Sex on Six Legs_ Lessons on Life, Love, and Language From the Insect World - Marlene Zuk [32]
Not all scientists have been willing to accept that insects lack emotions. Donald Griffin, who discovered the details of echolocation in bats and studied animal communication for much of the last half of the twentieth century, spent the later years of his life trying to convince his fellow scientists that nonhumans—whether dolphins, chimps, or honeybees—can possess what he unabashedly called consciousness. He challenged the prevailing view that consciousness, and by extension true emotion, is so subjective that one can never know if others share it. Instead, he defined consciousness pragmatically, as the "versatile adaptability of behavior to changing circumstances and challenges." By that token, insects certainly qualify, and Griffin was fascinated by the complex communication of social insects such as ants and bees. He dismissed concerns that the small brains and differently organized nervous systems of insects precluded consciousness as immaterial, asking, "What underlies this dogma that only a vertebrate central nervous system is capable of organizing thoughts?...The behavior of some insects is far more flexible and versatile than previously recognized. Perhaps this new behavioral evidence will modify our long-standing conviction that all invertebrates are thoughtless automata."
I like the idea that we have been underestimating insects, but I think we are on very shaky ground extrapolating our own feelings to beings so different from us. Calling insects conscious, or saying that their variable personalities mean they are much like people runs the risk of not paying attention to what they are actually doing, and instead assuming that they are little people in chitin suits. In the long run, I find it more rewarding to see them as insects, and leave the question of their awareness alone.
Scientists therefore simply rely on the outward behavior of an animal, often under controlled experimental circumstances, to tell them something about its personality. If you place a mouse in the middle of a bare room, is it likely to explore, or huddle in a corner? Does another mouse do the same thing? And if one animal is an exploratory type, does that mean it is also likely to be exceptionally aggressive toward other members of its species? It turns out that it does. The "bold-shy continuum," with some individuals eager to explore and others more risk averse, has been documented in several kinds of animals as well as humans, with evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson providing some of the landmark research on the topic. He points out that it is important to remember that being shy, whether in people or sunfish, his favorite study system, is not equivalent to being a loser; in other words, there is something more going on here than just dominance over food or nest sites. Instead, animals take their place on the continuum independent of other determinants of dominance, for example, how large they are and, hence, how likely to win a fight.
Over the last few years, biologists have also noticed that some individual animals, whether they are fish, ferrets, or fruit flies, tend to show predictable suites of traits, not merely characteristics such as boldness or shyness during a single event. The predictability can happen in two ways. First, an individual that is, say, bold when faced with a predator will also be likely to be aggressive and attack another member of its species, so that its behavior under one set of circumstances predicts a different kind of behavior under another. Second, an animal that is bold today will be bold tomorrow, and one that hangs back will hang back all the time. In another effort to avoid anthropomorphism, or perhaps just because of a fondness for jargon, scientists often refer to these repeatable clusters of traits as behavioral syndromes, a phrase that evokes a bit of the pathological to me—are there behavioral syndrome support