Absolutely not, for all the aforementioned reasons. What would motivate one to believe such an analogy?

> but should we compare gorilla social behavior to e.g. 21st century American social behavior, or "uncontacted tribe" social behavior?

There's a mostly unwarranted assumption that one of those is more complex than the other.

Surely that should be "Humans have developed gorilla-like social structure."

I guess that the people considering this controversial, must consider the book "Mama's Last Hug" by Frans de Waal highly controversial.

I don't understand why the article does not link to the paper it discusses. Here is the paper: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2019.068...

They do in the second paragraph

True, my bad.

I wonder why despite bonobos being closer to us genetically than gorillas, gorillas seem to be the more human like. Maybe its just a a false-bias of mine since these type of news seem to always be about gorillas.

Genes code for different things. Bonobo's look more like humans. I have always thought that Orang Utans were the most human-like of the Apes behaviourally, probably followed by Gorillas.

There are more gorillas out there and they are easier to access and study

I find it entertaining to learn about things that distinguish humans from other mammals, other primates, or birds.

Humans can throw good.

Humans can run long.

Humans can pen themselves up in masses without killing each other.

Humans can run long, but birds can fly far and fish can swim far, so human running doesn't look especially special.

Except we can out run nearly every animal on earth at distance. I’d consider the species of bird that can fly the farthest special. Why not humans?

Humans are good at killing what they're chasing at the end of the run.

Every once in a while I'll ask people this question: assuming evolution is true, which species do you think will evolve next?

Living populations never stop evolving.

Probably some type of bacterium since they have the shortest generation age (~30 minutes) and there's likely to always be a pocket of them somewhere in an environment that forces them to adapt.

Evolution is not going towards some future goal and humans are not more evolved than other species.

All species are evolving at the same time, so this question doesn't make sense as written. I assume you mean to ask which species will be the next to attain humanlike self-awareness.

I find it an interesting thought experiment. [Weasel words ahead!] I think our behavior (damaging the ecosystem, causing habitat loss and so forth) might be putting evolutionary pressure on other species in a way that could lead to an increase in intelligence and self-awareness. But I also fear that we're doing it too much, too quickly, and that extinction is easily as likely.

I think this sounds reasonable until you really consider Earth's history. We've gone through far more radical changes in environment - not only in terms of temperature shifts from ice ages to worldwide saunas but also in terms of geographic change as what was presumably one land mass gradually divided into many, land bridges between the newformed continents disappearing, even things such as the oxidation of our planet which resulted in the extinction of nearly all life. Yet, through it all - only one species managed to evolve anything like our cognitive and developmental ability. Quite peculiar in many ways.

There were lots of cognitive human like species. I.e. neanderthals etc. They're just dead now.

The Neanderthals lived hundreds of thousands of years longer than the entire existence of homo sapien. Their peak technological development was stone age, which sounds even nicer than what it is. Pound two rocks together, notice sharp pieces fall off, use them -> you're now in the stone age. And, contrary to misinformation driven by mass media - there is no clear evidence they engaged in any form of art, adornment, or generally symbolic behavior. [1] Extremely high rates of traumatic injury among the discovered remains also implies that in their hundreds of thousands of years of existence they failed to even refine their hunting technique.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Culture

> Yet, through it all - only one species managed to evolve anything like our cognitive and developmental ability.

Source? I mean that's a pretty bold statement...

This question make no sense in the context of evolution. What do you think it's like pokemon where a species achieves the necessary requirements and suddenly it evolves into a different species?

"assuming" a proven true fact is true?

Nobody says "lets assume that maths are true" or "lets assume that computers really exist"

I say "assuming" because many times I'm communicating with people who don't necessarily believe in evolution, and I'd rather not derail my thought experiment with an argument over whether evolution is real. Instead I have the argument with pompous believers of evolution who scold me for being respectful.

> Pompous believers of evolution

The disrespectul terminology says a lot. Evolution is not a "belief", is a fact and yes, I'm aware that you know it.

There is a skyscrapper of scientific articles documenting it in every coin of the planet, by entire generations of people from each nationality. We are aware of the existence of dinosaurs since more than 345 years ago. Darwin explained evolution "for children" 160 years ago. Most of his picture is still valid and relevant, accumulating proof after proof and expanding and gaining complexity and resolution since then.

Don't fall in the trap of disperate attention seekers or trolls. The only question for people that choose not understand that evolution is real in 2019 is: What is your excuse for lying to yourself?

Suppose humanity eventually achieves true digital sentience and that sentient AI surpasses and extinguished humanity.

Is that sentient existence alive? What is its evolutionary relationship with homo sapiens?

Is accidental genetic mutation the only form of evolution?

>Every once in a while I'll ask people this question: assuming evolution is true, which species do you think will evolve next?

Good question. I think Cats because they are intensely bred and they have a major deficiency in their personality (which is that they're boring and don't care about people) that if evolution fixes that then those improved cats will become immensely more popular than their boring ancestors

If you ask "which new species will evolve next", then my answer is that species is a human-made category system nature doesn't care about.

Specifically in the area of bacteria, you can constantly observe evolution (e.g., pathogens becoming resistant to certain antibiotics).

When to label the result of such an evolution process as "new species" is a very arbitrary decision.

which species do you think will evolve next?

All of them. Next question?

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