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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

So, as in many cases when scientists (or science writers) discuss the motivations of mammals with big brains, they go to a lot of effort to avoid the obvious conclusion, which is that the humpback did it for a similar reason to why a human might make a coyote lay off an attack on a raccoon or possum. We wouldn't always, but plenty of humans would, and it wouldn't be for any particularly abstract or intellectual reason, it's more like, "the coyote is being mean, make it stop because I can."

Sometimes, scientists remind me of mid-20th century behaviorists trying to explain human behavior.

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Isn't the entire idea of "being mean" an abstract and intellectual idea? Furthermore that thought process would have a number of complex implications. Do whales equate eating another animal with "being mean"? Does that mean they view hunting as "wrong" in some way? Do they have guilt over continuing to hunt? Are there some whales that morally object to hunting? Is there some orca out there that feeds on plankton because it is the whale equivalent of a morally motivated vegan?

It is much cleaner to isolate the motivation and equate it with something more animalistic like "it is instinctually initiating a preemptive attack on a predator and the seal was just a lucky but coincidental bystander".

> Isn't the entire idea of "being mean" an abstract and intellectual idea?

Not really, it boils down to harm prevention.

I believe that, as humans, we greatly overestimate our own reliance or abstract ideas.

If we notice someone is harming another, and we intervene, we simply act.

The explanation for our behaviour (someone was being mean) comes later as post-hoc rationalisation.

Ironically, we then further rationalise and extrapolate from this incorrect idea that human behaviour comes from a fount of abstract values and ideas, and use it to devalue animals and their behaviour (assuming they have no complex cognition, and so must be dumb).

I've lived with dogs and birds and seen dogs intervene when other dogs fight, birds intervene when other birds fight and dogs intervene when birds fight.

I don't think stopping aggressive acts in one's vicinity requires more reasoning ability than plotting to long term ruin the outlooks for other specific species X, species Y is cute or some thoughts about the moral act of hunting. Most animals have some experience with others acting aggressively and would like that reduced. We don't think about who is involved either when we see a fight break out between humans or animals.

I just happened to come across a magpie that was fighting a mouse outdoors today, and the mouse got pinned in a hole in a tree where the magpie kept pecking. I don't know why but I walked over so that the magpie went up in a nearby tree and the mouse ran away. That same magpie then attacked some nearby other magpies before calming down.

A YouTube video I enjoyed several years back involved chickens (hens) breaking up a rabbit fight.

Edit: it proved surprisingly easy to find: https://youtu.be/D35uQCtr4EY

> > Isn't the entire idea of "being mean" an abstract and intellectual idea?

> Not really, it boils down to harm prevention.

Ask the fish whom that seal will subsequently eat how much harm is being prevented.

I'm not sure I understand the down votes. I posed the question in a flippant manner, but I ask the question in earnest.

The grandparent pointed out that the concept of 'being mean' can't easily be applied to animals. The parent asserted without argument (or even definition) that it comes down to 'harm reduction', and went on to pontificate about humans overestimating their exceptionalism. So are the humpback whales harming the orcas by depriving them of a food source? Are the orcas harming the seal by eating him? Are the humpback whales harming the smaller fish who the seal will eat?

> The grandparent pointed out that the concept of 'being mean' can't easily be applied to animals.

The complex cognition of 'being mean' might apply to an animal, or it might not. I'm not arguing that.

What I was trying to argue, was that complex cognitions aren't required for complex looking behaviour.

In this case a maternal behaviour that already exists in the whale, to protect it's offspring, seems to have been transferred to a seal.

I see no need for complex concepts or moral calculi to explain the whale's behaviour.

You are of course correct that it fails at reducing harm down the line, but that's what makes it tragic, and interesting.

Physiologically it probably involves mirror neurones and what you describe shouldn't be all that surprising or require an internal philosophical discourse as parent might have suggested.

There are Orcas that eat seals and orcas that eat only fish and this is split across pod boundaries that haven’t interbred in hundreds of years or more but are physically capable.

I expect seals and humpbacks enjoy interacting with each other and that supportive feelings accompany their relationship. Humpbacks don't as individuals try to protect their babies in order to pass on their genes and survive as a species, they love them. Its only a tenuous academic exercise to suppose that they do not have a complex appreciation of their neighbors - as though they might be operating with little consciousness, like microbes. There is no great argument that we should reduce the appearance of friendliness between intelligent and emotional species, to clinical survival strategies. Its perhaps a trend left over from recent history when animal psychologists conducted cruel experiments in the name of science.

>Isn't the entire idea of "being mean" an abstract and intellectual idea?

If it is then whales likely know more about it than us. Our brain structure is a subset of theirs and their extra parts are devoted to emotional processing.

Citation?

A cetacean citation even!

Perhaps the reasoning occurs at a more primitive level. For example, the whale may have had a previous fearful experience. Sensing fear in the seal triggered that feeling in the whale. By helping the seal, the whale may have been helping itself.

So like us, then.

Yes, but as humans we can also empathise without a prior related trauma.

Point of interest: It's not clear, but it looks from your grammar structure like you're calling the Orca a whale. Orca are dolphins, calling them whales isn't wrong, per se, like calling a bottle-nosed dolphin a whale isn't wrong; they're cetaceans too; both belong to the taxonomic family 'dolphins'.

I gather we call them "killer whales" because of a mistranslation of "whale killers".

> I gather we call them "killer whales" because of a mistranslation of "whale killers".

I thought this was a stupid assumption so I set out to prove you wrong. I was wrong [0]. I could use practice humbly admitting that more often. Wiktionary, for what it's worth: Calque or mistranslation of Spanish asesina-ballenas (whale killer), referring to their tendency to hunt whales.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/killer_whale

Thanks for that interesting tidbit, I didn't know the taxonomy. But hey, at least I didn't call it a fish.

Well imagine is some apex predator killed off 25% of human babies. I'm sure that humans would expend significant effort to prevent that predator from living, feeding, or reproducing across the entire planets surface.

Is it so hard to believe humpback whales are smart enough to know killer whales kill humpback babies? The humpback whales might well understand that if killer whales eat the less, they reproduce less, which will result in less humpback whales dying?

I thought about this too, but then you consider whaling which killed much more and yet it doesn't seem that whales set up a persistent and organized resistance effort.

It sends me back to believing there is some sort of instinct triggered by the stimulus of killer whale attack.

Whales have to breath and are hunted by huge fast ships, basically floating factories. They are hunted with radar, radio, binoculars, microphones, and high power harpoons.

Even with whales smarter than humans, how exactly are they supposed to resist... beyond communicating about where the hunting ships are, which they may well be doing.

Not exactly a fair fight, or proof that they aren't smart.

Being from the town Moby Dick gets going in, I was thinking of the 18-19th century variety, where the whale boats were entirely vulnerable.

The variety employed in the last 100 years, you're right there's nothing they can do.

> and yet it doesn't seem that whales set up a persistent and organized resistance effort

Historically, they did. One famous example is the Essex, which was sunk in 1820 by the spontaneous attack of an unusually large male sperm whale soon after pursuing a pod of whales.

The difference today is that it's effectively impossible for a whale to put a hole in a steel-hulled ship.

Persistent and organized resistance? Not even the Native Americans and First Nations could manage that. There were a couple attempts to organize that were cut tragically short. I wouldn’t expect whales to be better at this than humans.

The aztecs did fairly well actually until their population was heavily atrophied due to newly introduced diseases.

edit Specifically La Noche Triste. It was only after small pox killed about 40% of the population leaving most of the remainder to deal with disease caused sever disfigurement, disability, senility and starvation that the spanish really began to gain the upper hand.

There was plenty of persistent and organized resistance. It is unlikely that European conquest of the Americas would have been as successful or rapid if European diseases hadn't killed of 90% of the native population.

Mistrust of nearby tribes was exploited over and over again by Europeans. The Aztecs were conquered because they managed to make enough coastal bands angry that they were totally willing to side with the new people with iron stuff. The French and Indian War had natives fighting each other on behalf of the English and (mostly) French. The Modoc War happened because they were living on a reservation with the Klamath -- who treated them so badly they decided to try and live on some lava beds instead.

Seriously, outside of efforts by Tecumseh and his brother Tenskwatawa, and the way-too-late Ghost Dance movement, intertribal unity efforts weren't really there. They won many, many battles against Europeans, but could not strategize to win a long war. Thus, disorganized and sporadic resistance.

Sure, disease made the conquest possible. And it's not a values judgement. It's just the old tale, divide and conquer.

Organized is not the same thing as Unified.

It does rather sound like a value judgement when you bring it up the way you have.

> yet it doesn't seem that whales set up a persistent and organized resistance effort.

Well sure, if everyone knew about it it wouldn't be that successful now would it? Nothing to see here. No whales. Move along please.

You haven't actually explained the behavior, just restated it in simple terms. "Because they can" doesn't explain motive or reason, only opportunity.

Empathy for, and altruism towards, your in-group against your out-group (for whatever the current values are of in-group and out-group) seems to me to be a necessary consequence of kin selection.

You'd defend pretty much any human against an animal which was attacking them. You'd defend your country against other humans. You'd defend your family against others from your town. All of these are variations of "you're more likely to intervene in a conflict in favour of the side with a greater chance of being more closely related to you."

It's selfish genes all the way down.

(But from the point of view of the whale, the motivation is probably that the whales think orcas are mean and seals are OK. The genetic stuff just explains why whales are cool with seals but not orcas.)

Analogizing animal behavior to human motivations feels intuitive but requires really big assumptions which scientists know they can't really defend, so they just have to avoid that topic.

Which big assumptions would those be?

Mine go the opposite way: I assume that when I see a dog or a cat or a rat or a ferret or a pig (all with brain and body structure completely analogous to my own) show an emotion or performing an act I can immediately relate to, their internal state is fairly much as my own would be in similar circumstances.

Claiming myself and my kin to be qualitatively entirely different from every other living species, now that is an assumption I wouldn't be comfortable to make.

I think no bigger assumptions than when I am trying to interpret the behavior of other humans. Behaviorists in the mid-20th century tried to avoid thinking about other humans' minds for similar reasons, and it was an intellectual dead end.

It could simply be: starve predators who could harm your young.

Coming up with logical reasons for the behavior of social animals is I think wrong when you consider how evolution works.

Evolution doesn't do logical analysis.

I think there is also this trap that we want theories to be logically/mathematically complete without external side effects. If you're looking for that you want a neat tidy theory that explains why a humpback whale would save a seals bacon.

Evolution though doesn't care about that either.

And then there is a bias Westerners have towards zero sum analysis. (I think this is a legacy of the Victorian and Gilded Age) Reality is for an adult humpback whale messing with a killer whale costs him likely nothing.

If something has no cost evolution doesn't operate off it.

So you're just left with humpback whales like protecting their young, or anything else really. Especially from killer whales in particular.

> Evolution doesn't do logical analysis.

Sure, but it rewards and institutionalizes behavior that benefits the genes of the individuals.

... by the mechanism of emotions, for instance.

> why a human might make a coyote lay off an attack on a raccoon or possum

By having "harm prevention in peer group" instinct misapplied to members of other species?

> Sometimes, scientists remind me of mid-20th century behaviorists trying to explain human behavior.

Mid 20th century behaviorism casts a really long dark shadow into our times.

But then why is there an instinctive response to intervene?

Although I think the instinctive reason is similarly obvious - for a creature with limited attention the safest environment is a calm one with nothing moving or acting (it is easy to process mentally). It makes a lot of sense for a large creature to intervene and break up other animals fighting so they can go back to scanning the environment for other threats without distraction.

I think the obvious conclusion is that humpback whales want to mess with orcas.

behaviorism is still ridiculously influential, unfortunately.

So the answer is simply:

Why not?

well said

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