Can Rhesus Macaques Pass The Mirror Test?

Some 40 or more years ago, American psychologist Gordon Gallup came up with a mirror test for self-awareness that could be applied across a whole range of species. In the classic versions of the experiment, primates, say, were anaethetised before a small dab of red dye was placed on their forehead. Measurements were then taken, on recovery, to compare their behaviour with their reflections in a mirror. A greater incidence of movements of hands to forehead to investigate the area around the spot suggested to researchers that the animals concerned had some concept of self-awareness - "Look that's me!" Higher primates like chimps could pass the test, as has one elephant to date. But, so far, no monkeys have ever demonstrated they can pass the mirror test. If the test really did test for self-awareness, any animal which passed it would have dissolved one major cognitive barrier between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, however, the test has always been criticized because not all researchers are convinced that body awareness is the same as self-awareness. That there is a difference between examination of one's body and a deeper sense of knowledge of oneself as a psychological entity with inner mental states. This "The Scientist" piece comments on some recent work reported in PLoS 1 where rhesus monkeys are held to have passed the mirror test for the first time. Instead of having red blobs of paint on their heads, these monkeys had already been implanted with electronic terminals for experimentation. Would they react to the sight of the terminals in a mirror? Although they did indeed react as if to satisfy the test, the experiment has drawn criticism, including some from the originator of the original test - Gordon Gallup. Gallup says this experiment is un-interpretable because the monkeys could feel the implant as well as see it - whereas , in his test, this was controlled for because the only way the monkeys could be aware of the paint mark was by seeing it. SO, for the time being, for several reasons the question of whether or not monkeys have any self-awareness remains open.

Since PLoS is a free journal here is the url for the original paper - in case anyone wants to follow it up.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0012865

Gene flaw causes small brain

In my chapter BRAIN-BUILDERS I detail the discovery of a number of genes that are implicated in causing microcephaly (small heads). Chief among them, are two genes that have an interesting evolutionary story to tell - Microcephalin and ASPM. Now the same team that did the spadework on those genes, Geoff Woods, now at Cambridge University, and Christopher Walsh at Harvard University Med. School, have identified another microcephaly gene - called WDR62. This gene, like the two mentioned above, is involved in the development of neurons. It will be interesting to see whether chimp-human comparison follows and whether any evidence points to recent positive selection for variants of WDR62.

Could brain abnormalities cause antisocial behavior and drug abuse in boys?

In my chapter INSIDE THE BRAIN I describe the important brain components for social intelligence - the so-called social brain. They include the anterior cingulate cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, amygdaa and insula.Not surprisingly, these very areas are seen to be under-active during decision-making tasks in teenage boys with a history of anti-social behaviour and substance abuse.

"The scientists, including collaborators at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Maryland, studied 20 adolescent boys. On average they had been on probation 139 of the last 180 days; 19 of the 20 had the psychiatric diagnosis of conduct disorder, and all had diagnoses of substance use disorder. They had been abstinent, however, an average of about five weeks when studied. They were compared with 20 other boys who did not have serious antisocial or drug problems, but who were of similar age, ethnicity, and home neighborhoods.

All played a computerized risk-taking game that repeatedly presented a choice between a cautious and a risky behavior: press the left button and always win one cent, or press the right button and either win five cents or lose ten cents. The scientists examined brain activation with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as the boys decided to press right or left, and then as they experienced wins or losses after right presses.

Brain activation differed dramatically in the two groups. The anterior cingulate cortex monitors changing rewards and punishments, and then sends that information to another brain region (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), which regulates one's choices among possible behaviors. During decision-making, antisocial boys had significantly less brain activity than normals in both of those regions, and also in other decision-making areas (orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, insula)."

The Day-Dreaming Brain

In side my chapter INSIDE THE BRAIN I detail recent work that has looked at the parts of the brain that are surprisingly active when we are in a resting state - day-dreaming - as opposed to being actively engaged in thought or upon some task. Key areas appear to be the medial parietal cortex, including a little-known area called the precuneous - and the medial prefrontal cortex. The latter area is known to become active when you are being reflective, particularly in the social sense of thinking about yourself in relation to others. This PHYSORG article details relevant work by Marcus Raichle on what he calls this default network. As he is reported:

"Raichle suspects that during these moments of errant thought, the brain is forming a set of mental rules about our world, particularly our social world, that help us navigate human interactions and quickly make sense of and react to information -- about a stranger's intentions, a child's next move, a choice before us -- without having to run a complex and conscious calculation of all our values, expectations and beliefs.

Raichle says such mental shortcuts are necessary because the brain cannot possibly take in all the detail available to our senses at any given moment. The default mode network, he proposes, keeps a template handy that lets us assume a lot about ourselves and the people and environment we interact with."

Interestingly these brain areas are very greedy - they have a high metabolic rate; they are disproportionately prone to the tangles of Alzheimers disease - which robs you of memory and a sense of self - while being overly protected in other ways - against stroke damage - by having two discreet sources of blood supply.

Why Hauser Did It

I have posted recently about the sad denouement of Marc Hauser, the Harvard psychology professor mentioned for his work on the evolution of morality in NOT A CHIMP, who has been found guilty by his university of mishandling data in his laboratory. Here is a fascinating essay by Derek Bickerton - famous for his work on language and the evolution of language - and his take on the sorry affair which chimes in perfectly with the sentiments and facts expressed both in NOT A CHIMP and in the complementary recent publication JUST ANOTHER APE? by Helene Guldberg.

Strange Tongue

Starting from language you can get to anywhere.
by Derek Bickerton

WHY HAUSER DID IT

Scientific dogma, not Hauser is to blame for misconduct
Published on August 19, 2010

Derek Bickerton is emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii; his most recent book is Adam's Tongue: How humans made language, how language made humans (2009).

By now everyone's heard that Marc Hauser, Harvard Professor of Psychology, known for his work on cognition in monkeys and on the evolution of morality, has been under investigation by Harvard for scientific misconduct. And despite Harvard's stonewalling, an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reveals that his misconduct went far beyond mere sloppy record-keeping.

At first, the whole affair seems baffling. You can understand why some over-ambitious post-doc or some aging and so-far-unsuccessful researcher might try to tweak Nature in order to achieve their dreams, But Hauser is a still relatively young yet already world-famous scientist who appeared to be at the top of his game. Why on earth would he do it?

The answer to that question turns out to be key in understanding the last half-century of the behavioral sciences and the forces that drove it. Hauser was simply a victim of those forces. And here's why.

For half a century, a major goal of the behavioral sciences has been to show that the differences between humans and other animals are in reality much less than they had seemed to previous generations. Two powerful forces combined to support that effort, one biological, one ideological. The biological force was the gradualness of evolution, which changed imperceptibly from a reasonable general rule into a dogma. If evolution happened always through a series of tiny steps, then there should not be any significant gaps between the abilities of related species. In light of this belief, the huge apparent gaps in language and cognition between humans and any other species constituted an acute embarrassment. If one could show that those gaps were only apparent, that embarrassment would go away.

The ideological force came from a vital front in the culture wars. After centuries of paying at least lip-service to religion, science started feeling its muscles. Science and religion moved ponderously into full combat mode. And the most crucial height to capture was that of human origins. Religion, or at least the Christian version, claimed that humans were the unique product of an all-powerful deity, and equipped (unlike animals) with immortal souls. The more science could show that humans were just another animal, the more religion's influence would be weakened.

All this was taking place during the heyday of genetic determinism, of Richard Dawkins's "selfish gene". Many saw genes as ruthless dictators, enforcing their irreversible wills on all forms of behavior as well as on physiology. And this was what led to behavioral scientists' big mistake.

Genes operate on behavior and physiology quite differently. On physiology, genes are indeed potent, determining how many limbs an organism will have, what kind they'll be, how big it will get, with relatively slight and slow-acting influence from the environment. Behavior is different. True, it's underpinned by genes, but genes don't determine it, except perhaps in the very simplest of organisms. Rather they make potentially available a wide range of behaviors (the more complex the species, the wider the range) from which the environment will select the most adaptive. It follows from this that while physiology is cumulative, behavior isn't.

The following will show you what I mean. Take a physiological organ like the eye, which started life as a cell that merely distinguished light from darkness, and then progressively acquired improvements such as depth perception and color discrimination (which also grew stepwise) until it achieved the sophistication of the human eye. In physiology, there's a cumulative effect as new bits and pieces are incorporated , and a ratchet effect that stops them from getting lost.

In behavior, there's neither. Take a behavior like communication. If behavior was like physiology, communication would have been like the eye. Relatively simple organisms would have had only a handful of signals. Signals would have increased in number as organisms grew more complex. Communication systems would have developed means for combining signals to give more complex messages, until they achieved the sophistication of human language. But the real picture is very different. Some fish have systems with as many signals as some primates. No system has even as many as a hundred signals. And in no system is any kind of meaningful combination possible. No cumulative effect, no ratchet.

But Hauser and most other behavioral scientists overlooked this difference. They saw language, like the eye, as resulting from the combination of many components, and in this they were right. But they thought that all or practically all of those components must, like the various stages of the eye, have pre-existed humans--that things like pattern recognition (indispensible for children acquiring the patterns of language) that Hauser claimed to find among cotton-top tamarins could not have originated anywhere but in the genomes of antecedent species. In other words, since every--or almost every--aspect of language had to have "precursors" of some kind in other species, biology's task was to go look for them.

But the assumptions on which this program was based weren't necessarily true, as recent developments in biology show. Evo-devo, the marriage of evolutionary and developmental biology, is revealing that genes are far from arbitrary dictators, that many are pluripotential and that interactions between genes, along with changes in the timing of regulatory genes and countless other factors (many of them epigenetic), can yield widely differing results. Niche construction theory is showing that animals can play a role in their own evolution. They can begin to practice new behaviors that go beyond what the animals were specifically programmed to do, and that become themselves selective pressures, altering genetic make-up to support the new behavior.

In light of this knowledge, a quite different explanation for the origins of human behavior becomes possible. Many of the things for which Hauser and his kind demand and seek "precursors" could have been produced practically from ground zero in a common-or-garden ape species whose lifestyle happened to demand something just a little extra. And this "little extra" could in turn have led to language, and language in turn could have triggered the cascade of changes leading to the cognitive and behavioral explosion that characterizes our species (for one account of such a process, see my latest book, Adam's Tongue).

In other words, Hauser fell victim to a soon-to-be-outdated view of evolution. He believed in that view, and, as the old adage has it, believing is seeing. When you're sure something must be there, you're liable to see it, whether it's really there or not, and at whatever the cost to your career.

He should have realized that "If it be maintained that certain powers, such as self-consciousness, abstraction etc., are peculiar to man, it may well be that these are the incidental results of other highly advanced intellectual faculties, and these again are mainly the result of the continued use of a highly developed language." No, I didn't say that. Darwin did--in 1871. It would take the science of the twenty-first century to show how and why he was right.

Just Another Ape?

Tim Black's review in spiked.com heralds the arrival of Helene Guldberg's much awaited (by me!!) book "Just Another Ape?" Guldberg's book is entirely comlementary to NOT A CHIMP because, while I dwell mainly in the world of human chimpanzee comparison at the level of genes, neurology and cognition, Guldberg spends most of her book looking at cognition and culture through the lens of infant and young primate development.

According to Black, Guldberg rails against philosophical voices like Richard Ryder and Peter SInger, who argue that seeing humans as a special case is arrogant species-ism. She believes current fashions for ape rights are part of a wide and growing disillusionment with humanity - a misanthropy. As Black says"

"While this mood of misanthropy is most definitely abroad, Guldberg is quick to point out that intuitively, experientially, most of us do value humans above animals. We may like pets, but we prefer people. For all the gee-whiz, aren’t animals amazing wildlife documentaries, we know that a cat’s ability to paw a door open, or even a chimpanzee’s dexterity with a stick when digging for termites, is far inferior to what humans have done with the microchip. We also tacitly accept that an animal’s life, in the interests of medical research for instance, is worth less than the human lives that the research might save. This ability to elevate our interests above animals does not make us sadists: it makes us human. However, as Guldberg points out, ‘the problem is that it is considered outrageously arrogant to assert this superiority’.

And that is why this sparkling, erudite polemic is so welcome. Just Another Ape? draws out, not our similarities with our closest animal relative, the ape, but our differences to it. It dwells not on the affinity between a vervet monkey’s set of alarm calls and human language, but on the near-fathomless chasm that divides them. It is what separates us from the animals that is important to Guldberg, not what binds us. Yes, we may share 98 per cent of DNA with chimpanzees, but we also share 70 per cent with yeast. Clearly biology does not exhaust our humanity. We are a bit more than our DNA. As Guldberg argues: ‘Our biology is the precondition for our humanity, but our instincts are transformed into something very different as a result of human consciousness and culture.’ Or as she puts it later in the book: ‘We need to look to cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution, to explain the vast gulf that exists between the capabilities and achievements of humans and those of apes.’

The fact that Guldberg singles out Richard Ryder for treatment augurs well, because she and I will be debating the question "Should apes have rights?" with him at the Battle of Ideas" at the end of October at the RCA.

Are Some Chimp 'Cultural' Behaviors Actually in the Genes?

Very interesting piece about the possible role genetics plays in determining chimpanzee culture. It reports on the work of lead author Kevin Langergraber, a molecular ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His team looked at mitochondrial DNA from 9 different chimpanzee groups (mtDNA can only be checked in females - and it is females that leave natal colonies, taking their genes with them) and linked it to over 30 cultural variants. Although their research cannot show that chimp culture is gene based it points to the fact that in order to prove that chimp culture arises as de novo product of chimp brains one now has to exclude both environmental and genetic forces. As the article says:

"The study does not link behaviors to specific genes or even conclude that there is a genetic explanation. Rather, it assesses whether genetic differences can be excluded as an explanation for each behavior; it finds that they cannot more than half the time.

This distinction may seem subtle, but the idea of animal culture turns on the requirement of first excluding ecological forces as an explanation for behaviors. The study now adds yet another hurdle to clear before making bold claims about culture. "I have no horse in this race," says lead author Kevin Langergraber, a molecular ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "I saw some studies that claimed they were settling this question, and I had gathered data that spoke to quite a different explanation."