DD60 – Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test
Sometimes I read something that comes to me from ‘out of left field’. It’s an odd phrase, and, resorting to Wikipedia, I learnt the term was first used in the idiomatic sense of ‘from out of nowhere’ to refer to a song that unexpectedly performed well in the market. Back in 1998, an American English professor reported that the phrase ‘out of left field’ was in use by 1953. However, he added that it was clearly related to baseball, and according to the 2007 Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, the phrase refers to a play in which the ball is thrown from the area covered by a ‘left-fielder’ to either home plate or first base, surprising the runner.
Things come out of left field when we least expect them, and the challenge we face is that our expectations can widely differ from those of others. I might consider a lightning or meteor strike as truly amazing, something so rare as to be almost impossible. An astronomer or climatologists might have a very different appreciation of their likelihood, and some other people might regard such activities as only to be expected when we live in troubled times, especially if they are fond of finding evidence of extra-terrestrials intervening in our world.
Marlene Zuk came to me from out of left field. She’s an American academic, a biologist and a behavioural ecologist. I wouldn’t have known about her if I hadn’t picked up a book in the Public Library, titled Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test. Who wouldn’t be tempted by a book with a title like that! Once I borrowed it, I discovered from the inside cover she has had a distinctive focus on the unusual. Given her interest in insects from a young age, when she went to university, and after majoring in English, she decided to switch to Biology. Now an academic, she is based at the University of Minnesota.
Her approach is refreshing. She works in a lab focused on emerging questions in behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology:
“We use invertebrate systems to study the evolution of mating behaviour and secondary sexual characters in natural populations. I and others in my lab seek to understand how natural and sexual selection pressures shape the behaviour, life history, and morphology of animals. Currently, we are studying the conflict between sexual and natural selection in Pacific field crickets, Teleogryllus oceanicus, which are subject to an acoustically-orienting parasitic fly. The fly uses the male cricket’s calling song to find a host, which means that natural selection favours reducing the same signal that sexual selection is expected to enhance.
What can a cricket do? In some of the populations of the crickets, 50-90% of the males now exhibit a wing mutation that renders them silent, protecting them from the fly but posing a problem in mate attraction. The mutation spread in fewer than twenty generations, remarkably rapid evolution. How do the crickets deal with the loss of their sexual signal, and how was the trait able to spread so quickly? This work has also led to a more general interest in rates of evolution and the role of behaviour in the establishment of novel traits.”
Interesting? She goes on to comment that “In addition, like others who study sexual behaviour in animals, I have noticed that people like to apply what we learn to their own behaviour. I am often contacted by journalists and other people asking questions like, ‘Is monogamy natural?’ or ‘Does homosexuality exist in non-humans?’ Clearly, she enjoys both interacting with other scientists as well as with the public on a broad range of topics. She has written several books for a general audience about animal behaviour and evolution.
That’s not all this busy academic does. In addition, she spends time in promoting women in science, on which she has made some very pertinent comments. In 2018, Zuk published an Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times titled, ‘There’s nothing inherent about the fact that men outnumber women in the sciences’. The article countered recurring suggestions that women are underrepresented in scientific fields due to inherent preferences toward the humanities. By highlighting the inextricable relationship between nature and nurture, she points out the impossibility of attributing female underrepresentation in science to any inborn cause. Citing studies based on essential scientific integrity, she argues that “until boys and girls are raised under identical circumstances one could not possibly prove any inherent female leanings towards or away from the sciences.”
Once I had read Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test, I was hooked. Helpfully, it has an overview which explains her interests in relation to five key ideas. In these blogs I usually avoid quoting another writer at length, but I can’t put her arguments better than she does:
- The nature-nurture controversy is a zombie idea.
“When people think about behaviour in either humans or animals, they often want to know if that behaviour is genetic or whether it’s learned. That’s especially true when headlines are full of declarations like “Our politics are in our DNA.”
“This is the old nature-nurture debate. Traits as complex as intelligence or aggression have to be affected by both genes and the environment. And yet, we keep resurrecting this notion of it being nature or nurture. The nature-nurture controversy has become a zombie idea that keeps springing back to life but deserves to die once and for all. The problem is that if people genuinely believe that, for example, men will always grow up with dominating tendencies because it’s in their genes, then interventions to prevent aggression are worthless. In reality, it’s the interplay, the entanglement, between genes and environment that’s important.” …
- Having a small brain doesn’t mean you are dumb.
“Many people have tried connecting brain size and intelligence, with the assumption that a big brain is a prerequisite for complex or flexible behaviour. But few have drawn this comparison out to its logical conclusion: are there animals that are so tiny that they are almost too stupid to live or do complicated tasks?”
“To figure this out, a scientist named William Eberhard studied extremely small spiders (including one kind that weighs less than a milligram) or about as much as an inch of sewing thread. Yet the spiders still produce orb webs, the silky wheel that entraps their even tinier prey. Eberhard measured whether the difficult process of weaving and adjusting a web was more of a challenge to the minuscule spiders than to three other kinds of spiders that weighed anywhere from 10 – 10,000 times more. The small spiders are just as capable as larger ones.”
- Dogs are not exceptional.
“Dr. Stephen Lea is a brave man. An emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Exeter in England, he published a paper with Britta Osthaus titled, “In what sense are dogs special?” The conclusion was that they aren’t. The reception to their work was not appreciative. “Your Dog Is Probably Dumber Than You Think, a New Study Says,” smirked a typical headline from Time magazine. Lea tried to pacify the dog people in an interview by saying, “Dog cognition may not be exceptional, but dogs are certainly exceptional cognitive research subjects.” No one seemed placated. “All nervous systems, and all brains, are success stories.” The study didn’t show that dogs were stupid. It asked whether they were smarter than you would expect.”
“To answer this, Lea and Osthaus picked three groups for comparison. First, they looked at other species that are related to dogs evolutionarily—members of the group Carnivora, meaning meat-eaters, including African wild dogs and cats. Then, they considered dogs as social hunters, alongside dolphins and chimpanzees. Finally, they examined horses and domestic pigeons, both of which are domesticated like dogs and which share characteristics like being subject to training. The result was that dogs do well at discriminating complex visual patterns, like telling human faces apart, but so do chimps and pigeons. Dogs are good at smells, but they are bested by pigs, which can even distinguish between the odours of familiar and unfamiliar people. Dogs are not especially skilled at what Lea and Osthaus term “physical cognition”—recognizing the consequences of manipulating objects like strings attached to food. Despite the heartwarming nature of movies like Homeward Bound, dogs aren’t particularly good at navigating over long distances”. …
- 4. Animals can treat their diseases.
“Early humans used medicine and treated injuries such as fractures, but where did their knowledge come from? Do animals help themselves feel better when they are sick?
Yes. Chimpanzees in Africa eat a variety of plants, but some individuals have been seen to select the young shoots of one particular plant, stripping the stems of their bark, and chewing the bitter pith and juice. These individuals often seemed sick with diarrhea, weight loss, and a lack of energy. Researchers found that the use of the plant was associated with a drop in intestinal parasites. Chimps will also swallow entire leaves from a different plant whole (without chewing) and here the leaves had tiny hairs that seem to scrape worms from the gut and allow them to be expelled.”
“This kind of behaviour doesn’t necessarily require a sophisticated level of cognition. Animals have many ways of changing their behaviour to deal with infection, and not all of the animals that do so are those we consider “smart,” as we do apes. For instance, goats supposedly eat anything, from tin cans to laundry off the line, but they are remarkably sensitive foragers. If infected with roundworms, they will eat more of a shrub containing a chemical that fights the worms.” …
- Animals get mentally ill too.
“Darwin thought that insanity in animals demonstrated how all living things are related, so he thought they did get mentally ill. On the other hand, some scientists think that animals can serve as models for us to understand mental illness, but don’t get the disorders themselves. Yet others think animals are only mentally ill when they are mistreated by humans.”
“I agree with Darwin, and one of the best places to see the continuity of mental disorders in humans and animals is in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD. People have noticed for many years that some characteristics of OCD are also seen in animals, particularly dogs. The disorder means doing normal behaviours—hand-washing, turning in circles before lying down—too much. In dogs, we call it CCD, Canine Compulsive Disorder, because we can’t know what dogs are or aren’t obsessing over.”
“A scientist named Elinor Karlsson and her team have identified genes that affect a dog’s risk of showing the disorder. These genes govern the way nerve cells communicate. But knowing a dog’s genetic makeup won’t tell you definitively whether or not they will exhibit the disorder. Dogs, like humans, inherit one copy of any particular gene from their mother and one copy from their father, so both can be the same or they can have one normal and one abnormal gene. Of the dogs with two normal copies, 10% have CCD anyway; of the ones with one copy of each type, 25% have it; and of the dogs with two abnormal copies, 60% show CCD, but not all of them. Knowing the dog’s genetic profile doesn’t tell you for sure whether the dog has the disorder. This shows us two things. First, entanglement of genes and the environment because the gene doesn’t cause the disorder unless the environment favours it. Second, mental disorders can illustrate the common evolutionary roots in our brains and bodies that give rise to amazingly different behaviours.”
OK! Have I convinced you her books are worth reading? Here are a couple of quotes that help me make a different point: often her writing is funny as well as informative. On her theme that most changes are not exclusively ‘nature versus nurture’, but usually some combination ,of both, she quotes Patrick Bateson ”whole organisms survive and reproduce differentially and the winners drag their phenotypes with them”. Well, if that seems a bit esoteric, how about another observation: “Has a gull ever snatched a French fry from you, or made a dive at your sandwich? Would you have been more, or less, annoyed if you found out that the bird knew exactly when you would appear and was in effect lying in wait”. This was from an English study on Lesser Black-backed Gulls. Oh, and the researcher noted those same gulls knew at what times there would be fresh dumped garbage at waste centres.”
She also has a mischievous side. :”Sea slugs are the rather more glamorous cousins of the shell-less molluscs you find in your garden. Often beautifully coloured, they move sinuously through the water in oceans around the world. Two species, called sacoglkossan sea slugs, were recently found to have an extraordinary ability: they can decapitate themselves , and then grow a completely new body, including the heart and digestive organs, from the head alone. The detached body does not respond in kind, and instead moves around in presumed bewilderment for several days to months before it expires, a scene that should surely be incorporated into a horror film at the earliest opportunity”. Yup, good idea?! Weird? No weirder than Mel Pennant’s recent murder mystery, A Murder for Miss Hortense, about a “retired nurse, avid gardener, renowned cake maker and fearless sleuth’ who lives in a quiet Birmingham suburb, and whose black West Indian) dialect is challenging, so say the least. Zuk is like Pennant: the subject might be different but the writing is unusually compelling.
Is she coming out of left field? Certainly Dancing Cockatoos and the Dead Man Test presents many observations that are quite different from what I might have expected. I’m not a biologist or a behavioural ecologist. However, even if her observations are not quite about what I might have predicted, they aren’t surprising. The reason why Dancing Cockatoos is such a compelling book is because it is reassuringly sensible. By the time I reached the end, I found myself constantly saying “of course”. If you want to be reassured how alike we are to many members of the animal world, even to gulls seen spying on apparently available French fries, Marlene Zuk is very convincing.
