Another fascinating article in the Washington Post, featuring a lawyer who is radically exploring the borderline between human and animal rights. Steven Wise asks, how human do you have to be before you have legal rights? Do you have to be self-aware? Able to speak? Smart enough? Or is it just that both your parents have to be human....?

I wonder whether future generations will be as appalled by our treatment of animals as we have been by our forebears' treatment of other human beings. If we ever encounter truly alien life forms, will we thereby be made more aware of how shabbily we have treated our cousins, whose kinship to us is written in the very fibre of our beings? And if not, how will we explain the differences to our new acquaintances?

Of course no discussion of animal intelligence is complete without the requisite parrot story:

Alex, the famed African gray parrot at MIT's Media Lab, has learned to identify shapes, colors and materials by name. He solves complex problems, uses symbols and is a deft imitator ~ a trait some scientists link to self-awareness. He reasons, comprehends and calculates at the level of a 4- or 5-year-old human, the MIT scientists say. He also enunciates about 100 words ~ and is learning to spell.

Wise tells the story about how Alex got his way one day when visitors were ignoring him. "Wanna nut," he spoke up. Nobody responded. Alex repeated emphatically, "Wanna nut!" No one paid attention. So Alex finally goes, "Wanna nut! Nnnn ~ uhhhh ~ tttt!" And everybody paid attention.

The latest attempt to draw the line between the human and the animal is to identify an essential human quality of morality.

Tibor Machan, a philosopher and professor of business ethics at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., who has written about the issue, argues that the criterion for rights is morality. "Such rights would only arise if animals developed into moral agents, which they haven't," he says. "Notice no one is expecting animals to be kind, compassionate, considerate of their own victims, stop being carnivorous if they are, and so forth. That's because the only moral animals are human beings."

I'll refrain from any cheap shots about the oxymoronic term "business ethics" ~ but I find it interesting that the purported only moral agent, human beings, are more notable for their breaches than their successes in that arena (animals rarely bilk each other). Few humans agonize over their prey (the animals they raise specifically to eat, for example).

On the other hand, I've definitely seen animals that looked ashamed, animals that have behaved with tremendous valor to protect their young or their companions. Was it their intention to behave honorably, to do the right thing? No, of course not, it was instinct (no matter how difficult it may be to account for the altruism in strictly Darwinian terms). Until an animal can explain its motives (or rationalize its misdeeds!) we won't attribute it moral agency.

Wise reports this conversation from the day after Koko [a gorilla] bit a caretaker, and her trainer asked what she had done.

"Wrong wrong," Koko signed with her large dark fingers.

"What wrong?" her trainer signed back.

"Bite," signed Koko. "Sorry bite scratch."

"Why bite?"

"Because mad," signed Koko.

"Why mad?"

Koko signed, "Don't know."

Indeed. Most of the time we don't really know either.

Another smart parrot story: No Birdbrains Here.

11:21:32 PM    please comment []

For awhile (before upgrading to OS X), I had the SETI screensaver on my main working machine. Sometimes I would fall into a reverie watching as Fourier transforms and other arcane algorithms sifted throught the cosmic white noise seeking intimations of intentionality. How wonderful to be the person whose spare CPU cycles provide us the first sign of alien intelligence!

It's my belief that we will not fully mature as a species or even a biosystem until we know that we are not alone. We need an encounter with the truly Other to know ourselves.

At NASA, the search of extraterrestrial life is gaining momentum. A whole new generation of spacecraft designed to look for planets and assess their life-bearing qualities is on the drawing board, according to a New York Times article.

At best, a distant planet would appear as a faint dot, a single pixel, in such instruments. What to do with those precious photons has become a cottage industry among astrobiologists. Dr. Turner of Princeton invited audience members to imagine what they could learn from Earth were it shrunk to a point. As Earth rotated, geography and weather would cause its brightness to vary. The more complex a planet's so-called light curve, he said, "the more interesting" the planet.

Another tool astrobiologists could use to sense life on that dot is spectroscopy, breaking down the light into its component wavelengths where the signatures of individual elements and molecules in the planet's atmosphere can be seen. Atmospheric oxygen, which on Earth was produced and maintained by photosynthesis of plants and bacteria, would be the "most reliable" indicator, Dr. Beichman said.

Another is plant leaves, whose cell structure produces a spectral feature known as "the red edge," said Dr. Sara Seager, an astronomer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Dr. Seager said that Galileo spacecraft had detected the "red edge" effect during a 1990 flyby of Earth on its way to Jupiter. In a 1993 Nature paper, a group of scientists led by the Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan concluded that the red edge combined with abundant atmospheric oxygen and radio signals constituted "evidence of life on Earth without any a priori assumptions about its chemistry." The red edge also shows up strongly in spectral measurements of Earthshine reflected off the dark parts of a crescent Moon by Dr. Neville J. Woolf of the University of Arizona, reported Dr. Wesley Traub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

There are some who argue that if we knew that life was abundant in the universe we would be even more careless with the fragile ecosystem we've got (after all, if we break this one, we wouldn't be extinguishing all life, everywhere). I wonder. I suspect that, tribal creatures that we are, we would work harder to preserve and protect our particular life-system's identity, so as not to disappear into the vast universal ocean as just one more bio-drop.

4:12:45 PM    please comment []

"Everyone needs to be alert to this threat. Your assistance is essential."

I've been living in the same apartment building for 8.5 years now. In many ways I've enjoyed the anonymity ~ but by now I actually have met each of the 4 residents of my end of the hall. I don't remember all of their names, but at least I know them on sight.

Now, meeting the neighbors is not only neighborly, it's the patriotic thing to do. Every time I start to forget, something else comes along to remind me that things have changed.

1:03:28 PM    please comment []

Sitting on an old green Pendelton blanket, watching the planes take off and land at National on the other side of the Potomac, enjoying a last warm breezy evening in Washington before the summer swelter sets in, drinking champagne and then playing among the parts of The Awakening....

B- and I had a picnic tonight.

I am glad he is the kind of person who'll take up a last minute invitation, grab a sandwich, and later stretch out on the grass in the dark and talk.

The evening had all the trappings of a date, but romance wasn't really in the air. There was a lovely casual quality to it. I had such a good time. I want my life to be more like this.

12:44:10 AM    please comment []