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

1. Animal Intelligence, Persona and Sociality

Kershenbaum, Arik. Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication. New York: Penguin Books, 2024. As the quote says, the author has traveled the world to hear creatures what creatures great and small have to say and in what way.

Why Animals Talk is an exhilarating journey through the untamed world of animal communication. Following his international bestseller, The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy, the author draws on extensive original research to reveal how many of the creaturely signals are in fact logical and consistent and not that different from our own. From the majestic howls of wolves and the enchanting chatter of parrots to the melodic clicks of dolphins and the spirited grunts of chimpanzees, these often strange expressions hold secrets that we are just beginning to decipher.

Dr. Arik Kershenbaum is a zoologist at Girton College, University of Cambridge. He has done extensive fieldwork on animal communication has decoded the whistles of dolphins among the coral reefs of the Red Sea, the songs of gibbons in the jungles of Vietnam and the songs of hyraxes in the mountains of the Galilee.

King, James, et al. Evolution of Intelligence, Language and Other Emergent Processes for Consciousness. Stuart Hameroff, et al, eds. Toward a Science of Consciousness II. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. A report about primate researchers who are finding a phylogenetic gradation in animal behavior and awareness.

This chapter proposes the hypothesis that the evolution of consciousness in mammals paralleled the development of independent control of behavior. In other words, as the sophistication of independent control has increased, we assume a corresponding increase in consciousness has occurred. (383)

Koch, Christoph and Florian Mormann. The Neurobiology of Consciousness. Zewail, Ahmed, ed. Physical Biology: From Atoms to Medicine. London: Imperial College Press, 2008. Caltech neuroscientists in part discern an emergent continuum of stirring sentience which extends by degree through the animal kingdoms.

There are three reasons to assume that many species, in particular those with complex behaviors such as mammals, share at least some aspects of consciousness with humans: (i) Similar neuronal architectures (ii) Similar behavior (iii) Evolutionary continuity. (376)

Krutzen, Michael, et al. Cultural Transmission of tool Use in Bottlenose Dolphins. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 102/8939, 2005. One of the first observations of an existing material culture amongst marine mammals. Female dolphins forage by breaking off a piece of sponge and using it to stir up the sea floor. Similar to tool use by chimpanzees, this is primarily a matriline activity and heritage.

Kuo, Tzu-Hsin and Chuan-Chin Chiao. Learned Valuation during Forage Decision-making in Cuttlefish. Royal Society Open Science. December, 2020. National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan neuroscientists describe the many clever, thought through devices that this cephalopod uses to find and secure food. Their practice of “optimal foraging theory” indicates a heretofore unexpected level of aware intelligence in this species. See also Cuttlefish Took Something Like a Marshmallow Test by Veronique Greenwood in the New York Times for December 30, 2020.

Laland, Kevin and Bennett Galef, eds. The Question of Animal Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. A further contribution to how wise and social our furry, feathered, and finned friends are, as if this needed to be quantified. But once the very idea, long taboo, is admitted then all sorts of primate, cetacean, rodent, avian, and so, groupings can be seen to have extensive and familiar cultural systems. But have we humans evolved beyond the meerkats as on Animal Planet TV where each clan or tribe is driven to annihilate the other. From Sri Lanka and the Sudan to Kurdistan and Northern Ireland are we powerless to stop the carnage.

Liao, Diana, et al. Crows “count” the number of self-generated vocalizations... Science. 384/6698, 2024. As innate abilities to enumerate become evident all the way to insects, University of Tübingen neurobiologists quantify their presence in this avain species. See also Corvids optimize working memory by categorizing continuous stimuli by Aylin Apostel, et al in Communications Biology (6/1122, 2023) and Looks like home: numerosity, but not spatial frequency guides pre ference in zebrafish larvae by Adam, Elizabeth Adam, et al in Animal Cognition (July 2024).

Producing a specific number of vocalizations with purpose requires a sophisticated combination of numerical abilities and vocal control. Whether this capacity exists in animals other than humans is yet unknown. We show that crows can flexibly produce variable numbers of one to four vocalizations in response to arbitrary cues associated with numerical values. Moreover, the acoustic features of vocal units predicted their order in the sequence and could be used to read out counting errors during vocal production. (Abstract)

Loukola, Olli, et al. Bumblebees Show Cognitive Flexibility by Improving on an Observed Complex Behavior. Science. 355/833, 2017. Queen Mary University of London experimental psychologists find that social insects have a more expansive behavioral repertoire than expected, including rapid learning and tool use.

Lucon-Xiccato, Tyron. Intraspecific variation in invertebrate cognition: a review.. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. 78/1, 2024. In a paper for a special Toward a Cognitive Ecology of Invertebrates collection, a University of Ferrera, Florence biologist lays out an approach to similarly study an array of invertebrate abilities and behaviors which have so far been found equivalent precursors to the backbone beings to follow.

From mammals to fish, numerous studies have revealed different cognitive phenotypes among individuals. But intraspecific variability in cognition has received much less attention in invertebrates, despite evidence of remarkable abilities in this group. In this review, we describe how certain invertebrates exhibit all the key features observed in vertebrates. We suggest that invertebrates can serve as alternative, complementary models, contributing to a deeper understanding of cognitive evolution. (Excerpt)

Lyon, Pamela and Ken Cheng.. Basal cognition: shifting the center of gravity (again).. Animal Cognition. November, 2023. Lyon, Pamela and Ken Cheng. Basal cognition: shifting the center of gravity (again). Animal CoUniversity of Adelaide and of Macquaire, Australia introduce a special issue with this subject title. It is composed of 17 papers such as Interspecific differences in developmental mode determine early cognitive abilities in teleost fish, Thoughts from the forest floor: cognition in the slime mould Physarum polycephalum and Chemical cognition: chemoconnectomics and convergent evolution of integrative systems in animals (search Moroz) which keep building a stronger case that life’s evolution is more about brains than bones. Into the 2020s, a view of a quickening evolutionary development which forms adaptive behaviors, intelligent groupings and personal agencies on its way to our worldwide retrospect becomes ever more evidentgnition. November, 2023.

Rapidly accumulating evidence suggests that behavior mediated by what is readily regarded as cognition in humans and other mammals (to say nothing of bees, flies and nematodes) is found in more evolutionarily basal, aneural phylaas well. Moreover, a wide variety of mechanisms known to implement cognitive capacities in animals are also found to implement cognitive capacities in these earlier-appearing phyla (Lyon et al. 2021). These mechanisms include—in bacteria alone—network activity in chemical signal transduction pathways, oscillations, ion channel-mediated bioelectricity, oscillations coupled to servomechanisms (Cheng 2022), and hormone- or neurotransmitter-like molecular action-at-a-distance. This basal cognition special collection, we hope, will be part of that ‘rethinking’ process. (1)

MacIntosh, Andrew, et al. Temporal Fractals in Seabird Foraging Behavior: Diving Through the Scales of Time. Nature Scientific Reports. 3/1884, 2013. With self-similar topologies now proven to suffuse nature at every spatial and temporal phase, researchers from Japan, France and Australia, along with New Zealand penguins, further verify that avian activities are graced by these same vital geometries. By what imaginations then, whereby each of these myriad findings appears as an iconic portal, might we collectively realize an ordained greater reality suffused with this mathematical genome?

Animal behaviour exhibits fractal structure in space and time. Fractal properties in animal space-use have been explored extensively under the Lévy flight foraging hypothesis, but studies of behaviour change itself through time are rarer, have typically used shorter sequences generated in the laboratory, and generally lack critical assessment of their results. We thus performed an in-depth analysis of fractal time in binary dive sequences collected via bio-logging from free-ranging little penguins (Eudyptula minor) across full-day foraging trips. Results from 4 fractal methods show that dive sequences are long-range dependent and persistent across ca. 2 orders of magnitude. This fractal structure correlated with trip length and time spent underwater, but individual traits had little effect. Fractal time is a fundamental characteristic of penguin foraging behaviour, and its investigation is thus a promising avenue for research on interactions between animals and their environments. (Abstract)

In conclusion, we show here that penguin dive sequences exhibit a complex fractal structure through time, and relate this structure to a combination of extrinsic (environmental) and intrinsic (self) organizational control elements. The application of fractal tools to temporal sequences of animal behaviour should be explored further, particularly in, though far from limited to, organisms that are often used as indicator species for climate and environmental change, like the penguins examined here and many other top predators in marine ecosystems. The merger of bio-logging and fractal analysis represents an important opportunity to do so, promising to advance our understanding of the many interactions that occur between animals and the environments in which they are found. (7)

Marcus, Gary. The Birth of the Mind. New York: Basic Books, 2004. Noted in the previous section, in this regard Marcus see the procession of organisms from microbes to social insects, mammals and onto humans to be distinguished by a vectorial advance in neural architecture, premeditated aware behavior and presently the “sum total of the library of knowledge.” And it all begins with a true “bacterial brain.”

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