Distressed ravens show empathy | Hacker News Reader

Distressed ravens show empathy

medium.com

76 pointsogig14 comments

I have a strange love for birds. People often laugh at the endearment I have for birds like they have for dogs or cats. But when asked why I like birds so much, I can answer this very succinctly: there is very few other species that can fly, walk or swim all at once like some birds can. Nor a group of species so diverse, colorful, capable and intelligent. With such an interesting evolution sharing an ancestry with the once terrifying dinosaurs that roamed the world now so commonplace and taken for granted.

Just the intelligence of birds alone is fascinating with birds that can learn human speech and understand its context, solve puzzles, solve puzzles in teams, understand the concept of self, learn human faces, give gifts, have theory of mind, perform ritual and now show empathy. All packed into a tiny "bird brain." They are truly marvelous creatures.

All that, and they're delicious, too.

Your comment reminds me of a story in a book called Shantaram. Guy feeds a mouse visiting his cell every now and then. Before being relocated this prisoner tells the new inmate to take good care of Mickey. Next thing he knows, his little friend is on display with two pencils piercing his body. Crucified.

And vice versa ;)

http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/11/23/b.gif

Oh man I miss Suck.com

Amusing, albeit predictable, that a article about another species sharing the construct of empathy would elicit such a veceral demonstration of its absence. I wonder if we'll ever observe another species that enjoys sarcasm and irony as much as we do.

Quite. How droll.

I'm fascinated by birds. It's not that I'm a lister, but I'm always aware of birds around me, from their vocalizations. The stereotype of "bird watchers" with their binoculars and scopes is misleading. Mostly you identify birds by sound.

Anyway, avian evolution has diverged enough from our line that birds are virtually aliens. Compared to other primates, and other smart mammals, I mean. Also rather alien are spiders, octopus, and colonial insects.

Corvids are bloody amazing. Arguably, they also have language.[0] Nightingales too.[1] But bird languages are very different from mammalian ones. Maybe more like neuronal activity directly mapped to sound.

[0] Mates (2016) Locally Periodic Signal Estimation and Pitch Detection, and Acoustic Communication in American and Northwestern Crows (PhD thesis) https://dlib.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/35...

[1] Weiss et al. (2014) The use of network analysis to study complex animal communication systems: a study on nightingale song http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1785/2014...

Hey mirimir, it's awesome to see posts from someone else that thinks birds are cool. I hadn't seen those papers before--that Weiss study looks like it's worth reading in depth.

Just wanted to say that most people who study birdsong and bird calls wouldn't describe it as a "language"--as far as we know, humans are the only animals with language, unless you believe that one guy who wrote the article about dolphins. But you're right that birdsong is a lot more like language than most other animal vocalizations; often the songs have "syntax" (like in the Weiss article you posted) where the structure follows rules. But the syntax doesn't convey meaning in the same way it does in our language. No bird has ever written a philosophy book, right? They're just communicating stuff like "this is my tree and I'm so manly I can sing in this tree for hours in the middle of the night".

Along the same lines, I think birds are pretty close to us evolutionarily speaking. You're not the first person I've heard compare them to aliens, but their brains are actually a lot like ours. Here's a grumpy blog post I wrote about it if you want to have a look: http://www.theneuroethicsblog.com/2012/09/snakes-on-brain-or...

As the article above demonstrates, along with many other behavioral studies like those you mentioned, birds behave a lot like we do. So: their brains are a lot like ours and their behaviors are a lot like ours. This is why we should study them even more, if we want to understand intelligence.

Think of it this way: you're an alien and you want to figure out how a computer works. If you could only carry out your experiments with MacBooks, it would probably take you longer than if you could also use e.g. Lenovo ThinkPads (just trying to draw an analogy, I'm not throwing shade at Mac or anything).

I hope that wasn't way too "tl;dr" but I just wanted to build a little bit on your comments.

> Just wanted to say that most people who study birdsong and bird calls wouldn't describe it as a "language" ...

Yes, I get that. And maybe they're looking too hard for something like human language. Maybe it's more like communication protocol. I mean, if you down-shifted Ethernet traffic and listened to it, would it sound like language?

> They're just communicating stuff like "this is my tree and I'm so manly I can sing in this tree for hours in the middle of the night".

Well, if you didn't know any human languages, and your system clock were really slow, maybe English would sound like that to you. So if I'm out dancing, I'm wasted, and I'm using earplugs, casual conversation does sound a lot like that to me ;)

> Along the same lines, I think birds are pretty close to us evolutionarily speaking. You're not the first person I've heard compare them to aliens, but their brains are actually a lot like ours.

Yes, I get that too. The basic layout is the same. But when reptiles and mammals diverged, their brains were much simpler, and arguably neither line was very intelligent. So brains and intelligence have evolved in parallel in birds and mammals. And maybe structural similarities just reflect the shared lineage.

This is compassion / responsiveness, not empathy.

Empathy = mental simulating of how an action will affect another.

Compassion = a desire to help another.

Responsiveness = the ability to recognize changes in someone's emotional state, and then develop and engage in a course of action based upon that change.

More info: Heinz Kohut - Reflections on Empathy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQ6Y3hoKI8U

I strongly recommend the book Ravens in Winter for anyone interested in this topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com