> "No we can't teach them," she said. "We try as much as we can to not interfere with the gorillas. We don't want to affect their natural behavior."
Tsk. Like the Prime Directive but in the real world.
Well, isn't it the natural behaviour of gorillas to learn? If they can learn by observing humans, without the humans specifically intending it, then what's so different, or unethical, if it's done with intent? I think this is just splitting of moral hairs that is missing an opportunity to help the gorillas protect themselves against poachers.
Anyway, if we left the gorillas on their own, without interfering, they'd eventually be wiped out by poachers and others.
P.S. It strikes me that the center's workers could have actually shown the gorillas how to dismantle the snares and are only pretending to be surprised at their "unprecedented" behaviour. But I'm proably just paranoid and jaded.
I'm no wild animal training expert, but surely there's a risk training gorillas could backfire?
humans training gorillas leads to gorillas being more trusting and less suspecting of humans, including poachers, or some other unintended consequences.
In every species except man, the benefits of intelligence are largely limited to a single individual or a small family clan. Without widespread cooperative behavior there can be no evolutionary pressure to push intelligence to our heights. What use is it for a gorilla to read or have complex language if it can't be used to cooperate with a large number of other individuals?
Unfortunately, both Darwinian genetics and game theory tell us that cooperative behavior is exceedingly unlikely to emerge. In fact, there exists no well supported theory that fits the Darwinian genetic model of evolution for how non-kin cooperation could have emerged in the human species, let alone one that's widely accepted or which is supported by evidence. All the existing theories are predicated on the argument that cooperation is beneficial therefore evolutionary would select for cooperation, but neither genes nor evolution have foresight.
On the other hand, it should be abundantly clear that the types of intelligence which benefit the individual or a family clan arise readily in nature. Tool use, teaching, even culture are clearly widespread; they're simply circumscribed by well known genetic counter pressures. Cheating strategies spontaneously emerge and effectively limit the establishment of cooperative behaviors to close kin and, to a lesser extent, non-kin that are genetically incentivized to play along (e.g. mating partners or prospective mating partners), but only to the extent that have the incentive to play along. The two species of mammals which exhibit the greatest degree of systematic social cooperation (i.e. the ones closest to humans in terms of eusociality, though still not remotely comparable) are bonobos and mole-rats. Predictably, those groups are predominately composed of cooperating genetic sisters, so in fact their behavior is more analogous to bees and ants than to humans in terms of how and why eusociality exists.
It follows that the emergence of non-kin cooperative behavior likely preceded our intelligence. This is the bottleneck--not thumbs or speech or whatever phenotype du jure, including complex intelligence. None of this stuff stands up to scrutiny. All the evidence and theory clearly points to cooperative social behavior, for which there's little reason to believe was predicated on some simple phenotype. If only we knew how we passed through that evolutionary bottleneck....
Perhaps it is wars, of all things, that made cooperative behavior an evolutionary advantage? Larger, better cooperating groups are more likely to win. Smaller groups are more likely to get wiped out. I sometimes think that humans are half way to becoming a superorganism with individuals as cells. But the superorganism actually benefits from some individualist cells, unlike real organisms where cells are supposed to perform their task and shut up.
I recently watched Band of Brothers. It is about people sticking together to kill other people. Why the hell is that interesting to me? I blame genetics.
Matt Ridely argues something like this, characterising it as trade within a group, and perhaps it began with the hunter/gatherer division of labour between the sexes.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rational_Optimist
> In every species except man, the benefits of intelligence are largely limited to a single individual or a small family clan.
Gordon Bennet, justify that claim!
If a few individuals are smart enough to disarm traps, are you saying that is not going to put an upward pressure on intelligence? (assuming it's hereditary).
> What use is it for a gorilla to read or have complex language
So intelligence is only relevant to complex language use? And not, for example, food acquisition?
Intelligence is clearly useful for almost everything. And that's exactly my point. The closer we look the more intelligence we find in nature. But there's a tremendous qualitative gap between human-type intelligence and everything else. When we believed other animals were dumb we were always underestimating the complexity of our own intelligence. What has been relatively clear, however, is that intelligence everywhere else in the animal kingdom is mediated by the lack of systemic, non-kin cooperation, because higher-orders of intelligence increasingly require the cooperation of other individuals to operationalize.[1]
Squid and octopus have jaw-dropping intelligence, clearly aimed at food acquisition. But they only mate once and then die, and so long as that's the case it's clear why cooperative behavior will never arise and why their intelligence maxes out at whatever is useful for the individual alone. (Note, however, such intelligence my incidentally promote limited types of cooperation. You have to be careful to distinguish the selection pressures to understand the limitations.)
Gorillas may learn how to disarm traps, but multiple gorilla troops are never go to learn to gang up together for their common defense and well-being such as by actively teaching other troops how to disarm traps, at least not in an evolutionarily meaningful sense, even though from our perspective it would be advantageous for the species as a whole. There's no genetic pressure for that. The genes that might promote non-kin cooperation are countered by genes for selfishness or laziness.
The fundamental dilemma is that benefits of cooperation partially inure to non-cooperators. If one gorilla disarms a trap then every gorilla benefits to some extent; to the extent they benefit then selection pressure is diminished for the trap-disarming intelligence trait to propagate as it's unnecessary to have the gene to reap those partial rewards. So what happens is that the species reaches an equilibrium according to how the costs & benefits are allocated.
Because of how genetics works, both the costs & benefits of cooperation and intelligence are moderated by degrees of kinship. The equilibrium reached--the selection pressure for stable, multi-generational cooperative intelligence--will always be a strict function of kinship. At least until a species can passthrough the bottleneck that humans did, after which things clearly get more complex. I don't know the mathematical function, but AFAIU game theory shows that selection pressures for cooperation basically drop off a cliff after the first or second generation.
Again, evolution doesn't have foresight nor intelligence of its own; it can't preference one trait over another simply because one trait leads to greater reproductive success down the road, or great success for the species as a whole. It can't disfavor genes for cheating or laziness as long as those strategies are equivalently successful for each individual's reproductive success considered in isolation.
Being able to disarm a simple trap clearly has tremendous benefit to the individual and the kin in his troop, no matter that almost every other gorilla in the forest benefits to a substantially similar degree regardless of kinship. So no surprise gorillas can do this, given other factors (e.g. in the abstract, slow rates of reproduction mean there's greater pressure for smarter individuals; whereas for species with high rates of reproduction other strategies will predominate). But legions of gorilla troops aren't going to start systematically disarming traps in the forest. Yes, they could if they spontaneously developed the certain types of intelligence, like complex communication and organizational behaviors, but those types of intelligence are predicated on being able to rely on a high degree of selfless behavior of non-kin, and that is unlikely to happen. As far as we know, in the billions of years of life on earth that qualitative kind of cooperation has only happened once. (Our degree of intelligence has also only happened once. That's unlikely to be a coincidence. My argument is that the former preceded the latter, at least at our branching point. Afterward intelligence may have driven greater cooperation in a virtuous cycle, but we shouldn't have much confidence that we can understand that process without understanding the genesis.)
My overarching point is that we can easily predict the types of intelligence exhibited in the article using basic, high-school level genetic theory. We should expect many more fascinating examples like this from gorillas, chimpanzees, orcas, dolphins, etc. And we can easily predict the limits of such intelligence similarly. Weird theories about sex or thumbs or w'ever, however, cannot explain how a species transitions to comparatively selfless, non-kin cooperation because they can't explain the mechanics of the selection pressures within the framework of Darwinian genetics; and because they can't do that they can't explain how a species is put on the path to human-level abstract intelligence.
[1] That the social groups of bonobos and naked mole-rates are organized around sisters is something that many research papers gloss over and often fail to mention at all. I actually had to dig through the literature to confirm this. (I'm not a biologist, FWIW.) Note this is distinct from a matriarchy. All that matters is that the seemingly atypical degree of social cooperation is most easily explainable by genetic relatedness. Occam's Razor says that Bonobo's non-reproductive sexual behaviors, for example, are ancillary to the core dynamic driving their cooperative social structure, rather than being a driver. And so analogizing Bonobo sex with human sex doesn't actually teach us anything; it doesn't suggest that social sex promotes cooperation, just that cooperative behaviors may correlate with social sex, which should be obvious.
How about religion? A perfect way to enforce/incentivize non-kin cooperation, instruct and transmit first principles across large groups and inter-generationally, organize and lead to cooperative behavior. Religion is the foundation of human civilization.
> If they can learn by observing humans, without the humans specifically intending it, then what's so different, or unethical, if it's done with intent?
I think this might interfere with some research involving the gorillas. You cannot study their natural behaviors if you are assisting them. Not to say there isn't research teams looking to train gorillas, my point is that may not be THEIR focus. While they cannot control for poachers, they can control for them own interactions. Furthermore, not to slippery slope, but to what end do you believe they should be allowed to interfere? If, say, a diseased food source begins to decimate the group that could be prevented through cooking, should the researchers attempt to teach them how to cook the food source to kill the bacteria?
It's a lot harder to study them if they're dead. I'm heartily in favor of assisting them to the extent they want to learn, it's possible that the more effort we make to communicate the more we'll learn ourselves.
Also, if they're capable of learning then they're sapient by definition which means we have some moral obligations to them rather than being disinterested observers, because it's our species that is trying to kill them.
Perhaps we should start considering them as different species of people rather than mere livestock.
> Also, if they're capable of learning then they're sapient by definition which means we have some moral obligations to them rather than being disinterested observers
It's because we have moral obligations to them that researchers try not to interfere.
> Perhaps we should start considering them as different species of people rather than mere livestock.
If we considered them livestock they'd be in cages. These researches are treating them as we treat many uncontacted tribes of humans.
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It's fine if you disagree with the option, but this approach has nothing to do with being callous or indifferent, it's just a different point of view on how best to protect them. And in my opinion, it's a reaction to the full contact approach that was already tried in the 60s/70s, and frankly didn't go well for either side.
Training them to disarm traps could cause more harm than good. Training them to avoid traps would maybe be better. If poachers learn that their prey are hanging around the traps all day disarming them they become lures. We also don't want an arms race between poachers and trained disarmers because the poachers are at a massive advantage. Once they know a significant number of their traps will be disarmed they will just develop traps that are more difficult to disarm or even traps that hurt the animal attempting to disarm them at which point we've trained Gorillas to walk right into their traps.
> I think this might interfere with some research involving the gorillas. You cannot study their natural behaviors if you are assisting them.
I think this is a very poor argument. First of all, conservation trumps research. Secondly, their environment already isn't "natural" when it has got snare traps in it.
> If, say, a diseased food source begins to decimate the group that could be prevented through cooking, should the researchers attempt to teach them how to cook the food source to kill the bacteria?
Seems far-fetched, but in principle: Yes, why the hell not?
Technology assures long term survival and it is in a species best interest to develop them. That is apparent. Now the question is how do you nurture technological development?
It makes genetics different. Your argument sets the default environment to be fit for the stone age one. I can respect that, but it needs to be put explicitly more often than it is.
It could go like "If we were to suddenly revert to, in the far future, some sort of stone age like environment, our distant descendants may be very unfit for that environment. This would be unfortunate."
IMO, hunting poachers should be legal, pricey, and encouraged. Sell licenses to hunt poachers, deputize them, and use the proceeds to improve protection of the wildlife.
Obviously only part of the solution, but considering that the poachers, especially of elephants & rhinos are now largely part of organized crime syndicates, totally fair.
They are getting more due process than they give their victims, which are also fully sentient, intelligent beings.
As far as I'm concerned, you hunt down a gorilla, elephant or similar with a high powered rifle, trap, or poison their water source, then use a chain saw to hack out their tusk or hand to sell, you've turned in your human-card for good.
At the very least, they've signed up for "Live by the sword, die by the sword". (and they at least have the ability to shoot back at their hunter, more than the elephants/gorillas have)
It's always strange to me when people seem to think humans and the things we do and make aren't "natural." We evolved naturally on the this planet like all other life here did, what we do is natural.
"Natural" by definition characterizes things that aren't a result of human activity. All you've realized is that it's a synthetic distinction and not a fundamental one, but if you turn around and include humans then its literally meaningless and you just lose a useful concept.
I feel that if any human was found to be teaching gorillas how to do human things, they would ultimately suffer punishment like Prometheus who taught humans how to use the fire of the gods.
”Hanabiko "Koko" (July 4, 1971 – June 19, 2018) was a female western lowland gorilla known for having learned a large number of hand signs from a modified version of American Sign Language (ASL)”
Wikipedia thinks Koko’s teacher still is alive (aged 72), so punishment certainly wasn’t swift.
Tsk. Like the Prime Directive but in the real world.
Well, isn't it the natural behaviour of gorillas to learn? If they can learn by observing humans, without the humans specifically intending it, then what's so different, or unethical, if it's done with intent? I think this is just splitting of moral hairs that is missing an opportunity to help the gorillas protect themselves against poachers.
Anyway, if we left the gorillas on their own, without interfering, they'd eventually be wiped out by poachers and others.
P.S. It strikes me that the center's workers could have actually shown the gorillas how to dismantle the snares and are only pretending to be surprised at their "unprecedented" behaviour. But I'm proably just paranoid and jaded.