- #36
baywax
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If a species that buries its feces survives longer as a result, then humans (who mix their feces with their ground water) don't have much longer to go. Long live the composting/combusting toilet.
Rebecca Moise said:I don't think humans do fare very well when they mix feces with drinking water.
In the animal world there are many ways of avoiding excessive contact with feces. Mole rats build specialized "latrine chambers" in their underground habitats. A new paper in Animal Behavior examines alternative ways to handle the sanitation issue. . .
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/tag/feces/
Cats burying their feces is a variant of behaviors found in different forms among many animals.
Rebecca Moise said:Probably sunlight also had something to do with the purification of the water, ridding it of disease producing organisms. There was a purification process, if natural rather than artificial. Without some kind of purification, the death rate in cities was high, so much so that without constant movement into the cities from the countryside the population could not maintain itself.
Beavers, by the way, do not maintain latrines in their lodges but rather defecate in water which surrounds the lodge. Probably plants, algae, sunlight, and maybe also currents help rid the water of disease producing organisms.
Different species have different methods form managing the disease/waste problem, of which the cat's burying is one variant, one presumably uniquely adapted to that species niche.
Rebecca Moise said:There is probably a lot to be learned from the behavior of beavers, including the interplay between instinct and learning. If you like beavers you might be interested that a woman named Dorothy Richards observed and wrote about beavers living on her property in upstate NY. Also she raised some beavers in her house.
http://users.snip.net/~qdi/uwr_beaversprite.html
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz made an interesting distinction between what he called "models for" and "models of," as I recall actually using the example of beavers' building projects. We humans, Geertz suggests, think about what we are doing and have in our minds a "model of," for example, building a road or building a house. Geertz thinks this is not true of animals. The beaver goes though certain motions by instinct and the end result is a dam, but animals (Geertz supposes) don't ask themselves why they are doing this, or even necessarily have in their minds an image of what they are doing. Whatever, in their minds, shapes their behavior is a "model for" ending up with a dam, but it is natural selection and evolution that shapes the outcome, not their own planning.
Richard Dawkins describes seeing beavers kept in a cage in a zoo with no access to building materials going through the motions of building a dam (or lodge) with sticks that did not in fact exist. Apparently this was blind instinct, an inclination to behave a certain way that, in the natural environment, would produce dams but which still operated without any possibility of this result.
Dorothy Richards, however, reports that despite her "house beavers" being provided access to a pool of water in her basement and building materials they used to construct lodges, when the beavers discovered upstairs parts of the house, they resourcefully turned on faucets and stopped up drains producing floods. This could not be instinct due to absence of anything like faucets in the environment of ancestral beavers. It seems that in their minds there was also a "model of" creating more water in the environment, and the ability to explore alternative ways of accomplishing this.
Beavers would thus seem to have one set of instincts involving need, pleasure, or inclination to go through the motions of building, along with other instincts involving need, pleasure or inclination to increase water in the environment. It is not that there is no instinct, in the second case, but that there are instincts which actually promote learning.
I guess the thread was confused some time ago, but not to lose it completely, consider instincts involving bodily waste. Some animals (not all) have an instinctive inclination (need?) to be clean. The cat may lick itself because it feels a need to do this, even when it is not dirty, but might also clean with special urgency when there is actual dirt. With more intelligence there can be more figuring out different means of accomplishing the instinctually-dictated end, such as a chimpanzee wiping its own or another chimp's messy bottom with leaves (as observed by Jane Goodall). Alternatively an animal might go through motions dictated by instinct without accomplishing anything other than going through these motions. Sometimes I have seen a cat make the motions of burying feces outside the litter box, with the feces still inside the box uncovered. Possibly it did not like the feel of the litter on its paws. It might be worthwhile to think about the implications of these different kinds of instincts, especially as regards the question of instincts that promote learning still influencing human behavior
Anyway beavers are interesting animals. I did not know they were the national symbol of Canada! In the United States too many people don't like beavers.
Rebecca Moise said:The first nations people were wise to hold the beaver in high esteem. They are both intelligent and extremely social. Both parents help raise the kits. When offspring become sexually mature, they leave their mother and original home to go off on their own. Mrs. Richards observed, however, that the father beaver accompanied them on their initial journey remaining with them a while longer. Each species has its own way of doing things, and there is probably much to be learned about different ways, for different species, of avoiding, or limiting, incestuous matings.
Our family became interested in beavers when we bought a lake in Michigan where there were beavers. The realtor was talking about blowing up the lodge to "make a nice beach" and we hoped, by getting enough family members to contribute that we could buy the whole lake, to prevent any such thing from occurring. As we learned more about beavers we were glad we had made this effort.
Rebecca Moise said:If the animal has a "choice" is this an instinct? Cats and other animals mark territory using urine and feces. Urine and feces may also be a sign of dominance. Under some circumstances even household pets may defecate on their owner's possessions. Is this the animal "choosing" to override the instinct? Or are there conflicting sets of instincts such as instincts governing body waste avoidance and instincts governing dominance?
BoomBoom said:There is always a choice to override an instinct IMO. An instinct would be just a tendency to react or behave a certain way in certain situations, but there is always a conscious choice. Animals can certainly be trained to not act on their instinctive behaviors. I see no reason why anyone would want to, but I bet you could train a cat NOT to use a litter box. :yuck:
After all, humans tend to avoid feces...is this instinctive, or does it just smell really bad to us? Which brings up another interesting point: are sense of taste and smell and what we consider good and repulsive instincts?
I see no reason in genetic heritage why instinctive bahaviors being passed down should be any different than the nature of any other gene or regulatory element being passed down.
Rebecca Moise said:I don't know if there is always a choice with instincts even for human beings. It would be interesting to find examples when choice seems to exist, and when it doesn't.
Rebecca Moise said:Sometimes one develops an aversion to eating again a particular food if one experiences severe nausea shortly after consuming this.
Rebecca Moise said:I've heard this can be a problem for cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, when there may be many different kinds of foods they come to associate with nausea, so their diet becomes uncomfortably restricted. If they really tried could they learn to disregard this instinct-driven behavior? Could they find ways to change this? I don't know.
Rebecca Moise said:I did not know marijuana could help with this. This introduces a new dimension, the human ability to change or override an instinctual response by the use of drugs or chemicals.
Chronos said:Er. aside from the logic bombs, circular reasoning, moving the goal posts and assuming facts not in evidence - I think you might be on to something. Are you seeking an autopsy? If so, will you agree to admit to any assertions demonstrated to be unreliable?
Asyncritus said:Sure. Go ahead.
But remember, the main point is: HOW did the instinct evolve? And enter the genome (if that's where it is).
baywax said:Through natural selection.
Similar behaviour is seen in salmon... fresh water to salt water transition and back again.
Their navigation is based on chemical and current sensing. A trait developed over millions of years of trial and error... and natural selection. This is a result of evolution.
Rebecca Moise said:As someone said in an earlier post, this is a science forum.
baywax said:Through natural selection.
Similar behaviour is seen in salmon... fresh water to salt water transition and back again.
Their navigation is based on chemical and current sensing. A trait developed over millions of years of trial and error... and natural selection. This is a result of evolution.
Rebecca Moise said:If this fascinating behavior of eels and salmon does not result from evolution and instinct, where does it come from? Perhaps I should know better than to ask that question. God put it there? Creationism? Is that the alternative theory? If not, then what? As someone said in an earlier post, this is a science forum.
Asyncritus said:At once, evolution theory is rendered impotent. I have yet to see mention of the word 'evolution' in the accounts I've read - though there's got to be some plank who will mention the E word.
Asyncritus said:Good questions Rebecca.
What's your answer?
Seconded.zomgwtf said:I think you should make a point by now and come out and say specifically what YOUR point is and what specifically you would like to know about the OTHER points. Right now your coming across as slightly arrogant and ignorant. No offense.
Asyncritus said:Yeah. That tired old catch-all 'explanation'!
Here's a little diagram for you:
Fish 1 (doesn't know where to go)------X------> Fish 2 (knows exactly where to go)
What happened at X?
Remember, natural selection can only 'select' from WHAT'S ALREADY THERE.
Oh yeah? How come their errors didn't kill them all?
An original few made it, let's say from the UK to the Sargasso Sea. That's 3000 miles.
Then they died.
Now the young somehow have to get back 3000 miles, in pitch blackness, to the UK.
How did they do it? Chemical and current sensing.
Gimme a break, willya?
baywax said:Trial and error as in "over millions of years".
The ones that made it back provided the mutations and traits for the next generation to make it back by "instinct" or "genetic survival superiority" to the ones that didn't make it back.
That's natural selection. Its a slightly better explanation than the bearded Dumbldorf in the clouds waving his wand and creating the migration of fish.
Trial and error as in "over millions of years".