Tika and her longtime mate, Kobuk, had raised eight litters of puppies together and were enjoying their retirement years in the home of my friend, Anne. Even as longtime mates, Kobuk often bossed Tika around, taking her favorite sleeping spot or toy. Late in life, Tika developed a malignant tumor and had to have her leg amputated.
Kobuk stopped shoving her aside or minding if she was allowed to get on the bed without him. He ran over to Tika. Anne got Tika up and took both dogs outside, but they just lay down on the grass. Anne rushed her to the emergency animal clinic in Boulder, Colorado, where she had life-saving surgery.
But Anne had witnessed their true relationship. Kobuk and Tika, like a true old married couple, would always be there for each other, even if their personalities would never change. After I picked Jethro from the Boulder Humane Society and brought him to my mountain home, I knew he was a very special dog.
He never chased the rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, or deer who regularly visited. He often tried to approach them as if they were friends. One day Jethro came to my front door, stared into my eyes, belched, and dropped a small, furry, saliva-covered ball out of his mouth. I was wrong. When I eventually released the bunny, Jethro followed her trail and continued to do so for months. Over the years Jethro approached rabbits as if they should be his friends, but they usually fled.
Fish are often difficult to identify with or feel for. Nonetheless, Chino, a golden retriever who lived with Mary and Dan Heath in Medford, Oregon, and Falstaff, a inch koi, had regular meetings for six years at the edge of the pond where Falstaff lived. Falstaff did this repeatedly as Chino stared down with a curious and puzzled look on her face. Their close friendship was extraordinary and charming. When the Heaths moved, they went as far as to build a new fishpond so that Falstaff could join them.
Embarrassment is difficult to observe. But world famous primatologist Jane Goodall believes she has observed what could be called embarrassment in chimpanzees. Fifi was a female chimpanzee whom Jane knew for more than 40 years. Freud always followed Figan as if he worshiped the big male. Once, as Fifi groomed Figan, Freud climbed up the thin stem of a wild plantain. When he reached the leafy crown, he began swaying wildly back and forth.
Had he been a human child, we would have said he was showing off. Suddenly the stem broke and Freud tumbled into the long grass. He was not hurt. He landed close to Jane, and as his head emerged from the grass she saw him look over at Figan. Had he noticed? If he had, he paid no attention but went on being groomed. Freud very quietly climbed another tree and began to feed. Harvard University psychologist Marc Hauser has observed what could be called embarrassment in a male rhesus monkey.
After mating with a female, the male strutted away and accidentally fell into a ditch. He stood up and quickly looked around. After sensing that no other monkeys saw him tumble, he marched off, back high, head and tail up, as if nothing had happened. Stories about animals rescuing members of their own and other species, including humans, abound. They show how individuals of different species display compassion and empathy for those in need. In Torquay, Australia, after a mother kangaroo was struck by a car, a dog discovered a baby joey in her pouch and took it to his owner who cared for the youngster.
The year-old dog and 4-month-old joey eventually became best friends. On a beach in New Zealand, a dolphin came to the rescue of two pygmy sperm whales stranded behind a sand bar.
After people tried in vain to get the whales into deeper water, the dolphin appeared and the two whales followed it back into the ocean. Closely tied to instinct is the innate animal behavior known as a reflex : a simple, inborn, automatic response to a stimulus by a part of an organism's body.
Reflexes help animals including humans respond quickly to a stimulus, thus protecting them from harm. Again, the animal does not think about what it is doing. If you touch a hot stove or receive an electric shock, you do not decide to pull your hand back: you whip your hand away from the painful stimulus faster than you can blink.
As with instinct, a reflex is a survival-friendly behavior over which the animal in this case, you has little control. Instinct is innate, meaning that instinctive behaviors and responses are present and complete within the individual at birth.
In other words, the individual does not have to undergo any experience to acquire such behaviors. For example, fish have an innate ability to swim, whereas most mammals must learn how to walk.
It is fairly easy to identify innate behavior when an animal exhibits it at birth, but in some cases innate behavior manifests only later in life.
In such situations improvements in the creatures' ability to perform an innate behavior may seem to indicate that the animal is learning, when, in fact, another process is at work. For example, chickens exhibit the innate tendency toward pecking as a way of establishing and maintaining a dominance hierarchy. This is the "pecking order," to which people often refer in everyday speech as a metaphor for various hierarchies in human experience, such as those at a workplace.
Though pecking is innate, chickens' ability to perform it actually improves as they grow older. Older chickens display a better aim when pecking than do younger ones, but this does not mean that they have learned from experience. Indeed, one clue that pecking is innate in older chickens is the fact that they uniformly improve in their ability to peck.
On the other hand, if they were simply learning, with practice, how to peck more accurately, one could expect that some chickens would exhibit more dramatic improvement than others, in the same way that some humans play basketball or sing or write poetry better than others. In fact, what has happened is that the ability to perform an innate behavior simply has improved as a result of growth: as the chickens' eyes and muscles mature, their aim improves, but this has nothing to do with experience per se.
This is one example of the ways in which instinctive and learned behavior can become confused, though in the pecking example there is really no gray area; rather, what is actually an innate behavior merely seems to be a learned one.
Yet there truly is a great deal of gray area between instinct and learning. Many behaviors that at first glance might appear purely instinctive can be shown to have an experiential component—that is, an aspect of the behavior has been modified through experience or learning.
A fascinating example of how instinct and learning can be blurred or combined is imprinting, or the learning of a behavior at a critical period early in life, such that the behavior becomes permanent. Lorenz, who first developed the theory of imprinting, noted that newly hatched geese learn to walk by following their parents, but he wondered how they distinguished their parents from all other objects in their environments.
Likewise, an instinctive urge towards tribal loyalty was useful when we lived in small bands, but such loyalties are now exploited to pit nationalities, political parties and religions against one another, often leading to deadly confrontations. Humans explain events and phenomena in two very different ways.
One approach to knowing common sense involves thinking and is objective, based on making repeatable observations that allow us to predict nature and future events -- this rational logical approach to knowing led to scientific methodology. This irrational non-scientific approach, championed by religions of all kinds, has helped many humans accept and cope with things they have no power to change or difficulty understanding rationally, such as unexpected deaths, other misfortunes, or natural disasters.
Unfortunately, the power conferred on religious leaders has often led to serious abuses and resistance to accepting the rational understanding of the functioning of nature as demonstrated by new scientific discoveries.
Human intelligence has also evolved so that we have remarkably good abilities to detect intentions of other humans in social interactions. We seem to have a propensity for superstitious mysticism and a tendency to emphasize explanations that invoke intention over those based on sheer mechanism, situation, or circumstances. Indeed, humans may be predisposed to see intentions in their friends and enemies. Similarly, we attribute conscious thought and intention to the actions of non-human animals anthropomorphism.
For example, predators want to kill us and prey want to escape from us. We even look for meaning and purpose in inanimate things such as the climate or the universe. Thus a destructive storm is interpreted as having occurred because people strayed from religious tradition or did something wrong and needed to be punished.
Everyone, religious or not, relies on objective rational thinking to handle problems encountered in everyday life. Thus, we all know we must eat to stay alive, things fall down not up or sideways, we seek to avoid collisions when driving, balance our budgets, etc.
Natural selection has organized our brains in ways that promote such duality Morrison ; Trivers ; Pianka Natural selection molded our emotions and instincts, including setting aside the right half of our brain for storage of subconcious irrational information. Rational logic and common sense reside in the left half of our brain along with speech. Morrison argues that this duality effectively gave the irrational right side of our brains invisible contol over the rational left side:.
People enjoy and thrive on mysticism as illustrated by the huge success of the Harry Potter books. One father decided it was time to break the news to his 12 year-old son who still believed in Santa Claus. Kids are expected to outgrow the tooth fairy, Easter bunny, and Santa Claus, but never the myth of a benevolent deity. That one is supposed to endure throughout life.
Religions occupy a very special place in the irrational right side of our brains adjacent to our carefully programmed feeling of 'spirituality'! Any challenge to a devoutly religious person's faith meets with adamant opposition, even physical hostility.
Interestingly, music resides in the irrational right side of the brain in the same place where language and speech reside in the rational left side Broca's area.
Music evokes powerful emotions in humans and is exploited by our leaders to arouse us into action: thus national anthems evoke patriotism and are used to inflame our tribal instincts as we go into insane wars. Religious and political fervor is exploited similarly as religious and political groups are pitted against each other.
Sports fans form similar opposing groups using their team's theme song to elicit passion. We are born into a given skin color, nationality, language, religion, and culture -- all are accidents of birth but have profound effects on our lives and the societies we live in.
Indeed, taken together they determine which side you'll be on in the next war! Few people are able to shift from their birth group to another. The rules of a level playing field dictate that people will always want to emigrate from an impoverished birth group into another that enjoys a higher standard of living. Governments discourage illegal immigration. Oceans and border patrols reinforce boundaries and maintain heterogeneity and disparities between national groups.
The driving force behind all living entities is Darwinian natural selection , or differential reproductive success. Unfortunately, natural selection is blind to the long-term future -- natural selection rewards just one thing: offspring. It is a short-sighted efficiency expert. Individuals who leave the most genes in the gene pool of the next generation triumph -- their genetic legacy endures, whereas those who pass on fewer genes lose out in this ongoing contest.
One of our most powerful instincts is the urge to procreate, which manifests itself in different ways in males than in females. Males simply want lots of sex whereas females are programmed with nesting behaviors that involve a safe home place for their family of course, sexual selection is much more complex than that one sentence brief synopsis. Primitive humans did not even know how babies were formed, but nevertheless they made them.
Huddled together with our furs during winters and the long ice ages, two became three. Hence we are programmed to have instincts to breed. And breed, we do, in fact, we are much too good at it for our own good, all 7. If we don't stop reproducing soon, human civilization is doomed. Some humans, unfortunately the most successful from the perspective of natural selection, combine greed with breeding and have obscenely large families.
Moreover, resources such as water , land , and food , are finite, whereas human populations are always expanding, steadily reducing per capita shares. People are encouraged to think that resources are ever expanding when the opposite is true. We are in a state of total denial about the overpopulation crisis -- instead of confronting reality, people only want to relieve its many symptoms, such as shortages of food , oil , and water , global climate change , pollution , disease, loss of biodiversity, and many others.
Overpopulation is a near fatal disease that cannot be cured by merely alleviating its symptoms. Of course, eventually, our population must decrease, but we could lessen the upcoming misery by taking action now. Unfortunately, most people are unlikely to be proactive and are much more likely to procrastinate until they are forced to react.
Competition is ubiquitous wherever resources are in short supply. Plants compete for light and water.
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