
The Intelligence of Earthworms - Hooke
https://www.historytoday.com/archive/natural-histories/intelligence-earthworms
======
ciconia
I love to spend time in my garden looking at all the different creatures: all
insects, for example, seem to have a very intricate behavior. Recently I
noticed how bees, not being able to drink nectar from comfrey flowers due to
their elongated form, would pierce a hole in the flower's petals in order to
reach the nectar.

It seems to me each creature, each species, have their own kind of
intelligence. Plantes also seem to me to have an awareness of some kind. They
know where the sun is, they know when to sprout, they can find water, they
have such complex relationships with everything around them, the microbiome in
the soil, other plants, insects.

Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless.

~~~
ebg13
> _Truly I find the mechanistic view of nature so grim and pointless._

Ok, but an anthropomorphic view of nature is fanciful and _also_ pointless.

This is not alive by any but the most inclusion-oriented definitions, and yet
it follows light: [https://www.popsci.com/make-light-following-robot-
instructio...](https://www.popsci.com/make-light-following-robot-
instructions/)

Talking about "intelligence" and "awareness" makes sense _sometimes_ because
we don't understand where our consciousness comes from. For mechanisms where
we have the capacity to concretely observe how and why they happen, cavalierly
throwing in notions like "intelligence" and "awareness" is an emotional
deception, a pathetic fallacy
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy#Science](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathetic_fallacy#Science)),
that adds nothing except fantasy.

You see a complex mechanical process and call it grim and pointless unless one
introduces metaphysics. I see a complex mechanical process and call it
fundamentally beautiful and awesome without needing the metaphysics.

~~~
carapace
It turns out that the bio-molecular machinery that neurons use to do their
thing is also present throughout all cells. In other words, all life thinks.
Brains are just concentrations of thinking tissue.

"What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric Computation Outside the Nervous System"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698)

~~~
ebg13
> _In other words, all life thinks_

Only for a hyper-inclusive definition of "think" that loses any communicative
value.

~~~
numpad0
I don’t understand the problem with being inclusive a bit. Plants could be
aware, so could be all life of all the Kingdom, we kill them and we eat them
for own survival.

What’s wrong with that? We’re just a bunch of talking animals. A huge bunch
with complicated tools but technically still wild animals.

As for sun tracking in plants I do agree with you it’s probably not a sign of
intelligence. If that’s your point, you can just point out that part.

~~~
jimmaswell
In that case, what word is left for what a human does in their brain that a
plant can't?

~~~
ta1234567890
Why does there need to be a specific word to describe that?

You can just say humans and plants think in different ways, or through
different mechanisms.

~~~
yetihehe
> Why does there need to be a specific word to describe that?

Communication efficiency. I'd like to have one short term for this so that I
don't need to make elaborate differentiations every time I need to use it.

~~~
op03
"Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men.
It is an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and
constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical
transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the
world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change,
differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions,
developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-
changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our
problem." \- Wendell Johnson (Semanticist)

Good example of ppl who make up new words to "simplify" things as their world
gets more and more complex every year are Lawyers and Accountants. But even so
sometimes you end up requiring buildings full of them to decipher what one
sentence they came up with last year actually means this year.

The problem is not the Lawyer or the Accountant but Human Language itself.

------
seesawtron
I find it fascinating that just a few centuries ago, most philosophers and
scientists considered that humans were the only "intelligent" species. Today's
research consists of diverse animal species where it is so common to see how
even the smallest of species like Zebrafish or fuit-flies possess extremely
complex neuronal networks which process external stimuli ranging from visual,
audio or social cues and produce very specific ("intelligent") responses. This
was thought to be absent in non-human species to a greater degree in the past
but now we have so much evidence to disprove that.

~~~
SuoDuanDao
It's quite fascinating that as we are making AIs which are smarter than humans
in 'narrow' applications, we are also becoming more aware of existing
lifeforms that are already smarter than us in 'narrow' fields of their own,
e.g. a squirrel's memory for food stashes.

I wonder whether our society will integrate interactions with AIs and nonhuman
animals as part of the same process.

~~~
seesawtron
We might need organizations to protect "robo rights"? I think I already saw
some piece of information where someone tried to enforce that.

------
op03
Minute creatures swarm around us, objects of potentially endless study and
admiration, if we are willing to sweep our vision down from the world lined by
the horizon to include the world an arm’s length away, a lifetime can be spent
in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a tree —E. O. WILSON

Got that that quote from Micheal Crichton's Micro. After reading that book I
don't know how many endless hours were spent reading abt the brains of wasps
and centipedes and spiders and ants and butterflies :))

------
simonh
I’m not sure. Leaf pulling could be reflexive, there’s no thought involved in
my hand flinching in response to a sudden pain. The fact that the worms
ignored lights when busy with some activity is interesting, but if that is
always the case then is there early any judgement involved?

We know now that highly complex behaviours can arise from fixed rules. Is
there any evidence of learning, judgement or adaptation? If not is there
really any thought? I’m not really very much persuaded on either side of the
question.

------
carapace
There's an emerging model of soil as a single living organism, in this milieu
earthworms are the "guts" of the soil.

------
russellbeattie
Currently reading "1493" \- which is about the effects of the Columbian
exchange of plants and animals after the discovery of the Americas - and was
fascinated to find out that earthworms are an invasives species in North
America, which mostly didn't have any since the last ice age.

------
xamuel
TL/DR: Darwin eventually came to believe earthworms have some amount of
intelligence because they drag leaves in certain specific ways, including
leaves not native to their environment.

I found it an interesting coincidence to read here about Aristotle's thoughts
on animal intelligence, because just a couple days ago I made a note of this
passage from Aristotle's "Prior Analytics": "Let A be raven, B intelligent,
and C man. A then belongs to no B; for no intelligent thing is a raven. But B
is possible for every C; for every man may be intelligent." I'm sure that's
not the specific place this author is talking about but it's interesting to
see Aristotle's philosophy about animal intelligence creep even into his works
on dry formal logic.

~~~
yareally
I know it was said over 2000 years ago, but ravens are quite intelligent.
Raking up there with primates and estimated to be similar to a 3-4 year old
human. Birds get a bad rap with terms like "bird brained", but it's rarely
true, even for those that people consider pests like pigeons[1].

A researcher from the University of Washington has a really great blog on
corvids I follow (crows, jays, ravens, rooks, magpies, etc)[2].

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_intelligence](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_intelligence)

[2] [https://corvidresearch.blog/category/raven-
intelligence-2/](https://corvidresearch.blog/category/raven-intelligence-2/)

~~~
numpad0
I wonder why there aren’t more examples of speaking animals.

Screw down a baby bird or a cat in a box, give him computerized English tests
with prizes and/or punishments like food or electric shock or elevated oxygen
level, whatever, 12 hours a day learning and 12 hours for brain to soak in a
day’s programming, for couple months.

Exactly above is an animal cruelty, but I bet something to that effect would
get him speaking in matters of months to few years.

~~~
fiblye
This is just my own personal theory, but one reason is that we just scoop
animals up, put them in a room, and expect to try finding speech patterns.
What would happen if a flock of hyperintelligent pigeons found some human
babies and locked them up in a room until it's time for snacks and games?
There probably wouldn't be much language observed aside from a few repeated
sounds.

Another is aside from insects and humans and maybe some birds, not many
creatures have multi-generational, continuous societies grounded in one
region. Humans have towns, cities, and countries. People have had their entire
family history confined to one town or one country with interconnected cities
for centuries or even thousands of years. This lets humans develop a common
means of communication between others who we see frequently or between those
who share a similar background. A lot of animal groups get pretty divided and
don't live in large and everlasting packs. There's not much evolutionary
pressure for complex language to evolve. We don't even know when humans first
developed languages capable of expression of abstract thoughts, but it was
probably sometime after we started to organize ourselves and cooperate to form
lifelong communities.

The last one is that even if animals had a language, our brains just might not
recognize it. For example, to many Europeans, picking up the idea of a tonal
language at 40 is pretty tough. They might not even notice the difference in
sound. Animals might have some way to distinguish words that we're just not
looking at. I think this is one time where the recent ML/AI surge might come
in handy. Record thousands of hours of animal sounds and put it through a
black box. We've identified some sounds from prairie dogs as carrying meaning,
but I don't think we've managed to identify grammar or sentences yet.

