Animal Magnetism
Clumsy, playful, clever, hungry (or all of the above)?
It may be that in a thousand years when they look back on youtube what they will be most impressed with is not the preponderance of evidence of the overwhelming stupidity of humans but proof of our interest in the cognitive, emotional and moral lives of other animals.
We know that other animals play, problem-solve and engage in selfless — that is, heroic — behavior, partly because we see them do it all the time on youtube. But the fact that we love watching them do it as much as we do is interesting.
Of course, animals have long been used by humans as examplars of moral activity, notably in fairy tales and fables, and usually based on anthropomorphized attributes, but never before have so many animals themselves been so widely observed going about the business of their own inner lives.
Although no videos featuring cute and cuddly animals have cracked the top ten most-viewed ever (unless you count Justin Bieber, who's got two in the top ten), animal videos do go viral on a fairly regular basis (remember "surprised kitty"? "Playing with an otter"? "Baby elephant sneezes and scares himself"?), with domesticated animals most likely to become viral video stars (Maru the Cat has his own wikipedia entry — see "Maru (cat)").
The truth is Top Ten be damned (I mean almost a billion views for Bieber? Really?), intelligent humans tune in to youtube for two reasons: to see videos of children, usually at their parents' prodding, saying and doing the darnedest things (which is infinitely more interesting than when, say, adult politicians do), and to see cute or clever animals doing likewise.
Research suggests we're hard-wired to respond to animals. In fact, researchers from Caltech and UCLA report that "neurons throughout the amygdala—a center in the brain known for processing emotional reactions—respond preferentially to images of animals."
"This preference extends to cute as well as ugly or dangerous animals and appears to be independent of the emotional contents of the pictures. Remarkably, we find this response behavior only in the right and not in the left amygdala."Had Charles Darwin or Konrad Lorenz, that giant of Comparative Ethology (animal behaviorism, essentially) been around at the dawn of the youtube age, I can imagine their satisfaction....[T]his striking hemispheric asymmetry helps strengthen previous findings supporting the idea that, early on in vertebrate evolution, the right hemisphere became specialized in dealing with unexpected and biologically relevant stimuli, or with changes in the environment. "In terms of brain evolution, the amygdala is a very old structure, and throughout our biological history, animals—which could represent either predators or prey—were a highly relevant class of stimuli."
Both Darwin and Lorenz were fascinated not just by animal behavior but by how it relates to human behavior. Darwin, in Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, observed how like other animals we are when it comes to expressing many of our emotions.
We snarl and raise our upper lip in fierce anger—to expose our nonexistent fighting canine tooth. Our gesture of disgust repeats the facial actions associated with the highly adaptive act of vomiting in necessary circumstances.Evolutionary Biologist Stephen Jay Gould has a fascinating short essay — "A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse" — that brilliantly explores the theme behind so many of today's internet memes. Riffing on Lorenz's observations in Ganzheit und Teil in der tierischen und menschlichen Gemeinschaft, that features of juvenility trigger "innate releasing mechanisms" for affection and nurturing in adult humans, Gould shows how Mickey's morphological evolution over time, a "reverse ontogenetic pathway" from "the ratty character of Steamboat Willie" to "the cute and inoffensive host to a magic kingdom", reflects precisely the unconscious human predispositions toward animals Lorenz posited.
For Lorenz, our affection for animals that share, "for reasons having nothing to do with the inspiration of affection in humans, ... some features also shared by human babies but not by human adults," may be a "biologically inappropriate response to other animals". But it seems it's one we can hardly help having.
Of course we humans have a habit of taking things too far, even evolution. And as often as not rather than shining a light on the moral life of animals, from which we might learn a great deal, our treatment of them instead sheds a light on the animal in us.
8 'Adorable' Viral Videos That Qualify as Animal Cruelty — powered by Cracked.com
I would hope that most humans would choose the biologically inappropriate to the morally inappropriate response. And hopefully in a thousand years we'll have more than just youtube videos to prove that occasionally we did.
You had me at Stephen Jay Gould.
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