Is A Revolution Brewing In Evolutionary Theory? - Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES).

This is one of the most important pieces you will read this year. Period. 

Full of insights to act on your everyday life (there are tips, it's up-to you to connect the dots). 

When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes, any more than a mouse that loses its tail in an accident should give birth to tailless mice.

If you are not a biologist, you’d be forgiven for being confused about the state of evolutionary science. Modern evolutionary biology dates back to a synthesis that emerged around the 1940s-60s, which married Charles Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s discoveries of how genes are inherited. The traditional, and still dominant, view is that adaptations – from the human brain to the peacock’s tail – are fully and satisfactorily explained by natural selection (and subsequent inheritance). Yet as novel ideas flood in from genomics, epigenetics and developmental biology, most evolutionists agree that their field is in flux. Much of the data implies that evolution is more complex than we once assumed.

Some evolutionary biologists, myself included, are calling for a broader characterisation of evolutionary theory, known as the extended evolutionary synthesis (EES). A central issue is whether what happens to organisms during their lifetime – their development – can play important and previously unanticipated roles in evolution. The orthodox view has been that developmental processes are largely irrelevant to evolution, but the EES views them as pivotal. Protagonists with authoritative credentials square up on both sides of this debate, with big-shot professors at Ivy League universities and members of national academies going head-to-head over the mechanisms of evolution. Some people are even starting to wonder if a revolution is on the cards.

In his book On Human Nature (1978), the evolutionary biologist Edward O Wilson claimed that human culture is held on a genetic leash. The metaphor was contentious for two reasons. First, as we’ll see, it’s no less true that culture holds genes on a leash. Second, while there must be a genetic propensity for cultural learning, few cultural differences can be explained by underlying genetic differences.

Nonetheless, the phrase has explanatory potential. Imagine a dog-walker (the genes) struggling to retain control of a brawny mastiff (human culture). The pair’s trajectory (the pathway of evolution) reflects the outcome of the struggle. Now imagine the same dog-walker struggling with multiple dogs, on leashes of varied lengths, with each dog tugging in different directions. All these tugs represent the influence of developmental factors, including epigenetics, antibodies and hormones passed on by parents, as well as the ecological legacies and culture they bequeath.

[---]

Take the idea that new features acquired by an organism during its life can be passed on to the next generation. This hypothesis was brought to prominence in the early 1800s by the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who used it to explain how species evolved. However, it has long been regarded as discredited by experiment – to the point that the term ‘Lamarckian’ has a derogatory connotation in evolutionary circles, and any researchers expressing sympathy for the idea effectively brand themselves ‘eccentric’. The received wisdom is that parental experiences can’t affect the characters of their offspring.

Except they do. The way that genes are expressed to produce an organism’s phenotype – the actual characteristics it ends up with – is affected by chemicals that attach to them. Everything from diet to air pollution to parental behaviour can influence the addition or removal of these chemical marks, which switches genes on or off. Usually these so-called ‘epigenetic’ attachments are removed during the production of sperm and eggs cells, but it turns out that some escape the resetting process and are passed on to the next generation, along with the genes. This is known as ‘epigenetic inheritance’, and more and more studies are confirming that it really happens.

[---]

Likewise, the diverse, culturally learned foraging traditions of orcas – where different groups specialise in particular types of fish, seals or dolphins – is thought to be driving them to split into several species. Of course, culture reaches its zenith in our own species, where it is now well-established that our cultural habits have been a major source of natural selection on our genes. Dairy farming and milk consumption generated selection for a genetic variant that increased lactase (the enzyme that metabolises dairy products), while starchy agricultural diets favoured increased amylase (the corresponding enzyme that breaks down starch).

All this complexity can’t be reconciled with a strictly genetic currency for adaptive evolution, as many biologists now acknowledge. Rather, it points to an evolutionary process in which genomes (over hundreds to thousands of generations), epigenetic modifications and inherited cultural factors (over several, perhaps tens or hundreds of generations), and parental effects (over single-generation timespans) collectively inform how organisms adapt. These extra-genetic kinds of inheritance give organisms the flexibility to make rapid adjustments to environmental challenges, dragging genetic change in their wake – much like a rowdy pack of dogs.

Despite the excitement of all the new data, it’s unlikely to trigger an evolution revolution for the simple reason that science doesn’t work that way – at least, not evolutionary science. Kuhnian paradigm shifts, like Popper’s critical experiments, are closer to myths than reality. Look back at the history of evolutionary biology, and you will see nothing that resembles a revolution. Even Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection took approximately 70 years to become widely accepted by the scientific community, and at the turn of the 20th century was viewed with considerable skepticism. Over the following decades, new ideas appeared, they were critically evaluated by the scientific community, and gradually became integrated with pre-existing knowledge. By and large, evolutionary biology was updated without experiencing great periods of ‘crisis’.

The same holds for the present. Epigenetic inheritance does not disprove genetic inheritance, but shows it to be just one of several mechanisms through which traits are inherited. I know of no biologist who wants to rip up the textbooks, or throw out natural selection. The debate in evolutionary biology concerns whether we want to extend our understanding of the causes of evolution, and whether that changes how we think about the process as a whole. In this respect, what is going on is ‘normal science’.

Most Important Sentences... To Stop An Intellectual Bullshit

The idea of AI sentience remains trapped in the misguided paradigm of evaluating non-human intelligence by its resemblance to human behavior. 

It is sad that our society is so generous in considering the sentience of machines, yet so skeptical of other creatures. 

We sympathize with software that prints “I don’t want to die,” without bothering to learn the languages others use to make the same plea.

[---]

All life has value. Even if they aren’t sentient, the endangered wildflower and the ancient coastal redwood should not be cut. However, it is logical and noble to extend special protections to animals, whom we know can suffer pain. It is natural to be partial to our fellow humans and to feel an indescribable connection to our favorite animals. But we must acknowledge that there is no objective basis to these preferences. It is equally valid to appreciate and value dogs as it is cats, or for that matter pigs, chickens, anchovies, or oysters. Founding the case for animal rights upon the universal value of all life imparts a more robust epistemology that does not undermine itself by ranking the value of species against one another.

We all know how it feels to be hurt, perhaps even in a way that no one else seems to understand. In these moments, we wish for nothing more than someone to acknowledge our pain. Sentience imparts us visceral, universal signals which we innately recognize in others, but have been conditioned to disbelieve. Other life forms cannot describe their pain to us, yet we can still listen. If there is a line of moral worth to be drawn across our tree of life, it should be below, through the common roots from which we all grow. Our world is so much more complex and wondrous than the myth of human supremacy would have us believe.

- More Here

In other words, morons are talking about "pain" in AI while feeding by beautiful and sentinel animal dead bodies. 

The Arrongant Ape - The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters

I am going to stop using the phrase "non human-animal" from now on. 

Here's a thought experiment.. well rather a test for you: 

• What did I eat for breakfast today?
• What color is the t-shirt I am wearing now? 

If you cannot answer these "simple" questions then you are stupid and dumb. 

Sounds ridiculous?  Even the above two questions you might be able to get right by random guess.

For centuries , the "system" to "test" cognitive abilities is zillion times worse than this. 

For starters we suffer from the inability to fully grasp another animal’s umwelt.

I know so many people who never even interacted with a dog or cat even for 24 hours but look down on them. 

Review of the new book The Arrongant Ape - The Myth of Human Exceptionalism and Why It Matters by Christine Webb:

Webb, a primatologist, has no doubt about the answer. She belongs to a growing subfield of ecologists, naturalists and evolutionary biologists who argue that animals do indeed have minds, and all that goes with them, including feelings, intentions, agency and consciousness. (She urges us to avoid the term “nonhuman animal,” as it implicitly reiterates human exceptionalism, and also to use personal as opposed to impersonal pronouns when writing about animals — both suggestions I am now following, although I may be guilty of misgendering a snake as a result.)

To those of us who have animals at home — two-thirds of U.S. households, for a total of some 400 million pets, according to Webb — the fact that our cats and dogs have thoughts and feelings won’t come as a surprise. But then, why do we continue to permit the torture and slaughter of similarly intelligent and feeling animals on an industrial scale, along with the confinement and experimentation that takes place on university campuses and in the labs of pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies?

Webb argues that the culprit is a pervasive belief in human exceptionalism — specifically, the belief that humans are exceptionally intelligent. This belief, however, is wrong. As she shows, data supporting the supposed chasm between human and animal intelligence has been systematically rigged in our favor.

[---]

Why is this criticism of any importance, given how convincing I find Webb’s larger denouncement of our treatment of the animal world? To my mind, the greater ideological danger is not the belief that humans are unique, but rather our tendency to overlook the limits of possible knowledge and impose our ways of being on others.

To better cultivate the intellectual humility Webb calls for and mitigate the attitudes and errors she denounces, I would argue that we must come to better understand human experience and how it sets us apart from the natural world.

 

Lessons from a Chimp: AI ‘Scheming’ and the Quest for Ape Language

I am in the field. 

I find it nauseating to observe people who know zilch about how much benefits machine learning has bought and could bring and these same people go gaga over LLMs. It's a sad state for a field with so much potential. 

Secondly, this paper hits the nail. For decades till today, non-human animal intelligence has been dismissed because of anthropomorphism (while the current AI/LLM  Ponzi scheme is built on again this misguided anthropomorphism and god knows how much financial damage it will cause when the marker crashes).

Here's my take: 

• Humans and AI face the opposite "Qualia" problem. Human qualia problems are easy for AI to bullshit and explain (and sometimes non-bullshit with good explanation) and conversely,  AI qualia problems are almost always extremely easy for humans. 
• Stop fucking talking about AGI. There hasn't been even a dent in cyberattacks based on AI. If there is AGI coming, trust me - our bank accounts to everything in our digital life will be in jeopardy.  We will not only know but it will hit hard like a tsunami in every aspect of your life.  

Read the whole thing here: 

The UK AI Security Institute1 published a new paper: “Lessons from a Chimp: AI ‘Scheming’ and the Quest for Ape Language.” It criticizes the “recent research that asks whether AI systems may be developing a capacity for scheming.”

“Scheming” means strategically pursuing misaligned goals. These “deceptive alignment” studies examine, for example, strategic deception, alignment faking, and power seeking.

The team, which consists of a dozen AI safety researchers, warns that recent AI ‘scheming’ claims are based on flawed evidence.

The paper identifies four methodological flaws in studies conducted by Anthropic, MTER, Apollo Research, and others:

1. Overreliance on striking anecdotes.

2. Lack of hypotheses or control conditions.

3. Insufficient or shifting theoretical definitions.

4. Invoking mentalistic language that is unsupported by data.

Accordingly, these are AISI’s conclusions:

“We call researchers studying AI ‘scheming’ to minimise their reliance on anecdotes, design research with appropriate control conditions, articulate theories more clearly, and avoid unwarranted mentalistic language.”

The AISI researchers drew a historic parallel to previous excitement about “the linguistic ability of non-human species.” “The story of the ape language research of the 1960s and 1970s is a salutary tale of how science can go awry.”

“There are lessons to be learned from that historical research endeavour, which was characterised by an overattribution of human traits to other agents, an excessive reliance on anecdote and descriptive analysis, and a failure to articulate a strong theoretical framework for the research.”

“Many of the same problems plague research into AI ‘scheming’ today,” stated Christopher Summerfield, AISI Research Director, when he posted the article (on July 9, 2025).

Broader lesson: Non-human intelligence (biological or artificial) requires extra-strong evidence, not extra-lax standards.

[---]

“Most AI safety researchers are motivated by genuine concern about the impact of powerful AI on society. Humans often show confirmation biases or motivated reasoning, and so concerned researchers may be naturally prone to over-interpret in favour of ‘rogue’ AI behaviours. The papers making these claims are mostly (but not exclusively) written by a small set of overlapping authors who are all part of a tight-knit community who have argued that artificial general intelligence (AGI) and artificial superintelligence (ASI) are a near-term possibility. Thus, there is an ever-present risk of researcher bias and ‘groupthink’ when discussing this issue.”

How To End Factory Farming

And yet, for all this progress, the problem overall is still growing worse. More animals are suffering at human hands today than at any prior point in our history.

We raise and kill 210 billion animals globally every year. Two hundred and ten billion. That's more than the number of humans who have ever lived on Earth.

We are the only species to have ever inflicted so much suffering on so many other animals. But we are also the only species to have ever acted to protect other animals from cruelty. We are a species of animal lovers. It is core to our humanity.

One day, humanity will end the worst abuses on factory farms. And when we do, our descendants will look back and ask what we did to help end them.

So what can you do to help? You can advocate, donate, even devote your career to this cause. But if you do just one thing, I ask this. Talk about factory farming.

Tell the corporations you buy from, the politicians you vote for that you expect them to adopt at least basic animal-welfare standards. Tell your friends and family what you've learned about factory farming.

Factory farming thrives in the dark, shielded by a cone of silence, ignored by our politicians, our media and society at large. Its victims are voiceless. They need your voice.

Beauty Happens - What If Animals Find Beauty In The World, Just Like We Do?

 

Today, we are comfortable describing these animals as having self-awareness, complex emotions, language-like communication, and even culture, but we hesitate to say they have a sense of beauty.

Perhaps that is because our ideas about beauty have been shaped by the philosophical traditions of the Enlightenment. Back then, beauty was conceived as a rarefied property best appreciated by mostly disinterested intellectual observers. That nose-in-the-air, art-for-art’s-sake concept of beauty no longer holds much sway in a culture that recognises the potential for beauty in pretty much anything, from classical art to windblown plastic bags. But Enlightenment thinking left behind a habit of regarding aesthetic experiences as distinct from other pleasures. Animals could hardly be expected to share them.

[---]

Studies on whether other animals share these sensibilities mostly involve primates, rats, and a few test-amenable bird species. Chimpanzees seem to share our fondness for the colour red and for curved objects; newborn junglefowl soon develop a preference for symmetry. Even so, one can imagine that aesthetic sensibilities have far-reaching evolutionary roots, which go beyond tested species. Choosing mates is an obvious context: some researchers suggest that symmetry is generally a marker of good health. Another context is risk avoidance: jagged, angular objects are often dangerous. More broadly, complexity tends to reward a sense of curiosity. Richard Prum, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, suggests that beauty demands ‘prolonged social and sensory engagement’. That engagement may have clear evolutionary benefits: an animal that lingers on a flowering tree’s loveliness might have a better chance of remembering its location when fruiting season comes.

We are even capable of finding beauty in ideas

To Prum, animals can only take aesthetic pleasure in those entities with which they have coevolved : wood thrushes and their layered, flute-like courtship songs, for example, or bumblebees and the pinks of wild roses. After countless generations of evaluation and choice, those stimuli are now entrained in their brains. Prum also thinks humans are unique in their ability to project tastes from one domain onto another, as when a predilection for colours that coevolved with fruit are projected onto the hues of a sunset.

- More Here and it was the them of 2017 Max's Holiday Card

Bubba Becomes First Fish To Survive Chemotherapy

38 years ago, an anonymous donor dragged a large, sloshing bucket to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, USA, dropped it at the reception desk, and disappeared. When staff pried open the lid, they discovered Bubba – a giant grouper fish, presumably caught and determined too big to take care of. A note attached to the lid asked for the fish to get to a good home.

Upon deeper examination, doctors learned more about the Epinephelus lanceolatus. At the time, she was only 10 in long, and was a Queensland grouper – a species fast disappearing in nature. The "super grouper" needed treatment, so they nursed Bubba back to health and found her a new home in a tank in the coral fish exhibit, where the predator happily swelled to 4.5 ft (1.37 m) and a whopping 69.3 kilos (150 lbs).

While there, she became a popular attraction, as visitors marvelled at her mysterious origin story and compassionate change in circumstances. And when she was briefly removed from exhibition in 1998, fans were distraught.

"That's when we found out how popular [s]he was," said Shedd spokesman Roger Germann, to the Washington Post, "because we started getting letters from people saying they couldn't find Bubba on their last visit and wanted to know what had happened."

Midway though the 1990s, Bubba underwent her second big life change as she transitioned to male, as groupers often do. This is a common reproductive strategy in fish species, whereby the larger female fish in a tank change sex to male, while the smaller fish remain female – and since Bubba was so big, scientists weren’t exactly surprised!

But scientists were shocked to find in 2001 that Bubba, their beloved grouper, had cancer. 

While this usually is a sure sign of a fish’s demise, because of Bubba’s size, scientists decided to take the unprecedented step of treating him with chemotherapy. This was never attempted before on a fish, but groupers can live 30 to 50 years, so if successful, they would be making advances in cancer treatments, while giving Bubba years of his life back.

Luckily, Bubba responded well to the treatment, and he became the first fish to survive chemotherapy – and cancer! 

After his treatments, he spent many happy years entertaining visitors and serving as an inspiration for human cancer survivors. The Shedd Aquarium reported receiving many calls from people affected by the disease, especially children, asking how Bubba was and gaining strength and courage from the knowledge that he had survived his own ordeal and that chemotherapy had extended his life. And beyond that, he was a personal favourite for many at the aquarium.

"Bubba overcame some incredible odds over the years, and that's what made him so special to us," said George Parsons, director of the Shedd's Fish department, to the Underwater Times. "Every once in a while for the last three years we have been getting phone calls from kids with cancer or from their parents, wondering how he is doing." 

After regaining his health, Bubba was moved to a new home in the 400,000-gallon main pool of the Shedd's new $43 million Wild Reef gallery, so his fans could properly appreciate his beauty. He even got a new 5-inch friend – a golden trevally fish, which swims around him and eats his scraps.

"He is such a character," said Rachel Wilborn, one of his keepers, to the Washington Post. "He is so curious, always coming around to see what you are doing. If you give him a food item that he doesn't like, he spits it right back at you, then looks you right in the eye, waiting to see what else you can come up with."

After many happy years in his new home, the magnificent fish passed away in August 2006 from age-related issues. A Shedd official said his autopsy shows only “evidence of multiple organ system failure consistent with [Bubba’s] age.”

"It's going to be tough now, if I have to tell people he's no longer with us," said Parsons.

But nevertheless, even though Bubba has passed, his story lives on as a testament to the compassion of his healthcare providers and all who loved him. His body was even donated to Chicago’s Field Museum across the street, where they will keep Bubba’s skeleton as a part of its enormous fish collection and cryogenically freeze his tissue samples, preserving them for study by future generations of scientists.

"If you want to know why we went to all this effort for a fish," Wilborn said, "all you have to do is look into his adorable face. We did it for Bubs because he is such a cool fish."

- More Here

Mice Seen Giving First Aid To Unconscious Companions

When they find another mouse unconscious, some mice seemingly try to revive their companion by pawing at them, biting and even pulling their tongue aside to clear their airways. The finding hints that caregiving behaviour might be more common in the animal kingdom than we thought.

There are rare reports of large, social mammals trying to help incapacitated members of their species, such as wild chimpanzees touching and licking wounded peers, dolphins attempting to push a distressed pod mate to the surface so it can breathe and elephants rendering assistance to ailing relatives.

Over a series of tests, on average the animals devoted about 47 per cent of a 13-minute observation window to interacting with the unconscious partner, showing three sorts of behaviour.

“They start with sniffing, and then grooming, and then with a very intensive or physical interaction,” says Zhang. “They really open the mouth of this animal and pull out its tongue.”

These more physical interactions also involved licking the eyes and biting the mouth area. After focusing on the mouth, the mice pulled on the tongue of their unresponsive partner in more than 50 per cent of cases.

In a separate test, researchers gently placed a non-toxic plastic ball in the mouth of the unconscious mouse. In 80 per cent of cases, the helping mice successfully removed the object.

- More Here

Grow Up - Enough With the Fireworks Already

Growing up in India, I enjoyed celebrating Diwali because I could play with fire and be macho. 

As time passed, I grew the fuck up. I grew the fuck up. I learned how much fireworks harm animals, ecosystems and the environment. 

So grow the fuck up and stop using fireworks in name of god knows what. Fireworks has nothing to do with you political ideology. 

Margaret Renkl reminds us that same but more politely than I do: 

For 15 straight years, our old dog Clark — a hound-shepherd-retriever mix who was born in the woods and loved the outdoors ever after — spent the Fourth of July in our walk-in shower. He seemed to believe a windowless shower in a windowless bathroom offered his best chance of surviving the shrieking terror that was raining down from the night sky outside.

Did he think the fireworks, with their window-rattling booms, were the work of some cosmic predator big enough to eat him whole? Did he think they were gunshots or claps of thunder spreading out from inexplicable lightning bolts tearing open the sky above our house?

There’s no way to know what he was thinking, but every single year that rangy, 75-pound, country-born yard dog spent the Fourth of July in our shower, trembling, drooling and whimpering in terror.

Clark was lucky. We have friends whose terrified dog spent one Fourth of July fruitlessly trying to outrun the explosions. The next day a good Samaritan found him lying on a hot sidewalk miles away, close to death. Other friends came home from watching the fireworks to discover that their dog had bolted in terror from their fenced backyard and been killed by a car.

And those were all companion animals, the ones whose terror is clear to us. We have no real way of knowing how many wild animals suffer because the patterns of their lives are disrupted with no warning every year on a night in early July. People shooting bottle rockets in the backyard might not see the sleeping songbirds, startled from their safe roosts, exploding into a darkness they did not evolve to navigate — crashing into buildings or depleting crucial energy reserves. People firing Roman candles into the sky above the ocean may have no idea that the explosions can cause seabirds to abandon their nests or frighten nesting shorebirds to death.

Then there’s the wildlife driven into roads — deer and foxes, opossums and skunks, coyotes and raccoons. Any nocturnal creature in a blind panic can find itself staring into oncoming headlights, unsure whether the greater danger lies in the road or in the sky or in the neighborhood yards surrounding them.

And all that’s on top of the dangers posed by fireworks debris, which can be toxic if ingested, or the risk of setting off a wildfire in parched summertime vegetation. Little wonder, then, that fireworks are banned in all national wildlife refuges, national forests and national parks.

[---]

“All flourishing is mutual,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, in her best-selling book, “Braiding Sweetgrass.” This is one of the most repeated lines in contemporary environmental literature, and for good reason. It reminds us that all creation, human and other than human, is interconnected. At a time when life on this planet is faltering in every possible way, Dr. Kimmerer gently points out that our own flourishing depends on the flourishing of planetary systems that we are barely beginning to understand.

Addressing climate change and biodiversity loss on a planet with eight billion human residents won’t be simple. How to grow affordable food without using petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides that poison pollinators, for example, is a challenge. How to build enough housing for human beings without also disrupting natural ecosystems is a challenge. Such things are doable, though they won’t be easy.

But there are easy things we can do at no real cost to ourselves. We can eat more vegetables and less animal protein. We can cultivate native plants. We can seek out products that aren’t packaged in plastic, spend less time in cars and airplanes, raise the thermostat in the summer and lower it in the winter. As Dr. Kimmerer points out in “The Serviceberry,” her forthcoming book, “We live in a time when every choice matters.”

In that context, surely, we can give up fireworks. Of all the little pleasures that give life meaning and joy, surely fireworks don’t come close to the top of the list, and it costs us nothing to give them up. This is one case in which doing the right thing requires no significant sacrifice, one case in which doing the right thing has an immediate, noticeable, undeniably positive effect on a suffering world.

The conflation of selfishness with patriotism is the thing I have the hardest time accepting about our political era. Maybe we have the right to eat a hamburger or drive the biggest truck on the market or fire off bottle rockets deep into the night on the Fourth of July, but it doesn’t make us good Americans to do such things. How can it possibly be American to look at the damage that fireworks can cause — to the atmosphere, to forests, to wildlife, to our own beloved pets, to ourselves — and shrug?

The truly American thing would be to join together to make every change we can reasonably make to alleviate the suffering of our fellow creatures, human and other than human alike. The truly American thing would be to plant a victory garden large enough to encompass the entire natural world.

 

Cattle-Aided Mental Health

While relatively rare, cow cuddling—or cow hugging as it’s sometimes called—may be an effective form of animal-assisted therapy (AAI), per a study out today from researchers at New York University and US Military Academy at West Point.

The investigation, by Katherine Compitus of NYU’s Silver School of Social Work and Sonya M. Bierbower of the Department of Chemistry and Life Science at West Point, also added a new twist: women were more receptive to bovine-assisted therapy than men were.

The researchers arranged for a group of 11 volunteers to spend 45 minutes each with one of two steers with varying degrees of gregariousness; the study was conducted at  a micro-farm called Surrey Hills Sanctuary in New York State. Volunteers ranged in age from 13 to 79. After the sessions, they filled out a survey and discussed their experience.

One of the voluntary participants responded that “it wasn’t a big deal to me that he” – one of the bulls, named Callum – “was shy. But when he finally started to approach me, I felt so good! Like I was special.”

Another participant offered that while she was worried that bulls would be aggressive, she “fell in love with cows” after the session. Another stated: “there is something about cows that is so therapeutic,” according to the study.

According to the researchers, the predominantly positive responses add to prior research suggesting that time with farm animals holds potential benefits for those engaged in psychotherapy and cognitive behavioral therapy for mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety.

[---]

Therapy animals typically are dogs, cats, horses or rabbits. But the range of animals can be extended to farm animals including cattle when the therapy is conducted ethically and with special care for both humans and animals.  

“We have discovered in the current study,” the authors concluded, “that bovine-assisted therapy may not only be an effective treatment model that benefits human participants but appears to be enriching to the cattle participants, as well, as shown by their proximity to and continuous interactions with humans.”

- More Here

How Animals’ Personalities Can Shape Ecosystems

I am so glad there is a lot of research going on to look at individuality of each animal instead of bucketing them as a species or worse just as animals. 

There are zero similarities in character between Max and Neo although both are chocolate lab; the similarities get even worse between Fluffy and Garph. 

I do see occasional flickers of similarities between Fluffy (cat) and Max. I think it's because she grew up around Max and mimicked him. I see heaven on earth when I see Max in her :-) 

Another study here: 

In reality, each individual animal consumes and disperses a different proportion of seeds, making some individuals more mutualistic than others. One implication of this is that some individuals may be more important than others when it comes to seed dispersal (from a conservation standpoint). In this paper, researchers explore how personality factors influence the dispersal behavior of deer mice, seeking to understand the relationship between an individual’s personality traits and their place on the antagonistic-mutualistic continuum.

To carry out their study, the researchers trapped deer mice in an experimental forest in Maine. They marked each mouse and tested them for personality traits including boldness, anxiety, docility, and activity level. From there, mice were given access to seed stations with a mix of white pine seeds, red oak acorns, and beech seeds. The seed stations were dusted with fluorescent powder so researchers could track seed dispersal routes, and the seeds were painted with fluorescent paint and marked for later identification. Researchers later cross-checked the dispersal routes and seeds with video footage of the seed stations to learn which seeds were taken by which mice. They assessed whether each individual seed interaction was mutualistic (meaning the seed was dispersed alive and intact) or antagonistic (meaning the mouse consumed the seed or stored it below ground where germination was unlikely to happen). 

The results were as follows:

• Out of 934 observed seed interactions by tagged deer mice, the researchers were able to determine the outcome of 532 seeds. 349 of these observations involved white pine seeds, 135 involved beech seeds, and 48 involved red oak acorns. 
• On average, mice were more antagonistic than mutualistic toward all three seeds.
• For red oak seed interactions, an individual’s timidness predicted the individual’s antagonism. Specifically, bolder individuals were more mutualistic toward red oak seeds, meaning they were more likely to remove and disperse them either on or below the surface. 

For white pine and beech seed interactions, bolder individuals were more antagonistic, though mutualism was more strongly predicted by body condition (calculated using body mass and the scaled-mass index) and forest type. Specifically, individuals with higher body condition tended to be more antagonistic.

[---]

Understanding the impact of individual animals’ personality types on their mutualistic behavior is important for a number of reasons. As human activities alter natural environments, it is vital to understand the potential impact a certain environmental change can have, and certain environmental changes may favor particular personality types in animals. For example, bolder mice are more likely to venture into open areas in search of food, which means that tree clearing may disproportionately affect them. This presents another factor humans must consider before encroaching on the environment. 

What’s more, conservation decisions are usually made at the species level. However, if only a minority of individuals are doing the majority of mutualistic behaviors (for example, if only the boldest mice are spreading most of the seeds of a given tree species), these mice might be considered “keystone individuals” for conservation projects. For example, previous research has demonstrated that bolder, more active individuals tend to be removed from environments at higher rates from hunting and fishing; understanding how these individuals impact the environment can increase our understanding of the consequences of such activities. While more research is needed on this topic, the study offers another reason why it’s important to value animals for their individual traits rather than their species membership alone.

 

Centring Individual Animals To Improve Research & Citation Practices

Thank you for this paper.  

This should be very obvious for people who shared their lives with non-human animals. 

The core of the paper is - each individual animal (say mice) has their own personalities, traits etc., like how you and I are different. I know, I know duh! 

Hence, lab experiments should take this into account. 

I think it will be impossible so my question is why are they still testing on non-human animals? These are psychological experiments done on these poor animals. 

Abstract

Modern behavioural scientists have come to acknowledge that individual animals may respond differently to the same stimuli and that the quality of welfare and lived experience can affect behavioural responses. 

However, much of the foundational research in behavioural science lacked awareness of the effect of both welfare and individuality on data, bringing their results into question. This oversight is rarely addressed when citing seminal works as their findings are considered crucial to our understanding of animal behaviour. Furthermore, more recent research may reflect this lack of awareness by replication of earlier methods – exacerbating the problem. 

The purpose of this review is threefold. First, we critique seminal papers in animal behaviour as a model for re-examining past experiments, attending to gaps in knowledge or concern about how welfare may have affected results. Second, we propose a means to cite past and future research in a way that is transparent and conscious of the above mentioned problems. Third, we propose a method of transparent reporting for future behaviour research that 

(i) improves replicability, 

(ii) accounts for individuality of non-human participants, and 

(iii) considers the impact of the animals' welfare on the validity of the science. With this combined approach, we aim both to advance the conversation surrounding behaviour scholarship while also serving to drive open engagement in future science.

- Full paper here