• Potential issues raised by thinking of as elephants as self-aware, reasoning beings
  • Anything with a mind has interests that matter
  • Our current views of evolution and function may need to be altered
  • If elephants have “minds,” should our practices for their management change?
  • Social lives (females)
  • Females live in “family units” of usually related individuals
  • Bond groups encompass several sets of families
  • Cohesion within these groups varies according to circumstance
  • Clan = groups of families that share same home range
  • Large families w/ dominant matriarchs evolutionary selected for increased survival
  • Although evolution often explains the function of a behavior, more social aspects can explain the motivation behind the behavior
  • Social lives (males)
  • During non-musth periods, groups develop
  • During musth – aggressive
  • Emotion
  • Large calls in unison when an individual, related or not, returns after a long period of absence
  • Evolutionary pressure: to reinforce links between individuals
  • Motivation: emotionally attached to each other
  • Orphaned infants tend to have lower survival rate than non-orphaned, even if no longer need mother’s milk for survival
  • Death of matriarch can lead to group discentegration
  • Vocal signals
  • “let’s go” rumble repeated until desired response given w/ specific orientation
  • Females give a “comment” rumble after a variety of events (i.e. predator or helicopter)
  • Syntax may be involved, and calls can be combined to create new meanings
  • Intelligence
  • Elephants have large, wrinkled temporal lobes of the cerebrum (good memory storage? – perhaps better than humans?)
  • Learned skills
  • Domesticated Asian elephants taught to respond to 30-100 vocal commands
  • Continue learning social behavior well into teens
  • Reasoning
  • Ex: Won’t put stick in hole until dog removed first
  • Ex: Plugging of drinking hole in riverbed
  • Tool use (“the external employment of an unattached environmental object to alter more efficiently the form, position, or condition of another object”)
  • Ex: use sticks to reach things otherwise out of reach, levers for prying, rocks on electric fences
  • Could be due to chance, social learning, imitation, or reasoned thought
  • Cultural transmission of knowledge (passing info. from one generation to the next through non-genetic means)
  • Eg: seasonal water holes, location of underground water, and migration routes
  • Eg: disabling of electric fences
  • Conceptual and abstract thought
  • A concept of the self – are elephants aware of their thoughts and feelings?
  • Knowledge of death
  • Ex: bury dead bodies / tusks / etc., act in a reverent manner around dead, try to support dead
  • If fear own death, than have an interest in living, and if have interest in living, than we have a reason to attribute the right of life
  • Implies
  • Consciousness of oneself as different from others
  • Having a concept of life / death
  • Having a concept of the future
  • Sense of humor
  • Eg: “smile” and wag head back and forth – play with Poole in car
  • Creativity
  • Eg: elephant paintings w/ particular colors in mind
  • Eg: doodling in sand, symmetrical fountains
  • Theory of mind
  • Ex: Bertha and the ignorant new hire and sugar lumps
  • Empathy and sympathy
  • Ex: larger males bow down to be less intimidating to younger ones, try to physically support / accompany injured
  • Teaching
  • Ex: try to teach infants to watch, mothers teach young daughters how to act in estrous
  • Imitation
  • Ex: scrawlings on walls by jealous elephants
  • Play catch
  • Deceptive intentions – believed by Poole not to play a large role in elephant interactions in the wild, although some examples in captivity
  • Evolutionary theory
  • Darwin’s Origin of Species (Nov. 1859)
  • Mechanism of Natural Selection
  • Natural populations could grow exponentially
  • i.e. one elephant / female every 10 yrs after 30 – 15 mil. Elephants in 500 yrs
  • Despite above, populations tend to remain stable over time
  • Many individuals don’t leave as many offspring don’t leave max. # offspring
  • Due to resource competition
  • Those best suited to the environment produce the most offspring
  • Offspring, due to heredity, are like their parents
  • Over many generations, progressively adapted individuals occur
  • “Survival of the fittest” is incorrect because
  • Organism doesn’t need to survive but reproduce
  • Fittest means best able to cope w/ life’s challenges
  • Adaptation
  • Designs for reproduction
  • Does not refer to reproductive organs alone, but any trait that better helps an organism to reproduce (i.e. bat sonar, the human eye, cheetah’s speed)
  • Adaptations vs. chance features
  • Former defined as structurally complex, integrated, and targeted for a specific purpose
  • Specialization
  • Each adaptation represents nature’s “choice” of the most efficient mechanism (of those provided to it) for a given function
  • Applies to psychological adaptations as well
  • Human recognition based on more than just faces
  • Prosopagnosia (can’t see faces)
  • Proves facial recognition unique adaptation cus can still use voice etc.
  • “mental organs” that produce a given trait the same way physical ones do
  • Mind is modular and each organ is domain-specific
  • Behavioral adaptations
  • Natural selection does not act on behavior directly, but on the structure of the organs etc. that produce it
  • Adaptations form slowly
  • Limited by generation time
  • Nature must “wait” for natural variations on which it can act to arrive
  • In response to environmental changes,
  • No relevant adaptation is available so the species goes instinct
  • Rare traits grow more common in population
  • Selection is cumulative not all-or-nothing
  • New adaptations are layered on old ones
  • Many adaptations are out of date because the environment changes faster than evolution can
  • i.e. humans and exhaust fumes
  • Mendelian genetics
  • Provided the link between Darwin’s theory and how traits were passed from one generation to the next
  • View of heredity as dilutable, liquid force was wrong
  • Evolved out or a study crossing pure-bred lines of pea plants
  • Found typical f1 and f2 results for independently assorting trait at single loucs
  • Conluded
  • Heredity was based on non-dilutable physical particles
  • Each adult in the diploid state contains a pair of factors for each trait, and one of these factors is passed in a haploid gamete to the offspring
  • Pairs do not fundamentally alter each other, but affect each other’s presentation
  • i.e. dominance / epistasis
  • Neo Darwinism
  • Natural selection “sees” phenotype but acts on the genotype that gives that phenotype
  • Natural selection (ns) only acts on genetic traits
  • i.e. change in genotype leads to change in phenotype
  • Why evolution has not driven some genes out entirely
  • Some genes offer equally fit conditions
  • The environment can prefer different genes at different times
  • Sometimes the heterozygote is the most fit specimen
  • i.e. sickle cell anemia
  • Some traits frequency dependent
  • i.e. nuptial feeding in flies
  • Mutation introduces new genes to a population
  • Polygenic traits
  • As one end spectrum favored, get shift in that direction and average of population shifts in that direction
  • 3 theories of complex adaptive mechanisms
  • Creationism (all organisms created directly by God)
  • Not considered a scientific theory
  • Cannot be tested
  • Has not led to any new discoveries
  • Has not provided useful scientific explanations having to do with current organisms
  • Seeding theory (life began somewhere else than Earth and was brought here by meteors or aliens)
  • Testable (can look at meteors etc.)
  • Not considered scientific theory either
  • No solid evidence that “seeding” has happened
  • Not led to any new scientific discoveries
  • All it does is push the origin back – still have to explain how life got there to begin with
  • Evolution
  • Good scientific effort because
  • Organizes known facts about life
  • Lead to new predictions
  • Provides guidance in scientific inquiry
  • 3 products evolution
  • Adaptations
  • Inheritable
  • Must develop reliably in a given species at the appropriate time
  • Must contribute to the solution of an adaptive problem, directly or indirectly
  • Period of evolution: mutation – if helpful passed down – spread to whole population over time
  • EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness) = composite of evolutionary pressures that shaped a trait
  • Period of evolution = time spent constructing trait
  • Byproducts
  • Have no adaptive function in-and-of-themselves, but co-inherited w/ an adaptive function
  • Must identify the latter to label a trait as the former
  • Random effects (noise)
  • If not harmful, can also be passed down
  • Independent of adaptation
  • All species have a nature
  • Nature of every species different
  • All psychological theories require a specification of aspects of human nature
  • All psychological theories are evolutionary (cus how human nature develops)
  • What is an evolved psychological mechanism?
  • Contributes to the solution of a problem consistently over time
  • Designed to incorporate only small amounts of information
  • i.e. the human eye and boundaries
  • Its input tells an organism what problem it is facing
  • i.e. snake or pizza
  • Transformed “through decision rules to output”
  • Output can be
  • Physiological activity
  • Behavior
  • Information to another system
  • Output is directed toward the solution of a specific problem
  • Doesn’t have to fix all the time, just more than average