The title doesn't match the paper though. People had already decoded the bird calls. What the paper was giving evidence to was that the birds themselves are cognitively decoding the calls.
I’m glad we’re doing this research. It makes me wonder how much time and potential we’ve wasted over the years actively assuming non-human animals were just rote automatons.
It seems like a meaningful amount of science has been spent on systematically dismantling pre-existing prejudice over the last hundreds of years (and thousands in some cases and cultures).
All humans are human.
Babies can feel pain.
Plants feel.
Animals think.
Just …
So much wasted time on what should have always been seen as true.
I get that some cultures already thought some of these things, but many of these were sadly not prevailing.
Yeah I think there's a lot of science news about how plants are capable of more than the average person thinks, but people tend to conflate that with some kind of conscious experience.
Some variety of learnings over the last several years. Many of them are sensationalized; but my simple statement was "plants feel"; and many of these values imply some level of "feeling":
A quick search reveals several other incidences of other "huh"-worthy thoughts; but my goal was "plants feel" and I would argue these are close enough to shorthand to "feel"
I think this is a huge error which collapses the most urgently important distinction at the heart of the entire issue. Plants do complex, interesting things, and we borrow from an already existing vocabulary to make analogies. So people will say plants "feel" or "communicate" or "see".
But those are automatic biological reflexes, and using words with connotations to conscious awareness to describe them makes people think they're the same thing. But a plant "feeling pain" is repurposing words about consciousness to mean new and different things. And I think people are seduced by it because it feels like being open-minded to new possibilities.
I think that there was a relatively recent panic to stop anthropomorphizing the rest of creation and that that rebellion against anthropomorphism clings so hard to "that's not how humans do it and stop thinking it is" that we commit the sin in the opposite direction - and declare everything as "definitely not a lived experience of another being" and "just rote programming" too early.
Of course plants have feelings and conscious experience, it's obvious to anyone who has spent time living with them. Plants literally think and solve problems, too. But you won't succeed in convincing anyone who doesn't understand such basic truths. Reducing a living being to a mere machine is so 19th century, but just as religions still influence how people see the world, it's going to take generations for science to "prove" it to satisfaction, and for the general public to accept it. We're still missing fundamental concepts, much less ability to measure and quantify it.
You'll probably like the biologist Michael Levin and his research, exploring what a mind actually is and seeing beyond what he calls our "mind blindness". https://www.drmichaellevin.org/
I don't think it's as obvious as you make it out to be. For one, what we consider evidence of "thinking" is autonomous action by a being as a whole. For as far as I know, there is no evidence that a plant's movements are governed by a central coordinating authority. Can your evidence distinguish between a plant having a single mind or each branch having decision authority of its own?
Interesting to me that you employ religion as the pejorative comparison here, when it's the inherent human religions that have perceived in plants gods and spirits since before the beginning of recorded time.
>Of course there's a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain.
But seriously, the articles you posted are inappropriately repurposing words normally associated with conscious experience, in order to get attention.
There is lots of evidence plants react to stimuli. There is no evidence they feel.
There's no reason to think that birds and trees don't routinely exuberate with joy, since cooperating with our needs in needful proportion brings us humans exuberance.
fortunately, there is a lot of evidence behind plant's feeling and thinking; enough so that if you were to expose yourself to it, and if you were willing to update your beliefs based on strong scientific evidence, I believe you'd change your view.
There's evidence for stunningly intricate, marvelously impressive biological function, but there's no evidence whatsoever for internal mental states.
What's happening is we borrow from a pre-existing vocabulary with connotations to conscious activity and we use it to describe automatic biological reflexes, and then some people lose track of whether it was an analogy or whether it was literal and start claiming plants can "feel."
11 distinct calls is something a rote automaton could easily cope with. So I don't think this study proves much of anything about birds' cognitive abilities.
I work in the field. The main takeaway is zebra finches (maybe other songbirds) can discriminate vocalizations based on function, even if they sound similar.
Generally, birds can tell apart categories of sounds e.g. vocalizations from different individual birds, male vs female, call vs song, conspecific vs heterospecific etc. The question is if birds can do it for specific function e.g. agonistic calls vs non-agonistic calls. Simple question but way harder to test because of associated contextual info. with vocalizations.
The paper is culmination of last decade of work (includes many of the past works) but this is the new result.
Interesting! Could you break this down further? Maybe specific examples of what you're mentioning might help - for instance, what "similar-sounding calls with different functions" are zebra finches discriminating between? What exactly are different situations of these functions? How exactly (and through what experiments) did she determine this?
And I read the article (but not her research paper), and have a vague idea, but it's tough to get a full grasp - and if this is just too difficult to fully explain, no worries!
A lot of interesting information here, but this one paragraph blew my mind:
> Although the birds occasionally made mistakes, they more often confused calls with similar meanings rather than similar sounds. “Their responses indicated they have a mental imagery of the meaning of their vocalisations,” Elie said. “In other words, that they understand the meaning of their call types.”
I remember hearing about an interesting paper; it argued that Zebra finch songs were as complex as recursively enumerable languages on the Chomsky hierarchy. I wanted to see if I could find it but came across another paper arguing that their embedded context sensitivity can be explained by simpler rules.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0908113106
Just the same, these little fellows are some of the cutest on our planet.
Left this comment as another computer science connection.
Coller foundation press release: https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/news-and-insights/pre...
The actual publication in Science: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ads8482
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.11.14.623689v1....
It seems like a meaningful amount of science has been spent on systematically dismantling pre-existing prejudice over the last hundreds of years (and thousands in some cases and cultures).
Just … So much wasted time on what should have always been seen as true.I get that some cultures already thought some of these things, but many of these were sadly not prevailing.
It's pretty easy to see that most things above plankton aren't rote automatons. Anyone claiming otherwise just has an agenda to sell.
Other than that you’re right.
Plants scream when harmed:
[0] https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-out-lou...
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stressed-plants-c...
Plants release VOCs when harmed:
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1lzg4x9/...
(OP's main comment has several sources)
Plants respond to audio stimuli (hearing, sorta):
[3] https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=24-P13-00035&s...
[4] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4102826/
A quick search reveals several other incidences of other "huh"-worthy thoughts; but my goal was "plants feel" and I would argue these are close enough to shorthand to "feel"
But those are automatic biological reflexes, and using words with connotations to conscious awareness to describe them makes people think they're the same thing. But a plant "feeling pain" is repurposing words about consciousness to mean new and different things. And I think people are seduced by it because it feels like being open-minded to new possibilities.
You'll probably like the biologist Michael Levin and his research, exploring what a mind actually is and seeing beyond what he calls our "mind blindness". https://www.drmichaellevin.org/
>Of course there's a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain.
But seriously, the articles you posted are inappropriately repurposing words normally associated with conscious experience, in order to get attention.
There is lots of evidence plants react to stimuli. There is no evidence they feel.
What's happening is we borrow from a pre-existing vocabulary with connotations to conscious activity and we use it to describe automatic biological reflexes, and then some people lose track of whether it was an analogy or whether it was literal and start claiming plants can "feel."
https://www.sci.news/biology/science-mimosa-plants-memory-01...
> The scientists show how Mimosa plants stopped closing their leaves when they learnt that the repeated disturbance had no real damaging consequence.
...
> Astonishingly, Mimosa can display the learned response even when left undisturbed in a more favorable environment for a month.
Generally, birds can tell apart categories of sounds e.g. vocalizations from different individual birds, male vs female, call vs song, conspecific vs heterospecific etc. The question is if birds can do it for specific function e.g. agonistic calls vs non-agonistic calls. Simple question but way harder to test because of associated contextual info. with vocalizations.
The paper is culmination of last decade of work (includes many of the past works) but this is the new result.
And I read the article (but not her research paper), and have a vague idea, but it's tough to get a full grasp - and if this is just too difficult to fully explain, no worries!
> Although the birds occasionally made mistakes, they more often confused calls with similar meanings rather than similar sounds. “Their responses indicated they have a mental imagery of the meaning of their vocalisations,” Elie said. “In other words, that they understand the meaning of their call types.”
Left this comment as another computer science connection.
>She then applied machine learning to analyse how information was encoded in the calls before testing her findings through behavioural experiments.