Do some elephants, at some age, develop the ability to think far into the future and pass the wisdom to their young? That is, is the incidence of “culture” among elephants the result of intellectual prognostication? No. If you eliminated all adult elephants, would the current “civilized” state of elephant culture eventually re-emerge after a number of generations? If so, after how many generations? Yes, with caveats.

Joshua riffs on the possible origins of the elephant society. Go read this article on elephant violence. It has the qualities of a seminal piece on cross-species relations. Consider this statement from a ugandan researcher who grew up in a war zone:

I started looking again at what has happened among the Acholi and the elephants. I saw that it is an absolute coincidence between the 2. All these kids who have grown up with their parents killed – no fathers, no mothers, only children looking after them. They form these roaming, violent, destructive bands. It’s the same thing that happens with the elephants. Just like the male war orphans, they are wild, completely lost.
Most people are scared of showing that kind of anthropomorphism. But coming from me it doesn’t sound like I’m inventing something. It’s there. People know it’s there. Some might think that the way I describe the elephant attacks makes the animals look like people. But people are animals.

Now we can either discuss the semantics of sentience as we recognize our peer species, hopefully before it is too late, or we can adopt a new term that is not laden with meaning that needs to be repurposed first. Sophonts works for me: Why look at far away stars when we can find peers right under our nose?

2006-10-30: another hurdle cleared

Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, joining only humans, apes and dolphins as animals that possess this kind of self-awareness

2007-12-30: More sophonts, unsurprisingly.

As recently as 10 years ago, the conventional wisdom doubted that even chimpanzees, which are more closely related to human beings than are monkeys, possessed theory of mind. This view is changing

2013-12-30: All sophont teenagers are the same

Dolphins ‘deliberately get high’ on puffer fish nerve toxins by carefully chewing and passing them around

2014-02-03: How is your self-definition of your human identity going?

This study describes how 3 individual fish developed a novel behavior and learnt to use a dorsally attached external tag to activate a self-feeder. This behavior was repeated up to several 100x, and over time these fish fine-tuned the behavior and made a series of goal-directed coordinated movements needed to attach the feeder’s pull string to the tag and stretch the string until the feeder was activated. These observations demonstrate a capacity in cod to develop a novel behavior utilizing an attached tag as a tool to achieve a goal. This may be seen as one of the very few observed examples of innovation and tool use in fish.”

2014-10-09: a preview of the legal climate as we uplift various sophonts.

A New York appeals court will consider this week whether chimpanzees are entitled to “legal personhood” in the first case of its kind.

2015-07-02: Meaning in bird song

A study of the chestnut-crowned babbler bird from Australia revealed a method of communicating that has never before been observed in animals. The bird combines sounds in different combinations to convey meaning. “It is the first evidence outside of a human that an animal can use the same meaningless sounds in different arrangements to generate new meaning. It’s a very basic form of word generation – I’d be amazed if other animals can’t do this too.” Babbler birds were found to combine 2 sounds (known as A and B) to generate calls associated with specific behaviors. In flight, they used an “A-B” call to make their whereabouts known, but when alerting chicks to food they combined the sounds differently to make “B-A-B”. The birds seemed to understand the meaning of the calls. When the feeding call was played back to them, they looked at nests, while when they heard a flight call they looked at the sky

2016-03-21:  Ants recognize themselves

Our observations suggest that some ants can recognize themselves when confronted with their reflection view, this potential ability not necessary implicating some self awareness.

2022-02-17: Elks understand property?

Elk in Utah are smart enough to move off of public lands (where they can be hunted) and on to private lands where they cannot. And then, when hunting season is over, they shift right back to public lands. Elks’ use of public land diminished by 30% by the middle of rifle season. “It’s crazy; on the opening day of the hunt, they move, and on the closing day they move back. It’s almost like they’re thinking, ‘Oh, all these trucks are coming, it’s opening day, better move.’ They understand death. They get it; they’ve figured it out.”

2022-02-23: Chimpanzees treating their own wounds

Never before have scientists observed chimpanzees (or any animal) essentially “treating” a wound or applying a different animal species to a wound. It’s likely an example of allo-medication behavior (medicating others) in apes, which has never been seen before. The chimpanzees caught an insect from the air, which they immobilized by squeezing it between their lips. Then they placed it on an exposed surface of the wound and moved it around using their fingertips or lips. Finally, they extracted the insect from the wound.

2023-09-29: Crow statistical reasoning

2 crows had to choose between 2 images, each corresponding to a different reward probability. Crows were tasked with learning rather abstract quantities (i.e., not whole numbers), associating them with abstract symbols, and then applying that combination of information in a reward maximizing way. Over 10 days of training and 5k trials, the 1 crows continued to pick the higher probability of reward, showing their ability to use statistical inference.