Animals

RIPLEY: How do we kill it, Ash? There’s gotta be a way of killing it – how, how do we do it?

ASH: You can’t.

PARKER: That’s bullshit!

ASH: You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? A perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.

LAMBERT: You admire it…

ASH: I admire its purity. A survivor. Unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

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Okay, this one is short.  In an interview, an evolutionary biologist explains why cats are, in an evolutionary sense, perfect.  There are big cats and little cats, but otherwise they vary surprisingly little in shape, diet and behavior.  They’re all doing one thing and they’re all doing it superbly well.
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I was walking with my teenage son in a large shop the other day, and we passed by the children’s section. I saw a duvet cover that so much reminded me of Kretk – or, in English translation, the Little Mole. We were recalling which of the Kretk films that we saw we liked most – but basically, we liked almost all of them. Thinking of the Little Mole brought back happy memories.

Krtek is a series of animations that have been made by Zdenek Miler in the 1950s and 1960 in Czechoslovakia. It has a very interesting artistic signature: not only the pleasing and colourful visual arts, and the typical light, cheerful and romantic music that would come with it; lots of anti-modernist themes (such as in this one that I just found on YouTube where the little mole tries to stop the damage a bulldozer will do to its flowers); and, of course, animals that are all humanized, as they are in many movies for children. Not all animals are nice, by the way; one of my favourite Krtek movies is one where there are large animals (wolves?) who are a danger to the other animals, and by painting themselves and standing on each other’s shoulders (and thus pretending to be huge, much more dangerous monsters themselves), they are able to chase away the wolves. (NB – I have this from my memory from watching this a pretty long time ago, so not 100% reliable!).

With for many of our readers the holiday season before the door, I just wanted to share this with those of you who have never heard of the Little Mole. If you have small children, I bet they (and perhaps you too) might like to see some of it, tucked away under a blanket on the couch. Happy holidays!

Within pretty broad limits[1], I’m an advocate of historical ‘presentism’, that is, assessing past events and actions in the same way as those in the present, and considering history in relation to our present concerns. In particular, that implies viewing enslavers, racists and warmongers in the same light, whether they are active today or died hundreds of years ago.

A common objection to this position runs along the lines:

Suppose that at some point in the future, the vast majority of people are vegans. They will judge you in the same way as you judge past enslavers, racists and warmongers. In anticipation of this, you should suspend judgement on people in the past.

I don’t buy this.
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I’m taking a break from reading stuff about political theory and liberalism and reading, instead, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness [amazon]. It turns out Peter Godfrey-Smith on the octopus brain is more like Jacob Levy on Montesquieu and intermediacy than I was expecting. (The cover of Levy’s book is a bit tentacular. Maybe they should have played that up?)

Godfrey-Smith:

The cephalopod body, and especially the octopus body, is a unique object with respect to these demands. When part of the molluscan “foot” differentiated into a mass of tentacles, with no joints or shell, the result was a very unwieldy organ to control. The result was also an enormously useful thing, if it could be controlled. The octopus’s loss of almost all hard parts compounded both the challenge and the opportunities. A vast range of movements became possible, but they had to be organized, had to be made coherent. Octopuses have not dealt with this challenge by imposing centralized governance on the body; rather, they have fashioned a mixture of local and central control. One might say the octopus has turned each arm into an intermediate-scale actor. But it also imposes order, top-down, on the huge and complex system that is the octopus body.

This is something a lot of people know about the politics of being an octopus: your various members enjoy semi-autonomy. Tentacles are federated, after a fashion. They continue to act in a purposive manner even if they are cut off from the center. Weird! (See also: Montesquieu on monarchy.) But what does he mean by ‘these demands’? [click to continue…]

This morning, Milo had his third professional grooming session. The first was a disaster. The salon we took him to thought they knew better than the universal wisdom of Samoyed owners, which is to brush first, then shampoo. Reverse the order, and brushing becomes impossible for, oh, about three months, till the matted undercoat grows out. He came home looking like a sheep who’s been too liberal with the Brylcreem, but instead of comely ripples of fur flowing down his back he had a mogul-field made of clumps of three-inch thick dog-felt.

The second time was pretty good. A woman parked outside and ran a power-flex into the house. Milo leapt into the van and sprang out a couple of hours later looking like a pompom. In the meantime, though, his yowling and weeping could be heard through both the van door and the front door and all the way back to the kitchen. When I went to get him, the inside of the van was covered with so much white fluff it looked like a candy floss drum right before the stick goes in.

Third time round, we went with the van-lady again. We have builders in. (Actually, we’ve had them in since January 2016. Work slowed down a LOT in the summer when the best one went home on a family visit and was press-ganged back into the army to go and fight in Donetsk. Allegedly.) When the van arrived and backed into the back-garden, the builders did the whole manly thing of waving it in and holding the gates, issuing a stream of instructions in loud Ukrainian. The Portuguese-speaking groomer found it very helpful.

Then we all had five or so minutes of trying to catch Milo and calm him down as he pinballed around the house and garden, dodging (mostly) power tools and ladders. At one point he stopped suddenly and tiptoed like a Lipizzaner out of the kitchen to hid behind the door, probably on the logic that if he couldn’t see us, etc. etc. Eventually, we got him into the van. The lamenting began and I went back to work upstairs. [click to continue…]

I promised a follow-up post on Baboon Metaphysics, but I haven’t had time. I’ll stop-gap with stray passages that struck me as deserving juxtaposition. (They have nothing to do, really, with my questions about questions.)

A few years ago, a member of the British royal family visited us in the field and spent a morning following the baboons. On being told the details of the baboons’ inherited, rank-based society she became both excited and relieved, as if a longstanding dilemma had at last been resolved and an onerous weight lifted from her shoulders. “I always knew,” she declared, “that when people who aren’t like us claim that hereditary rank is not part of human nature, they must be wrong. Now you’ve given me evolutionary proof!” Shortly thereafter she returned to her entourage, spirits uplifted, leaving us to ponder the wider implications of our work.

Another passage:

The brains of queen ants are significantly smaller than those of virgin females during their nuptial flight. Queen ants are also much less socially active and much less reliant on vision.

Long post. Input welcome on any aspect of what I am discussing but I end the post with a very specific question, to which I would really like an answer: do our esteemed primate cousins ask questions? Yet more specifically: have language-trained non-human primates demonstrated the ability to ask questions? (Communicatively elicit desired information from their fellows or humans?)

But let me first back up and give you my situation and needs. [click to continue…]