A Bit More Detail

• blogTO's Derek Flack posts photos of beach scenes in Toronto dating back a century or more.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly offers ten tips for tourists visiting New York City.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper suggesting that life on planets can influence the effective size of the circumstellar habitable zone, expanding it inwards or outwards.


• The Dragon's Tales links to an Economist article arguing that the English language has become the common language of the European Union's citizens.


• Eastern Approaches comments on the life of Polish general Wojciech Jaruzelski.


• A Fistful of Euros' PO Neill notes that the European Monetary System predating the Euro was associated with booms and busts in Ireland, among other countries.


• Kieran Healy notes a study suggesting that the success or not of crowdfunding and other online collaborations is strongly determined by whether or not people make initial large contributions.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money comments on the ethics of immigration and border control.


• At the Planetary Science Blog, Joseph O'Rourke summarizes a paper suggesting it's reasonably likely that Pluto has plate tectonics and subsurface oceans, derived from the impact that created its binary partner Charon.


• pollotenchegg maps turnout in the recent Ukrainian election.


• Strange Maps notes that the Belgian province of Liège looks in outline quite a lot like Belgium.


• Torontoist notes that the policies of the Progressive Conservatives under Tim Hudak would bode ill for Toronto if they won the upcoming election.


• Window on Eurasia links to an author who predicts only hard and soft authoritarianism for Russia.

Gross: What would you say to those who argue that there are huge gaps in cognition between monkeys and apes and humans?

De Waal: Over the years the dividing line between humans, certainly between humans and the apes, has sort of become fuzzy under the influence of field work, such as the work by Jane Goodall, Toshisada Nishida, and others, and under the influence of experimental work on cognition, which has shown all sorts of capacities that we had not suspected in the apes.

Also, neuroscience has not really helped maintain the dividing line because the brain of a human doesn’t contain any parts that the brain of an ape doesn’t have. The human brain is much bigger than, let’s say, the chimpanzee brain. It’s three times bigger. But there’s nothing in there as far as we can tell that is not in a chimpanzee brain. At the microscopic level there are a few differences and they’re probably interesting, but you would think if humans are so dramatically different, as different as the philosophers have often assumed, that you would find something in the human brain that is absolutely unique and that you would say, “Well, there’s a part there that no one else has,” but we have never found it.

Gross: What are some of the seminal experiments that revealed similarities in cognitive or behavioral traits between apes and humans, suggesting we’re not in fact unique, as many like to think?

De Waal: There are many. For example, tool use used to be considered uniquely human. And then when it was found in captivity by Köhler, this is in the 1920s, people would say, “Well, but at least in the wild they never do it.” And then it was found in the wild, and then they would say, “Well, at least they don’t make tools.” And then it was found that they actually also make tools.

So tool use was one of those dividing lines. Mirror self-recognition is a key experiment that was first conducted on the apes. The language experiments, even though we now doubt what the apes do is actually what we would call “language,” they certainly put a dent in that whole claim that symbolic communication is uniquely human.

My own studies on, let’s call it “politics,” and reconciliation behavior and pro-social behavior have put a dent in things. And so I think over the years every postulate of difference between humans and apes has been at least questioned, if not knocked over. As a result, we are now in a situation that most of the differences are considered gradual rather than qualitative.

And the same is true, let’s say, between a chimp and a monkey. There are many differences between chimps and monkeys in cognitive capacities, but we consider them mostly gradual differences.

The more we look at it, even if you take the difference between, let’s say, a human and a snake or a fish, yes, between those species the differences are very radical and huge, but even these species rely on some of the learning processes and reactions that we also know of in humans.

[. . .]

Gross: What in your view is the most compelling reason to stop invasive research on chimpanzees?

De Waal: The most compelling reason would be an ethical one. I myself have never done any invasive studies in chimps for exactly that reason. I don’t want to do that kind of thing on the chimpanzee because they are so mentally and psychologically close to us. Most people of my generation and younger who work with this species share this feeling. It’s almost like you’re working with humans, you know, they are very closely related to us.

It’s very easy to extend the moral qualms we would have with experiments on humans to chimpanzees. It’s much easier to extend them to chimpanzees than to, let’s say, rats or mice which are so much more distant from us.

Gross: What criteria should we use to decide what type of research on chimpanzees would be morally acceptable?

De Waal: I think we should keep doing non-invasive studies on chimpanzees, such as behavioral studies or comparative genomics, maybe non-invasive neuroscience. It’s hard to do the same imaging studies as we do on humans at the moment, but it’s going to happen, I think, one day.

For me, non-invasive would be defined as research that I would not mind doing on a human. And it does require a different mindset at NIH and maybe other funding agencies because sometimes if you submit proposals to them that include chimpanzees, they still will argue, “Well, you’re using animals, why don’t you go into the brain and manipulate it this way or that to enhance your study?”

The science community needs to change that mindset and treat chimpanzee studies basically the way they treat human studies. There’s a lot of things we cannot do on humans, and that we will not do on humans, and that will be the situation for chimpanzee research, I think, where we say, “Well, we can do all the same things that we do on humans, but that’s about it.”

Gross: In your commentary, you point out that the United States shares the distinction with Gabon of being the only nations in the world to hold chimpanzees in biomedical facilities. That’s surprising.

De Waal: The movement to remove chimpanzees out of research laboratories started to get teeth about ten years ago. The movement existed probably earlier but at least ten years ago certain countries like Japan and the Netherlands had chimpanzees in labs and said they stopped this kind of research for ethical reasons, it was very explicitly for ethical reasons.

And I think the U.S. is going to join the other countries, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but it will happen because the whole trajectory – and that’s what’s pointed out in the IOM report – is in this direction. And my argument is why not get ahead of that trajectory, and why not do it now rather than wait a couple of years.

[I]magine robots that obey injunctions like Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative — acting rationally and with a sense of moral duty. This July, the roboticist Ronald Arkin of Georgia Tech finished a three-year project with the U.S. Army designing prototype software for autonomous ethical robots. He maintains that in limited situations, like countersniper operations or storming buildings, the software will actually allow robots to outperform humans from an ethical perspective.

“I believe these systems will have more information available to them than any human soldier could possibly process and manage at a given point in time and thus be able to make better informed decisions,” he says.

The software consists of what Arkin calls “ethical architecture,” which is based on international laws of war and rules of engagement.

Although I am strongly in favor of the kinds of research programs that Professor Arkin is undertaking, I think the ethical and legal issues, whether the categorical rules or the proportionality rules, of warfare involve questions that humans have not managed to answer at the conceptual level. Proportionality and what it means when seeking to weigh up radically incommensurable goods — military necessity and harm to civilians, for example — to start with in the law and ethics of war. One reason I am excited by Professor Arkin’s attempts to perform these functions in machine terms, however, is that the detailed, step by step, project forces us to think through difficult conceptual issues regarding human ethics at the granular level that we might otherwise skip over with some quick assumptions. Programming does not allow one to do that quite so easily.

And it is open to Professor Arkin to reply to the concern that humans don’t have a fully articulated framework, even at the basic conceptual level, for the ethics of warfare, so how then is a machine going to do it? “Well, in order to develop a machine, I don’t actually have to address those questions or solve those problems. The robot doesn’t have to have more ethical answers than you humans — it just has to be able to do as well, even with the gaps and holes.” I’m not sure that answer (which I’m putting into Professor Arkin’s mouth entirely hypothetically, let me emphasize) would be sufficient — partly because I suspect that intuitions applied casuistically by human beings often encode and respond to facts that affect our ethical senses in ways that would not really be articulable, by human or machine. And partly because we probably do think that in various ways, the machine has to be better than the human.

• Otto Spejkers at 1948 refers to Haile Selassie's famous 1936 speech before the League of Nations to pose the question of how an international system run by states and groups unwilling to invest the necessary effort can survive, then and now.


• Phil Hunt at Amused Cynicism links to convincing arguments that the Flynn Effect of rising IQ over time is real, a consequence of--among other things--better nutrition and public health.


• The Lounsbury at 'Aqoul writes at length about remittances and the role that they play, and that some would like them to play, in the economies of the Middle East and North Africa. In the absence of a business-friendly environment, of course they'll be transmitted outside of the formal financial sector and used mainly for consumption.


• Centauri Dreams is one news source among many that carries the news that the asteroid impact that triggered the dinosaur-killing mass extinction of 65 million years ago may have been an incidental byproduct of a collision btween two large asteroids 160 million years ago. Celestial billiards.


• Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin writes about how Wikipedia is just like the Internet, while Henry Farrell observes that RapLeaf has touched wonders in jurisdictions like the European Union with strong privacy laws.


• Daniel Drezner links to multiple reports that the Bush administration is preparing to launch a PR campaign to try to get some support behind the idea of attacking Iran. ¡No Pasarán!, perhaps?


• Ian Irving at False Positives advertises the Friends of the Merril Science Fiction/Anime Flea Market that's being held tomorrow, the 8th of September, from 10 am to 4 pm at the Toronto Reference Library to raise funds for the Toronto science fiction collection.
  
• Razib at GNXP responds to the news that, for the first time in ten thousand years, agriculture is no longer the biggest employer of human beings by wondering how cultural traits developed during this long agricultural idyll are going to adapt to post-agrarian environments. ("Badly" is probably an accurate one-word answer.)


• Joe.My.God has written a couple of posts about Mike Rogers, a Washington D.C. blogger who's been busily outing closeted Republicans. So long as the people involved are in positions of power, I've no problem with his actions. It's as morally unambiguous as revealing that, oh, gosh, look how many Jewish relatives some of the members of such-and-such anti-Semitic movement have.


• Language Hat has a post up about the Basque-Icelandic pidgin, and about the masterwork on this pidgin that may have gotten neglected because it was written in Latin in 1937.


• Peteris Cedrins at Marginalia writes about how the Russian state's promotion of Russian as a foreign language conflicts with other, like non-Russian identities in the post-Soviet world, or the presence of more attractive language communities, or the whole messy history of Russian hegemony over its near abroad.


• Jeff at the Tin Man neatly sums up the reasons why he's uncomfortable with meat-eating and why he does it anyway. Me too, I guess.