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VI. Life’s Cerebral Cognizance Becomes More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware

1. Animal Intelligence, Persona and Sociality

Carere, Claudio and Dario Maestripieri, eds. Animal Personalities: Behavior, Physiology, and Evolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. A major retrospective survey of smart creatures that verifies the presence of constant, familiar behavioral repertoires across species from Drosophilia and cockroaches to apes and humans. Main sections cover Animal Taxa; Genetics, Ecology, and Evolution; Mechanisms of Trait Development; and Implications for Animal Welfare. Typical chapters are The Bold and the Spineless: Invertebrate Personalities by Jennifer Mather and David Logue, Quantitative and Molecular Genetics, Kees van Oers and David Sinn, Ontogeny of Stable Individual Differences: Gene, Environment, and Epigenetic Mechanisms, James Curley and Igor Branchi, and Animal Personality and Conservation Biology by Brian Smith and Daniel Blumstein. Its message might again be the quantified witness of a deep, ancient continuity as if a temporal embryonic ramification.

The study of animal personality is one of the fastest-growing areas of research in behavioral and evolutionary biology. Here Claudio Carere and Dario Maestripieri, along with a host of scholars from fields as diverse as ecology, genetics, endocrinology, neuroscience, and psychology, provide a comprehensive overview of the current research on animal personality. Grouped into thematic sections, chapters approach the topic with empirical and theoretical material and show that to fully understand why personality exists, we must consider the evolutionary processes that give rise to personality, the ecological correlates of personality differences, and the physiological mechanisms underlying personality variation. (Publisher)

Cartmill, Matt and Irene Lofstrom, eds. Animal Consciousness: Historical, Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives. American Zoologist. 40/6, 2000. Researchers on a range of creatures such as parrots and primates affirm the presence of cognitive sentience by degree throughout the animal kingdom.

Cheney, Dorothy and Robert Seyfarth. Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. The title is from Darwin’s 1830s ‘M’ Notebook to wit that an understanding of baboon thought and culture would contribute more than dry British philosophy. The author’s lifetime of field and laboratory work elucidates the individual, gender, and social intelligence of these archetypal primates.

Conradt, Larissa and Timothy Roper. Consensus Decision Making in Animals. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. 20/8, 2005. A careful synthesis of much literature across the Metazoa kingdoms from primates to birds and bees.

We conclude that consensus decision making is common in non-human animals, and that cooperation between group members in the decision-making process is likely to be the norm, even when the decision involves significant conflict of interest. (449)

Danchin, Etienne, et al. Do Invertebrates have Culture? Communicative & Integrative Biology. 3/4, 2010. European researchers answer yes, which is not surprising since “social learning” is commonly found across mammals, birds, and fish species. Once more a constant, ramifying evolutionary gestation becomes evident.

A recent paper in Current Biology (19/730, 2009) showed for the first time that female invertebrates (Drosophila melanogaster) can perform mate choice copying. Here, we discuss how female mating preferences in this species may be transmitted culturally. If culture occurs in invertebrates, it may be a relatively ancient evolutionary process that may have contributed to the evolution of many different taxa. This would considerably broaden the taxonomic range of cultural processes, and suggest the need to include cultural inheritance in all animals into the general theory of evolution. (Abstract)

De Waal, Frans. Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? New York: Norton, 2016. This latest work by the renowned Emory University psychological primatologist and author continues to evoke how apes and monkeys, along with avian, reptile, aquatic, insect, and invertebrate creatures actually possess and exhibit incredible cognitive cleverness. A wide array of wildlife and experimental observations are set in a historical train back to Donald Griffin’s 1992 book (which leads this section) when he was the first investigator to propose such a sophistication. See also Towards a Bottom Up Perspective on Animal and Human Cognition by Franz and Pier Ferrari in Trends in Cognitive Science (14/5, 2010).

What separates your mind from an animal’s? Maybe you think it’s your ability to design tools, your sense of self, or your grasp of past and future―all traits that have helped us define ourselves as the planet’s preeminent species. But in recent decades, these claims have eroded, or even been disproven outright, by a revolution in the study of animal cognition. Based on research involving crows, dolphins, parrots, sheep, wasps, bats, whales, and of course chimpanzees and bonobos, Frans de Waal explores both the scope and the depth of animal intelligence. He offers a firsthand account of how science has stood traditional behaviorism on its head by revealing how smart animals really are, and how we’ve underestimated their abilities for too long.

De Waal, Frans and Pier Francesco Ferrari. Towards a Bottom-up Perspective on Animal and Human Cognition. Trends in Cognitive Science. Article in Press, 2010. A proposal to shift in this endeavor from studies of mental evolution via a top-down method, which has pitted animal taxons against each other, to an approach that can show how widely prevalent are cerebral abilities across the range of metazoan species.

Eisthen, Heather and Kiisa Nishikawa. Convergence: Obstacle or Opportunity? Brain, Behavior and Evolution. 59/5-6, 2002. An introduction to a double issue on the increasingly obvious proof for convergent pathways.

Although many of the best-known examples of convergence are morphological, convergence occurs at every level of biological organization. (236)

Emery, Nathan. Cognitive Ornithology: The Evolution of Avian Intelligence. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 361/23, 2006. Most studies of animal cognition have focused on the social primates, since bird brains, as the saying goes, were considered devoid of such abilities. But corvids (ravens, crows, jays) and parrots, who similarly live in complex groupings, and have forebrains of relative size, are also found to possess a high degree of intelligence, sometimes surpassing the great apes. Even an avian “theory of mind” is noted whereby birds can perceive where another might hide a food cache. Such findings contribute to a quiet revolution in our understanding of animal intelligence, alien to the materialist model, but in much accord with a natural genesis.

Although the gross structure of avian and mammalian brains is radically different, there is evidence that there are connectional similarities in the brains of these two taxa which may explain their similar behavior and cognition. (34)

Emery, Nathan and Nicola Clayton. The Mentality of Crows: Convergent Evolution of Intelligence in Corvids and Apes. Science. 306/1903, 2004. A robust cognitive competence is being established throughout the Metazoan kingdoms, which was denied for most of the 20th century. This paper reports on the wily birds that frequent our backyard buffet, whose mental acumen implies a persistence convergence toward such qualities. My blue jays have me trained to put out egg shells.

…we argue that complex cognitive abilities evolved multiple times in distantly related species with vastly different brain structures in order to solve similar socioecological problems. (1903)

Engesser, Sabrina, et al. Experimental Evidence for Phonemic Contrasts in a Nonhuman Vocal System. PLoS Biology. Online June, 2015. Phonemes are the smallest units of sound in a language that distinguish one utterance or word from another. A Swiss, British and Australian collaborative proves for the first time that animal communications exhibit the same combinatorial emergence of content out of noise as homo sapiens. By a stretch might it be imagined that cosmic evolutionary genesis is trying in some way to achieve meaningful perception out of randomness?

The ability to generate new meaning by rearranging combinations of meaningless sounds is a fundamental component of language. Although animal vocalizations often comprise combinations of meaningless acoustic elements, evidence that rearranging such combinations generates functionally distinct meaning is lacking. Here, we provide evidence for this basic ability in calls of the chestnut-crowned babbler (Pomatostomus ruficeps), a highly cooperative bird of the Australian arid zone. Our results indicate that the capacity to rearrange meaningless sounds in order to create new signals occurs outside of humans. We suggest that phonemic contrasts represent a rudimentary form of phoneme structure and a potential early step towards the generative phonemic system of human language. (Abstract)

A major question in language evolution is how its generative power emerged. This power, which allows the communication of limitless thoughts and ideas, is a result of the combinatorial nature of human language: meaningless phonemes can be combined to form meaningful words (phonology), and words can be combined to form higher-order, meaningful structures (syntax). While previous work has indicated the potential for animals to form syntax-like constructions, there exists little convincing evidence for a basic phonemic capacity in animals. Here, we demonstrate, using analyses combined with natural observations and playback experiments, that the cooperatively breeding chestnut-crowned babbler reuses two meaningless acoustic elements to create two functionally distinct vocalizations. This result suggests the basic ability for phoneme structuring occurs outside of humans and provides insights into potential early evolutionary steps preceding the generative phonemic system of human language. (Author Summary)

Enquist, Magnus and Stefano Ghirlanda. Neural Networks and Animal Behavior. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. An exercise at applying this cognitive approach to animal evolution and learning capabilities.

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