Evolutions billion dollar question! (page 2)

Homerovah the Almighty

They developed with all mammals as their intelligence developed, not really a billion dollar question

Funny isn't how a simple 2 cent answer is all that is required !

Animals Enjoy A Good Laugh, Too, Say Scientists

Animals Enjoy A Good
Laugh, Too, Say Scientists
By Peter Gorner
Chicago Tribune Science Reporter
4-2-5

Tickling rats to make them chirp with joy may seem frivolous as a
scientific pursuit, yet understanding laughter in animals may lead to
revolutionary treatments for emotional illness, researchers suggest.

Joy and laughter, they say, are proving not to be uniquely human
traits.

Roughhousing chimpanzees emit characteristic pants of excitement,
their version of "ha-ha-ha" limited only by their anatomy and lack of
breath control, researchers contend.

Dogs have their own sound to spur other dogs to play, and recordings
of the sound can dramatically reduce stress levels in shelters and
kennels, according to the scientist who discovered it.

Even laboratory rats have been shown to chirp delightedly above the
range of human hearing when wrestling with each other or being tickled
by a keeper--the same vocalizations they make before receiving
morphine or having sex.

Studying sounds of joy may help us understand the evolution of human
emotions and the brain chemistry underlying such emotional problems as
autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders, said Jaak
Panksepp, a pioneering neuroscientist who discovered rat laughter.

Panksepp, of Bowling Green State University in Ohio, sums up the
latest studies in this week's edition of the journal Science in hopes
of alerting colleagues to results that he terms "spectacular." The
research suggests that studying animal emotions, once a scientific
taboo, seems to be moving rapidly into the mainstream.

"It's very, very difficult to find skeptics these days. The study of
animal emotions has really matured.

Things have changed completely from as recently as five years ago,"
said Mark Bekoff, an expert in canine play behavior and professor of
biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Biologists suggest that nature apparently considers sounds of joy
important enough to have conserved them during the evolutionary
process.

"Neural circuits for laughter exist in very ancient regions of the
brain," Panksepp said, "and ancestral forms of play and laughter
existed in other animals eons before we humans came along."

Research in this area "is just the beginning wave of the future," said
comparative ethologist Gordon Burghardt, of the University of
Tennessee, who studies the evolution of play. "It will allow us to
bridge the gap with other species."

New investigative techniques often rely on super high-tech scanning
wizardry, but the most important tool for scientists in this field is
much more simple.

"Tickles are the key," Panksepp said. "They open up a previously
hidden world."

Panksepp had studied play vocalizations in animals for years before it
occurred to him that they might be an ancestral form of laughter.

"Then I went to the lab and tickled some rats. Tickled them gently
around the nape of their necks. Wow!"

The tickling made the rats chirp happily--"as long as the animal's
friendly toward you," he said. "If not, you won't get a single chirp,
just like a child that might be suspicious of an adult."

Rats that were repeatedly tickled became socially bonded to the
researchers and would seek out tickles. The researchers also found
that rats would rather spend time with animals that chirp a lot than
with those that don't.

During human laughter, the dopamine reward circuits in the brain light
up. When researchers neurochemically tickled those same areas in rat
brains, the rats chirped.

Rat humor remains to be investigated, but if it exists, a prime
component will be slapstick, Panksepp speculated. "Young rats, in
particular, have a marvelous sense of fun."

Panksepp said that laughter, at least in response to a direct physical
stimulus such as tickling, may be a common trait shared by all
mammals.

Psychologist and neuroscientist Robert Provine, author of "Laughter: A
Scientific Investigation," tickled and played with chimpanzees at the
Yerkes Regional Primate Center in Atlanta while researching the
origins of the human laugh.

Laughter in chimps, our closest genetic relatives, is associated with
rough-and-tumble play and tickling, Provine found. That came as no
surprise.

"It's like the behavior of young children," said Provine, of the
University of Maryland Baltimore County. "A tickle and laughter are
the first means of communication between a mother and her baby, so
laughter appears by about four months after birth."

The importance of such an early behavior is apparent.

"We're talking about a life-and-death deal here--the bonding and
survival of babies," Provine said.

When chimps laugh, they make unique panting sounds, ranging from
barely audible to hard grunting, with each inward and outward breath.

"We humans laugh on outward breaths. When we say `ha-ha-ha,' we're
chopping an outward breath," Provine said. "Chimps can't do that. They
make one sound per inward and outward breath. They don't have the
breath control to ... make the traditional human laugh."

The breakthrough in dog laughter was accomplished by University of
Nevada, Reno, researcher Patricia Simonet while working with
undergraduates at Sierra Nevada College in Lake Tahoe.

With extensive chimp research behind her, Simonet was open to the idea
of animal emotions, but the laughing sound she discovered in dogs was
unexpected: a "breathy, pronounced, forced exhalation" that sounds to
the untrained ear like a normal dog pant.

But a spectrograph showed a burst of frequencies, some beyond human
hearing. A plain pant is simpler, limited to just a few frequencies.

Hearing a tape of the dog laugh made single animals take up toys and
play by themselves, Simonet said. It never initiated aggressive
responses.

"If you want to invite your dog to play using the dog laugh, say `hee,
hee, hee' without pronouncing the `ee,'" Simonet said. "Force out the
air in a burst, as if you're receiving the Heimlich maneuver."

When she played a recording of a laughing dog at an animal shelter,
Simonet found that even 8-week-old puppies reacted by starting to
play, something they hadn't done when exposed to other dog sounds.

"Some sounds, like growls, confused the puppies. But the dog laugh
caused sheer joy and brought down the stress levels in the shelter
immediately."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/

Blackboo

How can non-living dead matter know HOW to Evolve EMOTIONS? Do nature KNOW anything about it??

jefferywhat

Emotions are just proteins blackboo, they evolve like everything else.

You haven't realy made a point yet, your personifying evolution which is a classic creationist flaw.

Evolution is a process, not a reason, it does not have a purpose.

Your body even now is evolving and mutating, if that mutation gives you an advantage, it will live on, if not, its gone.

Why do you think before large scaled travel humans in the far southern hemispheres were small and very dark and those in the far north were blonde and fair?

Answer that and you will begin to understand how evolution works.

Answer it not, you will stay ignorant.

Blackboo

Doesnt it seem that EMOTIONS and Thinking is something that is Eternal? How can it just develop out the blue? Did Nature or some off balanced connection spark our emotions?

Satanus

Man and other animals

Our fellow creatures have feelings - so we should give them rights too

Jeremy Rifkin
Saturday August 16, 2003
The Guardian

When it comes to the ultimate test of what distinguishes humans from the other creatures, scientists have long believed that mourning for the dead represents the real divide. Other animals have no sense of their mortality and are unable to comprehend the concept of their own death. But animals, it appears, experience grief. Elephants will often stand next to their dead kin for days, in silence, occasionally touching their bodies with their trunks. Kenyan biologist Joyce Poole, who has studied African elephants for 25 years, says that elephant behaviour towards their dead "leaves me with little doubt that they experience deep emotion and have some understanding of death."

We also know that virtually all animals play, especially when young. Anyone who has ever observed the antics of puppies, kittens or bear cubs cannot help but notice the similarities in the way they play and our own children. Recent studies in the brain chemistry of rats show that when they play, their brains release large amounts of dopamine, a neurochemical associated with pleasure and excitement in human beings.

Noting the striking similarities in brain anatomy and chemistry of humans and other animals, Steven Siviy, a behavioural scientist at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, asks a question increasingly on the minds of other researchers: "If you believe in evolution by natural selection, how can you believe that feelings suddenly appeared, out of the blue, with human beings?"

The new findings of researchers are a far cry from the conceptions espoused by orthodox science. Until very recently, scientists were still advancing the idea that most creatures behaved by sheer instinct, and that what appeared to be learned behaviour was merely genetically wired activity. Now we know that geese have to teach their goslings their migration routes. In fact, we are finding out that learning is passed on from parent to offspring far more often than not and that most animals engage in learned experience brought on by continued experimentation and trial-and-error problem-solving.

Evolutions billion dollar question!

Share this