
Are ants capable of self recognition? [pdf] - randomwalker
http://www.journalofscience.net/File_Folder/521-532%28jos%29.pdf
======
tokai
Be aware that this journal is published by Pharma Intelligence[0], which is
with high certainty a predatory publisher. I would take this article with a
large grain of salt, as it's authors have not been able to get the research
published by a proper journal.

[0] [http://scholarlyoa.com/2015/08/27/open-access-journal-
provid...](http://scholarlyoa.com/2015/08/27/open-access-journal-provides-one-
day-peer-review/)

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randomwalker
The key bit from the abstract:

 _As long as they could not see themselves in a mirror, ants with a blue dot
painted on their clypeus did not try to remove it. Set in front of a mirror,
ants with such a blue dot on their clypeus tried to clean themselves, while
ants with a brown painted dot — of the same color as that of their cuticle —
on their clypeus and ants with a blue dot on their occiput did not clean
themselves. Very young ants did not present such behavior._

~~~
weinzierl
And from the conclusion:

 _Briefly, if an animal detains self recognition ability, it will recognize
itself in a mirror and will try to clean the alien colored spot it bears. The
inverse is not always true: if an animal clean itself in front of a mirror, it
might do so without recognizing itself. So, on the basis that ants
conspicuously marked on their clypeus clean themselves while ants marked
otherwise do not, both only after having been in front of a mirror, it can be
presumed (but not yet asserted) that, for the Myrmica species presently
tested, and for individuals of a given age, self recognition is not
impossible._

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oilywater
Doing this kind of science is so easy. Do the experiment, film the whole
thing, leave the footage untouched, point to the timestamp where stuff
happens, and voila, repeat the experiment and everyone will try to reproduce
it.

Instead of providing anecdotal evidence, fabricated data, and being a
scientist that spends time on saying that radiation from mobile technologies
is harmful, despite microwaves you use to heat up your food irradiating you
more in that frequency range, or sun, blasting you with even more radiation.

It's so easy to be a scientist, especially if you have government funding like
the authors do. But for some reason, they decide to spend their entire lives
doing nothing of quality, doing nothing meaningful.

Yes, we people invented terms like consciousness, self-awareness, intelligent
behavior. Yes, these things are used to put stuff on a scale when they
shouldn't be (if we agree that the evidence for theory of evolution is
convincing), and that is not good, and yes I do understand the motivation of
the authors. But really, doing good science, especially for these types of
things is not really hard.

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ourmandave
Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches Had bellies with stars. The Plain-Belly
Sneetches Had none upon thars.

Those stars weren't so big. They were really so small You might think such a
thing wouldn't matter at all.

But, because they had stars, all the Star-Belly Sneetches Would brag, "We're
the best kind of Sneetch on the Beaches."

...

That the Sneetches got really quite smart on that day, The day they decided
that Sneetches are Sneetches And no kind of Sneetch is the best on the
beaches. That day, all the Sneetches forgot about stars And whether they had
one, or not, upon thars.

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deadowl
Better question is whether humans are capable of self-recognition without
false positives/negatives.

~~~
hmate9
How is that the better question?

~~~
deadowl
Well, I suppose you could argue either way, but I think it's a better question
in the sense that humans are going to be used as a control group by most
people that follow pop science, and they're going to make assumptions that
humans have this ability innately (I imagine development psychology has some
degree of understanding for this already). Most discussion about this is going
to be comparing the results to something else. Then there are questions like,
could someone tell themselves apart from an identical twin without error?

