Let’s continue with our thoughts on octopus intelligence.
When we speak of intelligence, we can find ourselves on a slippery slope. I once heard a biologist make a strong case for the exhibition of signs of intelligence in the slime mold.
Yes; a slime mold.
Slime molds, like other fungi, reproduce by releasing spores. When these spores become moist they go on an amoeba-like prowl, seeking bacteria to eat. Once they chow down on bacteria, they become a moving mat called a “plasmodium”. Plasmodia may move several feet a day. When conditions dry up, or they no longer have a decaying log or plant to lay on, they go into a “puffball” stage, in which they produce more spores. The puffballs are carried by the wind to infect new areas.
Few of us would question whether the slime mold is alive. You can run down the typical characteristics of life and find examples of growth, development, response to environment, homeostasis, et al. But intelligence? I think the jury is still out on that one.
To me, (and other scientists, more well versed in neuroscience than your humble teacher) intelligence is demonstrated through a demonstration of consciousness regarding one’s actions. We have recently seen examples of this among orangutungs, and last week’s “post”-er star, the octopus (octopi? octopuses?). Remember that the stealth killer octopus did return to his tank, only to repeat his actions on another night, remember? That’s either intelligence, or an indication that the cephalopod in question has seen way too many episodes of Dexter.
It’s one thing to debate intelligence in primates, marine mammals, or cephalopods – but what about bees? This month’s Scientific American contains a story on scientists’ exploration of consciousness among our little furry pollinating friend, Apis mellifera.
You can read the brief article here: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=exploring-consciousness
(I'm afraid you'll have to cut and paste the link in your adddress bar - it isn't going live for some reason. Probably something to do with my intelligence......)
Please focus your comment specifically on this article, rather then a simple statement of your personal opinion on whether or not bees (or slime molds) are intelligent.
Maybe our next cake should have the shape and texture of plasmodia? Yummy!
16 comments:
I never really thought about the level of consciousness insects had, let alone the honey bee. It seems as though many animals could be proven to have some level of consciousness or intelligence.
When the author talked about the tests that they use associating color and direction this quote jumped out at me and reminded me of the question you were asking:
"Although these experiments do not tell us that bees are conscious, they caution us that we have no principled reason at this point to reject this assertion. Bees are highly adaptive and sophisticated creatures with a bit fewer than one million neurons, which are interconnected in ways that are beyond our current understanding, jammed into less than one cubic millimeter of brain tissue."
That seems like an awfully small space to hold so many neurons--no wonder we underestimate small animals, like the honey bee.
On the topic of animals and their consciousness: what other animals have been proven to hold intelligence?
Caitlin R.
I also thought this quote was interesting because their neural density is ten times more than in mammals. The fact that they could use the different colors to figure out which direction to go impressed me as well. It also talked about how they could remember images in addition to colors and be able to indicate which one they saw.
The article also metions other aspects of thier life that show signs of conscienceness and intelligence. They live in complicated social organizations and are capable of making group decisions. They are able to communicate with each other about many different things as well. They can even remember their surroundings and can identify a specific place by its odor.
The artical says that some people have a hard time imagining that bees can exhibit consciousness becasue they are so different from us. We don't really know for sure, but the evidence that resulted from these experiments shows that there's more to them than we thought. The difficult part is that, so far, we have no way to really measure their level of consciousness. How are we supposed to know if they have a sense of self or are able to reflect on thier self? Because we don't know we can't rule out this possibility and we should keep an open mind about what other animals are capable of.
-Amanda O.
After reading this article I was not left thinking about whether bees exhibit consciousness. I'm not entirely sure that bees are "self-aware" and when they look in a mirror the first thing they say to themselves is "Wow, I need to get my antennae waxed..."
What this article really said was that bees have the ability to adapt to their environment remarkably well. They adapted in order to survive and prosper. After learning the color system or developing the "right-turn" strategies they were better equipped to survive. What this shows is the bee's amazing ability to adapt to its surroundings.
I also don't like the argument that was made near the end of the article. "Although these experiments do not tell us that bees are conscious, they caution us that we have no principled reason at this point to reject this assertion." Ok. So we're no better off than we were before these tests were done. Had I written this article, I would have focused on the bee's ability to adapt to its surroundings. It seems to be more relevant to the tests than whether the bees are self-aware or not. For all we know these "complex social behaviors" are a result of the bee's evolution. They evolved/adapted in such a way that these "societies" enabled them to get a leg up on the competition. It's similar to pack animals--safety and strength in numbers. Becoming a pack was the logical choice for survival so it happened. Same could be said for our cities and civilization in general. Does that mean we're the same as the bee? Ooooh...
-Mike Diamond.
I think all animals with pack instinct have some sort of intelligence, or a way of communicating and carrying on with everyday tasks, otherwise how would they survive? Without any thought process an animal would surely die even if it were simply to know when to mate. Some may say it is instinct, but what is instinct without a thought process. For instance in the study by “Martin Giurfa of the University of Toulouse in France and Mandyam Srinivasan and Shaowu Zhang, both at the Australian National University in Canberra, trained free-flying bees, using sugar water as a reward, in a variety of complex learning tasks. The neuroethologists taught the bees to fly in and out of tall cylinders with one entryway and two exit holes. Each bee had to choose one of two exits to leave the cylinder and to continue her flight. (In bee colonies, males are a small minority and do only one thing—and that only during the virginal flight of the colony’s queen.)”
Ashleen
I don't know what to say about this article. I mean I thought it was interesting that the bee could tell between the different colors, but it is still hard to say if this is considered intelligence. I do agree with Ashleen that when any kind of animal, insect, or other creatures travel in packs this does make it seem like they are intelligent enough to communicate and work together.
Stacy R.
I think that many animals have different levels of intelligence to live. Everything will do what it has to to survive. Yes these bees might be thinking in spans of 10 or so seconds doesn't compare to the level of though of a human. Yes intelligence beyond ourselves is out there, but the fact still remains that there id a distinct difference between human intelligence and animal intelligence. Some animals may be better equipped than us and other may have better techniques, but I don't see them studying us. The answer is yes animals have the capacity of intelligence just like anything else, we just need to be careful defining the line between reaction and action after a thought. There may just be a subtle difference.
Andy H
I don't really know what to say in response to this article, but as I've said before, humans defined intelligence. It makes sense that we would define it in a way that leaves us the most intelligent species. We may have intelligence of a very human kind, but how can we be sure that there isn't a species out there that has a different, even more potent kind of intelligence? A species with a higher level of consciousness may have realized that disrupting the natural order of the planet can only lead to catastrophe. Perhaps it takes more intelligence to be content with one's lot in life. Fighting evolution is the game we're playing, and it doesn't seem to be working out too well, for us, or for these other species that we consider to be less 'intelligent' than our own.
Sorry Mr. Engler, I know you asked us to specifically comment on the article, I just really needed to get that off my chest. I read some newspaper editorial a couple of days ago that was arguing that medical research was morally sound in every way. . .and rawr. Anyway.
I'd just like to mention that I learned about bees dancing to share information from Ms.Frizzle (great woman), and that everything I've learned about honey bees since then has made me think about that Magic School Bus episode. Though Ms.Frizzle did teach me about the dancing, she left out the parts about color and image recognition, both of which are really fascinating. I'm not even sure I could handle that kind of an exercise - I have too many other things going through my head, and I'd probably end up getting distracted. Bees may have a very tiny amount of brain tissue, but since that tissue is so concentrated, doesn't that make their design more efficient than ours? Nearly 30% of our daily caloric intake is expended to support our brain tissue, when it seems that a smaller, more efficient design was available at some point on the evolutionary ladder. It seems to me that honey bees have gone about developing a more "technologically advanced" neurological system than homo sapiens - aka a smaller one - think of cell phones and cameras that never seem to stop shrinking.
Who knows what they're hiding in the corners of those nice little pinhead-sized thinkers?
Jennie M.
P.S. Mr. Engler, I just realized that I never gave you my lab report and reflective essay from two weeks ago!!! I'm so sorry, and I'll have those for you on Monday, if you're still willing to accept them. Have a good weekend!!!!
I always wondered how far bees fly in order to get their daily honey. Several kilometers… Considering how small they are, this is quite remarkable. It is amazing that they are able to find their way back. That seems to be proof of a pretty good memory. Their ability of creating an “incorporated a map of their environment” is surprised me.
I am not very impressed that bees can distinguish between different colors. Don’t they have to do that in order to find the blossoms of flowers? But I was amazed that you can train bees. I would never have expected that you could make bees do a certain thing just by rewarding them with sugar water.
But how does their ability of finding their way through a maze proof that they are conscious? Does the ability of adapting to the environment imply that they are conscious?
These are all really thoughtful, great comments.
Several of you make some distinction about "thoughtfulness" and "self-consciousness" as measure of intelligence.
Put a dog in front of a mirror, and the dog will have no sense that it is looking at it's own reflection.
Are dogs intelligent? Do they demonstrate consciousness? Have any of you ever walked into a room and knew just from looking at your dog's expression that he had done something "bad"?
It took humans ten of thousands of years to develop self-consciousness, or self-awareness.
"I think therefore I am" (So when thinking about consciousness, don't put Descartes before the horse.)
Wow. I feel sorry for all the bees who were needlessly subjected to maze tests so that human researchers could say, "We still don't know..."
The part of the article I found the most interesting was this:
"The neural density in the bee’s brain is about 10 times higher than that in a mammalian cerebral cortex, which most of us take to be the pinnacle of evolution on this planet. In humans, widespread loss of cerebral cortex, as in the vegetative patient Terri Schiavo, leads to an irreversible loss of consciousness. That is not to say that a cerebral cortex is necessary for consciousness in creatures with a different evolutionary heritage."
So in a human being, conciousness is tied to the physical brain, but in another species, it might not be? I'm not going to lie; it makes me think of the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Yes, I am a nerd, thanks.) But the whole concept of the Star-Child is just this: a conscious entity that is not tied to a body.
Obviously, science fiction is far from reality as we know it. But how much do we really know? If researchers can't even figure out whether or not bees are conscious, isn't it possible that something like slime mold, that we dismiss as "too different" from ourselves to be intelligent, may actually be? I'm just saying.
And I think that our next cake can be whatever shape you want, Mr. E!
I have to agree here with Rebecca, people often think that we are the smart and/or the most intelligent creatures on the face of the planet. However, in this article they mention that a honey bee’s cerebral cortex is ten times the size of a human’s and yet, we are the top of the food chain. Why? Is it simply because we eat just about everything. Think about the dinosaurs most of those guys do not have such big brains let alone cortexes. Yet, they were the top of the food chain for millions of years. How did they survive?
Another thing that caught my eye is that the researcher say the in order for an animal to be intelligent, it’s brain must be able to have a large stream of consciousness that is filled with raw sensations. An example would be like when the author fall off a sea cliff. He states, “One moment I am exquisitely aware of my feet on all too smooth rock, reaching upward with my left hand for a handhold. The next I am airborne, my right hand bloody, my right rib cage aching. After catching my breath and shouting to my anxious belayer that I’m okay, I am filled with adrenaline for having survived yet another fall, can’t contain my enthusiasm, and scream. Today only the bruised rib remains as a testament to how much of the stream of consciousness is pure sensation.” So, know am intrigued by what Mr. Englar said in his blog post, would anyone of us consider a dog to be intelligent. Even though the dog clearly has not raw sensation of looking into the mirror. I would be my opinion that not all dog breeds are the same and therefore, not all dogs would act the same; once, placed in front of a mirror. For example, a labrador is intelligent enough to figure out how to open a cabinet door without any proper training; whereas a pomeranian probably would not have the intelligence to figure out how to open it without proper training.
My first thoughts aftering reading this article lead me to think that bees aren't necessarily "intelligent". I don't really think that bees actually do show real signs of consciousness, they just have an extreme ability to adapt to their environment and survive. I definately agree with the previous comments saying that by traveling in pacts bees can better understand ways to cope with their environment. I also thing that their strong ability to do amazing and "intelligent" things has a lot to do with being around the same things and the same environment their entire lives. They learn and therefore they make conscious decissions. This reminds me of some videos that are on U Tube that show animals thinking in order to achieve a specific task. For example a dog patiently nudges a chair away from the table so he can have something to jump up on to the counter from. Also there was a video of a badger trapped in a cellar hole and moves a board against the wall in order to climb up it and escape. I think that when animals are placed in a particular place for so long they can learn methods of survival or escape which in turn can be translated into intelligence.
-Heidi
"Although these experiments do not tell us that bees are conscious, they caution us that we have no principled reason at this point to reject this assertion." This quote may not necessarily help the authors article about the conciousness and intelligence of bees, but it does open the door for much further questioning. Personnaly, I had never even considered honey bees to be intelligent creatures (although they can travel miles from their hive and be able to return to the exact place just by memory). Bees and insects are so small that they are commonly over-looked when thinking about animal intelligence. The tests that the scientists performed showed signs, but not evidence, of consciousness in bees, and although the results were inconclusive they showed that even insects could be intelligent. So where do we go from here; without testing all creatures we have no idea how intelligent they all are. It justs creates a huge void in the perception of animal intelligent.
Practicly every creature must have a level of intelegence. All organisms adapt and change. In order to do either they must take stock of the world around them. Sure a bacteria can't talk,or add two and two and make four. But it can understand that somthing is killing it off, and respond in an inteligent manner right?
Da cleava
So I really thought I had responded to this when I was supposed to, but I don't think anyone died because of it, so that's good. I think in general people don't give animals as much credit regarding their intelligence as they should recieve. Like reptiles. I have owned several, and people think of them as having instincts and nothing else at all for brains, but I don't think that's true. Snakes are maybe a bit further back in the intelligence level, but they are cunning and learn who their owners are and are calm when being handled by them. Right now I have a lizard who, at first was skittish and scared of everyone. Now he knows me and is fine with me walking in and out of the room while he gets defensive with other people. He also learned that his food dish is for food and will stand on it until I bring him food for it. It can't just be instincts.
So that all doesn't have much to do with bees, but since that's what everybody else was talking about I felt like being different. Anyways, it's still basically the same thing, people don't give animals credit where it's deserved. One of these days the octopusses are gonna take over the world.
Dan
I've always thought that animals have had some level of conciseness and intelligence. Not to the extent where they can learn complex things or evaluate actions of other organisms, but they have to be able to think. They would have to have some level of thought process to survive. I would think that even something as simple as just knowing to eat would require a bit of thinking and intelligence. I agree with Jennie on who are we to say that bees are intelligent. Just because doing actions such as reflecting on ones self requires intelligence, doesn't mean that simple actions such as eating doesn't require it as well.
Katie B
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