4 ms·

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 th

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.

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.