Murderous Elephant Sophonts
Gregor links two news articles I also noticed. The most recent says that Elephants pass the test of self-awareness, like apes, dolphins, and man. The other is about maurauding bands of violent orphan elephants. The journalist cited in NYT draws a parallel between human war orphans. The theory is that elephants actually learn civil behavior from their parents, and removing the parents breaks this pattern.
Of course, Rousseau’s ideas about humans were overturned long ago — if you abandon human children to raise themselves, they don’t automatically become civilized. The fact that “Lord of the Flies” was still widely discussed shows that Rousseau’s ideas were seductive less than 100 years ago, but thankfully we’re past that.
On the other hand, it’s tempting to completely kill nature and swing exclusively to nurture. Do the elephant examples show that elephants have an ancient culture passed down from some Abrahamic elders? Probably not.
Two interesting questions arise:
- 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? I say 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? I say yes, with caveats.
Basically, self-awareness, mimicry, and empathy seem to go hand-in-hand. All that is necessary for “culture” to form among a group species is ability to observe, mimic, and condition behaviors. Think of it like this. One elephant gets into a particular situation and has a good outcome. Another gets in the same situation and does something different, and has a bad outcome. The elephants surrounding him observe and mimic (mentally or physically). Depending on the strength and characteristic of the accompanying stimulus, the behavior will become conditioned after few or many repetitions, and will stick without need to mimic. Younger elephants, presumably more impressionable, will pick up many stock behaviors by mimicking elders with acquired repertoire.
Basically, I am arguing that elephant societies (and dolphin societies) are a lot like neural networks. The self-awareness indicates ability for the nodes to communicate, and mimicry/conditioning is like nodes firing and propagating.
Of course, this pattern would apply to apes and humans, too. But with apes and humans you have to factor in third and fourth order intensionality, which makes things considerably more complex. And of course, none of this discounts nature — aggression is clearly in the elephants repertoire of in-built behaviors, and will emerge again if the neural net is scrubbed clean.
It also is no guarantee that the same “culture” will emerge again. The mechanics described just say that the social species will pass learnings intergenerationally; but these learnings are not necessarily logical. The environment today may be very different from the environment in which the current net was programmed. It is entirely plausible that the net today could be reprogrammed in a completely different pattern. The pattern is not evolutionary, rather it is environmental, so it is also quite possible that the “learned” pattern could be one that is deadly to the species as a whole. In other words, there is no evolutionary basis to say that the bands of murderous elephants will be assimilated and conditioned by the gentle elephants — it is equally possible (given our current understanding) that the murderous elephants could infect the elephant culture and skew it off on a survival-hostile path. Of course, I’m not predicting disaster, but it is completely illogical and unscientific to assume that such cultures will always “emerge/converge” back to the current state. The neural net of social learning is a lot more volatile than genetics, and a lot more is open to chance.