5 ms·

In the animal kingdom, the astonishing power of the number instinct

55 points by jelliclesfarm 6y ago

sillysaurusx 6y ago
To pick one specific aspect: Male pseudoscorpions smell the number of competitor males that have copulated with a female and adjust by progressively decreasing sperm allocation as the number of different male olfactory cues increases from zero to three. How in the world was this determined? It's presented so neatly, and I certainly believe it, but it's fascinating to think of the procedures that must've been taken to verify such a claim. You'd need a scorpion sperm counter, perhaps, and I'm not sure Amazon sells one.
- positr0n 6y ago
  Probably some grad student pipets a precise quantity of scorpian semen onto a slide, perhaps with a dye to aid the process, and manually counts the number of sperm with a microscope. Human sperm tests are done using a similar procedure depending on what you are looking for.
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    Fascinating; apparently you can perform a sperm count test on yourself with nothing more than a microscope: https://www.hellomotherhood.com/article/94302-read-clearblue-pregnancy-tests/ https://www.hellomotherhood.com/article/94302-read-clearblue... and a spreadsheet: https://web.archive.org/web/20070224203309/http://www.fertilityformen.com/download/sar.xls https://web.archive.org/web/20070224203309/http://www.fertil... There's a high-quality video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9_XkaXCXqc&ab_channel=AdvancedFertilityCenterofChicago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9_XkaXCXqc&ab_channel=Advan... I'm just surprised it's theoretically possible to do it yourself. Tests are upwards of $100.
    - jdc 6y ago
      Hey, this is great info. Any machine learning engineers have a bunch of spare time on their hands?
      - sillysaurusx 6y ago
        Interesting line of thinking. I guess you could pipe a microscope's video feed into a YOLO model and do a count. The hard part would be making it cost effective. Legacy (YC S19) seems to be capturing this market: https://www.givelegacy.com/ https://www.givelegacy.com/ $200 is still a hefty price though.
      - tzs 6y ago
        There are automated sperm sample analyzers already, that give sperm concentration, motility (broken down by rapid, slow, and non), morphology, velocity, and more. Here's a promotional video from 2008 from a maker of such devices [1]. Here's a 2015 video from them showing a newer model [2]. I'm not sure how they actually work. Given the age it probably isn't machine learning. The same company also sells a home test kit, under the name Yo, which might use machine learning [3]. It uses your smart phone camera. There is also a PC/Mac version that looks like it includes its own camera. $69.95 for either kit, $45.95 for refills for the consumables for 2 tests, $89.95 for 4 tests. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krakvOT-7xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krakvOT-7xI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukIns4rPgHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukIns4rPgHw [3] https://www.yospermtest.com/how-it-works/ https://www.yospermtest.com/how-it-works/
    - darkerside 6y ago
      Not that surprising. Doing my own is one thing. For counting someone else's sperm, $100 seems pretty low.
- claxc 6y ago
  These experiments have so many variables that the outcome is sometimes hard to believe (see the section about rats): http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm Maybe the don't "adjust", but it is a fear reaction because of the imagined proximity of other males, which kind of distracts from the act ... How they measured it? Perhaps a fake female with a reservoir, which would introduce even more variables.
- _Microft 6y ago
  I'm reasonably sure that this is the paper in question if someone cares enough to actually want to read it: "Discriminating Males and Unpredictable Females: Males Bias Sperm Allocation in Favor of Virgin Females", doi:10.1111/j.1439-0310.2011.01928.x
- godelzilla 6y ago
  For me it's more fascinating to think about how "science" articles regularly overstate and exaggerate weak data.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
omginternets 6y ago
If you're interested in Numerical Cognition, I can't recommend Stanislas Dehaene's The Number Sense enough. It's fantastic.
082349872349872 6y ago
Herd animals are masters of conformal mapping (with you, or a dog, as a pole) poor example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDQw21ntR64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDQw21ntR64 (Humans are also herd animals, which has repercussions for safety measures in public spaces.)
ilaksh 6y ago
I believe that many of the capabilities that researchers are seeking in general AI are present in ordinary animals that we do not consider particularly intelligent. And I suspect that the focus on imitating higher-level human cognition has actually slowed down research in general AI. The numerical instincts in this article are one example. Other useful abilities that would make them more general purpose, but missing from most AI systems: fast adaption, basic understanding of complex high-dimensional environments, integrating streams of information, self-maintenance, etc.
hooande 6y ago
Is there a difference between "counting" and "determining relative size"? for example, I can distinguish between a group of three people and a group of ten people without being able to count at all. There are big differences in the amount of noise, motion, smell, etc that don't require a concept of numbers. I feel like the author uses several examples that are based on relative size, and also examples that appear to require actual counting (ie the cowbirds at the end). It kind of muddies the issue, but overall interesting ideas
glaberficken 6y ago
I find it we are anthropomorphizing when we say: Non human animal x or y can "count their own eggs" or "assess numbers" Animals can surely assess and "feel" quantities via the senses and via their own automatic body reactions (hormones etc...). As well as have many pre-programmed quantities in their genome. But a "number" is purely an abstract concept. I don't think we can ever be sure an animal is actually "counting" things. Instead from what we know about how fear, excitement, etc is regulated via hormones it seems fairly probable that they are simply seeing, hearing, touching and this triggers a feeling that guides them to a certain behavior (through hormone secretion).
- BucketsMcG 6y ago
  I saw my dog reasoning the other day. Unfortunately he's been to the vet rather too often in his life. It's in the neighbourhood, so if we're out and he thinks I'm taking him there, he starts to think about ways to avoid it, and pulls me along alternative routes. Every walk's a negotiation between me and his determination to avoid the vet. Anyway, he got attacked on Monday and I had to take him to get stitched up. This made him extra wary of having to go there again, and it resulted in him trying to drag me along a path he has never walked down in his life, because it's a) through a kids' playground and b) a dead end. But he THOUGHT it would take him away from danger. So yeah, you can say he was responding to hormones if you like, I'm sure that's true. But he was acting on a hunch, or a hope, not on knowledge.
  - Stratoscope 6y ago
    Our dog Brownie suffered a major back injury last December that left her hind legs paralyzed. We took her to Scout's House in San Mateo, CA for several months of physical therapy. This is a pretty wonderful place; if you ever need PT for your dog and you live on the SF Peninsula, I highly recommend them. So does Brownie. After the first few visits she had the route memorized. When I turned off 101 and onto the city streets, she got more excited at each turn as we approached their parking lot. She's made an amazing recovery. Here's how she was doing in March: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSGAf3oo6Jc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSGAf3oo6Jc And even better since then: now she runs and chases squirrels in the yard. She's still a little wobbly, but I can see why she was so excited about her visits to Scout's House.
at_a_remove 6y ago
This is a bit depressing, but I sometimes think about r/K selection and how many times the K-strategists might have evolved true, distinct counting, only for that to end up triggering depression. I watched a video of a duck who, reasons unknown, decided to navigate a waterfall with her six ducklings. Two made it. Does she know that she has fewer babies now? I have seen similar videos where a heron will snap or two or three ducklings while the mother is unable to do anything about it. It occurred to me that zero ducklings might make it per year, and that this would be a normal thing to happen to a mother duck. A continuity of memory and the ability to enumerate loss could result in learned helplessness; would nature end up selecting for creatures that live in the blind optimism of now, with neither past to compare against nor future to dread on either side?
- grawprog 6y ago
  I participated in some goose egg addling for conservation reasons at a lake where they're overpopulated and causing damage through their numbers. This pretty much involved two of us paddling around the lake in a canoe searching for goose nests, one person would distract the geese, while the other snuck up to the nest and shook the egg until you felt them break inside. The geese would return to the nest, and continue hatching the eggs and be fairly unaware and unperturbed when they didn't hatch. It had to be done that way though. If the eggs were just removed, the geese become stressed and upset and end up just laying another nest.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  This kind of child mortality is fairly common for humans historically. Did they know when they'd lost children? Could they remember the missing children? Of course.
  - at_a_remove 6y ago
    Humans yes, and some of the other primates. Obviously. But before those species, was there a kind of "great filter" of numeracy and memory? If you have cats, and one of them dies, the other may spend months looking for their companion in the usual places, howling away, but for progeny, litters of kittens average about four or so (by nipple math!). If a kitten dies or is somehow lost, the mother will likely miss them on an individual basis, but will the change in the number of kittens in a kitten pile also cause a feeling of loss? What about with the aforementioned ducks? You might have twelve ducklings and a reduced capacity in the mother to recognize them individually; she might instead look at the ducks collectively. I saw a bit of a nesting duck leading her babies out for their first foray into the water. She would quack and every so often another duckling would pitch themselves out of the nest-hole and onto the water. Eventually the quacking didn't get her any more ducklings and she proceeded onward. She had an astounding nineteen ducklings. However, that number is going to decrease over time. Will she have a creeping experience of fewer and fewer ducklings? Or is it something like "many, three, two, one"? And what kind of internal state comes about? Certainly we see that loss in the larger primates, and even in our own pets, but when it gets down to birds, many of them do not have a lot of brain matter to work with -- what's their state? Is there enough memory and experience to overcome instinct? "All of my babies died last year and the year before ..." Overall, and this is just the vaguest of grim suspicions, what if, at each increase in memory and care for offspring, evolution must select against those organisms experiencing a kind of despair, a learned helplessness, at the futility of the ever-larger spheres of their existence? It's not an issue if you're just a handful of neurons wiggling your way toward the next source of food, but it could become large enough to struggle against the survival instinct, and I wonder if numeracy is one of those critical struggles.

55 points by jelliclesfarm 6y ago

To pick one specific aspect: Male pseudoscorpions smell the number of competitor males that have copulated with a female and adjust by progressively decreasing sperm allocation as the number of different male olfactory cues increases from zero to three. How in the world was this determined? It's presented so neatly, and I certainly believe it, but it's fascinating to think of the procedures that must've been taken to verify such a claim. You'd need a scorpion sperm counter, perhaps, and I'm not sure Amazon sells one.

positr0n 6y ago
Probably some grad student pipets a precise quantity of scorpian semen onto a slide, perhaps with a dye to aid the process, and manually counts the number of sperm with a microscope. Human sperm tests are done using a similar procedure depending on what you are looking for.
- sillysaurusx 6y ago
  Fascinating; apparently you can perform a sperm count test on yourself with nothing more than a microscope: https://www.hellomotherhood.com/article/94302-read-clearblue-pregnancy-tests/ https://www.hellomotherhood.com/article/94302-read-clearblue... and a spreadsheet: https://web.archive.org/web/20070224203309/http://www.fertilityformen.com/download/sar.xls https://web.archive.org/web/20070224203309/http://www.fertil... There's a high-quality video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9_XkaXCXqc&ab_channel=AdvancedFertilityCenterofChicago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9_XkaXCXqc&ab_channel=Advan... I'm just surprised it's theoretically possible to do it yourself. Tests are upwards of $100.
  - jdc 6y ago
    Hey, this is great info. Any machine learning engineers have a bunch of spare time on their hands?
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      Interesting line of thinking. I guess you could pipe a microscope's video feed into a YOLO model and do a count. The hard part would be making it cost effective. Legacy (YC S19) seems to be capturing this market: https://www.givelegacy.com/ https://www.givelegacy.com/ $200 is still a hefty price though.
    - tzs 6y ago
      There are automated sperm sample analyzers already, that give sperm concentration, motility (broken down by rapid, slow, and non), morphology, velocity, and more. Here's a promotional video from 2008 from a maker of such devices [1]. Here's a 2015 video from them showing a newer model [2]. I'm not sure how they actually work. Given the age it probably isn't machine learning. The same company also sells a home test kit, under the name Yo, which might use machine learning [3]. It uses your smart phone camera. There is also a PC/Mac version that looks like it includes its own camera. $69.95 for either kit, $45.95 for refills for the consumables for 2 tests, $89.95 for 4 tests. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krakvOT-7xI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krakvOT-7xI [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukIns4rPgHw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukIns4rPgHw [3] https://www.yospermtest.com/how-it-works/ https://www.yospermtest.com/how-it-works/
  - darkerside 6y ago
    Not that surprising. Doing my own is one thing. For counting someone else's sperm, $100 seems pretty low.
claxc 6y ago
These experiments have so many variables that the outcome is sometimes hard to believe (see the section about rats): http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm Maybe the don't "adjust", but it is a fear reaction because of the imagined proximity of other males, which kind of distracts from the act ... How they measured it? Perhaps a fake female with a reservoir, which would introduce even more variables.
_Microft 6y ago
I'm reasonably sure that this is the paper in question if someone cares enough to actually want to read it: "Discriminating Males and Unpredictable Females: Males Bias Sperm Allocation in Favor of Virgin Females", doi:10.1111/j.1439-0310.2011.01928.x
godelzilla 6y ago
For me it's more fascinating to think about how "science" articles regularly overstate and exaggerate weak data.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

omginternets 6y ago

If you're interested in Numerical Cognition, I can't recommend Stanislas Dehaene's The Number Sense enough. It's fantastic.

082349872349872 6y ago

Herd animals are masters of conformal mapping (with you, or a dog, as a pole) poor example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDQw21ntR64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDQw21ntR64 (Humans are also herd animals, which has repercussions for safety measures in public spaces.)

ilaksh 6y ago

I believe that many of the capabilities that researchers are seeking in general AI are present in ordinary animals that we do not consider particularly intelligent. And I suspect that the focus on imitating higher-level human cognition has actually slowed down research in general AI. The numerical instincts in this article are one example. Other useful abilities that would make them more general purpose, but missing from most AI systems: fast adaption, basic understanding of complex high-dimensional environments, integrating streams of information, self-maintenance, etc.

hooande 6y ago

Is there a difference between "counting" and "determining relative size"? for example, I can distinguish between a group of three people and a group of ten people without being able to count at all. There are big differences in the amount of noise, motion, smell, etc that don't require a concept of numbers. I feel like the author uses several examples that are based on relative size, and also examples that appear to require actual counting (ie the cowbirds at the end). It kind of muddies the issue, but overall interesting ideas

glaberficken 6y ago

I find it we are anthropomorphizing when we say: Non human animal x or y can "count their own eggs" or "assess numbers" Animals can surely assess and "feel" quantities via the senses and via their own automatic body reactions (hormones etc...). As well as have many pre-programmed quantities in their genome. But a "number" is purely an abstract concept. I don't think we can ever be sure an animal is actually "counting" things. Instead from what we know about how fear, excitement, etc is regulated via hormones it seems fairly probable that they are simply seeing, hearing, touching and this triggers a feeling that guides them to a certain behavior (through hormone secretion).

BucketsMcG 6y ago
I saw my dog reasoning the other day. Unfortunately he's been to the vet rather too often in his life. It's in the neighbourhood, so if we're out and he thinks I'm taking him there, he starts to think about ways to avoid it, and pulls me along alternative routes. Every walk's a negotiation between me and his determination to avoid the vet. Anyway, he got attacked on Monday and I had to take him to get stitched up. This made him extra wary of having to go there again, and it resulted in him trying to drag me along a path he has never walked down in his life, because it's a) through a kids' playground and b) a dead end. But he THOUGHT it would take him away from danger. So yeah, you can say he was responding to hormones if you like, I'm sure that's true. But he was acting on a hunch, or a hope, not on knowledge.
- Stratoscope 6y ago
  Our dog Brownie suffered a major back injury last December that left her hind legs paralyzed. We took her to Scout's House in San Mateo, CA for several months of physical therapy. This is a pretty wonderful place; if you ever need PT for your dog and you live on the SF Peninsula, I highly recommend them. So does Brownie. After the first few visits she had the route memorized. When I turned off 101 and onto the city streets, she got more excited at each turn as we approached their parking lot. She's made an amazing recovery. Here's how she was doing in March: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSGAf3oo6Jc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSGAf3oo6Jc And even better since then: now she runs and chases squirrels in the yard. She's still a little wobbly, but I can see why she was so excited about her visits to Scout's House.

at_a_remove 6y ago

This is a bit depressing, but I sometimes think about r/K selection and how many times the K-strategists might have evolved true, distinct counting, only for that to end up triggering depression. I watched a video of a duck who, reasons unknown, decided to navigate a waterfall with her six ducklings. Two made it. Does she know that she has fewer babies now? I have seen similar videos where a heron will snap or two or three ducklings while the mother is unable to do anything about it. It occurred to me that zero ducklings might make it per year, and that this would be a normal thing to happen to a mother duck. A continuity of memory and the ability to enumerate loss could result in learned helplessness; would nature end up selecting for creatures that live in the blind optimism of now, with neither past to compare against nor future to dread on either side?

grawprog 6y ago
I participated in some goose egg addling for conservation reasons at a lake where they're overpopulated and causing damage through their numbers. This pretty much involved two of us paddling around the lake in a canoe searching for goose nests, one person would distract the geese, while the other snuck up to the nest and shook the egg until you felt them break inside. The geese would return to the nest, and continue hatching the eggs and be fairly unaware and unperturbed when they didn't hatch. It had to be done that way though. If the eggs were just removed, the geese become stressed and upset and end up just laying another nest.
thaumasiotes 6y ago
This kind of child mortality is fairly common for humans historically. Did they know when they'd lost children? Could they remember the missing children? Of course.
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  Humans yes, and some of the other primates. Obviously. But before those species, was there a kind of "great filter" of numeracy and memory? If you have cats, and one of them dies, the other may spend months looking for their companion in the usual places, howling away, but for progeny, litters of kittens average about four or so (by nipple math!). If a kitten dies or is somehow lost, the mother will likely miss them on an individual basis, but will the change in the number of kittens in a kitten pile also cause a feeling of loss? What about with the aforementioned ducks? You might have twelve ducklings and a reduced capacity in the mother to recognize them individually; she might instead look at the ducks collectively. I saw a bit of a nesting duck leading her babies out for their first foray into the water. She would quack and every so often another duckling would pitch themselves out of the nest-hole and onto the water. Eventually the quacking didn't get her any more ducklings and she proceeded onward. She had an astounding nineteen ducklings. However, that number is going to decrease over time. Will she have a creeping experience of fewer and fewer ducklings? Or is it something like "many, three, two, one"? And what kind of internal state comes about? Certainly we see that loss in the larger primates, and even in our own pets, but when it gets down to birds, many of them do not have a lot of brain matter to work with -- what's their state? Is there enough memory and experience to overcome instinct? "All of my babies died last year and the year before ..." Overall, and this is just the vaguest of grim suspicions, what if, at each increase in memory and care for offspring, evolution must select against those organisms experiencing a kind of despair, a learned helplessness, at the futility of the ever-larger spheres of their existence? It's not an issue if you're just a handful of neurons wiggling your way toward the next source of food, but it could become large enough to struggle against the survival instinct, and I wonder if numeracy is one of those critical struggles.