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Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Biologically, it would be pretty strange for grieving to not have evolved pretty early on in the mammalian brain, no?

It would be pretty weird for a smart, social mammal to simply ignore the death of a beloved companion. Are there any social mammals that DON'T grieve? Maybe large herd/flock animals (deer, bat, rodents)...?

It was surprisingly hard to find a scientific consensus on this topic. Maybe there isn't one yet? It seemed obvious to me, but that's not data, just anecdotal experience with animals.

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> Are there any social mammals that DON'T grieve?

I remember a video of a hunter shooting a deer and the other deer around it didn't care and kept eating their grass. I suspect most cats are smarter than deers.

Or the deer, constantly looking outside the herd for threats, did not understand what one deer suddenly falling over truly meant.

I doubt cats would immediately understand what was happening if one of them was suddenly shot by something they could not perceive either.

Even apart from the grieving, that sounds like very odd behaviour. Don't deer herds usually flee in all directions the moment they hear the bang of a shot? It seems weird they'd not react at all here.

Late, but I assumed some kind of silencer was used.

> Biologically, it would be pretty strange for grieving to not have evolved pretty early on in the mammalian brain, no?

Depends. How would it benefit the mammal?

A stress response to the death of a fellow mammal could contribute to discouraging risk-seeking, maybe?

And knowing the member is no longer a member of the herd or pack?

That has nothing to do with grief.

Ok, let's begin from the other end. What evolutionary benefit does grief have in humans?

Apparently none. Of course you can tell stories, but it's not as if we know exactly how grief has (or hasn't) benefited humans from an evolutionary point of view. We can't create genetically modified humans who don't experience grief and then rear them in a parallel environment to see if they have more or less reproductive success than regular humans. So who knows?

Nor is it safe to assume that any existing trait must confer an evolutionary benefit. Evolution isn't a perfect optimizer, and it's an ongoing process without a terminus. All kinds of traits in the current human population might turn out to be evolutionarily disadvantageous and scheduled for elimination via natural selection in the long run. We won't be around to find out.

None directly afaik.

But attachment has immense benefit for social animals. Attachment is maintained by both positive and negative emotional incentives.

Grief is the negative emotional incentive ramped up to the max.

No way to know, but the concept of "momento mori" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori means the living might live more "examined" - and therefore more valuable or meaningful lives - when they are conscious of the inevitability of their own death. Perhaps this consciousness then benefits the society/group they are a member of?

Social cooperation is immensely valuable. Grief over loss encourages solidarity and cooperation.

My personal opinion (which is I think at least loosely supported by research into animal vs. human memory) is that relative to humans, animals are very grounded in the present so they grieve much differently.

When a human's loved one dies, we miss them in the present moment... but we are also thinking of the past and future. We think of our days ahead without them and mourn the happy times in the past that can now not be repeated.

    It was surprisingly hard to find a scientific 
    consensus on this topic.

There's no real objective way to measure feelings, particularly in animals.

Even in humans, you usually just have to ask the subject how they're feeling.

Behavior changes are at best kind of a decent proxy for making... educated guesses instead of uneducated guesses into an animal's feelings.

We could measure things like oxytocin and cortisol levels or take fMRIs, but good luck collecting those metrics without profoundly altering the animal's emotional state.

That's a really good point. I think it's even possible that my personal experience of lack/grief/loss is 0% present-moment and 100% reflective. Noting of course that this includes reflection on the super-recent past / future.

I think that feels very very true for me and probably for most people as well.

I of course grieved mightily when my mom died. Even though it made nearly zero practical difference in my present life at that point. I was grieving the loss of things past, and of the future - I would not see her in the future, and I also greatly grieved that she would no longer be able to do the things that she loved so much in the future.

Subtract all that past and all that future, and what's left? I think that's where most animals are at... there is much common ground, and they clearly feel emotions as strongly as we do, but they experience the world so differently.

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