Whaling cap and trade has the politics of carbon taxes

The politics is that I don't see it happening, or at least not as the primary tool for managing the problem, regardless of the merits.

Unfortunately the paywall means I can't RTFA in Nature, but here's the Washpost and an interesting take by Holly Doremus.  A pure cap/trade, which they're not proposing, would require whaling nations to buy whaling allocations they now steal from the world's common heritage for free, so politics rules that out.  The authors apparently propose allocating parts of the harvest for free to whaling nations, which raises the question of why anyone else would support it.

The other biological aspect of this issue that I haven't seen discussed stems from my understanding that the current harvest is likely significantly less than what some common whale species can handle.  Of course whalers currently ignore species restrictions and kill whatever whales they can find, but that gets arm-waved (and more could be done if the political will existed).  This proposal could result  in an increased allocation, making it more expensive for whaling opponents to buy out quotas.

I agree with Holly that there are non-economic problems with this proposal, although I disagree with her implication that an economic approach is incapable of addressing non-economic problems.  Just this one.

Holly also picked up on the same parallel I saw to attempts to buy slaves as a way to end slavery.  I wouldn't be as dismissive as she is though.  I suspect buying slaves their freedom was an important method to reduce the number of slaves in states where it was a marginal activity, making it easier for those states to move to abolition. Pennsylvania then moved to a gradual abolition of slavery in 1780, diminishing the economic impact to slaveowners by putting it off into the future.  Economic approaches have their value.

Been there, didn't do that, but it was still pretty cool

We went there in 2010 and did a little bit of volunteer work with a group focusing on mountain gorilla preservation. We did the one-day hike through Bwindi thing and had what we considered an amazing encounter with a gorilla group, but not like this. I'm just impressed at the relatively calm dominance of the silverback in this video. The silverback we saw was far less tolerant, partway bluff-charging our guides when they walked in a direction that he wanted to go (they bluff-waved their machetes around in response, and everybody settled down).  You're not allowed to approach the baby gorillas but they can approach you.  We had one that came within ten feet of us, and that was pretty amazing to us.

The silverback in this video is calm but not completely, like at minute 2:50 when he pulls an infant away that was intensely scrutinizing the tourist's face.  One interesting speculation is that the silverback may have thought that staring into the man's face would be somewhat threatening, as it would've been to the silverback, but it would be hard to reason all the way through that without using a theory of mind.  And the silverback's quick glance at the man as he left was interesting - somewhat cautious, a bit threatening, and I suspect maybe just as curious as the females and juveniles but constrained by social norms from showing it as openly.  Or maybe I'm just anthropomorphizing, but it all seems plausible.

Only 700 of these guys in the wild, split into two geographically-separated groups.  As we see from the population structure of one male and a number of females, the effective breeding population is far smaller.  These gorillas haven't been bred in captivity.

Here's hoping this video helps raise awareness and maybe some money to keep the species alive.

NIH recognizes chimps can waive rights

The decision by the National Institute of Health to nearly completely eliminate invasive medical experimentation on chimps has received a medium amount of attention.  Good news, overall, except the advisory committee had no consensus on testing vaccines on chimps.  The testing could accelerate vaccine development but requires infecting chimps with potentially horrible diseases.  The lack of a consensus doesn't mean testing should go forward, but leaves a vacuum.

One intriguing development is that research can continue where chimps voluntarily subject themselves to it.  The chimps are trained to receive treats in return for allowing researchers to take blood samples, and it's up to the chimp to decide whether the research will proceed.  I suppose it's not impossible to do something similar with less intelligent animals, but it would be extremely difficult and not considered ethically important.

The other interesting development was the emphasis on testing on other animals instead of chimps - in other words, there's a moral scale and other animals rank below chimps.  These two developments inch toward the sapientist position I support - not animal rights, but rights based on intelligence.  A long way forward before we get there, though.

NIH's disingenuous response on chimps and bioethics

I'm mostly a supporter of the mainstream scientific institutions, but I'll take a moment here to bash the National Institute of Health and its decision to play politics with research regarding medical experimentation on chimps.

NIH wants to return "semi-retired" chimps to invasive medical experimentation, a proposal that provoked a response by several Senators demanding first a study "about the merits of continued invasive research using using chimpanzees." NIH said, okay fine, and then sent things southward.

The disingenuity is, as told by Nature, the deliberate decision to remove all ethical aspects of the research from the scope of the study. To claim you're creating an objective response to a research request that only considers the category with potential positive aspects and while excluding the category with the most potential negatives, is to be transparent. In a bad way.

What doesn't help is the argument by animal rights types that there's no medical benefit to this type of research. They're trying to avoid an ethical dilemma by claiming there's no reason to do it at all, and shutting their ears to contrary evidence. NIH isn't any better by refusing to think about ethical dilemmas.

Research defenders don't help their cause by deliberately underplaying what they want to do with the chimps. For example, they say regarding testing a Hepatitis C vaccine on chimps that "As inconveniencing tens of chimpanzees impacts the health of millions of humans, it is unethical not to use the chimp model." They don't say how they plan to examine effectiveness, but from my perspective, contracting Hepatitis C after being deliberately exposed, because a vaccine didn't work, is more than an inconvenience.

An even better example of the dilemma is the proposal to use the chimps to research treatments for Ebola. Someone needs to explain to me a humane way of infecting a chimp with Ebola. It remains a dilemma though, unless someone can explain a reason not to explore an avenue for saving human beings from Ebola.

FWIW, I'm not an animal rights type, I'm a sapientist. I'll pick a human over a chimp in some weird hypothetical matchup, but I'd rather cheat the hypo and pay some additional money so I don't have to sacrifice either. Researchers might jeer at that evasion, but their own answer is less clear cut than they think. Medical research on chimps is expensive, but only because we treat them according to modern coddling standards. Drop back to early 20th Century standards of care and willingness to euthanize unneeded specimens, and you could reach your research goals faster or cheaper. Even people who think they have a clear cut answer are actually making compromises.

Anyway, I'm not completely opposed to invasive research that doesn't hurt, scare, or medically harm chimps. Maybe the effect of public review of this issue will be to let us cheat the hypo, and inject some extra government money so we find a way to solve these medical problems without harming chimps more than we already have.

Reviews: Daybreakers and McClatchy's story on restarting chimp medical experiments

Daybreakers is an above-average vampire flick, partly for the premise: instead of being a hidden minority, in the near-future the vampires have won and run the world, with a small number of remaining humans being all that exists for the carefully controlled, medical blood farms.

There's a certain environmental analogy in the film: some vampires ask their complacent colleagues what will happen when they've drunk the last human blood (there will always be more is the answer). I think we have an even better analogy, though.

McClatchy reports that the US is considering restarting the use of chimpanzees for medical experiments. Just like some vampires in the fictional movie believed it was wrong to use their closely related species of humans, however inferior the humans might be, many people and even a major pharmaceutical company (GlaxoSmithKline) oppose this experimentation on great apes.

McClatchy's reporting is good and detailed and has two flaws: first, it's not clear exactly how the chimps would be used. Many were previously infected with Hepatitis C, so this research could potentially benefit them. More to the point, any research that doesn't hurt, scare, or medically harm the chimps isn't too controversial. I think the researchers' comparison to human volunteers doesn't work, though: you don't have shoot human subjects with anesthetic darts on a daily basis in order to get blood samples from them. Overall, I doubt the proposed research matches the benign standard that I could live with.

The second flaw is the assertion that chimps do not make particularly useful subjects for human medical research. I highly, highly doubt that to be an accurate statement. It treads into the animal rights version of science denialism, and provokes the over-reaction from people like Mark Hoofnagle who can't stand animal rights activists and miss the point that sapient species need to be treated differently.

I suspect a much better version of the utilitarian argument against using chimps for medical experiments is that they're too expensive to use, especially if you accept that we must treat them decently. To me, that would mean teaching them sign language, something you could easily argue is a necessity to avoid unnecessary harm, and should be enough to make it way too expensive to use chimps. There ought to be a law on this, and I think we could get one on a state by state basis.

Teaching appropriate technology to wild chimpanzees

I wrote several years ago about the idea that we could facilitate cultural transmission between chimpanzee groups. Another reason for doing that came to light earlier this fall - some chimps in Guinea have learned how to destroy wildlife snares set by poachers. These wire-loop snares set under tension can accidentally catch chimps by the hands and feet, leading to partial amputations, and some male chimps have learned to break the branch that's used to create the tension.

So the idea would be to teach other chimps hundreds of miles away the same technique. Exactly how to teach them is a little tricky. Maybe the handful of groups that are used to people can be shown a model snare and how to break it, or possibly even shown a video similar to the one at the link, showing other chimps breaking snares. The other trick is getting juvenile female chimps to learn the technique, because males stay with the group they grow up with, while females disperse to new areas and can take their knowledge with them.

I don't know, maybe it's not feasible. But just the fact that we can consider teaching chimps appropriate technology in a manner resembling the way we think human societies can be taught appropriate technology suggests that highly intelligent animals should be considered as having some kind of intrinsic moral value.

UPDATE (slightly related): a psychologist finds that human males are much less aggressive if shown pictures of meat. Chimps are somewhat similar - Jane Goodall wrote that the dominance structure breaks down in the aftermath of a successful kill by chimps that were hunting monkeys, and an otherwise-dominant male will beg for meat from a subordinate but won't attempt to take it away.

Chimp death, unpredictability of smart critters, and relative intelligence

Ed Yong has another fascinating post with videos showing how different chimps react very differently to death in their groups. Among other things, chimp mothers refuse to abandon dead babies, sometimes carrying them for days or weeks. Very difficult to guess what's going on in the mind of another species, but there's a clear recognition that something's happened, and somewhat flawed ways of handling it. Kind of like us.

Five years ago I wrote a post about chimp infanticide and added "Another interesting aspect is that chimp infanticide appears somewhat harder to explain with simple evolutionary principles than is the case with monkeys. That fits my own little theory that behaviour of smart animals is hard to predict...."

With my usual, blisteringly fast analytical skill, I've come up with another theory after five years. Chimp behavior isn't necessarily harder to predict than mouse behavior, it's just that it's harder for humans to predict chimps because the relative difference in our intelligence is much smaller. By analogy, a chess grand master (human) can easily predict the outcome of a chess move by a low-ranked player (mouse) but not so easily playing against a slightly less proficient chess master (chimp). They're a lot closer to our league.

All the more reason why we shouldn't treat chimps, other great apes, and maybe a few other animals as belonging in the same ethical category as mice.

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Unsettling video of a young chimp playing with the mummified body of an infant below. An adult is clearly disturbed and wants no contact with the corpse, and the mother eventually scares off the juvenile and takes back the corpse. If you ignore that macabre aspect, though, you'll notice the chimps using stone hammers and anvils to crack open nuts, one of the prime examples of chimp tool use and one of the few that many of us have done as well.

More Uganda

Felt like writing a little more about Uganda:

Gorillas are almost entirely herbivorous (they eat some insects, apparently).  We were watching the silverback try to eat a small green vine going up a 25-foot tree, but it snapped when he tried to pull it down.  No problem, though - he stood up and wrenched the whole tree down, putting the entire vine in easy reach.  Gorillas are like small elephants, changing the balance between trees and ground cover in the forest.

A lot of the gorillas spend a significant amount of time foraging in neighboring farms and not just the forest.  Understandable when Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is so small (about 20 by 15 kilometers) and the farmland used to be habitat, but you can also sympathize with subsistence farmers living on less than $2 a day when their tiny plots are torn up by gorillas.  The average woman has 7 to 9 children in her lifetime - they say they need to keep some children home from school to chase wildlife away from their fields.  The organization we volunteered with, Conservation Through Public Health, has a family planning program that attempts to persuade people that smaller families are better.  I've also thought that programs elsewhere to compensate people for damage to their farms, or to pay them to create buffer areas, could be good models to apply at Bwindi.

We did a river wildlife cruise at Queen Elizabeth National Park that was fantastic.  The birdlife in particular was amazing - I'm an indifferent birder overseas where I have no hope of absorbing much understanding, but these were great.

Congo seems to be improving somewhat - we were right on the border and there's lots of traffic.  Rwanda is already open for tourists.  North Uganda, previously dangerous, is now settling down some.  Some good signs in this.  OTOH, we heard that Rwanda wasn't as careful as Uganda in controlling the level of exposure that gorillas, susceptible to human diseases, have to tourists.

Everyone in Uganda and Dubai seemed happy to see Obama as president, although many didn't expect great things either, just less war.

Uganda and Dubai

My wife and I took a long vacation to Uganda with a short side trip to Dubai.  In addition to the standard tourist things, we did some volunteer work with Conservation Through Public Health, a Ugandan/US non-profit that protects mountain gorillas and other wildlife by resolving conflicts with humans, particularly disease transmission and family planning issues.

CTPH is exploring a new kind of volunteer vacation experience where it utilizes the professional skills of short-term volunteers, rather than have them do the unskilled work that other volunteer vacations offer.  I highly recommend the experience to anyone who's interested.  We were the guinea pigs, so they're still working it out, and I'd be happy to talk to anyone who's interested.

As for seeing Uganda and the gorillas, I'll steal from Richard Dawkins who said of our California redwoods, "see them before you die."  Same is true with the gorillas.  It's right up there with the chance I had to see orangutans in Borneo in terms of seeing something of ourselves.  We also saw chimps in Uganda, but it's not the incredibly up-close experience that we had with the gorillas.

I've occasionally written about the Great Ape Project and how I distinguish that concept from animal-rights arguments for chickens and other unintelligent animals that I mostly disagree with.  These gorillas we saw were mountain gorillas, only 700 left in the wild, a breeding population much smaller than that, and no reproductive success in captivity.  It would be a tragedy to lose this relative, so I'm hoping for the best for the efforts of CTPH and others.

As for the rest of the tourist experience, Uganda was a great place to visit, people were extremely nice, and it doesn't have the unsafe feel of rampant crime of some other places, like the big cities in Kenya.

Dubai was a strange place, but worth a short visit.  I wonder if human mobility will mean that much of the world will be like it a century, where 90% of the residents in the country are non-citizen expatriates.  I tend to think of a country as being "for" its citizens, while expats on work visas are just in a commercial relationship with the country.  But when the expats are 90% of the people, have been there for decades, and have done at least 90% of the work of building the country, the question of who the country belongs to is a little muddled.  Anyway, if you go, check out the Sheik Mohammed Center for Cultural Understanding and their "cultural breakfasts," where you can eat excellent food, hear a little about the culture, and ask the women who run the program any questions you want about life and religion in Dubai.

Chimps like magic

Buzzfeed shows a highly entertaining snippet from Japanese television of a young chimp being given its own magic show. You could easily see the chimp's shocked reaction as some of the tricks blew its mind.

All very entertaining, but also a demonstration of the chimp's intelligence. It's easy to get a surprise reaction in animals by startling them, but I don't think a dog or horse has enough of a mental framework of the universe to notice that something had just gone very wrong in each of the tricks. Also worth noting how young the chimp is - I'd guess about three years old or so, and probably as far away from adult mental development for chimps as a six year old human would be from adult intelligence.

Entertaining and maybe enlightening. I guess I should also wonder though about what happens to the chimps when they're not so small and cute.

Mixed-bag NY Times article on whales

Very long NY Times Magazine article on whales being sociable with humans, mostly our local gray whales in their non-local nursery lagoons in Baja Mexico. One important piece of information I got out of it was that whales escaping from sonar and other underwater explosions show evidence of the bends because of their rapid ascent to avoid the sounds. While my view, that highly intelligent animals should be treated as if they have rights, is a minority position, there's a strong societal consensus that we shouldn't cause unnecessary pain to animals. The bends can be extremely painful in humans; we don't have any reason to assume it's better for whales.

Another interesting piece of information was the implication that only some gray whales, the "Friendlies", were sociable in the Baja lagoons while the rest kept their distance. Understanding which ones interact and which don't could go a ways towards explaining their behavior. Finally, the article pointed out that the whales weren't getting food from people, so it's not the usual reward system involved that tames wild animals. It's fascinating behavior.

Unfortunately though, the rest was quasi-New Age speculation that kept a veneer of scientific respectability by being posed as questions rather than stated as assertions. One example was when the author asked the main scientist being interviewed whether the whales' sociability showed "forgiveness" for past violence directed at gray whales (only token numbers have been hunted in the last 60 years). The scientific response should have been "your guess is as good as mine," but instead she says:

“Those are the kinds of things that for the longest time a scientist wouldn’t dare consider,” she said. “But thank goodness we’ve gone through a kind of cognitive revolution when it comes to studying the intelligence and emotion of other species. In fact, I’d say now that it is my obligation as a scientist not to discount that possibility. We do have compelling evidence of the experience of grief in cetaceans; and of joy, anger, frustration and distress and self-awareness and tool use; and of protecting not just their young but also their companions from humans and other predators. So these are reasons why something like forgiveness is a possibility.

Oh well. And this'll attract attention to the Baja lagoons, where I was hoping (selflishly) to visit sometime soon. Oh well. Maybe we can sort out the New Agey stuff and still be concerned with protecting whales and interacting with them.

UPDATE: Fresh Air interviews the article author and the main scientist, unfortunately not providing much useful information. They did add that only a small number of boats/captains are allowed to approach whales, which would reduce the riskiness of the whales' behavior.

Since not much science is being provided, I'll try a bit of speculation instead: polar bears are sometimes known to play with dogs instead of killing, avoiding, or ignoring them. My understanding is that these are seal-eating bears stuck on shore until winter ice lets them get out to sea, and they go a long time without eating. With no responsibility to feed themselves, they revert to immature play behavior, with dogs as playmates substituting for the bears' mothers and siblings.

The parallel to the whales is that the mother grays don't feed in the nursery lagoon. Other than feeding the calves, they have nothing to do but engage in play, and the humans are interesting creatures to play with.

Let's try the Foxp2 gene on chimps

My usual blogging timeliness here. News broke several weeks ago that the Foxp2 gene, one that is nearly identical in all mammals except humans and is associated with language problems when it's defective, had been experimentally altered in mice to partially resemble the human gene. They found the mice vocalized differently, behaved differently, and had more developed neurons in the parts of the brain controlling fine motor activity necessary for vocalizing.

So I think it would be very interesting to see how the same change would work on chimps. Those who think that chimps are on the far side of some ethical line that separates humans from everything else shouldn't really see any problem with this idea. I would hesitate and think a long time before genetically altering chimps to make them smarter, but the main change from this gene, probably, might just make it easier for chimps to verbalize what they can already do by sign language (or maybe it would do nothing that substantial, who knows). I think that change, if it happened, would strongly affect us and how we deal with great apes if all of us could hear them talk.

Geese, guts, and gays

Kristof in the NY Times about his childhood on the farm:

Then there were the geese, the most admirable creatures I’ve ever met. We raised Chinese white geese, a common breed, and they have distinctive personalities. They mate for life and adhere to family values that would shame most of those who dine on them.

While one of our geese was sitting on her eggs, her gander would go out foraging for food — and if he found some delicacy, he would rush back to give it to his mate. Sometimes I would offer males a dish of corn to fatten them up — but it was impossible, for they would take it all home to their true loves.

Once a month or so, we would slaughter the geese. When I was 10 years old, my job was to lock the geese in the barn and then rush and grab one. Then I would take it out and hold it by its wings on the chopping block while my Dad or someone else swung the ax.

The 150 geese knew that something dreadful was happening and would cower in a far corner of the barn, and run away in terror as I approached. Then I would grab one and carry it away as it screeched and struggled in my arms.

Very often, one goose would bravely step away from the panicked flock and walk tremulously toward me. It would be the mate of the one I had caught, male or female, and it would step right up to me, protesting pitifully. It would be frightened out of its wits, but still determined to stand with and comfort its lover.

So, no more eating geese for me. The thing about it is, my feeling that it would be wrong to eat an animal that can behave like this, isn't an intellectual determination. By contrast, I can intellectually justify my general rejection of animal rights. I can also justify my acceptance of some level of rights for highly intelligent animals that the Great Ape Project supports, and even my squishy concerns regarding eating smart-but-not-sapient animals like pigs and some other mammals. But my reaction against killing geese is just a gut reaction.

Gut reactions aren't necessarily wrong though - I think any coherent ethical system could be used to justify horrible things, so a gut check is a good thing. On the other hand, I think it's exactly this kind of unthinking gut response that tells other people that gay behavior and gay marriage is bad.

So how do you reconcile gut instinct against intellect? I don't think you can, and I don't think you should really choose one over the other. But knowing that gut instinct can be directed by personal feelings that have nothing to do with morality makes me believe that my reaction to not eating geese is better than others' homophobia, because the consequences of being wrong are very different. If I'm wrong and eating geese is fine, then the world has not been badly damaged. Wrongly choosing to discriminate against a whole class of people, though, is a different ball of wax.

Santino planned for his own future state of mind

Ed Yong caught the crucial issue regarding the zoo chimp that calmly collected and made stone missiles to throw at visitors that would come to the zoo later:

Santino is an advanced tool-maker, learning to create concrete missiles through its own initiative. And what's more, he showed the ability to plan for the future based on a predicted state of mind, rather than the one he was currently experiencing.

I haven't seen other reports about Santino discuss this issue - he didn't just plan for the future but did so with a self-awareness of what his future state of mind would be. If he thought in words it would have meant him thinking, "Humans will show up today, I will be antagonized, I will want to throw something at them, nothing to throw at them is presently available, so I will make things and store them for when I am angry." The fact that Santino doesn't have mental language capability makes it even more impressive that he could understand these concepts without words to guide him.

More evidence that intelligent animals like the great apes shouldn't just be used as our playthings or medical subjects except under circumstances we'd apply to human child subjects.

Connecting North American newts and Australian dolphins through mediocrity

Two interesting posts from Not Exactly Rocket Science: one on the evolutionary arms race between sometimes-poisonous newts and sometimes-immune garter snakes here on the West Coast, and another on how the recently-discovered tool use by Australian dolphins seems to be learned along matrilineal lines and also a recent invention by dolphins.

In the first post, newts in some areas of the West Coast have evolved poisonous skins as deterrent to predators like garter snakes, and snakes have evolved immunity that sometimes completely defeats the poison. Interestingly, in some places there's no poison and no immunity. One possible explanation for this is that we're at a special moment in time where the evolutionary arms race hasn't yet started in all geographic areas, but I doubt it. My speculation is that the time period the two species have coexisted is far longer than the period needed to go through the arms race (or even more likely than independent evolution, that genetic diffusion from areas further along in the arms race would spread quickly to new areas).

If we apply the Mediocrity Principle and assume we're not seeing a special moment in time for newts and snakes, then something else must explain the geographic difference. Time for more speculation!

I wonder if there's an alternative cyle: 1. newts develop toxicity. 2. snakes develop overwhelming immunity. 3. newts completely lose their now-useless toxicity. 4. snakes completely lose their now-useless immunity, and the cycle starts over.

Instead of the British Columbia newts evolving behind the rest, they may just be at a different point in the cycle.

Total guessing, but fun in a geeky way.

And then there's the second link, about dolphins who use marine sponges to protect their snouts while digging out hidden fish from the muddy sub-surface (one of the full articles is here). One in nine dolphins use sponges, although one in two dolphins use them in the deeper waters. The dolphins only appear to learn from their mothers, and males rarely stay with their mothers long enough to learn the technique. Finally, genetic analysis suggests that a recent "Sponging Eve" invented the technique and passed it on to her descendants now using it.

That only 11% of the females in the area use the technique doesn't sound all that impressive, until you consider that half use it in the deep water, that Sponging Eve was a recent ancestor, and that a lot of the male descendant dolphins are also indirect beneficiaries. Researchers observed 41 dolphins using the techniques, so Sponging Eve seems to have done pretty well.

But how does this successful technique relate to the Mediocrity Principle? Dolphins have been big-brained for millions of years longer than hominids, yet we just happen to observe the technique within a few decades of when it was first invented?

I speculated at some other science blog that the technique was only marginally useful, but this information suggests otherwise. The Mediocrity Principle isn't absolute, and sometimes weird things happen.

On the other hand, something else might keep the sponging technique from persisting over the long term. Maybe the dolphins get too good at exposing the fish, or use up too many of the sponges that are suitable tools. Instead of a steady-state equilibrium, it's more like the newts and snakes. The dolphins over-exploit their environment and either the tools or the fish disappear from accessible habitats, and then the dolphins forget the technique until it's reinvented.

It's all guessing, but it satisfies the Mediocrity Principle. Fortunately, it's also easily tested - just wait a century or so and see if the dolphins over-exploit the environment.

(And with that, I may be offline for awhile, so Happy New Year everyone.)

Notes on de Waal's "Tree of Origin"

Some random notes on Frans de Waal's "Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution," a book I had mentioned briefly in another post.

• Page 47: says modern hunter-gatherer tribes rely more on plant foods, usually gathered by women, than by meat hunted by men. Vegetarians love to say this too. Maybe right today, but there's a bias in relying on modern tribes as a reference. They've been pushed out from the coasts and the most fertile hunting grounds by "advanced" groups, and have to make do with the wastelands. I'll bet most hunter-gatherers had more meat than modern groups did.
• 
  
• Page 64: contrasting human breeding patterns to chimps, it says "the nuclear family relies on paternity certainty." I think modern paternity testing plus the availability of abortion may change genes affecting human personality - the male genetic strategy of "cuckolding" without having to invest resources in the offspring works less well, the male strategy of monogamous investment in children no longer carries the risk of being cuckolded, and "straying" females are more likely to abort pregnancies that might be the result of a liason.
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• Page 143: in the last 1.9 million years, hominid sexual dimorphism has stayed roughly the same, despite massive changes in brain capacity. Gender dimorphism generally gives some clue about sexual relations. Our moderate level of sexual dimorphism suggests moderate polygyny, again very different from our chimp and gorilla relatives. Interesting that this has been stable through our ancestral species too.
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• Page 168: larger apes seem smarter than smaller monkeys, despite having similar neocortex/body size ratios. The book says that one explanation besides a better-wired brain is that "rather than relative neocortical enlargement, absolute size is what matters. When the total brain volume reaches a certain point, the ability to perceive and organize the structure of instrumental behavior emerges." My comment is, what about cetaceans? If only a small fraction of a sperm whale's 20-pound brain exceeds what's needed for body control, that's likely to be a scary amount of brain matter available for cognition. The author goes on to suggest that testing whales would be interesting, although I'd guess that experimental testing of adult sperm whales would be a challenge.
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• Pages 180-183: the most interesting part of the book. Neocortex/body size ratios for primates correlate positively along a line for each primate species typical group size. Applying the same neocortex ratio to humans gives a group size of 150, which the author argues fits well with the group size found for hunter-gather clans. Humans have other group sizes, he argues, but they're either much larger or much smaller than the 150 figure. And he claims modern groups fit similar size structures. The apogee of the neocortex ratio can be found with Neandertals, who could theoretically manage slightly larger groups than we can.

Like I said before, it's a good book and well worth reading.

Reviews: The Uplift Universe Trilogies, and "Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution"

David Brin's Uplift Universe trilogies are some of the better "hard science fiction" that I've read, defined as sci-fi that cares about the "sci" part. And unlike most hard sci-fi, the writing's good and the plots move quickly. The two trilogies deal with a universe populated by warring, status-seeking alien species all uplifted to sapience by previous alien species, except for self-uplifted humans who have just genetically enhanced chimps and dolphins. The Earth species navigate through this minefield to survive in a dangerous galaxy cluster.

The ideas are fun, with a decent if speculative grounding in biology, and the first-person perspective for non-human species works well. The chimps in particular are the most engaging characters, with their wisecracking, playful, sporadic heroism. The books would make a great movie, I think.

Downsides are the somewhat repetitive, victory-is-only-achieved-at-a-cost format, and that the best book is The Uplift War, at the end of the first trilogy. I recommend reading the first series, and then if you really liked it, read the second set.

The Uplift Universe's focus on obligations between species influenced how I read the collection of science essays, "Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us about Human Social Evolution," edited by Frans de Waal. The essays are well worth reading, some more than others but you can skip the less interesting ones. I'll write more about it some other time, but I'm very interested in the discussion of chimpanzee culture (p. 248) and how different chimp groups have developed different tools. Chimps in west Africa learned to use stones to open nuts. Nothing stops other chimps from accessing the same food, except geographic barriers stop the spread of knowledge. Similarly, I also saw recently that other chimp groups use tools to extract ground tubers (via Afarensis).

I've argued recently against Denialism Blog that we have a special moral obligation not to harm intelligent species like chimps. Do we have any other obligations? Eli Rabett suggested that we might follow the Uplift Universe path and choose to genetically increase chimp intelligence, in the near future. My spin on all this is that we should, right now, teach wild chimps any tool using technologies currently used by other chimps in separate geographic areas. One could justify this as slightly balancing out all the harm we've done to them by enabling more of them to survive in the decreased habitat available. I don't think that's necessary though - it's justifiable on the basis that it makes their lives better.

What we can do beyond this, I don't know. I don't know if wild chimps could feasibly use or benefit from human-created techniques for improving their lives. Maybe chimps aren't even smart enough so that one group can master all the techniques used by all chimp groups. But then again, maybe they are, or at least can choose the best techniques.

I think this type of uplift is justified.

Denialism Blog can't face a fire in a fertility clinic

Mark Hoofnagle's Denialism Blog is a good blog I agree with 95% of the time (especially about bringing back the Office of Technology Assessment). But - the blogger license requires me to focus on disagreement, where Mark is wrong, wrong, wrong. So let's start.

Mark begins interestingly with a post praising Obama for his willingness to answer hypothetical questions. I agree that politicians should answer most hypos. It fits the rule that one should generally do the opposite of anything Bush does, for one thing. It's not clear that Obama actually follows the rule though, when he says things like this:

AP: Is there any circumstances where you'd be prepared or willing to use nuclear weapons to defeat terrorism and Osama bin Laden?

OBAMA: No, I'm not, uh, there has been no discussion of using nuclear weapons and that's not a hypothetical that I'm going to discuss.

Regardless of Obama though, where Mark goes off the rails is in denying there's any reason to treat especially intelligent animals like chimps as having some special moral value that relates to their intelligence. When asked whether a post-human evolved species could abuse us with moral impunity he says it's an impractical question, and therefore the response is "This is stupid. Fail. Try again." Mark should've just said, "I refuse to respond (and he did refuse to respond, we never got an answer) on the grounds that it's a hypothetical question."

Mark soon tries to rescue himself by saying that realistic hypotheticals must be answered, but it's fine for him to refuse to answer the unrealistic ones. This is where he can't face a fire in a fertility clinic.

The "Fire in a Fertility Clinic" hypothetical is a standard argument used against the people arguing that personhood begins at conception:

Probing the assumptions underlying the equal moral status view of the embryo, Sandel asks how a person holding that view would behave if confronted with a fire in a fertility clinic. Given a choice between saving a five-year-old girl or a tray of 10 embryos, which would one choose?

The right blogosphere has been fumbling with this one for years, with several unconvincing responses, but Mark's advice to them would be "Don't answer it! It's vanishingly unlikely! This is stupid. Fail. Try again."

I think the rest of us can see a value to the question that extends beyond its practicality - it helps us understand what we really believe to be ethical, regardless of what we tell people or tell ourselves about our beliefs.

But, if it's helpful to Mark to try something more probable than the specific fire in a fertility clinic scenario, I can come up with something regarding the treatment of intelligent beings. What if computers get smarter than us? Plenty of experts think that's possible in the next 50 years - some don't, but I think at our current state of knowledge, it meets the reasonable percentage probability that Mark demands. So what about it - okay for the smart computers to use us solely for their own ends?

Eli Rabett raised another sci-fi possibility in a comment, the possibility of "genetically modifying other terrestrial species (chimps/dolphins etc) to increase their intelligence to our level. It would make this a much more interesting place. This actually might be within reach." I agree that within 50 years this may be in reach, so what then? Should they be treated differently? What if we "overdo it" and make them superior - can they do what they want with us?

Finally, something I've not seen anywhere is a discussion about the ethical implications of intelligence distribution curves within a species, say for chimps. If they're like humans, a small percentage are likely to be much more intelligent than average. The tiny number of great apes taught sign language probably means we've never encountered individuals in the top 1% of their species for intellectual ability. What are they like? What can they do? If it's ethically disturbing (to me anyway, if not to Mark) to imagine killing Washoe in a medical experiment, what about a chimp that's twice as smart?

I don't think Mark's reason for refusing to answer an improbable hypothetical is right, and I think reasonably possible hypotheticals present themselves too. At some point, Mark says "I'm making a judgment, speciesist as it is, that human life is more valuable than the lives of other animals." I'll disagree with the first clause of that statement too - it's not a judgment, it's a fundamental assumption that he doesn't use logic to justify, and the only way to question such an assumption is to pose contrasting hypotheticals.

For my part, I'm a sapientist - smart creatures have moral value. There's lots of tricky gray areas that I haven't figured out with this, but I have more confidence with this approach for answering the hypotheticals.

(And yes, this is all about a post from months back. My typical quick response time.)

UPDATE: Mark and I have been emailing, and here's one response he sent me:

I still don't understand.  What is the use of a hypothetical if I can
just propose an alternate one that counters it?  They are
uninformative.  Surely you can see the difference between asking a
politician a question like, "If Roe v. Wade is overturned, would you
support legislation to guarantee or deny abortion rights?"  It's a
hypothetical, yes, but it's about a possible event, of relevance to a
political discussion.  Now, compare this to, "If space aliens came to
earth and enslaved us based on our moral code of speciesism, how would
you feel?"  Yeah I can answer it, but it's not a meaningful response
and has no business being used to justify a moral code.  It's based on
assumptions of the morality of non-existent aliens.  I could just as
easily propose that we get visited by the Klingons, and in their
contempt for our vegetarian/pacifist existence they making us slaves. 
What's the point of such stupid questions?

I'm not composing an argument for why I'm a speciesist based on this,
I'm just relating my contempt for the hypotheticals proposed by ARAs
like Singer, as if they are meaningful.  As long as someone can propose
another that is equally improbable and contrary to the first, they have
no value for a moral discussion. If you like publish this reply as a
discussion of that aspect of the conversation.

I also don't feel as if I have to justify the morality of animal
experimentation and using animals for human benefit.  I believe the
burden is on the ARAs to justify why we are the one species on the
planet that can not use or kill other animals.  Why are we the exception
to the rule?

I think he's missing the distinction between the outcome of a hypothetical versus the lesson we can learn from the hypo. If he can come up with an alternative hypo that teaches a different lesson that backs his moral position, let's hear it, regardless of how outlandish it is. And he hasn't responded to my more probable hypos.

As for why we have to obey morality while animals don't, I would guess that sufficiently intelligent animals may well be capable of right and wrong, something that an intellectually-negligible predator like a shark or crocodile wouldn't. I'll further guess that existing apes are in a gray moral area, whose limited intelligence results in at best, limited moral culpability, but I don't really know. Before Mark jumps on this with the question "Is it then immoral for chimps to attack neighboring chimp groups?" I'd guess the answer is that it's understandable, and the morality is a gray area.