The KGB Oracle Forums General Public Discussion (PUBLIC) The Pub Best Speech You Will Ever Hear

Actually, milk cows suffer pain from distended bag and utters if not milked regularly. Clearly you've never witnessed a cow that has had a calf die, eagerly jump into the milking stall after not being milked for a couple of days.

Actually plants can be seen in time lapse video moving away from environments that they find unpleasant or harmful and towards healthy environs, just like animals only slower.

There are myriad resources available that show studies that suggest that humans are actually not equipt to digest grains. I'm just sayin.

Dude, that's not a bear. That's a wolf, and I was just posting what Donk tried to link. His point, I think, is that wolves aren't supposed to be that large and that they are growing to that size because they are protected by humans and allowed to evolve into some sort of super predator.

Dude, that's not a bear. That's a wolf, and I was just posting what Donk tried to link. His point, I think, is that wolves aren't supposed to be that large and that they are growing to that size because they are protected by humans and allowed to evolve into some sort of super predator.

The arguments of authority were and are quite common, unfortunately. Aristotle said that the planets are perfect spheres, and this was true for the next 1800 years. When Galileo showed that the Moon's surface was irregular (the moon is a "planet" in classical astronomy) there were many who said he was wrong because it was contrary to Aristotle. It was no use to show images in your telescope, make drawings, bringing the moon pulling with a rope and rub it on the nose of the citizen: Aristotle had not said that its surface was flat? Well then it is flat, what the hell! This reminds me of the famous phrase "if the facts do not fit the theory, so much the worse for the facts ..."

So when you kill a pig or a dog, even if he cries, bud, try desperately to escape, if squirm in pain as you scream and stabs him horribly until the last breath of life was fading, that does not mean that he feels pain, suffering or has any other emotion ... Why? However, because Descartes said so, that nonhuman animals (a group clearly paraphyletic!) Are just automatons, devoid of any internal mental state. And that's it!

This nonsense did not come Cartesian join the Catholic and Jewish view that nonhuman animals are only movable property, public or private property, devoid of "soul" and subject to any treatment that humans want to dismiss them. In fact, this nonsense is born into this Cartesian view Catholic and Jewish, as is easy to see.

Exploring the internal mental states of bees cows, cognitive ethology is becoming increasingly robust.

And so for the next four centuries, the authority Cartesian hung (would have stopped hovering?) On all scientific research on all of biology, zoology over all, on the whole ethology. I've heard several times, my students, that "man is the only rational animal." Well, I attribute this kind of opinion over the Christian tradition that Descartes. However, I've heard my colleagues in academia, and no fewer than a dozen times, saying "animals (nonhuman) have no emotion", "animals have no rationality", "animals do not feel pain", explicitly using the name Descartes as an argument of authority. I guess these guys are able to do vivissecções without anesthesia, because, since animals do not feel pain?

The cognitive ethology, a branch of ethology, in short, seeks to study the internal mental states of animals, is not exactly a new science, though only about 30 or 40 years (for those who do not know, I recommend the books of disclosure scientific Mark Bekoff and Colin Allen, especially "Species of mind"). However, I have the impression that cognitive ethology is gaining traction, producing more papers and being taken increasingly seriously in the academic world. I may be wrong, but I bet some chips that I'm not.

This therefore is the reason for this brief note: draw attention to the recent progress in an area of biology extremely interesting and complex. Bees with emotional states, cows that demonstrate understanding of their social structure, demonstrations of affection in chickens, whales that give names to each other ... The last few years have been quite prolific for cognitive ethology, and the trend is that it becomes increasingly robust and increasingly important. That, just as Galileo and his telescope, the cognitive ethology show that an argument from authority can not override the facts and scientific analysis.

When Darwin published "Origin," began the slow but inevitable death of this concept is detrimental to the scala naturae. Likewise, I hope that the maturation of cognitive ethology begin the slow death of this nonsense Cartesian, primarily in academia, and then in society as a whole.