Anyone who issues this kind of criticism, as is inevitable when these animal stories come up on HN, needs to provide a consistent, objective framework explaining why I should not regard their perceived individuality (and accompanying emotional state) as merely the output of a very complex, deterministic state machine. I can think of no reasonable standard which would produce evidence for the theory that your own behavior is everything short of magical, but an animal's behavior is all mimicry, evolutionarily derived to be advantageous for survival, but not indicative of that magical personhood. What evidence should I take to be suffficient proof of the proposition that your emotions are real and the birds' aren't.
A sensible defense against poisoning? Just because evolutionary psych seems intuitive doesn't mean that every seemingly inuitive speculation passes for evolutionary psych. Do you stop eating for a day when your friend has diarrhea from a meal 12 hours earlier? Didn't your highly social species also evolve in an environment where food poisoning was a concern?
On a meta note, while I realize that it's science reporting, which is generally of bad quality -- why does every article on HN about some research findings receive at least one comment from someone at a keyboard who thinks he has a better explanation than people who spent months putting this work together. (Many of whom have committed their lives to this field)
Do you like it when, e.g., a client dismisses hours of your work because it doesn't have the latest X which he only heard about last week, and really has no clue how it works or whether that would be applicable? Don't we all generally think that such a person is an assclown? How is this different?
Or to put it another way, given a short sunmary of the story made for a public which reads at the eight grade level (at best) -- if a person could generate the criticism given that simple input, how/why would it be that the authors who invest their own careers in the research wouldn't have anticipated and addressed it?
> if a person could generate the criticism given that simple input, how/why would it be that the authors who invest their own careers in the research wouldn't have anticipated and addressed it?
People who work in the field do also level the same criticism, quite frequently; teleological and anthropomorphizing explanations are extremely controversial topics in biology. The critique that some researchers jump to such explanations more quickly than the evidence warrants reappears frequently, and the critique that popular-science writers and journalists do so is basically universal. Most researchers also try to avoid doing so. You'll often find such explanations in scare quotes in papers, with it being clear that they're an evocative shorthand, not part of the scientific conclusions: the researchers really have a certain set of scientific conclusions about an observed phenomenon, which they refer to as a "funeral" as shorthand, but the scientific conclusions don't usually include any attempt to prove a strong analogy with human funerals. (It does somewhat depend on the journal how strictly such careful treatment of metaphors is enforced.)
In this case, the BBC article is a lot more anthropomorphizing than the original article (linked at the bottom), which doesn't make any conclusions about mourning or similarity to human funeral practices.
Ironically, you provide another demonstration of the difficulty of guessing other people's inner state from a smattering of evidence based on their actions, since you've completely missed the mark on my own. And I actually am human, which is what your brain is optimized for; how do you expect to do with something alien?
In particular, I would not claim that human emotions are that special and it is plainly obvious that evolution has left its mark all over them.
Further, you may wish to consider re-reading my post carefully and considering why I used the phrase "based on the info given in this article"; compare to the same post but with that clause struck. You may discover something useful about my inner mental state as I was writing my post.
[...] why I should not regard their perceived individuality (and accompanying emotional state) as merely the output of a very complex, deterministic state machine.
A sensible defense against poisoning? Just because evolutionary psych seems intuitive doesn't mean that every seemingly inuitive speculation passes for evolutionary psych. Do you stop eating for a day when your friend has diarrhea from a meal 12 hours earlier? Didn't your highly social species also evolve in an environment where food poisoning was a concern?
On a meta note, while I realize that it's science reporting, which is generally of bad quality -- why does every article on HN about some research findings receive at least one comment from someone at a keyboard who thinks he has a better explanation than people who spent months putting this work together. (Many of whom have committed their lives to this field)
Do you like it when, e.g., a client dismisses hours of your work because it doesn't have the latest X which he only heard about last week, and really has no clue how it works or whether that would be applicable? Don't we all generally think that such a person is an assclown? How is this different?
Or to put it another way, given a short sunmary of the story made for a public which reads at the eight grade level (at best) -- if a person could generate the criticism given that simple input, how/why would it be that the authors who invest their own careers in the research wouldn't have anticipated and addressed it?