Why do animals adopt?
nautil.us
nautil.us
But it's a mistake to think that non-optimal phenotypes require special explanations, when the obvious one is at hand: the optimal solution hasn't been found yet. In this case, the mechanisms that ensure that young are cared for are simply being triggered or activated by situations it wasn't "designed for", and nothing has evolved to prevent that from happening because it's an infrequent occurrence in the first place (and perhaps because any solution to it would be more expensive that it's worth?).
Life works with what its got, and natural selection (and other forms of selection) are not explanations, they're frameworks, models of a type of process. Actual explanations involve actual causal chains with actual stuff in the world.
Can't you take 'predisposition' to be a little more hardline, and that it removes all 'choice'. We are so 'predisposed' by biology/chemistry that animals, and humans, don't have any agency of choice, no free will to calculate anything.
It appears that occasionally straying from the hard rules provides an overall better fitness to the organism given that the fitness landscape (or fitness seascape) changes with time
To use a computing metaphor, every animal has "buildtime" predispositions and "runtime" choice-making ability. That "runtime" decision making is based on exercising free will, but of course free will is a biologically built-in capability which executes on the deterministic "VM" that is our physical universe.
i.e., we have free will from the perspective of ourselves, but if you zoom out, that free will is just another predetermined physical phenomena.
In the computer analogy, if the 'run time' always arrives at the same answer, because that is the answer from the calculation. Then was there ever a choice?
I guess this and the other comments are really saying just because we have the illusion of free will from our perspective, just assume a choice is being made and roll with it. Don't get tied in knots about the question of free-will, we know we don't have it, but just assume we do in order to make our perspective work out.
IMO, no.
> In the computer analogy, if the 'run time' always arrives at the same answer, because that is the answer from the calculation. Then was there ever a choice?
To me, there was a choice, but that choice was made by an entity which operates deterministically.
> I guess this and the other comments are really saying just because we have the illusion of free will from our perspective,
Kinda. I would only disgaree with the "illusion" thing. It's not an illusion: from our perspective we DO have free will, we ARE in control. Like everything else, free will is relative.
Realize that when we say "we", each of "us" is a facet of that deterministic universe. The universe is not some big external VM that controls us like zombies. It is us. We are the hardware, firmware, and software of the universe, operating and evolving with agency, modifying one another and the world around us. We're not sandboxed processes. You and I, we are two manifestations of conscious thought occurring in the same grand unfolding of physical phenomena. We see a clear boundary between ourselves and the universe, but that's a human point of view, not a physical truth. When the universe decides something, we decide something, and vice versa.
Maybe that's too far into woo woo land for your taste, but it's how I personally reconcile free will and determinism and it's resolved a lot of the existential dread I used to feel around this. ymmv
It's just that you frequently use the word 'deterministic'. -> "facet of that deterministic universe."
And then also talk about how we have agency.
Not sure how to square those both occurring unless you are just saying at different scales.
Like the universe is deterministic, but on our human scale we appear to have a choice. But that is just appearance because at our scale there are so many chaotic interactions that the world really appears random and we are making choices.
What I'm saying is that in the brain, you keep boiling down the science at each scale, and at some point you don't find any 'agent', each layer is explained, and every action is the effect of a previous cause.
A genetic lineage may both lose resources to adopting and gain them from being adopted at different times — and where that nets out over 1000+ generations isn’t immediately clear. Survival benefits from having more members at the cost of some resources now is even less clear.
This may be a case of a benefit being selected for on a multi-generational scale; or it could be as you say and a disadvantage.
"Already I can see the chain reaction: the chemical precursors that signal the onset of an emotion, designed specifically to overwhelm logic and reason. An emotion that is already blinding you to the simple and obvious truth"
I don't know if you're being fair to yourself. It's probably advantageous to have simple heuristics for determining if you should care for something, if that something will turn out to be your offspring 98% of the time. What possible pressure would there be to push that to 100%?
It would be possible for DNA to do better with some sort of signalling. Select for kids that inherit a smell, for example. But to develop that you'd have to start with a bunch of false negatives, and a bunch of deceptive smells would develop to start giving you false positives again.
In the example with the elephant seals, if a mother becomes separated from her calf during a storm, having a predisposition in the population to adopting someone else's calf is beneficial to the mother, as her offspring might be adopted as well
The question is, then, if there is some gene that encourages adoption, will such a gene spread in the population or not? I'm not sure I see why it would. However, if such a trait is already spread in the population, especially if it's not a specific gene but an outcome of others, indeed I don't think there would be selective pressure working against it for the reason you mentioned.
Getting philosophical here, but what does it even mean for me to "gain something", given that my entire existence is a conglomeration of mostly-cooperating genes trying to spread themselves, and my values, desires, and outlook on life are heavily controlled by said genes? Spreading my genes is the intrinsic value, from which all my other instrumental values like eating tasty food, making good friends, enjoying sex etc are derived.
That's not the way natural selection works. A gene either spreads in the population or not, and individuals are merely carriers of a particular gene. It is no more "your" gene than it is "your" flu virus that you spread when infected. The gene and the virus "use" you; you don't use them.
Of course, because genes, like a flu virus, use us as carriers, they can only spread if we help them spread, so if we come to think of genes that we and others carry as "our" genes then that helps those gene spread. But natural selection doesn't care about gene carriers beyond their role as carriers any more than a flu virus does.
(To avoid an argument: the picture is murkier when one considers that we are also meme carriers, which also affects our behavior, and that memetic and genetic reproduction are not entirely aligned; nevertheless, we have no more control over our memes than over our genes, so the core point remains: there is no "me").
I disagree, because even if you were indeed merely the sum of your genes, natural selection works on a gene-by-gene basis, not on a full genotype basis. Furthermore, each of "your" genes -- unlike your genotype -- is not unique to you (that's the whole point of genes spreading; a successful gene is one that is carried by many individuals). Unless you clone yourself, spreading your genotype is simply not an option available to you whether you see value in that or not.
In other words, even if you believe you are no more than the sum of the words that constitute the sentence that is your genotype, natural selection does not work to spread that sentence but its constituent words. In fact, it works to spread only some of those words and against the spread of others. In a way, the genes you carry are in competition with each other.
> It is fundamentally impossible for me to act in a way that is not calculated to spread the genes that constitute me. Any behavior that I perform is the result of inclinations which have been programmed into me for the express purpose of successful reproduction. No other selection pressure exists.
That takes things way too far. We are not "programmed" by our genes, as seen in identical twins. But to whatever limited extent genes do "program" us, their spread is not necessarily dependent on you reproducing. That's the whole discovery of kin selection: because your genes are shared with others, behaviour that sacrifices you for the sake of someone else will also spread your shared genes in the population -- just not through you.
I grew up on a small farm, where we mainly kept sheep. Most of the year the ram would have next to no interest in the yews (female sheep), unless there was some sort of threat - he'd just be off doing his own thing.
Once my mum bought a calf as auction as it was so cheap (from memory 20p - most cows are sold in lots of 6, but this was an odd lot and no-one bid) - the calf loved us and wanted to be with us whenever we were in the field (and to be bottle fed), but the rest of the time would hang out with the ram.
That September a family brought a pet duck to us as their daughter couldn't take it to university and the parents didn't want to look after it. We said sure, and as soon as they left we put it in the pond. The geese we had started to attack it, and the duck ran out of the pond and hid between the legs of the cow who just happened to be near.
And that was it - for the rest of the year the duck, cow and ram were always together - they'd pace up and down the field together and at night the duck would either sleep between the cows legs, or curled up to it, if the cow was seated/lying down.
They genuinely seemed to all get a lot from the bond they shared as three 'others'. Sadly a couple of years later, after a few of our chickens were eaten by a fox, my mum tried to put the duck away each night. As she was trying to catch it the cow started stamping to tell her to leave the duck alone, and accidentally stamped on the duck, breaking its leg. We took it to a city farm and 'gifted' it to them - but I am told it made friends with their ducks, though I didn't recognise it when we visited - but I was only about 8 at the time.
One theory is it requires multiple phases. First an unintenional egg mixup. First there are eggs laid by one bird, then it's abandoned for some reason and another bird of a different species lays eggs on top. All the chicks are raised by the parents as if of the species of the latter bird, but one or more of the hatchlings are actually from the first batch, a different species. The chicks will absorb enough of the habits as to mate with their "social species" instead of their "biological species". (Am not a biologist and don't know the precise terms).
In the sense that genes don't 'want' anything, but selection creates a pressure towards overall adaptation and survival... a lion shares a lot of genes with a leopard. Is it pro-genetic-survival in some very broad sense for a lioness to care for a baby leopard? I guess not, if adults of those species compete to the death... but many species don't seem to do a lot of murdering, beyond predation for food. Animals sometimes seem quite incurious about other activity close to them, except when they need to eat. Could there be some small selection pressure towards live-and-let-other-DNA-live?
Cookoos exploit the system via this bug.
This is why I despise practically every discussion of "why" when it comes to talking about observed traits and evolution like this. People invent this bizarre deterministic model of life as it it were purely chemical or computational and could be controlled & understood as such. As if every single little trait has design intent.
You have one guy in this thread that's like, "Would this imply that humans’ propensity to keep pets is also an association error in the brain?". Like holy shit dude, I don't know, but maybe people just like pets. Maybe pets like pets. Maybe pets like us. Maybe we aren't computer programs whose nature is defined by scripts and wiring. "Association error". The fuck? We're not computer programs. We don't have "errors".
Like what a dull and inhuman lens to view the world with: "We're all just computers", or "We're all just a bunch of chemicals". I wonder, do you also think of me as a computer or a chemical sack? Do you view my child that way? My cat? If you do, that disturbs me, because then you may be tempted to treat us as such, when we're all so much more than that.
So far, nobody has proven otherwise.