By David Futrelle
So an amateur phrenologist in the Men going Their Own Way subreddit has come up with a new (to him) bogus reason why men are smarter than women: their brains are a little bit bigger. (Never mind that brain size doesn’t actually correlate with intelligence.)
Then he has some thoughts on dogs and cats and the right to vote.
Speak for yourself, dude. I would totally let dogs and cats vote. Not so sure about humans, though.
My favorite response to this post?
Know wonder why they say there light on their feet. They have half a brain.
Know wonder.
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@Lumiouna
To be clear, the idea of races as subspecies is total BS, since race isn’t a natural grouping but human-defined. And even if it were, bestiality is typically defined as sex between species, not subspecies (though we don’t seem to call it that when both animals are non-human, such as when a male donkey and female horse are bred to make a mule).
I think the main objection for many to bestiality beyond the squick factor is that animals can’t give consent. Though at the same time, this argument runs into the issue that animals don’t consent to being killed or castrated either and people do that. I’m sure Alan or someone else can phrase this better with animal rights ideas.
As for your second comment, I don’t think the hybrids would have been less fertile given that most humans today have some level of Neanderthal DNA, meaning hybrids must have been able to reproduce.
@Naglfar
I might have to. because i think she is going to keep letting him out into the balcony and he’s going to keep jumping because he’s a cirous young cat. Though Dalillama told me it’s unlikely he will fall down the gap between our balcony and get hurt which makes me feel better. He’s also not fixed yet because when my neighbor found him he had been attacked by something and she was waiting for him to heal and get his strength back before she took him in for surgery but now i think he’s healed and she’s just trying to find time
Also about parrots. My friend has a parrot who was rescue from a trafficking thing. I think she does understand what some words mean because she knows his name, and mine and others, she also knows what certain words mean like in the morning she will all but scream ” TimTim! food!” and she likes to look at herself in the mirror and whistle and call herself pretty.
Some of Kurten’s ideas have proven wrong or increasingly unlikely over time, but those were highly speculative to begin with. I loved the novels, and you might (with considerable luck) find them in also in English:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_of_the_Tiger
(The sequel is titled Singletusk, in original Swedish Mammutens rådare)
I did one of those ancestry DNA kits and it told me I had a good portion of Neanderthal DNA. When i did some research about that I found out that a lot of people think that it’s where Red hair and pale skin come from. Both i have a lot of.
I also just read a new article for school about a theory that us having offspring with Neanderthal contributed a lot to genetic diversity while our species was moving out all over the planet.
@Lainy
One of our cats regularly took a shortcut from my workshop in the attic to the garden – out the skylight and off the roof to the patio, a 7 meter drop – as a matter of course. It was her preferred route. So don’t be worried too much about any fall (if it happens at all – unlikely).
Mind, she was called Brainless for a reason. 🙂
@Lumipuna
I don’t speak Swedish, so I could be wrong, but wouldn’t that translate to something like “Mammoth Ruler?” If so, it seems fitting on this site.
EDIT: Just checked Amazon and it looks like there are English translations of both books you mentioned, but the latter appears to be out of print.
I’m pretty sure my mice could vote better than any alt-right assholes. We might have had cheese or sunflower seeds or dried corn as a president, but honestly I still feel like those are better than what we’ve got now.
@threp
yes, and Derrick doesn’t seem to understand that my female cat is very much fixed because she will sit at the balcony window and watch him as he tries to show off for her and she just looks at him like
“peasent, don’t know I am a queen, nay a goddess, and you mortal are beneath me!”
She only really likes my brother cat though out of all the other cats she has met, but she does like dogs. Well the dogs she has met are fine with cats so she likes them.
Not quite sure, but it does refer to a mammoth-related deity or spirit in the “black” people’s mythology. The Finnish translated title is literally “Mammoth’s guardian”.
I have a tattered Finnish copy of Singletusk from ancient library leftovers. The same library also once had Dance, but the copy disappeared. I should someday see if I can buy it in Finnish – or English if that’s available.
@Alan
Come to think of it, I can’t tell the difference between reading one of the current POTUS’s speeches and the transcript of an obscenity laden cockatoo freakout. Looks like we may have just found out who is doing all the illegal voting in this country.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/4abffz10ffI
@Naglfar
I guess they could be told when the became an adult?
@Moogue
Come on now, no parrot could ever be as racist and misogynistic as Trump. No extant parrot species are native to the US, so they wouldn’t go for his xenophobia either.
@Naglfar
I don’t know, the video that I was trying to edit in to embed contiains lots of ranting about fucking rednecks and rock n roll and I can’t work like this and get back to work. :p Or at least that’s what I’m picking up.
It’s funny in a really tragic way, because you know that it has been witness to some shit while in another home.
Afaik, birds categorically cannot learn to read, at least not normal text; it seems that their visual cortex just won’t register letters right. I shouldn’t wonder if corvids and maybe parrots* could potentially learn to read a set of pictographs designed for them, though. I don’t know that anyone has tried it.
*a category which includes falcons, although they’re pretty dim by parrot standards. It turns out that they’re not related at all to the raptors, just a product of parallel evolution.
@Moogue
That brings us back to the issue I mentioned of how parrots, like children, might be echoing what they’ve heard rather than making their own choices when voting. A parrot might say that, but I doubt the bird is actually conservative.
@Dalillama
If such a system is possible, the question would then be whether it is possible to make a pictogram system that is both simple enough for parrots and corvids to understand but complex enough to express ideas from human languages. There’s a big leap from having symbols that represent objects or actions to expressing sentences with a subject and predicate.
@Naglfar
Intercorvid communication of some complexity is illustrated by an incident that happened in our building’s carpark some years ago: A smallish crow had got hold of a discarded bagel and was eating it, when a larger one came by, drove off the smaller bird, and commenced eating. A short while thereafter, the first bird came back with two companions, and the three of them proceeded to beat the bigger crow and drive it off. Then they divided the bagel into equal shares and enjoyed a convivial meal together. The only plausible way this could happen is if the original crow was able to tell the other two that there was food available, and that they would need to cooperate at a particular task to get some.
@Dalillama
That demonstrates that they can communicate amongst each other, but there would still be some inter species language issues if we wanted to make a pictogram set for them (plus they probably don’t use a written language to communicate with each other). If you’ve ever seen the movie Arrival or read the Ted Chiang story it’s based on, I imagine it would be a little bit like the challenges faced by the human linguists in those media.
Corvid are known to not only hold grudges, but also transmit thoses grudges to other ravens.
@Alan:
They’re “Neanderthal” only if they come from the Neandertal region of Germany. Otherwise they’re just sparkling hominins.
Ah yes, the Managing Complex Abstract Thingian Node is an area of much exciting current research in Bro Neuroscience. (It’s closely related to the Do You Even Lift Broca Area.)
Blue jays seem to have good memories.
My dad had most of his backyard devoted to vegetables and fruit trees and a pair of jays considered it part of their territory while they were in the area raising young. Since dad was always in the garden working and never bothered them, they just treated him as part of the environment. When I came over to visit, if I went into the yard, they generally flew off, sometimes scolding me as they went.
Until.
One day when dad and I were in the house, I heard a ruckus in the backyard. When I looked out the kitchen window, I saw the blue jay pair squawking at a crow that was harassing their fledgling. I went out and shoo’d off the crow and sat on the back steps until the jays made their escape with the fledgling safely in tow.
For years after that, the jays treated me the same as they did my dad; hunting insects (and particularly the tomato worms my dad’s plants provided for them) as if we weren’t there. I was no longer persona non gratis! It made me feel very privileged.
Jays are corvids too.
@Dali
This is well studied among American crows, although a lot of birds have a certain call that means “food” as well. Crows will also hold funerals for the dead where they will gather around and yell at the dead bird, presumably to try work out what killed that crow so they can avoid it in the future. And they will remember the faces of humans who have wronged them for years, and will teach other crows not to like these people, who will than teach other crows not to like these people, and so on.
@Naglfar
Of course not. Do I really need to put a /s on a joke that Donald Trump has been secretly elected by cockatoos because they both like to throw raging fits?
Could birds be taught to discriminate? Probably. See what I said above about crows, and it’s probably not just crows that teach each other what to trust and like through “language”. Parrots, specifically are also typically very wary of new things, and true empathy has never been demonstrated in them.
We don’t have to worry about parrots voting. Parrots are, psychologically, really different than humans. It’s not even just a matter of intelligence, they just form different societies. Anyone that keeps parrots would tell you that they make cats look as obedient as a rabid wolverines. They harrass and drive their sick out of the flock, so parrots have evolved to not show any weakness until dying. They also commit a rather stunning amount of rape, although I have to say I’ve seen males getting their faces ripped open trying to do so. Parrots use no foresight, no long term planning for what’s going to happen in 20 years. They could be wake up every day and it could be Groundhog day and they wouldn’t even know it.
Misogynists will say that women shouldn’t vote because we behave the same as parrots and are ruled by nothing but emotion, but then they will also say that women are not to be trusted because we are evil schemers that will carefully fuck men over with plans that take years to set into motion. As usual with bigots, they talk out of both sides of their mouth, because it’s not about logic.
/edit/ Ninja’d on crow grudges by Ohlmann.
@Moogue
I got that it was a joke, I was just pointing out that it seems a bit unfair to compare any animal to the disgusting individual in the White House.
To be fair, many humans fail to think about this as well.
It’s also a classic fascist tactic to paint one’s enemy/scapegoat as both weak and easily defeated but also powerful and dangerous. See also: Nazi propaganda about Jews, or how the alt right portrays the left as weak “soy boys” but also simultaneously a massive threat.
@corvid fans
Yep. Corvids, or at least jungle crows, can recognise and retain symbols with a 70 – 90% success rate. OK, it’s a single study, but it matches well with their ability to not only remember faces but to describe them to their flockmates.
I am also an admirer of corvids – though ravens are my particular admiration. Uncle had one years back, and it were ridiculously smart. Also very vindictive towards the dog.
@Ohlmann:
That’s actually extremely important. That’s the key cognitive innovation that allows a social tool user to make the transition to the Neolithic.
Consider the classic tragedy of the commons: overgrazing of a field will reduce it to dust and then no-one can graze their sheep there, so a quota needs to be collectively decided upon and enforced. The key to this is the ability of the group to come to a decision and oust or ostracize anyone who subsequently breaks the rules.
Once you have this capability for social punishment of individual transgressors, you have the capability to keep, maintain, and invest in communal resources. That’s the real key to being able to build cities, complete with infrastructure, to store food against future famines, and the like — the things we started doing (along with such superficial additional things as monumental architecture) in the Neolithic.
(Even the monumental architecture, when not a single wealthy individual’s folly, required public investment; and it requires a society with infrastructure and public investment to get wealthy individuals, too. Wealthy individuals are individuals society has chosen, wisely or otherwise, to subsidize heavily, after all, and can only get and stay that way by collective maintenance of whatever subsidies and rules permit wealth inequality. Including the norms and enforced laws against theft, lest a mob just materialize and redistribute all of their stuff.)
So, crows have all the qualitative cognitive prerequisites to be inventing law, money, and taxation … though perhaps not yet the quantitative.
Note that having cities, public investment, laws, and money is pretty much where we tend to draw the line between “barbarians” and “civilization”. Crows are 90% of the way to being able to build one of their own. I’m not sure if any of the other smart, social tool users are (except, of course, for us).
Well, there is one other thing we tend to associate with civilization: literacy, at least of the upper classes. But it’s actually a side effect of sorts: it is very useful when you have lots of laws and money and grain and stuff to keep track of, and especially once your legal system is starting to pile up a corpus of case law and useful precedents and guidelines. Different civilizations in human history have gone about the business of record-keeping in sometimes quite different ways, from clay tablets to ink on papyrus and quipu knots. I expect something as clever as a crow would find some way as soon as it was of significant use, likely starting from scratched marks on wood or tree bark and evolving from there.
One more thought: we associate the “ages” of civilization with material technologies: the Neolithic, monumental stone architecture; the Bronze and Iron Ages, the corresponding metallurgical technologies; the Industrial Age, the steam engine and subsequent fuel-to-mechanical-power technologies. I would argue, though, that each one had a key social technology that was necessary to enable the more immediately visible material innovations that followed. For the Neolithic, again, this was the concept of public investment, and the collective punishment or exclusion of freeloaders that this required.
For the Bronze Age it was long range trade, not just haphazard through exchanges across borders but involving actual trade infrastructure, including some rudiments of diplomacy and norms for treatment of non-aggressive international travelers. Only then could tin and copper, which occur in different geological settings, be brought together in large enough quantities, with steady enough supply, to have a reliable ability to mass manufacture bronze items.
For the Iron Age, the social innovation was to create transnational religions and states: not those of specific ethnic groups, but ones that readily accepted converts and proselytized. These in turn allowed establishing a firmer set of transnational norms over large regions and further enhanced trade. It also made large empires like Rome possible, because such large polities are necessarily pluralistic and need a trans-ethnic social glue. The Roman “civil religion” was quite successful. Its successor, Christianity, was even more so, succeeding in spreading into the northern European regions that had ever resisted Roman rule. In the far east Confucianism may have been the glue that made it possible for China to get as huge as it did. As for the actual metallurgical technology of iron-making, it may actually just be a timing coincidence that it showed up around the same time. As the later European pioneers in the Americas demonstrated, it doesn’t take a very large population base, long range trade, or any other big social innovation to make iron. A wild west town can manage it without outside help, as can a fledgling colony that is months away from any support by sea and surrounded by hostile natives. You just need to have the right bit of knowledge, which perhaps happened to spread alongside the transethnic religion concept.
As for the industrial age, that requires sufficiently empirical scientific methods of thinking as to work out things like the laws of thermodynamics, at least to get something good enough to become cheaper than cheapish human labor. A shortage of the latter helps kickstart things, as does having access to a reasonably energy dense fuel. So methods of truth-finding that privilege observation over intuition and logical reasoning over revealed wisdom, and a social infrastructure of adherence to these — so, able to enforce replicability, do peer review, and the like — may be what unlocked industrial technology for us. Ironically, those same methods tend to undermine those same transethnic religions that allowed the first continental-scale empires and federations to form, at least to the extent that any particular one of those was heavily reliant on the supernatural to explain and legitimate itself.
The pragmatic Confucian civil religion in China was well-constructed to weather that storm and coexist with the scientific method, which might go a ways to explaining why China is exploding industrially right now while the heavily Christianized west is staggering drunkenly trying to resolve the tension between empirical knowledge (favored by liberals here) and traditional beliefs and hierarchies (favored by conservatives, natch). We relied too much on supernatural woo to support and legitimate our institutions, even in the nominally secular states like the US, and the contradictions with secular empiricism are coming to a head.
(Notably, one of China’s most serious recent failures resulted from importing a Soviet sort-of-religion, adapting it, and then screwing up their ecosystem by trying to exterminate sparrows, culminating in a famine. Not a mistake either Confucians or scientists would likely have made. Unfortunately, their post-communist beliefs retain an unhealthy tolerance for authoritarian government and that is leading to genocide, not to mention the kind of “speak no evil” coverups and mistakes that let COVID fester in Wuhan for weeks before there was a national-scale response to it, and previously to that, SARS.)
What might be a very interesting question is, what is the next big social innovation? And what will it enable?
One obvious candidate is a secular “religion” that can fill the gaps left by the receding tide of Christianity in the west, while being more compatible with empirical science. Something with a more pragmatic emphasis, largely void of the supernatural except perhaps as window-dressing here and there, and consequentialist in its justifications for rules and recommendations. Ideally, it merges science with a non-extreme form of socialism and underlying understanding of economics and politics to promote policies that diminish wealth inequality, attack rather than reinforce ethnic, sex, and gender based bigotries, and push for sustainability in areas like agriculture and energy production. Think GND meets some sort of epicurean humanism and the scientific method’s emphasis on the primacy of observed consequences, where clear evidence trumps any amount of theory or authority. As for what it might unlock for us: perhaps asteroidal resources and beyond; or maybe just the ability to keep a functioning civilization through the upheavals of climate change.