6 ms·

The Intelligence of Earthworms

74 points by Hooke 6y ago

SeanFerree 6y ago
Great article! Enjoyed it!
xamuel 6y ago
TL/DR: Darwin eventually came to believe earthworms have some amount of intelligence because they drag leaves in certain specific ways, including leaves not native to their environment. I found it an interesting coincidence to read here about Aristotle's thoughts on animal intelligence, because just a couple days ago I made a note of this passage from Aristotle's "Prior Analytics": "Let A be raven, B intelligent, and C man. A then belongs to no B; for no intelligent thing is a raven. But B is possible for every C; for every man may be intelligent." I'm sure that's not the specific place this author is talking about but it's interesting to see Aristotle's philosophy about animal intelligence creep even into his works on dry formal logic.
- yareally 6y ago
  I know it was said over 2000 years ago, but ravens are quite intelligent. Raking up there with primates and estimated to be similar to a 3-4 year old human. Birds get a bad rap with terms like "bird brained", but it's rarely true, even for those that people consider pests like pigeons[1]. A researcher from the University of Washington has a really great blog on corvids I follow (crows, jays, ravens, rooks, magpies, etc)[2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_intelligence [2] https://corvidresearch.blog/category/raven-intelligence-2/ https://corvidresearch.blog/category/raven-intelligence-2/
  - numpad0 6y ago
    I wonder why there aren’t more examples of speaking animals. Screw down a baby bird or a cat in a box, give him computerized English tests with prizes and/or punishments like food or electric shock or elevated oxygen level, whatever, 12 hours a day learning and 12 hours for brain to soak in a day’s programming, for couple months. Exactly above is an animal cruelty, but I bet something to that effect would get him speaking in matters of months to few years.
    - opportune 6y ago
      I think the brain needs something special to be able to understand language properly. Perhaps this is one of the things humans are particularly (well, extremely) good at relative to our general intelligence. Many parrots can speak but it's not really language, it's more contextual. Same with the non-human apes that can "use sign language". Also your example is not good IMO because there are physiological constraints on animals' ability to speak similarly to humans, like needing a larynx
    - fiblye 6y ago
      This is just my own personal theory, but one reason is that we just scoop animals up, put them in a room, and expect to try finding speech patterns. What would happen if a flock of hyperintelligent pigeons found some human babies and locked them up in a room until it's time for snacks and games? There probably wouldn't be much language observed aside from a few repeated sounds. Another is aside from insects and humans and maybe some birds, not many creatures have multi-generational, continuous societies grounded in one region. Humans have towns, cities, and countries. People have had their entire family history confined to one town or one country with interconnected cities for centuries or even thousands of years. This lets humans develop a common means of communication between others who we see frequently or between those who share a similar background. A lot of animal groups get pretty divided and don't live in large and everlasting packs. There's not much evolutionary pressure for complex language to evolve. We don't even know when humans first developed languages capable of expression of abstract thoughts, but it was probably sometime after we started to organize ourselves and cooperate to form lifelong communities. The last one is that even if animals had a language, our brains just might not recognize it. For example, to many Europeans, picking up the idea of a tonal language at 40 is pretty tough. They might not even notice the difference in sound. Animals might have some way to distinguish words that we're just not looking at. I think this is one time where the recent ML/AI surge might come in handy. Record thousands of hours of animal sounds and put it through a black box. We've identified some sounds from prairie dogs as carrying meaning, but I don't think we've managed to identify grammar or sentences yet.
simonh 6y ago
I’m not sure. Leaf pulling could be reflexive, there’s no thought involved in my hand flinching in response to a sudden pain. The fact that the worms ignored lights when busy with some activity is interesting, but if that is always the case then is there early any judgement involved? We know now that highly complex behaviours can arise from fixed rules. Is there any evidence of learning, judgement or adaptation? If not is there really any thought? I’m not really very much persuaded on either side of the question.
ciconia 6y ago
I love to spend time in my garden looking at all the different creatures: all insects, for example, seem to have a very intricate behavior. Recently I noticed how bees, not being able to drink nectar from comfrey flowers due to their elongated form, would pierce a hole in the flower's petals in order to reach the nectar. It seems to me each creature, each species, have their own kind of intelligence. Plantes also seem to me to have an awareness of some kind. They know where the sun is, they know when to sprout, they can find water, they have such complex relationships with everything around them, the microbiome in the soil, other plants, insects. Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless.
- danharaj 6y ago
  > Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless. Would you find it ridiculous if I said that it serves an ideological purpose so deeply entrenched in our civilization at this point that we hardly notice its contingent nature?
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    I wouldn't call it ridiculous, but you are kind of begging the question ;-)
- ebg13 6y ago
  > Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless. Ok, but an anthropomorphic view of nature is fanciful and _also_ pointless. This is not alive by any but the most inclusion-oriented definitions, and yet it follows light: https://www.popsci.com/make-light-following-robot-instructions/ https://www.popsci.com/make-light-following-robot-instructio... Talking about "intelligence" and "awareness" makes sense _sometimes_ because we don't understand where our consciousness comes from. For mechanisms where we have the capacity to concretely observe how and why they happen, cavalierly throwing in notions like "intelligence" and "awareness" is an emotional deception, a pathetic fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy#Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy#Science), that adds nothing except fantasy. You see a complex mechanical process and call it grim and pointless unless one introduces metaphysics. I see a complex mechanical process and call it fundamentally beautiful and awesome without needing the metaphysics.
op03 6y ago
Minute creatures swarm around us, objects of potentially endless study and admiration, if we are willing to sweep our vision down from the world lined by the horizon to include the world an arm’s length away, a lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a tree —E. O. WILSON Got that that quote from Micheal Crichton's Micro. After reading that book I don't know how many endless hours were spent reading abt the brains of wasps and centipedes and spiders and ants and butterflies :))
carapace 6y ago
There's an emerging model of soil as a single living organism, in this milieu earthworms are the "guts" of the soil.
seesawtron 6y ago
I find it fascinating that just a few centuries ago, most philosophers and scientists considered that humans were the only "intelligent" species. Today's research consists of diverse animal species where it is so common to see how even the smallest of species like Zebrafish or fuit-flies possess extremely complex neuronal networks which process external stimuli ranging from visual, audio or social cues and produce very specific ("intelligent") responses. This was thought to be absent in non-human species to a greater degree in the past but now we have so much evidence to disprove that.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  It's quite fascinating that as we are making AIs which are smarter than humans in 'narrow' applications, we are also becoming more aware of existing lifeforms that are already smarter than us in 'narrow' fields of their own, e.g. a squirrel's memory for food stashes. I wonder whether our society will integrate interactions with AIs and nonhuman animals as part of the same process.
  - seesawtron 6y ago
    We might need organizations to protect "robo rights"? I think I already saw some piece of information where someone tried to enforce that.
russellbeattie 6y ago
Currently reading "1493" - which is about the effects of the Columbian exchange of plants and animals after the discovery of the Americas - and was fascinated to find out that earthworms are an invasives species in North America, which mostly didn't have any since the last ice age.

74 points by Hooke 6y ago

Great article! Enjoyed it!

TL/DR: Darwin eventually came to believe earthworms have some amount of intelligence because they drag leaves in certain specific ways, including leaves not native to their environment. I found it an interesting coincidence to read here about Aristotle's thoughts on animal intelligence, because just a couple days ago I made a note of this passage from Aristotle's "Prior Analytics": "Let A be raven, B intelligent, and C man. A then belongs to no B; for no intelligent thing is a raven. But B is possible for every C; for every man may be intelligent." I'm sure that's not the specific place this author is talking about but it's interesting to see Aristotle's philosophy about animal intelligence creep even into his works on dry formal logic.

yareally 6y ago
I know it was said over 2000 years ago, but ravens are quite intelligent. Raking up there with primates and estimated to be similar to a 3-4 year old human. Birds get a bad rap with terms like "bird brained", but it's rarely true, even for those that people consider pests like pigeons[1]. A researcher from the University of Washington has a really great blog on corvids I follow (crows, jays, ravens, rooks, magpies, etc)[2]. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_intelligence https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_intelligence [2] https://corvidresearch.blog/category/raven-intelligence-2/ https://corvidresearch.blog/category/raven-intelligence-2/
- numpad0 6y ago
  I wonder why there aren’t more examples of speaking animals. Screw down a baby bird or a cat in a box, give him computerized English tests with prizes and/or punishments like food or electric shock or elevated oxygen level, whatever, 12 hours a day learning and 12 hours for brain to soak in a day’s programming, for couple months. Exactly above is an animal cruelty, but I bet something to that effect would get him speaking in matters of months to few years.
  - opportune 6y ago
    I think the brain needs something special to be able to understand language properly. Perhaps this is one of the things humans are particularly (well, extremely) good at relative to our general intelligence. Many parrots can speak but it's not really language, it's more contextual. Same with the non-human apes that can "use sign language". Also your example is not good IMO because there are physiological constraints on animals' ability to speak similarly to humans, like needing a larynx
  - fiblye 6y ago
    This is just my own personal theory, but one reason is that we just scoop animals up, put them in a room, and expect to try finding speech patterns. What would happen if a flock of hyperintelligent pigeons found some human babies and locked them up in a room until it's time for snacks and games? There probably wouldn't be much language observed aside from a few repeated sounds. Another is aside from insects and humans and maybe some birds, not many creatures have multi-generational, continuous societies grounded in one region. Humans have towns, cities, and countries. People have had their entire family history confined to one town or one country with interconnected cities for centuries or even thousands of years. This lets humans develop a common means of communication between others who we see frequently or between those who share a similar background. A lot of animal groups get pretty divided and don't live in large and everlasting packs. There's not much evolutionary pressure for complex language to evolve. We don't even know when humans first developed languages capable of expression of abstract thoughts, but it was probably sometime after we started to organize ourselves and cooperate to form lifelong communities. The last one is that even if animals had a language, our brains just might not recognize it. For example, to many Europeans, picking up the idea of a tonal language at 40 is pretty tough. They might not even notice the difference in sound. Animals might have some way to distinguish words that we're just not looking at. I think this is one time where the recent ML/AI surge might come in handy. Record thousands of hours of animal sounds and put it through a black box. We've identified some sounds from prairie dogs as carrying meaning, but I don't think we've managed to identify grammar or sentences yet.

simonh 6y ago

I’m not sure. Leaf pulling could be reflexive, there’s no thought involved in my hand flinching in response to a sudden pain. The fact that the worms ignored lights when busy with some activity is interesting, but if that is always the case then is there early any judgement involved? We know now that highly complex behaviours can arise from fixed rules. Is there any evidence of learning, judgement or adaptation? If not is there really any thought? I’m not really very much persuaded on either side of the question.

ciconia 6y ago

I love to spend time in my garden looking at all the different creatures: all insects, for example, seem to have a very intricate behavior. Recently I noticed how bees, not being able to drink nectar from comfrey flowers due to their elongated form, would pierce a hole in the flower's petals in order to reach the nectar. It seems to me each creature, each species, have their own kind of intelligence. Plantes also seem to me to have an awareness of some kind. They know where the sun is, they know when to sprout, they can find water, they have such complex relationships with everything around them, the microbiome in the soil, other plants, insects. Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless.

danharaj 6y ago
> Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless. Would you find it ridiculous if I said that it serves an ideological purpose so deeply entrenched in our civilization at this point that we hardly notice its contingent nature?
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  I wouldn't call it ridiculous, but you are kind of begging the question ;-)
ebg13 6y ago
> Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless. Ok, but an anthropomorphic view of nature is fanciful and _also_ pointless. This is not alive by any but the most inclusion-oriented definitions, and yet it follows light: https://www.popsci.com/make-light-following-robot-instructions/ https://www.popsci.com/make-light-following-robot-instructio... Talking about "intelligence" and "awareness" makes sense _sometimes_ because we don't understand where our consciousness comes from. For mechanisms where we have the capacity to concretely observe how and why they happen, cavalierly throwing in notions like "intelligence" and "awareness" is an emotional deception, a pathetic fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy#Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy#Science), that adds nothing except fantasy. You see a complex mechanical process and call it grim and pointless unless one introduces metaphysics. I see a complex mechanical process and call it fundamentally beautiful and awesome without needing the metaphysics.

op03 6y ago

Minute creatures swarm around us, objects of potentially endless study and admiration, if we are willing to sweep our vision down from the world lined by the horizon to include the world an arm’s length away, a lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a tree —E. O. WILSON Got that that quote from Micheal Crichton's Micro. After reading that book I don't know how many endless hours were spent reading abt the brains of wasps and centipedes and spiders and ants and butterflies :))

carapace 6y ago

There's an emerging model of soil as a single living organism, in this milieu earthworms are the "guts" of the soil.

seesawtron 6y ago

I find it fascinating that just a few centuries ago, most philosophers and scientists considered that humans were the only "intelligent" species. Today's research consists of diverse animal species where it is so common to see how even the smallest of species like Zebrafish or fuit-flies possess extremely complex neuronal networks which process external stimuli ranging from visual, audio or social cues and produce very specific ("intelligent") responses. This was thought to be absent in non-human species to a greater degree in the past but now we have so much evidence to disprove that.

SuoDuanDao 6y ago
It's quite fascinating that as we are making AIs which are smarter than humans in 'narrow' applications, we are also becoming more aware of existing lifeforms that are already smarter than us in 'narrow' fields of their own, e.g. a squirrel's memory for food stashes. I wonder whether our society will integrate interactions with AIs and nonhuman animals as part of the same process.
- seesawtron 6y ago
  We might need organizations to protect "robo rights"? I think I already saw some piece of information where someone tried to enforce that.

russellbeattie 6y ago

Currently reading "1493" - which is about the effects of the Columbian exchange of plants and animals after the discovery of the Americas - and was fascinated to find out that earthworms are an invasives species in North America, which mostly didn't have any since the last ice age.