The Glade 4.0

I'm fairly certain such strong "emotional" bonds (whether there is an actual emotional attachment... human response... I question) between penguins are shattered every single day at the hands of predators, yet those populations manage to carry on and not jump over the cliff. Of course, that also ignore that this specific instance was likely artificially created anway.

Honestly, I think you're way over-anthropomorphising a couple of birds -- ascribing complex, abstract emotional thought to a creature that just isn't capable of them. We designate something as a "mating behavior" because we assume that penguins (or bears, or whatever) think like we do. We know that we see these behaviors in the context of mating, but we don't really know what they mean to the penguin. In all likelihood, they don'y really "mean" anything to the penguin; not in the way that we think of meaning, certainly. The assumption that nesting behaviors necessarily signifies sexual attraction is just that -- an assumption based only on correlation and personal bias. And the idea that it signifies some kind of existential emotional attachment is just ... fairly well absurd, even if the former is true. There are not, as far as we can tell, very many animals that demonstrate anything like human self-awareness: higher primates, arguably dolphins, not so much penguins. In short, their brains are sufficiently different from ours that trying to translate "penguin thought" to human analogs is somewhat of an exercise in absurdity.

Edit:

^ What he said.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Stathol:

What's the documentation like on non-reproductive copulation among penguins?

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I don't know, and I'm not sure I want to google that...

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

I don't want to google it either; that said, it stands to reason that if we're going to ascribe human emotions, justifications, and valuations to this behavior, we should first establish whether or not non-reproductive copulation happens among penguin populations.

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Bottlenose Dolphins and most larger species of cetaceans pass our "self-awareness" tests, and often test much higher than "higher primates" on human-intelligence tests (which, of course, are poor tests for self-awareness because they test things that humans concern themselves with, and may mean nothing to an different species, even if it is self aware.) Other creatures that score equivalently high are magpies and elephants.

Dogs, Cats, and Parrots are fairly high on the animal-intelligence list, but do not pass self-awareness tests.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I disagree, Stathol. From what I've read, research in the areas of animal intelligence and emotion (which, importantly, are different things) is pretty consistently demonstrating that the capacities for thought and feeling are much more widely spread among the species than we have traditionally believed. I strongly suspect that the more we learn, the more obvious it's going to become that the true bias in human perceptions of animals is that we ascribe far too little "humanity" to them.

In short, we ain't as special as we think we are, so if an animal's behavior suggests that it's experiencing an emotional response, it probably is.

Way to be ignorant? Some penguins mate for life and have longer attention spans than you do.

Even if they mate for life I bet they would forget about eachother quickly after being separated.

To be completely honest, I'm not sure a feral human would necessarily pass those tests, either. It's such a rare occurrence that it's hard to get any statistically meaningful data. The meta-conversation here is that thought, emotion, and language are inextricably intertwined to the point that we often don't even realize it. In a very real sense, we are language, and there is no way to "translate" this to/from a creature that doesn't possess that. Even statements like "the bear is angry" probably says more about us than it does about the bear.

That isn't to say that animals don't experience anything like human emotion, RD. I believe that a deer, for instance, experiences a physiological fear reaction which is quite similar to our own. However, while a deer can experience fear, it cannot "fear for its life".


Lex may or may not be speaking from ignorance, but what little evidence we have on the subject suggests that he's right either way. This is pretty much exactly what happened with the (in)famous Silo and Roy. Somehow, I'm not expecting "And Tango Makes Three" to be getting an epilogue about that any time soon.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Perhaps, but I submit that the inability to conceptualize the emotion makes it more, not less, significant for the animal experiencing it. When we view our own emotions as abstractions or contextualize them as "physiological reactions" in response to certain environmental stimuli, we separate ourselves from them, to a degree, and in so doing can control and limit their effects. To the extent an animal lacks that intellectual ability, sensation and emotion become that animal's whole existence. It can't deliberately focus its attention away from a painful stimulus, think its way out of an unpleasant emotion, or even find comfort in accepting the inevitability of the situation; instead, it just feels that sensation or emotion, lives it, is adrift in it. If anything, that only makes me more inclined to feel sympathy for the animal.

Your opinion is contrary to experimentation, much less natural history.

Not based on what I've read, Ladas. Like I said, the trend seems to be more and more toward finding that non-human animals have a much higher degree of mental and emotional complexity than previously believed.

Elephants, in particular.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

Aren't scientists saying now that Dolphins are so smart we shouldn't even be holding them in captivity? There's a **** load we don't know about animals and their intelligence relative to our own.

And if we did, then we would have been right.

Which is it... the animals (specifically penguins for this question) lack the ability to reason or resolve emotional events and are stuck living in that emotional state, or they have a much higher mental and emotional complexity and are able to deal with situations in a more human like manner? Now perhaps you are meandering all through the animal kingdom without differentiating between the OP and the vast range of animals with your comments, and in that instance, I would agree with some of your comments in regards to select species.

The issue with your comment to which I originally replied is I disagree with the concept that the penguins are stuck in some sort of emotional state with no way to resolve or dispense with emotional trauma, and therefore deserve more sympathy. If anything, its humans and/or those animals with a higher level of self awareness and critical thinking (not problem solving) that are in greater danger of emotionally charged events having long term negative or positive effects on the individual.

I do agree that their physiological response to situations are emotions, just as they are for us, but I don't believe separating two "attached" male penguins, who where likely only in that situation due to unnatural circumstances, is going to cause any sort of long, or even short, term despair in the animals. If that were the typical response, the mortality rate of "widowed" penguins would be substantially higher in the wild, when I don't believe that is the case (caveat, I do recall at least one species in which mating for life usually meant both animals died within a short period of time of each other in the case of predation, but I can't recall which species). Whats more, most animals that mate for life (pretty rare) also go through a renewal process as part of the mating ritual to reestablish that mating bond. I would hazard a guess this activity provides an evolutionary advantage as opposed to some emotional attachment, since it means the females/males are spending less time/energy selecting mates once a suitable subject has been found the first time.

I can't speak to the issues of penguin emotion and intellectual capacity, and I think the issues of animal awareness and emotion have been well covered, but I do have to wonder:

How much of the concern over the Penguins is due to the fact that they appear to be gay? Normally, we see no meaningful questioning of efforts to promote breeding of underpopulated or threatened species. I suspect a great deal of concern over this comes from the mistaken idea that if we separate two male penguins in order to get them to breed, that in some way contains implications for the rights of gay humans.

I'm sure there is someone out there stupid enough to claim that if these penguins mate successfully, they'll have been "cured of teh gh3y" and that therefore you can do the same thing with gay humans but really, I don't see that it's likely to carry any real implications. Given the unlikelyhood of that, I simply do not see that speculative concern for the emotional well-being of two particular penguins is really more important than letting the people involved try to maintain/restore a healthy population of them.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The point is, they're trying to help save a species. They've got a job to do. I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of two little penguins don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Yeah, and I bet the penguins came to Toronto for their health, for the waters.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I have always suspected Linux is gay.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Some day who will understand this? That's basically what I was saying.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Brokeback Iceberg.

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"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

I was quoting...oh never mind.

Uncultured philistines.

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Well, I got it, at least.