Contrary to what was contained in my last post, I actually dropped by to comment that it would seem to me unlikely, given human impact and influence on virtually all ecological niches, that another sentient species would be able to evolve. The time-scales to go from chimp, dolphin, raccoon, etc. to sentient versions thereof seem like far too long for insistent environmental pressure to select for intelligence (given human environmental disturbance).
To offer my opinion on the OP, given our human history of treatment both of foreign human cultures and intelligent, near-sentient species, I can’t think that all of humanity would embrace our new neighbors. When our Western, developed-world stomachs are full, it’s all very well to care for dogs and cats and gerbils. But when people are hungry, then dog, cat, monkey, dolphin, etc. are just another item on the menu.
I guess this also speaks to my point above - any species that is to evolve sentience would have to do it in ecological backwaters, where human existence is also likely to be marginal. A more likely scenario than that species asking for it’s rights is that the little guys would ask, “kindly please, don’t eat me!!” (Or at least kill me before you go lopping off the top of my head in order to eat my brains.)
No problem, I have just been burnt by this before. I found myself defending a statement I didn’t make. Not that your statement is that bad, as I said, I am overly sensitive.
It’s likely that another species would have not only different ideas of what should be “rights” but also in the way that they think. That’s why I said:
Person. Not human. Person implies sentience and individuality. A human can be a person, as could a sentient individual of another species. You say that human demanding the same rights as a porpoise or merman sounds ridiculous. I would argue that a human demanding rights based on the fact that they are human is ridiculous; we don’t have rights because we are a certain species, we have rights because we are persons. It just so happens that all humans can be classed as “persons” and so the idea of “human rights” sounds obvious. We don’t have rights just because we are human; we have them because we’re sentient people. As would a merman, or whatever, as long as they’re sentient people.
I’d agree that this other species would probably not want or ask for the same rights as humans; I would say, though, that if we class them as being to our level of sentience, we should start off with giving them the same rights as we do, and then work out the details from there.
My neighbor’s dog, Sam, tells me that he is sentient. He also tells me very bad things. And, apparently he thinks that I am his son.
I would like to know what scientific criteria is currently used to judge sentience in animals. My guess is that the criteria is anthrocentric. Figuring that sentience is ultimately an advanced and abstract manner in which animals process the information they receive from their environment, the complexity of their senses most likely has a lot to do with the manner in which their sentience is expressed. Compared to other high life forms on earth, humans seem to have at least a moderate degree of advancement in all 5 senses, vision being our most relied upon. Most of our advanced cogitation and abstract thinking seems to be primarily vision based. We contemplate future and past events and base most of our symbolic representations in a visual context.
But what about a dog? His primary sense is that of olfaction. He lives in a world not so much of vision, but of smells. I don’t believe we would be able to test for or understand whether a dog has evolved a finely tuned smell-based sentience or not. Dogs may very well contemplate past and future events, and indeed even themselves as complex interactions of odors. They may have developed other smell-based skills and thought processes that we could not begin to comprehend, because our sense of smell is so inferior to theirs. Maybe Fido works out odor-trigonometry problems in his head for enjoyment - we wouldn’t know.
I tend to be more liberal with regard to assigning the term sentient to animals. I would not use tool-use as a prerequisite - many animals simply haven’t evolved the morphology to manipulate their environment toward any type of meaningful tool use. (i.e. maybe my cat can conceptualize the blueprint of a house, but without opposable thumbs, he’s not likely to build one). I wouldn’t necessarily include language, because we may not be equipped to properly judge whether another species is using symbolic language or not (i.e. maybe a dog is bilingual: a simple auditory language of barks and a complex language of smell). For me, the label of sentience should be assigned to any creature that thinks of himself as a unique individual separate from his enviroment and has the capacity to contemplate past and future events. It may not be possible at this time to gauge which species qualify using this criteria, but my guess is that it is more than we imagine.
I remember seeing an interesting documentary about Orcas a while back. In one scene, they showed two adult Orcas playing catch with an adult seal, one propelling it out of the water toward the other who would nose it back. This went on for a while until the seal was dead, at which time they abandoned the corpse, since they were not hungry at that time. They really seemed to relish the cruelty of the act. In another scene they showed one of the aforementioned Orcas hunting for food (obviously hungry now). He came across a baby seal who was in distress far from shore. The Orca, very gently, nosed the baby seal safely to shore, then went back out to continue the hunt. Seems like they are pretty complicated creatures.
Housecats are maybe not the greatest example to cite here; at any rate, my mom’s cat displays a quality of sublime obliviousness that is usually found only in the mineral kingdom. Granted, it does move toward the sound of an electric can opener, but I’m not entirely convinced that this demonstrates ‘sentience’ rather than some form of magnetism. (No offense intended, Tibbycat…)
I suspect that the use of the term “sentience” as a synonym for intelligent self-awareness can probably be chalked up to influence from the *Star Trek * TV series. “Sapience” might possibly be a more usefully descriptive term.
Excuse me, but not all of these pairing produce viable offspring. Some produce hybrids, which are themselves sterile. Mules and Hineys (the products of horses and mules) are sterile for genetic reasons. Mules and horses have different chromosome numbers. It just so happens that they can produce a single, sterile offspring, but that offspring cannot procreate because its gametes’ chromosomes will not combine with the chromosones of either a horse or a mule.
Ligers and Tigons (the sillt names for crossbreeds of lions and tigers) don’t behave predominantly like either parent. Since behavior is a big component of fitness for mammal espeically, there’s little reason to think they might thrive in the wild.
True, some other hybrids are much more viable. Wolf/coyote hybrids for example.
Just because Cro-mags and Neanderthals might have occsionaly got it on ([ure speculation) doesn’t mean they were genetically capable of hybridizing at all, and their offspring might not have been fertile, or viable. Sometimes the barrier between two speicies that are superfically identical is nothing more than the fact that one species has twice as many chromosomes as the other. That’s a speciation event which is relatively common in flowering plants.
I was going to offer this observation as well - it appears that the OP meant, and that successive posters (myself included) have been focused on, the word sapient (connoting knowledge or higher consciousness) rather than sentient (the ability to feel or perceive, but not necessarily including the faculty of self-awareness).
The previous discussion makes much more logical sense if people are talking about sapient beings (humans, neanderthal, hyper-intelligent shades of the color blue, etc) rather than just sentient life (molluscs, cats, non-SDMBers, etc).
“Viable” just means that it can live. You are thinking of “fertile”, which means they can reproduce. Note that **xtisme **used the term viable, hence I didn’t limit my list to those species which produce fertile offspring.
Here’s another question: what would be the reaction of people if another species developed writing, and subsequently a written tradition? That to me is the only real measure of what we’re talking about (I don’t agree with the usage of “sentience” in this discussion).
It’s possible that some species already have an oral tradition. Arguably, species that exhibit cultural differences have an oral tradition. It’s a pretty small step from that to a written tradition, and from that, to technology.
To answer the OP, I don’t know about you, but if I see any corvids with pamphlets and spears, I’m going to buy a hand gun.
Just some further clarification… mules and hineys are almost always sterile, but occasionally they can reproduce. And while having a different number of chromosomes is **often **a hinderance to producing fertile offspring, it isn’t **always **so. Within the equids, the “domestic” horse and the Przewalski’s horse have different chromosome counts, yet they do produce fertile offspring.
I think it is now agreed that the term “sapience” is more appropriate to this discussion than “sentience”.
I would say that any species that develops writing automatically qualifies for the high-sapience moniker, but, many other species should qualify as sapient who do not express themselves in written form. IMO, that is setting the bar too high.
I believe getting too specific in categorizing and cataloging leads to misleading cubby-holing, and this cubby-holing will most likely be biased toward our species, since we are the ones quantifying and qualifying the criteria for inclusion. We tend to make this sapience qualifier an “us” vs. “them” situation. Arguably, Homo sapiens are the most advanced intellects on earth, and barring an extreme global catastrophe, we are likely to remain the most advanced until our species becomes extinct. So, yes, we should be at the top of the list of sapient creatures on earth. But imagining a large chasm between us and the next lower species on the sapience totem pole, I believe, is unfair. I prefer to imagine a species that is low on the totem pole at one extreme, us at the other extreme and delineate a rather smooth and gradual progression on the sapience-scale between the two. Understanding that evolution often proceeds in a variable stop-and-go fashion, however, I am willing to concede a certain upward thrust when we arrive at Homo sapiens, due to a number of variables that came together in our ancestral past. Environmental stresses often lead to quick adaptation/advancement and our species encountered many, unique stresses during our genesis. All in all, though, I don’t see a whole lot of difference between “us” and “them”.
As I alluded to in my prior post, I think cutting to the chase is important when contemplating sapience in animals. What is it that you really want to know about our fellow earthlings? For me, I would like to know if they think of themselves uniquely from everyone and everything else. I would like to know if they reminisce about past events and contemplate the future. Some rudimentary abstract thinking would be nice as well. Any species that can do all that can be a member in my sapience club.
That’s an interesting question. I believe that we would be aware of their advanced intellect long before it manifested itself in written language, but you never know. A threat? I really don’t think that could ever come to fruition, unless our specie’s attention was seriously diverted for a very long time by a very major catastrophe. Our top-banana position precludes #2 banana from advancing to the stage of being a serious threat (as soon as they learned how to make pea-shooters, we’d nuke em).
Hiney, arse, ass - doesn’t really matter which one you pick…just don’t pick mine.
