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Comment by GrantMoyer | Hacker News Reader

I find it funny that observations of the cognitive capabilities of animals like in the featured article always induce people to come up with convoluted alternative ways to word the "anthropomorphic" descriptions of the behavior. "Oh that crow isn't counting, it's just basic pattern recognition associating specific quantities with specific sounds", "oh that octopus isn't playing, it's just throwing the bottle around as a stress response to boredom", etc. I get wanting to be careful not to misinterpret the behavior of specices which have evolved different social structures (if any) and under different selective pressures, but sometimes the simplest explanation really is that the animal is doing a "human behavior".

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I think you're right, but historically there have been problems. Frans de Waal has written about how in his field there was a lot of early egregious anthropomorphizing. As people realized how flawed that was, they swung around the other way, to refusing to consider analogous human behavior. But things like de Waal's work demonstrating moral sense in animals is hard to explain in any other way. [1]

Even so, it can be tricky. In Bernd Heinrich's excellent "Mind of the Raven" [2], he points to a story where a woman, lost in the wilderness, noticed a raven crying near her and spotted something like a mountain lion creeping up on her. In the news story she gave the raven credit for warning her and saving her life. But Heinrich points out that ravens have a demonstrated history of leading predators to prey, because that way they get the leftovers with much lower risk. So although the woman was correct that the raven understood her danger and was demonstrating advanced social cooperation, her anthropomorphic bias led her to perhaps be dangerously wrong about who the raven was trying to help.

So although I think shorthand like, "The octopus is playing" is fine for casual use, I think serious people have to always be challenging those tempting assumptions.

[1] e.g., this book https://www.amazon.com/Good-Natured-Origins-Humans-Animals/d... or this TED talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meiU6TxysCg

[2] A stellar book, and I recommend it strongly to anybody fascinated by corvids or interested in decoding animal behavior more generally: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/mind-of-the-raven-ber...

>story where a woman, lost in the wilderness, noticed a raven crying near her and spotted a mountain lion creeping up on her. She gave the raven credit for warning her and saving her life. But Heinrich points out that ravens have a demonstrated history of leading predators to prey.

That's a hilarious (and scary) story. I made the same cognitive mistake when reading, i.e. assumed that either raven was helping her, or was crying for unrelated reason (because I suspected a twist). It completely didn't occur to me that the animals could have cooperated among themselves.

> So although the woman was correct that the raven understood her danger and was demonstrating advanced social cooperation, her anthropomorphic bias led her to perhaps be dangerously wrong about who the raven was trying to help.

This is such an excellent insight, thanks for sharing!

There is also similar story about Komodo Dragon. Guy buys a big lizard, tries to communicate with it, teach tricks, all to no avail. Then one day the lizard bites him out of the blue. Guy is angry at the lizard, swears to give it back to the shop the next day. Then he notices the lizard is following him with it's head down. Guy warms up to the lizard "Finally you show remorse! Understood that biting me was a bad idea, huh?" After several days of that following he decides to call the vet about it. And the vet explains to him that the lizard is simply waiting for him to die from the bite.

Being straightforward about it would force us to question a lot of assumptions we have about animals and how we (mis)treat them. We can’t have that!

>>sometimes the simplest explanation really is that the animal is doing a "human behavior".

Or, perhaps more accurately, humans are one of many intelligent animals and we do behaviours typical of many intelligent animals, and are now noticing that they also do these behaviours (but notice it from a self-centered point of view).

And on the other hand, if you start recognizing 'play' in other species, it can help you learn what 'play' actually is and why we do it. What was frivolous is now how we learn and discover and invent and develop.

>"but sometimes the simplest explanation really is that the animal is doing a "human behavior"."

If it looks like duck and quacks like a duck ...

What if humans are “playing” because they’re bored?

I think that's Grant's point - there's a (potentially) false dichotomy in those descriptions.

I don’t know if he was he was making that point, but rather he was expressing the desire to avoid anthropmorphosizing by describing the same thing in different words.

(Kind of like what I did now, hehe)

Because straight forward language isn't scientific language and lacks precision.

Sure, but the idea that animal cognition is radically different or lesser than ours is itself an assumptive default that science is comfortable making. We should question that as the default assumption.

As a pet owner, I find it absolutely ridiculous and insulting that animals intelligence is assumed to be so low. My firsthand experience is that there is a lot more intelligence there than people generally give them credit for, even if science hasn't delineated every single aspect of it yet. As scientists keep confirming these "discoveries", I think the default assumption (and language) should shift to assuming more similarity than differences unless proven otherwise.

Eh, with the crows example you could think of it this way for a counter example. Listen to the drum intro to wipeout. Now play a measure of it with your hands banging on your desk. You recreated the sound but how many times did you hit the desk? I find it very plausible that they aren't actually counting. This isn't a counter example trying to prove they're not, but they can certainly repeat or "know" things without doing arithmetic.

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