[augustnagro]

Definition of anthropomorphism (noun): "the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object. "

A common example of anthropomorphism is in voles (and other rodents). [1,2] Very long ago, scientists noticed that bank vole pups frequently cry when their mother leaves the nest. The scientists assumed that the pups were afraid, and missed their parent. Eventually, it was discovered that the absence of their mother drops the temperature of the underground nest, and that the pups cries are actually a mechanism to generate heat. When scientists took their mother away, but increased the heat of their den to normal levels, the pups did not cry. The animals were not communicating or displaying anything resembling "human" emotion, but were innately responding to environmental stress.

No matter how much we want to believe that animals are sentient, have emotions, and communicate to each other via language, science indicates that's just not the case. In fact, there have been numerous studies that indicate anthropomorphism is a byproduct of our complex social structure.

Nice job bringing racism into a discussion about dolphin vocalizations, by the way.

[madaxe_again]

You've just underscored my point, however, by reducing potential communication to "vocalisations".

Then again, perhaps you are just a well trained markov chain, and not actually a person.

[tzs]

> No matter how much we want to believe that animals are sentient, have emotions, and communicate to each other via language, science indicates that's just not the case.

That's an overstatement. All you can really conclude is that science cannot say whether or not any non-humans are sentient.

[7952]

Surely sentience is a philosophical concept, I am sceptical that science can be applied as directly as you suggest.

I agree that human characteristics are sometimes falsely assigned to animals. But that doesn't mean that human characteristics can only ever exist in humans. If a crow exhibits theory of mind, it just suggests that humans are not as unusual as previously thought. It does not mean that we are assigning the full philosophical implications of human sentience to that animal. In fact science could not possibly do that and still be science.

[cmdrfred]

How do we know that human infants don't respond that same way, for the same reason? Perhaps the voles reaction to heat signals a more sophisticated understanding in comparison to the child who cries regardless of temperature.

[true_religion]

> How do we know that human infants don't respond that same way, for the same reason?

Infants are known to lack forward-planning, object permanence, and many many other indications of reasoning. I don't think it'd be wrong to say that they behave quite like little finite state machines.

[scotty79]

Human infant would also cry for missing mother much later if it was kept warm (as opposed to cold) and not hungry.

Human crying as any strenous activity generates heat.

[lawpoop]

How do we know that studies purporting to show emotions and sentience in human beings aren't just anthropomorphic bias?

[lawpoop]

This study doesn't even make sense. How does crying generate heat? It takes an awful lot of physical movement to generate any measurable about of heat. There's no way they generated enough sonic energy to make a measurable change in temperature.

This is not evidence that the crying act was just to generate heat. Not that it's evidence that they missed their mom, but it's neither evidence for the heat theory.

You can comfort a crying child with a blanket; maybe all human distress is just a need for a blankie?

[meric]

That's a fine pattern matching Markov chain generator. Is it open source? It looks like it crawls science blogs, too.