It is odd they don't mention that paper, but there is a caveat buried near the bottom in about prior studies showing it in higher insects and how fly brains are more primitive than butterflies. IIRC only about 2/3 to 3/4 of butterflies of the type tested retained the aversion response, and only if they were of a certain age - they needed to have certain cells developed in caterpillar form to be able to remember. It is possible that the species they studied simply does not retain memories or that they missed the development window or that the method they used would not detect memories - the butterfly study showed aversion behavior to smell, this one does not measure behavior at all - it's possible that some behavior was retained but they did not measure it, though I think the particular cells they studied in flies is the same one the butterfly studies relied upon existing to work.
Off the top of my head, monarch butterflies taking multiple generations to travel up and down the west coast to and from Mexico each year implies if not conscious memory as we think of it, some sort of genetic imprint of how and where to travel that is mind blowing to me.
To sidetrack the original story slightly, and not aimed at this particular paper, but this kind of chicanery is what made me give up on academia. The basic foundation of academic science is sound enough, but this style of cooking results by omitting critically relevant comparisons or including semi-irrelevant approaches just because they make yours look good is pervasive and unbearable.
but its really interesting that there is a really large hippocampus in birds, and some insects - which allows for them to have a really spacial/geographic memory - they recall where they find food.
But the interesting thing about monarchs is that this information has some ability to encode over skipped generations...
But because we monsatan the "weeds" we are FN the monarchs up.
When I wasa child, in Lake Tahoe Monarchs were on the migration path and we would have entire pine trees covered in them
As a lay person, Metamorphosis is the strangest biological process I am aware of. Somehow they have evolved to almost completely break down and then reform as a new creature. How did something like this even come to be? Just a fascinating process that I struggle to understand. Insects, specifically social insect as a whole are just incredibly interesting to me as far as how completely alien they are to us.
I think the hypothesis is that it started as a delay in the internal development of wings. This split the creatures life cycle into a pre-winged feeding stage and a post-winged adult breeding stage.
The possession of wings in the later stage created a very different environmental situation, so the selective pressures on the winged stage are very different from those in the pre winged stage. These cause a split in the evolutionary environment of pre and post winged stages, causing selection for further divergent trait acquisition in the transitional stage during wing development.
Not an entomologist though, so if anyone has a better understanding I’d be grateful.
Not entirely - they change shape certainly, but don't encapsulate and rework almost their entire organ system to do so. Insect metamorphosis is far more drastic.
Frogs seem to have a delayed Ontogeny, too, but the restructuring is much less drastic than insects.
Vertebrates go through several stages in their development while in the egg (or placental sack, which stands in for the egg). The develop a head, spine, and tail initially. Then they add front limbs and finally rear limbs. Frogs hatch from their eggs prior to the limb development stage and retain that neotenous legless form while tadpoles. They are essentially hatched as embryos and don’t assume their adult form until later.
Frogs are strange too, but not as odd as insects at least to me. Frogs almost seem to just pause growth and then resume it. Definitely interesting as well though.
Which shouldn’t feel so alien to us because human childhoods are a period of much slower growth than you see in other animals. Not a pause but still. IIRC it’s speculated that slowed growth is to give time for the brain to mature and to learn but either way it’s interesting to think about. If we grew the way dogs and cows do we’d be fully grown by around 10 years old.
You are right, and I am hard pressed to think of anything scarier than a pack 10 year olds with the strength of a man. Society may have taken an interesting direction.
Human embryos go through some crazy changes too. Parts grow and are reabsorbed (tails). Many animals also shed hard exoskeletons regularly (lobsters, spiders). That involves softening up the inner animal. Perhaps that was a part-way step towards full metomorphosis.
Or as similar to a two-generation-cycle parasite that alternates between a host-A form creating eggs that grow into a host-B form (creating eggs that grow into a host-A form, etc.)
The pupa internally "gestates" the adult as a parthenogenetic clone-child; the adult being gestated, absorbs the pupal parent's entire body for nutrients — and, crucially, the pupal parent's body allows this absorption of its entire body, producing no immune response to it, because they have the same DNA. As with a cyclic parasite, you get two different complete lifecycles, that are each born, live, and die from the same genetic program, given a different epigenetic kickstart, in a back-and-forth cycle.
Someday, I predict humans will be able to undergo a similar process. Our main obstacle is building a suitable cocoon structure that could hold a human for the duration of the metamorphosis. Essentially what we do is trigger a process that can rembryonize the body and break down the excess material into base elements. This stew of embryo and nutrients then goes through a process of regrowth over the course of 9 months until the human has become a newborn baby again, with some core memories retained. Once born, the baby learns to walk and talk all over again until they are as functional as before the metamorphosis.
The obvious advantage of this process is you can regenerate a body if your current one is no longer suitable, due to disease, degeneration, or even dysphoria.
To me this reads as a really complicated form of physician assisted suicide. I also think the marketability of this would be complicated, as most adult people would want to start over in their teens or twenties, not as a baby.
Starting as a baby gives you a better chance at building a foundation for the kind of lifestyle you want when you reach your teens or twenties. Those baby years will go by quickly anyway.
It isn’t really suicide because your consciousness isn’t extinguished, you just end up unconscious for a bit while you restructure.
If you start as a baby your body is too small and weak to get anything on your own, so the foundation of your life is actually built by the people taking care of you. How could you customize being helpless to suit a later presumed lifestyle? I also struggle to see how all the content stored in an adult brain could be transferred to a smaller-sized baby brain, when the brain grows as your body matures.
Family? Are we so broken that it doesn't pop out as an obvious choice? In China (lived there 10 years) I feel like many would accept this without even a moment's hesitation.
So the scenario plays out: you get too old to have fun, so you metamorphosize back into a baby, which your now-adult children have to take care of. This is just as labor-intensive as care for the elderly you would have been, but now they have to go through the psychological horrors of knowing their mother/father is now a child in their care, adding to their load of possibly already trying to raise a family of their own?
No, like putting that aside, because I assume that it’ll exist. I’m thinking more along the lines of, how do you satisfy the emotional needs of an adult who is trapped in a body that is not responsive to them? If I behaved like I do as an adult to my parents and teachers but I was a child I’d spend my entire youth in the timeout corner.
If reincarnation is real, isn't that already happening? Granted, it is not the same exact base material that gets rebuilt in a baby, but in a way the dead body gets decomposed, eaten by other animal and join the soil through feces or get cremated and join the soil/water. Then after sometime, someone gets pregnant gets nutrient form the soil (plants, fruits, grass fed beef...) and a baby is built. Obviously some of the individual base parts will go to other creatures too.
We only miss the memory, that which makes us individual human beings. I wonder where the hell does it go. That's is marvelous to me. Where does the memory go?
If memories are just a side effect of where certain chemicals flow along pathways, then along the lines of your comment...
A river is like a memory: water generally flows the same way down them, some days stronger some days drier, and the more they are used, the more they shift their course.
Memory is just a word for the human experience of localized state. There is a universal state that we experience a small piece of as we live. Though our experience of it ceases when we die, the state of the universe continues its natural course, with no loss of continuity, just a phase shift.
The experience of human life is like a river. At first we are small mountain trickles, barely aware of our existence. As we make our way through the middle of our lives, we are self-important rivers, providing an ecosystem to those around us, sometimes with others flowing their experience into ours, and sometimes as we give our experience to others; some amount evaporating to who knows where and some amount being replenished by rains, growing ever larger.
Towards the end, we either become stuck in lakes, or we are like large idle bays, full of experience, most of us moving now with less fundamental "purpose." Lake or bay, eventually we disperse back to the ocean of existence.
Maybe in the old days. These days you'd just reincarnate as decomposition bacteria and then live out your life in a pool of formaldehyde and human jerky chunks inside a sealed casket.
There are those cool liquefaction burial places though that will dissolve you in a strong acid (or base?). Your family is left with some you juice that they can flush down the toilet (or drink in a cocktail, I suppose).
Maybe the Tibetans and their sky burials with vultures eating your fresh meat is the way to go.
Aquamation. It's basically like when murder victims get dissolved in a bathtub full of lye, except they charge you a ton to do it, and market it as a gentler alternative to cremation, because it uses less heat.
Yet, across both sides of morphogenesis and reproduction, some remarkably complex behaviour persists: food preferences, predatory and predator evading behaviours, mating, signalling for mating, epigenetic or not, so something cellular and mechanistically related to "memory" in a linguistic sense persists. How is this so?
The problem of english: we call it "memory" but it encompasses more than just overt neuronal knowledge acquisition, it includes the gut brain relationship and intracellular activity.
Maybe all the things I list are not in fact "memories" but then..
What you are contemplating here is a question of English-language semantics and usage, not biology. It is commonplace for words previously used in one restricted sense to be adopted to talk about other situations that are merely analogous in some sense. This is useful and probably inevitable, but it does not mean we can take these disparate uses to imply a sameness, where the expanded usage is merely the consequence of a similarity (and sometimes the similarity is quite abstract.)
In this case, neuronal information storage and retrieval, which is the biological basis of memory as the word is ordinarily used, is quite different and separable from the genetic storage and use of information.
Same with the recent linguistic discussion of whether AI is lying, hallucinating, or confabulating (personally, I think confabulation has the closest linguistic meaning to what AI does). All of these are really terms that apply to agents with agency and don’t apply to LLMs, but we don’t currently have terms for them, yet.
Of these, lying is most clearly (definitely, I would say) a term that applies to entities with agency, but I don't see hallucinating being so. Confabulation seems to me to fall somewhere between: insofar as it is not simply a synonym for lying, that seems to lie in it being a pathology, and one which tends to compromise the subject's ability to act with agency (a person fully aware that their confabulation is false is, if they hope their listeners will believe them, lying, and has apparently chosen to do so.)
Personally, I feel that the last two are useful analogies while the first is not, but they are all of limited applicability because I doubt an LLM's use of language follows from, or is indicative of, an understanding that there is an external world.
Show me your definition of intelligence and I will show you how people might reasonably disagree with it.
(The simplest refutation would be that demonstrating intelligence requires first demonstrating motivation on the part of the subject. The current way we interact with "AI" is much more akin to prodding an organism with a stick, seeing it recoil in response to the stimulus, and then claiming that it therefore has intelligence. No, you haven't demonstrated intelligence, you have at most proven it has an autonomous sensory response -- anything beyond that is confusing the complexity of the response with complexity of the mechanism producing it).
We don't know intelligent beings that aren't mammals, either, but that doesn't imply that one is a prerequisite for the other. One could reasonably argue that self-directed agencies are an outcome of the evolutionary process, and predate evolution of intelligence, so the latter necessarily comes with those strings attached in nature. But we're past the "in nature" part by now.
I know that in my mental model of what intelligence is, a completely passive entity that responds to my questions in a certain way would qualify.
Biological beings so indeed code information at multiple levels including genetic, epigenetic, at the cellular level in the form of interneuronal connections, etc. Whether you can that memory or not is irrelevant eyes, as it's still information that the biological being has encoded at some level to achieve some function
Maybe via epigenetic changes? From my limited knowledge of the topic, I can imagine that a species might evolve such that, if the larva is in an unusually hostile environment (too cold, too dry...) then a gene controlling the imago's behavior gets methylated.
I doubt. I've found the "proof" the butterfly remembers very dubious. A lot of modern studies are very low quality. Has anyone reproduced it? No. I doubt they will.
Somehow reminds me of that story where our form right now is actually human larvae form, and we'll metamorphosize into "adult" humans once we eat the "apple of eden"
That's interesting. I'll just nitpick that the bible never actually mentions an apple, but rather "the fruit ... of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ... the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil". I suppose this
could actually fit your story very well, except for the fact that the biblical story is considered aetiological - we are the way we are now *because* our ancestors ate that fruit.
The OC is maybe referring to Larry Niven’s ring world, in which a race of humanoids called the Pak which resemble real life elderly people, only with armoured joints and immortal, have a life cycle where their offspring are humans. Once reaching old age, pheromones given off by a certain type of tree that bear a fruit similar to an apple, cause the humans to be overcome until they eat the fruit, at which time they metamorphize into an adult Pak, increasing intelligence massively and lifespan. In the book, the humans of earth stay as the larval stage as the “Tree of Life” were never planted (or never produced the correct fruit, I can’t recall) on our planet as there wasn’t the right kind of minerals to support it.
The Pak went about colonising planets and they left their offspring on earth when they discovered radiation coming from the centre of the galaxy that was changing the genetic makeup of their offspring, causing the adult Pak to murder their own offspring and all sorts of wars.
The Pak built a massive ringworld (think Halo) because that’s easier than colonising a planet apparently, but their offspring started to mutate wildly into different offshoots of humans, pygmies, humans with gills, etc.
It’s a good series and enjoyable to read but it’s not a particularly serious story. One of the aliens is depicted as being some sort of hand puppet with legs. Super odd stuff.
Yes, quite a silly story in some ways. For instance, one of its premises is the idea of luck as a genetically heritable trait. That pays off in a pretty funny way.
I would say, subjectively yes, but these insects are incapable of worrying about that. Furthermore, biologically not quite, because they can reproduce with 100% their original DNA afterwards (unlike offspring which has less and less overlap).
Has it even been proven that insects retain “memories” as we know them? The question always leads back to 1 of 2 options. 1) insects are biological robots and their “instinct” is akin to a program executing code based on the I/O of their senses, or 2) the information required to perform their “instinctual” actions is carried genetically.
Option 1 has significant implications for humanity; are we just more complex machines who believe we’re different (due to a complexity beyond our understanding), but are ultimately just deterministically executing code like a spider? Are we genetically/chemically pre-determined to learn, think, feel and decay the way we do based on the I/O of our lives, and everything we’ve ever done would be repeated identically if we were rebooted and exposed to the exact same I/O (down to the planck unit).
Option 2 indicates more of an inherent “free will”… but even then, are the memories just a more complex form of input, but still inescapably deterministic.
Personally, I believe in determinism — that another universe which started in the EXACT same way (down to the most miniscule detail), exposed to the exact sane external forces (if any) would lead through the EXACT same events to the EXACT same end.
Mechanical determinism is actually somewhat orthogonal to free will - a quantum process, for example, is inherently unpredictable, but I don't think that randomness of choices automatically implies free will.
Now I wonder what it's like for sea stars and sea urchins as they grow from their larval bilateral symmetry to the adult 5-way version, in which everything is also reabsorbed/rearranged to an absurd degree.
There’s been a lot of research on self identification in many species. One paper I’m aware of did an analysis of 50 years worth of research on over 30 species. So we have a fairly decent idea about the development of theory of mind and self identification in animals. For example self identification has only been found in social animals, and lacking in all the solitary animals studied.
It seems like there’s a progression from simple organisms with sense/response behaviour but little or no cognitive modelling of the environment. Then organisms that can model and reason about their environment in fairly sophisticated ways. Then some animals develop the ability to model the knowledge, intentions and responses of other creatures. That’s what evolutionary psychologists call theory of mind.
Finally there’s development of a sense of self, and then further on the ability to reason about one’s own thoughts, motivations, intentions and cognitive abilities, and act to change those. That’s us. It’s a continuum though, with various species at different points along the line.
It‘s unlikely because decades of experiments suggest so and also because it‘s unlikely that animals with a very basic neural system can have a sense of self. The burden of proof is on those claiming differently.
The burden of proof is on anyone claiming anything because the polarity of propositions is irrelevant to standards of proof, which is why you brought up the studies, because you know that intuitively if not formally.
The title of the article says "Insect", the first few paragraphs are about lacewings, but the study being cited only looked at fruit flies. The study didn't test memory. It looked at neuron location and activation, which could indicate something about memory, but that's a journalistic leap.
How do we know metamorphosis evolved from a single organism, as opposed to a parasitic relationship (like mind controlling wasps) that developed into these multiple life stages? Has anyone researched the origin?
You don't even need genetic testing to see holes in that hypothesis (though there is no proof of a parasitic relationship genetically) - it is pretty easy to see phylogenetically the evolution of metamorphosis. Ie, hemimetabolous insects vs homometabolous insects.
The way insect brains completely disintegrate and then reconstruct into entirely new neural circuits is simply mind-boggling, and it makes me appreciate the wonders of nature even more.
https://www.wired.com/2008/03/butterflies-rem/
The article is odd because it's written as if this hasn't been tested and it has, or I thought it had.
Towards the end they acknowledge butterflies might be different, but don't mention any of the prior research at all.
The whole article is structured very strangely given the existing literature.