Instinct is an old term. It may well turn out that in light of advances in genetics, it’s only as useful a scientific construct as the concept of race. Neither concept ever had a lot of rigorous mechanism wrapped around it. Genetic studies are changing that though, and when detailed mechanisms come to the fore, old verbiage sometimes become obsolete. There’ll still be plenty to talk about if ‘instinct’ itself becomes passe.
Not quite. If people realize that evolution genuinely selects even though it doesn’t have a mind, then they won’t be tempted to say some of the crazy things they sometimes do about how it’s possible for humans to select. It’s just something that happens in nature, even in inorganic nature, all the time.
-FrL-
Why do you object to such an assumption? Anthropomorphism is a mistake at either extreme: either to believe that an animal feels and thinks just as humans do, or to believe that no animals think or have feelings and are little more than biological robots doing exactly (and only) what they are programmed to do. Bird brains (and bird behaviors) are complex and very different from mammalian brains. The truth is, we don’t know with anything resembling “certainty”, what, exactly, is passing through those feathered little heads of theirs. So, while it may be safe to attempt to explain bird behaviors from a purely instinctive point of view, it is not necessarily correct. The truth may well be somewhere in between: a combination of instinct and conscious effort, in varying quantities and degrees.
Considering we haven’t even got ourselves completely figured out yet, it’s a bit of a stretch to make the assumption that we know what’s going on in other animals’ brains.
In other words, I reject the premise that such language as sited by your OP in the description of bird behavior is automatically and necessarily in error.
I suggest going over to GD and reading the thread about whether humans have free will. I’m sure you’ll find someone who thinks we don’t, but birds do.
I basically agree with this.
It’s very hard to say whether a singing male bird actually conceptualizes that this behavior will attract a mate. However, birds (and other animals) are very far from being little automatons. At some level they certainly make “decisions,” even if they may not have a clear idea of cause and effect.
Whether a male bird sings or not doesn’t merely depend on his hormone level. It may depend on whether or not his territorial neighbor (or a member of his own social group) is dominant or subordinate to him, or where exactly he is in his territory. In some sense he is “deciding” whether or not he is going to sing depending on individual circumstances.
Birds recognize each other as individuals. Most small songbirds raise the young as male-female pairs. It was long believed that such pairs were monogamous, but genetic work has shown that many broods have multiple fathers; both males and females “cheat” on their partners surreptitiously. Females paired with a low-quality male will sneak off to mate with a more studly male when the opportunity presents itself. Certainly she doesn’t do this deliberately in order to improve the quality of her offspring; but she is making choices based on the relative quality of her own mate and her neighbor.
Ravens, at least, seem to have at least a primitive “theory of mind”; that is, they can project motivations onto other individuals and modify their own behavior accordingly. Ravens hide food to come back and retrieve later, and steal from each other if the opportunity arises. If an individual knows that another bird has seen it hide food, it will come back later to move it because it is able to predict that the other bird will try to steal it.
I don’t know if these sorts of things constitute “decisions” according to the OP criteria. Birds certainly can’t conceptualize the results of actions the way humans do. But they are also certainly not little machines responding blindly to hormone levels and stimuli.
**Darwin’s Finch **, thank you! You saved me from rushing in where angels fear to tread!! And very elegantly, too!
All of the terms in that sentence are old terms.
So? Neither does “evil”, “should”, or “I”, for that matter, especially when people are talking in English.
I see no reason to drop the word from the English language because it is still useful to describe the differences we are talking about in this thread. That the matter is further pushed back to the level of theories of intelligence, to the point where some anthropomorphism is unavoidable, inasmuch as in plain English-talking people usually would count human-like decision making as being non-instinctual despite the fact that at a base level everything is chemical, does not change the fact that since we are human, making a distinction between animals whose actions are precipitated in a way relatively close or far from how ours are is at the very least interesting and possibly scientifically useful.
I object to it in the absence of any evidence that it is so. It appears to me to be an unwarranted assumption. **Colibri ** offers some better informed suppositions, I suppose, but I wondered if there is any reason to think that a bird is singing with the intention of attracting a mate. Science has been pretty clever over the years in designing ways of collecting data that leads us to better understanding. My question was if there is any, and, absent that evidence, I think it is a reach to make assumptions about bird - or frog - or fish - behavior. Whether their behavior is mediated by light, temperature, pheremones, or other stimuli, unless we have some reason to believe that they ARE thinking, then I think it’s a leap to suggest it.
Could one not argue that every single thing a bird (or other organism) does is done “in order to attract a mate” - pass on its genes?
As I tried to suggest and Colibri elaborated, I think it is YOU who are reading too much into the sentence you cite, as far as the writers intending to imply intent to the bird. Perhaps the bird is singing “in order to” acquire and defend a territory, and it is the territory that “attracts” the mate. Or maybe it is just expressing “joy” over the new day. We can probably rule out “pining for the fjords,” tho. 
This would give us an ability to further read the feathered tea leaves, I suppose. Here’s a question that should be asked:
“Does the incidence of ‘cheating’ by the bird referenced above decrease as the mates are higher up the ‘studly’ chain. That is, do more suitable, high-quality males have a higher percentage of their own offspring in their broods than low-quality males due to a lower ‘cheat’ factor by the females. If so than we find another means by which suitability leads to increased reproductive success.”
No one has suggested that it should be dropped. However, it should be acknowledged that it’s a 15th century term which collects together a whole bunch of behaviors that we don’t really understand. Merely calling some behavior instinctual gets you no closer to understanding the process which gives rise to the behavior.
I also agree with Darwin’s Finch on animals and our lack of knowledge about what their brains can do. I have a great deal of trouble with the idea that they are just instinctive and obeying DNA without decision making. I spend a great deal of time observing animals (in particular birds and spiders) in the wild and have no doubt they are decision making. As for knowing if the song will attract a mate - I would really need evidence to convince me that they don’t know what they are doing. They do not all make identical calls at identical times . I have watched bronze-winged pigeons and their mating games at length. It is way far from automated and the calls and interactions far from simple.
Spiders make decisions - and hence it is much more likely that birds do. Cites on spiders: Robert Jackson’s work on the little jumping spider, Portia, and Mark Elgar’s research on leaf curling spiders selecting leaves. Plus my own observations on orb weavers and many reports by arachnologists on how they will adapt their web making every night to new situations. Maybe some of you see that as a complex program playing out. I have worked on this question a great deal in the writing of a book on spiders and have concluded that they have a basic orb weaving skill inbuilt and then learn and adapt and make decisions.
So if animals can make decisions, then why isn’t a bird deciding to do the mating call when the hormones so dictate knowing exactly what it is doing? It does a call by instinct, a mate responds and so it decides to keep doing it because it wants a mate.
It’s a perfectly cromulent word in this particular thread, which is why I used it in this thread, even though I do not often use it in biological discussions.
Well OK then, if cromulence is your watchword, no worries.
I have no doubt that animals make decisions, of sorts. They certainly choose one direction over another in many cases. But as to behavior that entails some degree of planning, some intentionality, such as engaging in some sort of behavior in the hopes of causing a different type of behavior in another individual some time in the future, I just don’t think that’s within the ability of a fish, or a frog, or a bird, for that matter. But Lynne’s assertion that she’d need evidence to disprove her fervent belief is a bit backward. Evidence needs to be invoked to support the contention that fish, etc. DO think, plan, and intend to attract a mate via some behavior that they have chosen. There are many folks, for example, who would ask for evidence that God DOESN’T exist. Proof doesn’t work that way.
I study a lot of ethology as part of my major, and if you were to ask my why birds sing, I would answer “in order to attract” mates because I would assume that you were interested in the adaptive reason for why birds sing. In ethology, we have four questions that we use to examine animal behavior:
Causation: this is the immediate causes.
-Why do birds sing? Hormones kick in…
Ontogeny: this is how the behavior changes though life, what experiences are necessary, etc.
-Why do birds sing? The birds are taught to sing by listening to older birds singing (in some species, a bird who doesn’t hear these songs never learns to sing).
Phylogeny: how does this compare with related species and how might it have origin in evolutionary history?
-Why do birds sing? I focus on primates, so I don’t know this one, but when doing this to look at human behavior, we look from non-human primates to mammals when explaining things on this level.
Adaptation: this is how this behavior impacts the chances of survival and reproduction
Why do birds sing? To attract mates, guard territories, etc.
All of these answers are correct and any good ethologist will recognize the existence of all of them while answering questions on behavior. However, most people when they ask “why” tend to focus on the adaptive mechanisms which is why I usually answer just on that level. Because of all these other levels, answering just on the causation level doesn’t really explain anything. And, as others have pointing out, the birds aren’t just singing because of hormones. Birds will vary their singing based on their proximity towards rivals, the amount of females they believe to be in an area, their dominance level in some species, etc. Because of all these factors, I doubt you are going to find an ethologist who will only focus on the causation mechanisms when answering this question. And based on these variations in exhibition of behavior, I think there is fairly good evidence for the argument that (some) birds make a conscious decision to sing in order to increase their reproductive success. I doubt that they think “I’m going to increase my reproductive success” but most of the evidence suggests that they aren’t just singing blindly in response to chemicals.
Evolution and Natural Selection are NOT the same thing. Evolution is random, natural selection is not.
My pet birds will call for me to come pay attention to them, and when that doesn’t work, they will change their behavior and try new things, watching my reactions, until they get a reaction from me that they want. When confronted with problems they have never faced before, sometimes they will come to me and raise a ruckus and go back to the problem and look at me pointedly.
I can’t help but think, wow, what a random collection of impulses mimicking, but in no way counting as evidence of, “engaging in some sort of behavior in the hopes of causing a different type of behavior in another individual.”
Sailboat
I understand. I guess I’m looking at a difference in scale or dimension. Maybe a bird does learn that song brings female. And maybe they learn that they can intentionally make certain songs happen. And maybe they sing that song when they’re desiring a female. It seems to be a pretty complex trick to learn. More I think about it, I suppose that could be the case, given the time it takes a bird to learn this represents a good deal of the life of a bird, enough time to learn something. I guess I’d like some sort of confirmation for the existence of, or better understanding of, the mind of a bird. I imagine it’s basically like a 2-d picture of some event is to us - pretty blank, devoid of depth and richness and understanding - certainly lacking contemplation. That’s why I don’t think that our conception of doing something deliberately for a reason can equate with a bird’s singing during mating season.
Point taken. As the author of “The Skeptic’s Guide To The Paranormal” where I make that point very strongly, I should have worded it better! I am being unscientific, I acknowledge, but when we don’t know something we can take a stand while acknowledging that we don’t know. My stand is that I believe that they are making a deliberate decision - partly because that is what I want to believe (which is the main reason people believe things!) and it matches my interpretation of my observations. However, anecdotes do not make evidence. I am hypothesising that birds make the active decision because the behavior that I am observing indicates that to me.
What particularly interests me about the birds I observe coming into seed and around our back yard (18 acres of bush) is that their calls are only a small part of the sounds they make. They do tiny chatterings all the time. I don’t think they are random. I intend to find out a great deal more about this.
If anyone knows references to research on the chattering sounds of birds - not just their major calls - then I would be very interested. I have noted that the social birds do this a great deal more than the isolates, such as the owls, which is logical.
Fascinating thread!
I don’t think anyone contends it “equates.” I do, however, think that bird behavior and human behavior are part of the same continuum. At some level, birds perform actions in order to acheive some desired result - whether to obtain food, attract a mate, or drive away a rival - even if they aren’t clearly aware of what they are doing.