Future evolution of intelligence

[Michaelangelica]

This excellent radio program/documentary pushed me further towards vegetarian Bhudism

Saturday 20 March 2010

 

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Diving into dolphin heads: science, rights and ethics

The Cove took out this year's Oscar for best documentary for its confronting coverage of the annual dolphin culls in Taiji, Japan. Scientists argue dolphins have complex, large brains - second only to human brains relative to body weight. Join Natasha Mitchell with leading cetacean scientists and an ethicist for a tour of a waterborne 'alien intelligence'. What are the consequences for captivity, and a controversial call for 'personhood' status? READ TRANSCRIPT

All In The Mind

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2010/03/aim_20100320.mp3

[paigetheoracle]

This excellent radio program/documentary pushed me further towards vegetarian Bhudism

Saturday 20 March 2010

 

 

All In The Mind

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2010/03/aim_20100320.mp3

 

Remember the Nazi's. First they denigrated the Jews as a justification for wiping them out and for centuries man has done that with animals (trying animals for crimes in medieval times/ burning cats as witches familiars/ slaughtering them for 'sport' and all the time saying they are vermin or only animals, implying unimportance).

 

Overfishing is bringing whole species to the brink of extinction and destroying ecosystems through bottom trawling - how soon before they start on cetaceans? (It won't just be the Norwegians and Japanese). This is the problem with money - the rarer something is, the more valuable it becomes - until it becomes extinct as a species or resource. The real question should be as this will eventually lead to a Soylant Green scenario, who is more intelligent 'suicidal' us or the animals we are wiping out? This monomania will lead to a boring world of only us, logic dictates, unless even we cannot stand this and kill ourselves as a race, just to get away from this depressing scene.

[CraigD]

Remember the Nazi's. First they denigrated the Jews as a justification for wiping them out and for centuries man has done that with animals (trying animals for crimes in medieval times/ burning cats as witches familiars/ slaughtering them for 'sport' and all the time saying they are vermin or only animals, implying unimportance).

A bit of an inaccurate analogy, comparing the systematic killing of a particular ethnic group of humans (the Nazi Holocaust) to systematically killing animals perceived as pests (the until-fairly recent mainstream status of the housecat), because people of Jewish, Romani, Slavic, Polish and the various other ethnicities target by the Holocaust were by even the harshest contemporary definition considered of the human species (that is, able to mate with humans of any ethnicity), while cats and the various other animals that have occasionally been subject of purposeful extermination campaigns aren’t. Discounting the wilder demon familiar superstitions, even the most credulous medieval people didn’t fear that cats would breed with their men and womenfolk and somehow pollute their race, a biologically nonsensical fear that drove popular support for the holocaust, and still drives some racists to this day.

 

There’s something more atavistic, I think, underlying the sometimes bizarre tendency of humans to exterminate animals they simultaneously value as pets (to modern sensibilities, the tendency doesn’t get much more bizarre than medieval and 17th century cat-burning). These fads tend to emphasize the sadistic torture animal as much or more than their killing. Despite modern legal prohibitions, many children and adults take pleasure in illicitly torturing animals (eg: killing feral and neighbors’ pet animals, organized dog fighting). Other primates, such as chimpanzees, also seem to sadistically torture and kill outside (and more rarely inside) their species.

 

To bring this excursion in the uncomfortably bizarre realm of sadism an thanatos back to this threads theme of the possible of future terrestrial non-humans of human-level intelligence, I throw out for your consideration the possibility that we humans are the only animal with such intelligence in part because of our tendency to be genocidal, especially, I grimly suspect, toward animals that seem to us to have potential for such intelligence. Grimmer still, I suspect we H.Sapiens may be the reason why, despite hundreds of thousands of years in which many anatomically very different hominid species coexisted, by historic times, we are the only surviving hominid species – in short, I believe prehistoric H.Sapiens may have purposefully exterminated all of our contemporary “creepy near-humans”.

 

If this is the case, the future evolution of human-level intelligence in non-humans may be similarly constrained, if not by our competition-elimination-prone species, then by another. Possession of the top intelligence niche may be determined not only by great intelligence, but by a strong instinct toward non-predatory killing, and a related trait for sadism.

Overfishing is bringing whole species to the brink of extinction and destroying ecosystems through bottom trawling - how soon before they start on cetaceans? (It won't just be the Norwegians and Japanese).

We started on the cetaceans centuries ago – though it was only around 1860 that the technology necessary to kill the largest whales was successfully developed and used (It’s not practical to kill a blue whale with a non-explosive, hand-thrown harpoon!).

 

The question, then, is how soon before we resume on cetaceans? I’m optimistic that, following the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th century over-killing of the largest, slowest-reproducing cetaceans, humans in business, governments, and advocacy have learned the necessary lesson, and won’t cause extinction or near extinction of whales again. This is not to say whale killing won’t increase – those Japanese “research” whaling fleets the crew of the Farley Mowat and the Steve Irwin havr been so famously harassing for the past few years, really are doing research, not scientific zoological research, but of how soon and low large large-scale commercial whaling can resume, after arguing successfully for the lifting of international laws banning it – only that that business is now wise enough not to over-kill again and drive itself out of business.

This is the problem with money - the rarer something is, the more valuable it becomes - until it becomes extinct as a species or resource. The real question should be as this will eventually lead to a Soylant Green scenario, who is more intelligent 'suicidal' us or the animals we are wiping out? This monomania will lead to a boring world of only us, logic dictates, unless even we cannot stand this and kill ourselves as a race, just to get away from this depressing scene.

Fortunately for the non-humans of Earth, I think this scenario overestimates the human capability for causing extinctions, and overemphasizes the overt act of killing vs. habitat encroachment. With the exception of very large, slow-reproducing animals – like, sadly, whales – or odd very specialized ones, like the dodo, you can’t effectively wipe out a species by directly killing individual animals. You must destroy its habitat, making it impossible to live.

 

While humans have a proven capability to destroy the specialized habitats of some animals – some already extinct – the ocean is a harder habitat on which to infringe. While pollution and climate change may disrupt ocean habitats – especially when it wipes out “foundation” species, such as coral – the ocean is, I believe, such a wonderfully resilient ecosystem that it will, in a short time on evolutionary time scales, recover from all but the worst we humans can do to it. In short, overfishing and ocean habitat damage hurts humans, in the form of the loss of productive food sources, more than they ultimately hurt the ocean.

 

If, as some speculative biological futurists predict, the next occupant of the terrestrial top intelligent niche is an aquatic cephalopod (eg: the squibbon), only the most incredibly acts of human destruction can stop it.