Ethology for Writers

I was on the Ethology for Writers at Arisia this weekend. Here are my notes:

Definition: study of the behavior of non-human animals.

Comments: There was a comic I saw years ago. A collection of different animals such as a horse, a monkey, a human, a giraffe, an elephant. In the thought balloon over each were the words “And God created <insert animal here> in his own image…”

The definition of ethology has that same sort of arrogance. Similar to the division of animals between invertebrate and vertebrate animals—as if vertebrates, which contain humans, were the important group and all other animals lumped together regardless of heritage or adaptation.

A better approach is to include humans in ethology as another animal. Or, it’s possible, the distinction allows uncorrupted study of non-human animals and the inclusion of humans would inevitably torque the study around us.

As writers, we are writing for an audience of humans. That constrains us.

I think, for our purposes, we can list a few basic principles:

1. Behavior derives from evolutionary heritage and adaptation. This does not limit its capacity but it does orient its expression. Humans have two hands and two eyes. What we do personally begins there. But it could end with an enhanced human Shiva.
2. Evolutionary change is drive by variation and natural selection. Organisms retain capabilities as long as they are useful and/or are not too expensive to remove. Evolution loves to repurpose otherwise “useless” components to new purposes. Horses run on their middle finger. The other bones have been repurposed to support that effort. Our reptile ancestors have many bones in their lower jaw. Mammals have but one—the mandible. Two of those ancient bones were repurposed to the mammalian middle ear.
3. My definition of “conscious” is quite broad. It means the animal is aware of the consequences of its actions as an entity. The degree of this “consciousness” varies by species and individual. My suspicion is an ant is not conscious. A cuttlefish is. Once this awareness is in place, it changes the dynamics of behavior.
4. Behavior, then, can be inherited (typical of stereotypy) or learned or a blend of the two. My own feeling is as we progress upward on the axis of stereotypy we probably progress downward on the access of consciousness.
5. Common categorical behavior across the breadth of a species is probably indicative of some heritability. Unique categorical behavior within species groups is likely product of a cultural aspect. (By “culture,” I mean group behavior that retains knowledge independent of biology. I.e., termite hunting in chimps or sinking ships by orcas.) In human terms, common ground might be the existence of special procreative behaviors such as marriage, music, group organization. This capability is likely inherited. The individual instantiation of these categories is not inherited but preserved in the culture.

For purposes of fiction, I think we can broadly discuss two basic aspects of how ethology can influence writing:

1. Behaviors animals have in common with human beings. E.g.: mammals rear their young. Humans, as mammals, do the same. Fictionally, this allows the reader to feel common ground to the animal/alien/mythic creature in question.
2. Behaviors animals that are unique to them and not common with human beings. E.g.: cattle offspring are born quite ready to walk, move, and eat—given a little start up time. Human offspring can’t even thermoregulate properly for several months. Fictionally, this creates contrast between the human and the animal/alien/mythic creature. 

All animal behaviors (as well as human) exceed the bare necessity required by survival and reproduction. 

 

The advantage of cognitive mediated behavior is that it enlarges the behavioral repertoire of the animal to handle future events that cannot easily be extrapolated from past adaptations. Evolution does not know the future. However, animals that are in general better prepared for an unexpected future do better than more specialized animals over long periods of time. However, repertoire can only derived from the animals evolutionary heritage. If it’s advantageous for humans to have a third eye that can see x-rays, we’re not going to develop one because we don’t have the biological mechanism to present it and have it honed by natural selection.

 

There’s another approach where a given animal is given human characteristics—the Mowgli stories, for example. The tension between the animal nature and human nature of the characters drives the dramatic tension.

 

Okay, okay. Enough about analysis. What can we use?

 

I’m in SF so I’m not going to play in the fantasy camp. 

 

If you’re world building in SF you’re interested in ethology for three reasons: aliens, beasts, future humans. (Which is another word for aliens.)

 

For my money, over the last billion years or so, earth has pretty much explored all possibilities of form given the earth environment. For physiological adaptation, you can go back to Ediacaran all the way to the present. But you won’t get much in the way of behavior. It’s pretty certain that some dinosaurs nested and probably reared their young. But it’s debatable.

 

Behavior is the province of the present. I’d start with the character goal of the alien/beast/future human. 

 

Vertebrate examples:

1. Stickleback fish and some other similar fish. The female leaves the eggs with the mated male. The make cares for them and doesn’t eat for the duration of the hatching and raising of the fry. If it survives the experience, it will make no distinction between the fry and other pray. Some sharks nurse similarly.
2. Many reptiles are the deposit and leave them there philosophy with their offspring. Of those, some engage in cannibalism—that is, they make little distinction between same species and extra-species meals. However, some reptiles—notably alligators—make and guard the nest and will actively come to the defense of the young. At some point, the young mature enough to leave the area near the nest and from then on are considered a competitive adult.
3. I like cuckoos. They are a high stereotypy—and probably less conscious—organism. The adults have little interaction except for mating. Since the cuckoo leaves its eggs in the nest, there is no rearing. Consequently, there has been shown some specialization of cuckoo subgroups towards particular species with the newly hatched young more closely mimicking the host species.
4. There are many examples in primates, elephants, cetaceans, and birds where quite sophisticated behaviors and cultures exist in the absence of obvious language—at least, language as humans perceive it. Corvids have been shown to have knowledge persist across generations without the benefit of language. No one knows how.
5. There’s some evidence that dolphins can project sonar images of an object under discussion. To my knowledge, this is still debatable. While it is in the bandwidth of their sonar, it’s not clear how to prove this.
6. A lot of vertebrate behavior is oriented around the ecological niche they have to live in. For example, elephants have a matriarchal society. Non-forest elephants are incredibly destructive to the local are.  Before they were decimated and the area around them destroyed, they had a roughly fifty year circle where they would cycle through. It’s not an accident that this is a bit less than the age of a matriarch. It gives a young elephant time to cycle through the path and then remember it for the next round.
7. More on elephants: apparently, the older bull elephants tended to keep younger bulls in check. However, they also attract poachers. Without the older bulls around, the younger bulls are much more destructive.
8. One thing that I wish were more explored in fiction is the cross-species cooperation. Cooperation is selected for at least as much if not more than direct competition. There are a number of examples:
1. Crocodilians and wading birds. The birds tend to nest near the crocs. It’s not clear what the mutual advantages are. One hypothesis is the crocs scare off the egg stealers and get the tasty chicks that fall out of the nest. I can buy the egg stealers but the birds would have to lose a lot of nestlings to make it worth the crocs while. Also, given the normal diet of the croc, a nestling is pretty small potatoes.
2. Ostriches and zebras: sight vs smell. This is a fairly obvious case of mutualism. It’s also the case that there’s no possible competition between them.
3. Coral grouper and moray eel: if the grouper’s prey goes into a rock, it signals the eel to go after it. The grouper gets the shredded bits.
4. Remoras and sharks: remoras have been following sharks so long that they’ve developed an attachment sucker on their head. They eat the remainder the shark leaves behind. Not so sure what’s in it for the shark.
5. Coyotes and badgers mutually hunt ground squirrels.
6. Tarantulas and frogs: tarantulas protect the frogs and lets them live with her. The frogs eat the ants that are trying to eat her eggs.
7. Pistol shrimp and goby. The goby sees predators and alerts the pistol shrimp. The pistol shrimp digs a burrow for them to both live in. They pair bond for life. Figure that one out.
8. Ravens guiding wolves to prey
9. Carrion beetles with mites. Carrion beetles lay their eggs in the carcass. The mites eat any eggs other than the carrion beetles. Beetles carry the mites from carcass to carcass.
10. In the 1860’s orcas drove baleen whales to a whaling station in Australia where they would be killed. The whale would be left out overnight so the orcas cold feed.
9. One of the more interesting ideas to come out of paleontology in the last decade is the predator/prey relationships. If you examine something like the Serengeti, you’ll see a bunch of animals fitted closely to their niche. Small cat sized predators. Medium sized predators. Large predators. Similarly, you’ll small herbivores, medium, etc. Enormous species diversity. However, if you look at the paleontological record in the Jurassic or Cretaceous, you won’t see this. One  hypothesis is that even very large animals hatched out at a fairly small size. This meant you had a single species that, as it grew up, occupied the size niches from birth to adulthood. A baby T-rex for a leopard. A juvenile T-rex for a lion. And an adult T-rex.

Invertebrate examples

These are a lot harder to tease out. There have been a few studies of the neurology of invertebrates showing that just random chemical variation can present multiple options for given behavioral decision. Some have interpreted this as “free will” or evidence of sentience. I’m not in this camp. It’s not at all clear to me that a planarian can possibly have free will.

We can’t conceive of exercising memory without consciousness. Therefore, it’s very hard for us to imagine how that happens. Instead, we place the burden of consciousness on the organism to make us feel better.

It’s fairly clear one can have multiple behavior options and intelligent decision making in the absence of consciousness. We see it in ChatGPT, for example. And, given such a system, there is a potential to select for intelligence as this gives better long term viability for the organism.

Thus, you can have complex behaviors without any associated consciousness.

1. Cephalopods. You can’t have a discussion of invertebrate behavior without octopuses and cuttlefish. It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law.
1. They have strong ability to solve problems.
2. They modify their behavior based on the circumstances. During mating there are big tough guys and little not so touch guys. While the big guys are displaying, the little guys slide in and get the girl.
3. Not sure they are actually conscious but they are the best candidate we have in the invertebrate world.
4. They have a networked brain—this gives some credence to the idea that intelligence arises inevitably above a certain neural complexity. Or, at least, it presents the opportunity for evolution to select for intelligence.
5. They do not have a social existence. Both O’s and C’s are solitary except at mating time. This violates a long standing hypothesis that intelligence arises from social interaction. Certainly, that correlation is viable in vertebrates.
6. They no not have long lives. Neither O’s nor C’s live all that long. Breaking another hypothesis that long lives are necessary for intelligence.
7. So, we have intelligent behavior in a non-social animal. This means that though it might have sophisticated behavior, that behavior is not oriented around a social existence. O’s have been shown to engage in behavior that might be construed as play. How does play help a non-social animal?
2. Insects are another group being investigated. A lot of work has been done with honeybees and bumblebees. They learn. They appear to have the capacity to mitigate a behavior based on a previous state. I.e., they can have an “emotional” state going into a task and have that state affect the outcome.
3. Cost/benefit analysis is rampant in invertebrates. It’s been demonstrated over and over again. Crayfish make informed decisions when presented with a positive appetite reward coupled with a potential predator signal. This sort of behavior is shown time and again in cockroaches, bees, ants, etc.
4. Eusocial insects (bees, ants, termites) do seem to have an “intelligence” that is embodied in the group rather than in individuals. That is, interactions between members of the group produce positive outcomes even though the individual actions may be quite simple.

Examples in fiction

There was a very interesting story I read a long time ago about a frog-like alien and a human teaming up for a goal. All of the story from the set up to the finish are lost to the mists of time but the character of the frog alien contrasting to the human remains. The frog alien only responded to its own self interest. It was not interested in friendship with the human, did not care for him—did not care at all. The frog had only self interest in mind. He was the perfect rational economic person. The human, on the other hand, had feelings of honor, obligation, and friendship.

By the end of the story the maguffin was achieved (that is another panel) with the human baffled and confused and the frog alien, having achieved its goal, moves on. I think there might have been a sort of coda where the frog alien decides it’s in his own best interest to maintain a relationship with the human.
The point of the story were the irreconcilable differences between frog and human. They could achieve their goals together but had little common ground.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle postulate an elephant derived alien where the behavioral paradigms were based on acts of dominance and submission—which humans kept screwing up. The aliens were clearly vertebrate mammalians—much closer to us than other phyla.

In my own work, I invented the Centaurs for the Future Boston anthology. Centaurs resemble a preying mantis top stuck on a sow bug body. They were context driven—that is, were a more digital kind of conscious rather than our continuous analog version. They were also laid their eggs in the sea and the survivors returned to their ancestral home as larvae which pupate into an adult. Thus, there are no Centaur children and only intellectual husbandry to keep the adult population from eating the offspring. I got this from a lot of invertebrate groups and the way some vertebrates care for their young by not eating rather than eating them. When the “not eating” period is ended, the offspring might be fair game.

The Role of Lies

I’ve been watching Hogfather recently.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

I’ve seen it before but I’ve been rather interested in comfort food lately and Hogfather filled the bill.

 

For those who are unfamiliar, Hogfather is Terry Pratchett’s take on creating a Christmas tale. Hogfather, the television series, an adaptation of the novel. In Pratchett’s Discworld, Hogwatch is remarkably similar to Christmas in that there are presents, an archetype Santa Clause like being, yet no hint of Christianity. It’s more an investigation of Christmas the holiday rather than Christmas the Holy Day.

 

I will not give away any part of the plot—it is a wonderful story—but I will try to get at something important the film talks about. This is the role of illusion—lies—in human society. The foreground metaphor is the Hogfather—the Santa Clause equivalent—but the background for that are all the other illusions: ownership, justice, mercy, honesty, etc. These are no more real than Santa Clause yet we act as if they have heft and substance like a lump of iron.

 

Stories matter. Words matter.

 

This is where I get upset with the current climate. In human beings there is a tension between what we believe and what is factually real. The sun is a great ball of gas and radiation. It is also the symbol of light and grace. Justice the dispassionate determination of the role of the state with regards to crime. 

 

It is also a euphemism of revenge and punishment. In human beings, we tend to slant towards the belief rather than the fact. I remember reading somewhere that there was a selective advantage to running from a tiger that is imaginary to remaining and being eaten by one you didn’t believe was there. Thus, human bias is born. (I do not remember who said it at I apologize.)

 

The comfort I find in science is that if you examine a scientific proposition, you will find in its ultimate heritage observable, experimental facts it is based on. The whole concept of dark energy came from an observation that the universe appears to be expanding faster the further away you look at it. The expanding universe came from Hubble’s observation that all celestial objects observed at a sufficient distance appeared to be moving away from us. That observation was based on the “red shift,” the idea that objects emitting light that are also moving away from us shift their frequency lower (toward the red, hence “red shift”) to compensate that light in a vacuum always travels at the same speed. That was demonstrated by the Michelson-Morley experiment that showed that light moved at the same direction no matter how it was measured in a vacuum—one of the sources of Einstein’s theory of relativity. 

 

This particular path is a bit simplified but shows that if you drill down far enough, you will find the facts and the long chain of analysis arriving at the proposition. One can agree or disagree with the chain of analysis—that’s the basis of scientific debate—but experimental evidence trumps everything else. If the experiment disproves the hypothesis, back to the drawing board. This is why published and peer reviewed experiments are so important, to make the facts clear. Experimental facts are the foundation upon which the scientific edifice is constructed.

 

This is the reason when a false story is accepted as truth—worse, used as proof for a belief—is so terrible. It’s not the story in and of itself, it’s the way the story then is accepted, absorbed, and becomes part of the structure of our social world. Justice and mercy are invented concepts just like revenge and religion. We decide how true they are. Once we’ve decided that, we act—whether or not the original story was true or not. 

 

Because, for good or ill, to humans, truth is malleable. It’s up to us to penetrate the rhetoric and determine what we need to know. Is this justice or revenge? Is this mercy or self-interest? Do I believe this man or am I just following him because he validates how I think the world should work and not how it does work?

 

The Rosewood Massacre happened because white people believed a black man had raped a white woman. In 1931, eight black men were accused and seven went to prison because of fabricated rape story. Hitler rose to power on the lie that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s loss in World War I. Stories matter. Words matter.

 

The theme of Mother Night (Kurt Vonnegut) is be careful who you pretend to be for that is who you will become. 

 

Similarly, beware the lies you espouse and accept, for they will become your truth.

 

Let Humans Be Human

Orgel’s Second Rule is “Evolution is smarter than you are.”

 

(Picture from here.)

 

I first heard this rule (unattributed at the time. Attributed by Francis Crick to Leslie Orgel) back when I was an undergraduate zoology major. It does not attribute intelligence to evolutionary design. It simply states that the solutions natural selection, spontaneous variation, and deep time create appear ingenious to mere humans. 

 

Humans have the irritating trait of either elevating humans to a divine pedestal or degrading them to an undistinguished member of homogenous animals. It is a character flaw we share as a species. 

 

Every species is selected to excel in their particular niche. The front leg of a horse is magnificently built to run on its middle finger. A human is magnificently built to model the world within its neocortex. That limb design did not evolve to pull a cart. Nor did the human neocortex evolve to build skyscrapers. Yet, both manage to do so.

 

This particular set of issues came out of a Thanksgiving conversation as to what was, and was not, more the purview of humans as opposed to other animals. To continue the skyscraper analogy, I’ve heard conversations saying something like “humans are superior because they build skyscrapers” responded to with “well, termites build complex mounds.” Both are true and neither prove the point of the conversant.

 

This particular conversation centered around music. All human cultures have some common qualities. They have stories. They have rules about reproduction and rearing. They have rules regarding community behavior. They have music. The implementations of these can be vastly different but, I think, the fact of their presence is inarguable. I would tend to suggest that qualities that appear in all cultures are likely to have a biologic component. 

 

Yes. I know that all of these cultures invest in the rearing of their children so that we can’t really say there’s a biological underpinning to these qualities—they could just be an artifact of the rearing process. The old nature vs nurture argument. Things might be different if a human were reared in isolation. My only response to that is a human reared in isolation would be barely human. Stories of feral children suggest this. If we have to be around humans to be human, that suggests the biological underpinnings of humanity are a combination of learning and heredity. Therefore, I don’t think it’s such a stretch to think that qualities shared by all of humanity would be any different.

 

I think both of these approaches—that the human species is singular or the human species is one with other animals—are problematic. Continuing to use music as a concept here, if we look at our closest relatives, chimpanzees, they do not have music as we know it. There is evidence of rhythm and spontaneous drumming that begins to approach what humans can do—see here—but we’re back to boiling down a behavior to such a low common denominator that I think the comparison becomes meaningless.

 

There are animals that can recognize melodies—elephants, for example—but do they recognize them as music as we do. Elephants, whales, wolves, and birds recognize and communicate with complex acoustic patterns. Some repeat them. Some repeat them with innovation. Some use them for identification. But I don’t think we should use the word “music” for them unless we’re willing to redefine music to something that is not useful in human discourse.

 

In the case of elephants, birds, and whales, these sounds can be used for individual identification—more akin to names than music. Do animals spontaneously burst into song as an expression of joy to the world? The problem is we don’t know. If a whale sings by itself in the Arctic Sea, is it singing at all? Or is it calling out to find someone else? To extend its community? To attract a mate? 

 

For a long time, ethologists were extremely limited in determining the inner state of an animal. If you have an animal respond to a treat, all you can really say about it is that it responds to a treat under these circumstances. Complex behaviors can be taught by the right training regimen but the internal mental state of the animal could only be inferred from the animal’s behavior. It could not be proven. 

 

The mammalian brain has many similarities between different species. Both humans and dogs, for example, have a neocortex, brain stem, thalamus, etc.—all the same parts but different in size and organization. Dogs, for example, have an enormous olfactory center in the brain compared to a human’s. As technology has improved, the internal state of animals can be sort of demonstrated by using fMRIs on brain activity. I mean “sort of” because there is an underlying assumption that if a given region of the brain demonstrably used in the human for a determined purpose is shown to activate in similar circumstances that the activation is common between the two species.

 

In 2020 a paper was published in PubMed that tested dogs shown images while in an fMRI machine. The dogs were shown facial images of strangers, the primary caregiver, and familiar people while the MRI tracked brain activity. It was shown that the region in humans involved in attachment and emotion were more activated when the images of the caregiver were shown than the other two images. Other studies have shown similar results reflecting oxytocin levels.

 

When this came out, it was suggested that dogs love their humans in the same way humans love their dogs. The studies do not show this at all. To do that, we’d have to know what both humans and dogs feel when they feel love. What it suggests to me is that one of the fundamental mammalian interactions might well be common between two species. (Of course, we will ignore the thousands of generations of dogs being bred to accept human authority. I.e., did we select them for this or is it a happy accident? Until we do the same test with a wolf or an elephant, we’ll never know, will we?)

 

This is further complicated with animals whose brain organization separated long before we had such things as neocortices—birds, for example. Mammals and the line the led to birds (via dinosaurs) split before there was anything resembling a mammal. The term “neocortex” means “new brain” and evolved in mammals after that split.

 

But going back to music. 

 

I am not saying music is the divine nature of human beings, arising de novo in the human species. In evolution, nothing arises de novo. Natural selection always works with what it has, not what it should have. So, for humans to evolve something music, some protomusic had to be there first. Something had to be present to be selected upon. I am saying that we evolved with it to the point that attributing “music” to non-humans can only be done by trivializing what it means to human beings.

 

It’s always been my thought we sang before we spoke. Music evokes emotion and the mechanism of emotion are primitive indeed. They were in the mammalian repertoire long before there were primates, much less human beings. Did we share calls like howler monkeys? Did we practice a cappella harmony out there on the prairie to find each other and console each other when the only thing we had was each other?

 

I think so.