Do you believe that chimpanzees are capable of “love”?
“Love” isn’t some mystical, grand, “higher” process of which only humans are capabable. It’s a chemical reaction in the brain, where certain receptors are flooded with chemicals that give pleasurable sensations.
IIRC, experiments have shown that the same chemical processes happens to a chimpanzee mother who looks at her offspring as happens to a human mother who looks at her baby. It appears that in chimpanzees, at least, “love” is part of the basic wiring.
I know of no studies on other animals which have looked to see if those chemical processes are present, but it stands to reason that in at least some social animals they would be present. It would be greatly beneficial in pair-bonding, as well as raising the young.
We humans, of course, have built complicated social factors around love (an other emotions) that animals do not have the capability to do because of their incapacity for higher reason. However, love is relatively simple. A child incapable of reason can still love its parents, and I know of few dog owners who would (after years of experience with them) claim that their canines are simple stiumlus-response robots incapable of love.
The penguins don’t go so far inland but that the glacier like ice flow toward the sea will eventually carry all the dead penguin ancestors thereto to provide food for the scavengers of the deep.
I knew when I posted that you were going to dodge the issue by referring to primates rather than birds with a brain capacity approximately the size and neuronic density of an M&M.
Penguins are birds. They do not have higher emotional consciousness. They do not love. You can’t provide a cite because none can possibly exist. Because you love animals does not mean that they love you back.
The next time your parrot tells you he loves you, remember that he says that to everyone. Slut.
If the Man in the Ice found in the Alps can rest for a few thousand years, I’ve no doubt that within glacial Antarctic ice there are plenty of flash-frozen corpses (primarily penguin) waiting for microwave heating.
I thought penguins were a bit different than other birds in that they’re social animals (much like primates, which is why I used the comparison.)
The wiring for “love” isn’t all that complex. They don’t have to think about it. All they have to do is secrete a chemical and have receptors to accept it. Considering they have hormones and the like, it doesn’t seem a far reach. “Love”, in other words, is not necessarily linked with intelligence.
Penguin mates caress one another with their beaks and necks. They obviously have some reason to do so, and the logical assumption is that they do it because it feels good. They don’t caress other random penguins that way, so it’s likely not just a pleasant tactile senation they can get from any touch. They apparently get pleasure from the touch of their mate. (i.e, their brains flood with pleasure-causing chemicals when they reinforce the pair-bond by “necking.”) That’s pretty much what happens when my husband hugs me. My brain gets a chemical boost which tells me that this is a pleasant experience, but I don’t get the same “rush” from being hugged by a casual acquaintance.
No, I can’t provide any cites because I know of no chemical studies on the brains of penguins, but then again, you can’t show me a study which proves that those chemicals are absent.
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It depends on what kind of pet you have. Snakes and fish probably don’t experience love, because they don’t pair-bond, nor care for their young. (Thus, evolution probably didn’t equip them with the receptors. There would be no benefit in it.) Parrots display the same necking behavior as I’ve seen in penguins, so it’s likely that they experience love. I would lay money that dogs do. Cats may-- I’m not so sure because of the social structure aspects. Iguanas, though, almost certainly do not.
As I said before, “love” is not as complicated as we humans would like to believe, nor are anger, fear and hate. All are relatively simple when stripped of all the social constructions we have built around them. “Love” is a simple evolutionary adaption which gives incentive for pair-bonding and care of offspring. It also smooths social interraction. In fact, it’s more along the lines of simple stimulus response, as in “I’m going to groom my offspring because doing so gives me pleasure.”
Penguins do not love. They do not do what they do because of love, they do it because of thousands of years of instinct and evolution telling them “This is what you do to make more penguins”. They had no need to develop love to further their species. They’re dumb birds, that’s all.
But my point was not to get into a discussion of penguin love. My point was simply to watch some real, quality work on the Antarctic. I liked the Morgan Freedman one too, but the David Attenborough one has real information and knowledge.
Which kind of penguins? The ones the OP is talking about are emperor penguins. But there’s lots of different kinds. Are you saying they all love, to some degree? I highly disagree. They work together because it’s beneficial to evolution, that’s all.
They caress each other because they are preening and they are mated. If you are reducing love to a set of chemical reactions - which it most likely is - I still hold that “penguin love” - if there is such an animal - is vastly different than the way humans love each other. Watch Life in the Freezer, and then come back to me and tell me it’s the same thing.
Other than that, Exapno Mapcase has already made most of my points.
Just because a carcass is frozen doesn’t mean a predator will ignore it. I’m sure other birds peck at anything that might provide food. Enough pecks and you’ve got fewer bushels of dead penguins.
Your location is not coming to mind, Anaamika, but I have to question which version of the film you saw. In the American version, it’s made fairly clear that Emperor Penguin pairs last only a season. Although there certainly are passages in the film where pair-bonding and infant-nurturing are shown with feel-good music behind them, leaving the viewer to anthropomorphize as they wish. I don’t recall a lot of pronouncements about love, however.
Meanwhile, I’m aware that the version shown elsewhere in the world gave cartoony voices to the penguins (the American version only has Moragan Freeman narrating) which announced their undying affection for each other or some such, hence my original question.
Only on the SDMB would a question about frozen dead penguins devolve into a debate over the meaning of love.
In any case, this is merely a semantic issue. Certainly penguins and other birds feel attraction, distress, and other emotions analagous to those experienced by humans. It is purely a matter of definition whether you decide to call the kind of attachments experienced by animals “love” or not. I personally would not. Birds, whatever their emotional states, are not self-aware, or really capable of the kind of response that most people would characterize as love. (Perhaps they may experience “crushes” on each other, though. )
I have only seen it once. I’ll have to pull out my copy, as I did buy a copy. As I said, there were lots of interesting parts. But there’s lots of parts I clearly remember him saying things about love, and I certainly remember the sappy feel good music and the lovey-dovey stuff around it. There were no cartoony versions, thankfully, or I possibly might have exploded in the theatre. (And I am an American, btw.)
It really annoyed me because it felt to me like we couldn’t have a proper nature documentary without a bunch of sensationalism.
Thank you Colibri. You’ve said what I was muddling through much more clearly.
I started out by saying that you were misusing the word “love.” I continue to do so, now with added banging head against wall.
I realize that nothing will convince you that mere expression of instinctual behavior is not love, but equating a complex emotional, social, and cultural human artifact like love with “hormones and the like” is about as anti-science a notion as creationism.
But an animal doesn’t think “this is what evolution wants me to do.” Likely, they don’t even think about how to make more little penguins. What they think about is doing what feels good. Evolution has provided an incentive in emotions to make them do things that are beneficial to the species.
In other words, they want to mate because they’re horny, not because they want to have a baby. (I seriously doubt if they have the reasoning capacity to link an act they did months ago with an egg coming out of them now.) They chose a mate based on what’s attractive to them, which, of course, has evolutionary aspects, but it most likely manifests itself to the bird as sort of an infatuation.
An animal needs a reason to do something. They don’t act simply because their genes tell them to do so. They don’t eat because their brain tells them they need food to sustain themselves until they can mate: they eat because they’re hungry and eating feels good (It’s probably “fun” for them to chase fish.). If they caress one another, they do it because it feels good to do so, not because their genes command them to robotically caress one another a certain number of times. As I pointed out, they don’t invite strange birds to preen them, so they must get some sort of chemical incentive to do so with only their mate.
I agree fully that “penguin love” would be much different than human love (and have said so several times, I might add.). We add many social constructs to love that animals are incapable of since they lack the capacity for higher reasoning. That does not mean they can’t feel emotions, and possibly feel them very strongly.
Can a human toddler love its parents? The child certainly lacks the capability for reasoning, but I don’t think anyone would argue that a toddler is emotionless. At two or three years of age, a child’s reasoning capacity is much like that of an animal. It has needs and wants to fulfill them. Mother’s caresses give the child comfort (most likely in the form of a chemical reaction, just like love.) Evolution equipped the child with emotional attachment so the child would not want to stray far from its parents’ side.
Hey, no arguments here. I don’t think we should romaticize animals and try to make them look just like us, but I don’t think we should discount their emotional lives, either.
For a long time, scientists argued that animals couldn’t feel pain because they lacked the abilty to reason about it. Now, we understand that you don’t need higher reasoning to feel pain-- all you need is a nervous system designed to send “damage signals” to the brain. Couldn’t emotions be as simple as nerves in their most basic forms?
I love this place.
Call it “proto-love”, then. All I’m talking about is the chemical reactions which give a creature an urge to do something. As in, “I will neck with my mate because it feels good”. That it has the side-effect of increasing the pair-bond is not the bird’s primary motivation. He is preening his mate for the same reason that I hug my husband: because chemicals in my brain give me pleasure when I do it.
“Love” in essense, is a chemical reward given to social creatures for doing acts which benefits the species.
This is an unfair slander against birddom. Some birds display remarkable cognitive ability. Granted this does not mean penguins are avian Einsteins and for all I know they are dumb as bricks. Nevertheless the capacity for some higher reasoning does seem to be able to exist in at least some bird species.
That’s what love IS! We love our kids, we love our parents, we love our friends, we love our mates. And why? Because thousands of years of instinct and evolution tell us “This is what you do to make more humans”. Love isn’t a complex epiphenomenon, it is simply an instinct that social animals feel to one degree or another. Just like hunger is an instinct that animals feel. There are plenty of animals that don’t feel hunger…filter feeders for instance. But we know mammals and birds feel hunger. And there’s no reason to believe human hunger is anything more complicated than the hunger my dog feels, or the hunger a mouse feels.
Love is just the name that humans give to our own social-bonding instincts. And there’s no reason to believe that only humans can love, or that our feelings of love are much different than a dog’s feelings of love. Obviously a dog experiences love in different ways, just like they experience hunger in different ways…a human isn’t likely to experience hunger when smelling a rotten hunk of gristle pulled out of the trash, or a fresh cat turd.
It is a mistake to anthropomorphise animals, to pretend they are humans covered in fur/feathers. But humans are animals…atypical animals but animals…and our emotions don’t come from our massively hypertrophied frontal lobes, but rather from the parts of our brains we share with other animals. Humans had emotions before we were human. Love, fear, hunger, hate, lust, these are not human emotions but animal emotions. We feel them because we are animals, not because we are humans.
I said “self-aware,” not stupid. What I meant was that birds are unable to understand or evaluate their own behavior in the way that humans can. (Although based on some relationships I am aware of, that is certainly not universal among humans either.) If a penguin chick does not make the right behavioral responses, its parents will not feed it and it be allowed to starve, no matter how much they might “love” it.
I am not going to continue this hijack either. I will simply say - we as humans “love” even when it’s not good for evolution. We marry and don’t have children. We love children when they are not good for the species. We keep humans alive that could not survive without constant help.
A penguin mother with an unfit child will leave it to freeze and starve. We as a race love even the most unfit creations. (By unfit I solely mean ones that are not capable of spreading their genetic material, or possibly have genetic material that is unsuitable for spreading.)
Indeed although I find it difficult to imagine high intelligence yet lacking self awareness.
Regardless here is the last sentence in the quote I provided above (highlighting mine):
“Instead, they are beings that, within the constraints of their molecular inheritance, make complex decisions and show every sign of enjoying a rich awareness.”
Well, this makes me feel better about not having seen the movie. I just didn’t think it sounded interesting - not fond of nature documentaries. But everyone was ranting and raving about how wonderful a movie it was. Now I have justification for my refusal to see it!
It’s a good thing about the tarp. Otherwise that would be kind of gross.
Cite?
If you take such a clearly materialistic view of emotion - which, I will add, is my own view as well - then you have to acknowledge that when the material is vastly different, you can’t really claim that the processes exhibited are the same. A penguin’s brain is much simpler than a humans; if you believe that love is nothing but chemicals acting on the brain, then when the brain is substantially different, I don’t see how you can confidently claim that the penguin is feeling the same thing. In fact, it seems to me logically very unlikely, in that view, that they feel “love”.
Yeah, but chimps and humans aren’t very different. Humans and penguins are much more dissimilar.
By that standard, you could grow something in a petri dish that can “love”. There’s certainly more to it than that.
Right, but you can’t prove it. Based on my cognitive science class last spring, the origin of emotions is something that’s still poorly-understood (though not very thoroughly-studied, admittedly.) I don’t think it’s at all safe to summarize emotions as nothing but chemicals and receptors - the rest of the brain has to be there as well, or it’s nothing but a chemical reaction you could do by pouring one test tube into another.
How simple an organism can we look at and decide its behavior is the product of “emotions”? Does an amoeba eat because it feels hungry? What about a flatworm? Do earthworms get horny right before they reproduce? There’s no logical necessity for that - and there’s no reason to think they have the capacity. Obviously penguins are a little more complicated, but your presentation of “love” as nothing but chemicals is simply not logically satisfying. You can claim penguins love each other, but if you have to reduce love to something one can do with a slice of brain tissue in a biology lab, you’ve emptied the term of all its meaning.
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