Evolution Commons^™

Mesotocin Influences Pinyon Jay Prosociality, Juan Duque, Whitney Leichner, Holly Ahmann, Jeffrey R. Stevens

Jeffrey Stevens Publications

Many species exhibit prosocial behavior, in which one individual’s actions benefit another individual, often without an immediate benefit to itself. The neuropeptide oxytocin is an important hormonal mechanism influencing prosociality in mammals, but it is unclear whether the avian homologue mesotocin plays a similar functional role in birds. Here, we experimentally tested prosociality in pinyon jays (Gymnorhinus cyanocephalus), a highly social corvid species that spontaneously shares food with others. First, we measured prosocial preferences in a prosocial choice task with two different payoff distributions: Prosocial trials delivered food to both the subject and either an empty cage or a partner …

If Nonhuman Animals Can Suicide, Why Don’T They?, C. A. Soper, Todd K. Shackelford

Animal Sentience

An evolutionary analysis suggests that selection is unlikely to have tolerated the capacity for intentional self-killing in nonhuman animals. The potential to escape pain by suicide would have presented a recurrent and severe adaptive problem for an animal with a reproductive future to protect. If the potential for suicide arose in the evolutionary past, anti-suicide mechanisms may have co-evolved, as we believe they have in adult humans. Peña-Guzmán’s (2017) argument that some nonhuman animals can suicide is incomplete without an account of the defences that result in the vast majority opting not to.

Chicken Minds And Moral Standing, Kristin Andrews

Animal Sentience

Some of the cognitive traits that Marino reviews are not in themselves relevant to ethics, either for chickens or human infants, but affective traits are, among them desires.

Convergent Body Size Evolution Of Crocodyliformes Upon Entering The Aquatic Realm, William Gearty, Jonathan Payne

School of Biological Sciences: Presentations

Twenty-four species of crocodile populate the globe today, but this richness represents a minute fraction of the diversity and disparity of Crocodyliformes since their origin early in the Triassic. Across this clade, three major diversification events into the aquatic realm have occurred. Aquatic and terrestrial habitats impose differing selective pressures on body size. However, previous research on this topic in Crocodyliformes remains qualitative in nature. In this study, our goal was to quantify the influence of habitat (terrestrial versus aquatic) on the evolution of body size in Crocodyliformes. We find a history of repeated body size increase and convergence following …

Floral Symmetry Genes Elucidate The Development And Evolution Of Oil-Bee Pollinated Flowers Of Malpighiaceae And Krameriaceae, Farahnoz N. Khojayori

Theses and Dissertations

Specialization on insect and animal pollinators is thought to be the driving force for the evolution of floral traits. Specifically in the New World (NW), the oil-bee pollination syndrome has led to the convergence of floral characters in two distantly related families of core eudicots, Malpighiaceae and Krameriaceae. Both families display a flag-like structure that establishes a zygomorphic flower and floral oil rewards in epithelial elaiophores. These traits work concomitantly to attract and reward female oil-bees that help fertilize these flowers and in return receive oils. The underlying genetics of floral zygomorphy were studied in several clades of core eudicots, …

Comparative Phylogeography, Taxonomy, And Neuroanatomy Of Montane Chameleons In The Albertine Rift, Central Africa, Daniel Hughes

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

How do traits vary across the tree of life? Our ability to address this question is diminished if: A taxonomic group has a poorly sampled phylogeny, a species goes extinct before their systematic position is resolved, or a trait is inadequately characterized for detailed studies. In the current era of mass extinction, it is imperative to not only accelerate species discovery through traditional studies in taxonomy and expeditionary research, but also to increase rescue efforts for all types of data before poorly understood species and potentially undescribed traits are lost. Here, an integrative taxonomic approach was used and novel methods …

An Investigation Of Implicit And Explicit Memory In The Survival Memory Paradigm, Allison M. Wilck

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Robust support has been found for a survival processing effect on memory when information is encoded for its fitness-relevance (Nairne, Thompson, & Pandeirada, 2007). However, support for this effect has been limited to forms of memory that require intentional, explicit retrieval processes. Thus far, the literature has failed to identify the effect in implicit, automatic memory using conceptual and perceptual production tasks (McBride, Thomas, & Zimmerman, 2013; Tse & Altarriba, 2010). In the current study, an alternative implicit memory test that employs different memory processes was employed in a further attempt to examine the survival processing effect in implicit memory. …

Literature Review: Analyzing The Reasons Behind The Long-Standing Debate Of Evolution And Religion In America, Michelle Kathryn Matchell

Honors Program Theses

Evolution has been a widely studied and debated topic for centuries. Since the days of Greek philosophy, humans have been curious about the diversity of life and how it arose to what we see today. Interest in evolution flourished during the days of Charles Darwin when he and Alfred Russel Wallace developed the concept of natural selection. Now, evolution is an integral part of many scientific studies, especially genetics, developmental biology, geology, behavior studies and social sciences. According to Muhammad Ashraf, evolution can be considered ‘the cornerstone of modern science’ (Ashraf, 2016). On what would have been Darwin’s 201st birthday, …

Dna Extraction And Microsatellite Amplification Of Daphnia Pulicaria Resting Eggs: Analysis Of Allele Frequencies Through Time, Anna Ries

Departmental Honors Projects

A paleoecological approach allows for the study of genetic change in populations over longer periods of time than would be possible if one were sampling populations from year to year. Daphnia and other cladoceran zooplankton are amenable to this type of study because they produce diapausing embryos (ephippial eggs) when they sexually reproduce, and these resting eggs can remain viable for decades to centuries in lake sediments. This study uses paleoecological methods as well as a new methodology for ephippial DNA extraction and amplification to assay for genetic variation in ephippial eggs obtained from sediments of varying ages from Square …

The Many Faces Of Fear And Vigilance, Guy Beauchamp

Animal Sentience

In the target article, I examined the relationship between vigilance and fear in prey animals. The joint occurrence of vigilance and other physiological responses to fear, such as increased heart rate and stress hormone release, would bolster the idea that vigilance can be a useful marker of fear. Nevertheless, a common theme in much of the empirical research is an uncoupling of vigilance and physiological correlates of fear. The commentators suggest several ways to refine the concepts of vigilance, fear, and risk. I discuss these refinements, which in the end will prove useful to assess further the relationship between vigilance …

Evolution Of Floral Morphology And Symmetry In The Miconieae (Melastomataceae), Maria Gavrutenko

Dissertations and Theses

Analyses of evolution of floral morphology and symmetry broaden our understanding of the drivers of angiosperm diversification. Integrated within a flower, labile floral characters produce different phenotypes that promote variable interactions with pollinators. Thus, investigation of floral evolution may help infer potential historic transitions in pollinator modes and ecological pressures that generated present diversity. This study aims to explore morphological evolution of flowers in Miconieae, a species-rich Neotropical tribe within family Melastomataceae. Despite a constrained floral plan, Melastomataceae manage to achieve a variety of floral traits appealing to diverse pollinator types, with majority of the species requiring specialized “buzz pollination” …

On Crabs And Statistics, Jonathan Birch

Animal Sentience

I respond to commentaries by Elwood and Seth & Dienes and to a recent critique by Diggles, discussing the link between avoidance learning and sentience, the relevance of the clash between frequentist and Bayesian statistics, the risks to decapod welfare in aquaculture, and the broader concerns one may have about a “precautionary” approach to protecting invertebrates.

Natural And Anthropogenic Drivers Of Tree Evolutionary Dynamics, Brandon M. Lind

Theses and Dissertations

Species of trees inhabit diverse and heterogeneous environments, and often play important ecological roles in such communities. As a result of their vast ecological breadth, trees have become adapted to various environmental pressures. In this dissertation I examine various environmental factors that drive evolutionary dynamics in threePinusspecies in California and Nevada, USA. In chapter two, I assess the role of management influence of thinning, fire, and their interaction on fine-scale gene flow within fire-suppressed populations of Pinus lambertiana, a historically dominant and ecologically important member of mixed-conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada, California. Here, I find evidence …

Evolution Belief Trends, Jamie Jensen

ScholarsArchive Data

This is the essay code frequencies along with the raw survey data for both Cohort 1 and Cohort 2 for the following paper:

Bradshaw, WS, Phillips, AJ, Bybee, SM, Gill, RA, Peck, SL, Jensen, JL. 2018. A longitudinal study of attitudes toward evolution among Mormon undergraduates. PLOSONE.

Sentient Plants? Nervous Minds?, Arthur S. Reber

Animal Sentience

The commentaries by Calvo (2018) and Mallatt & Feinberg (2017) on my 2016 target branch out from a common conceptual node like forks in a road. Calvo criticizes me for not acknowledging that plants too are likely to be sentient and claims I have fallen into the kind of category error of which I accuse others ─ a zoocentric bias that fails to grant consciousness to flora. Mallatt & Feinberg maintain that I've gone too far in granting sentience to any species that lacks a nervous system. Calvo makes some good points but there are other issues concerning plant sentience …

Anthropocentrism As Cognitive Dissonance In Animal Research?, Ellen Furlong, Zachary Silver, Jack Furlong

Animal Sentience

Harmon-Jones et al. (2017) make a thought-provoking suggestion in their commentary on Zentall (2016): Overlooked biases among researchers on animal cognition might lead them to discount the traces of higher-order cognition in animals they study. We find the suggestion both philosophically important and worth further reflection for animal scientists. Harmon-Jones et al. point to two “cognitive dissonance” biases involving the clash between the common human resistance to viewing ourselves as animals/meat-eaters and how these biases might lead to discounting possible advanced cognitive performances in the animals studied. We show how these biases might appear in cognitive research generally and argue …

Caterpillar/Basil-Plant Tandems, Paco Calvo

Animal Sentience

According to Reber (2016), subjectivity springs from primitive life itself. Granting his non-neurocentric stance, I shall try to show that his framework falls prey to zoocentric preconceptions that divest certain non-animal life-forms of mentality. There is no reason to exclude the possibility that plants have evolved different structures that underlie their own subjective experiences, all according to Reber’s model. It is the degree of phenotypic flexibility and integration that we observe in the behavioral repertoire of plants that may end up supporting their capacity for subjective experience. This remains an open empirical question.

Can They Suffer?, Todd K. Shackelford

Animal Sentience

We should treat sentient nonhuman animals as worthy of moral consideration, not because we share an evolutionary history with them, but because they can suffer. As Chapman & Huffman (2018) argue, humans are not uniquely disconnected from other species. We should minimize the suffering we inflict on sentient beings — whether human or nonhuman — not because they, too, are tool-makers or have sophisticated communication systems, but because they, too, can suffer, and suffering is bad.

Ecological Uncertainty Influences Vigilance As A Marker Of Fear, Laurence E. A. Feyten, Grant E. Brown

Animal Sentience

We expand on the factors that may shape the predictability of risk and the potential impacts on the links between vigilance and fear, primarily in aquatic prey communities. Uncertainty in predation risks has been shown to induce increased levels of neophobia among prey. As a result of this phenotypically plastic response, prey are faced with risk assessment cues that may vary widely in their reliability. We argue that decomposing predictability may provide useful insights into the relationship between vigilance and fear.

Competing Activities As Measures Of Fear And Vigilance, Ferenc Mónus

Animal Sentience

In animal behavioural research on vigilance, visual signs of alertness are usually used to estimate perceived risk (an internal “fear” state) of free-ranging animals. Different measures of vigilance and competing activities (e.g., predator vigilance, conspecific vigilance, feeding, food handling) provide clues for better understanding vigilance behaviour. How efficiently does an animal in a vigilant/non-vigilant posture devote attention to threats or invest in other activities, such as searching for or handling food? Several species regularly withdraw to a sheltered spot when feeding in an abundant food patch, spending short periods in complete safety. Frequencies of feeding interruptions or false-alarm flights provide …

Generating Species Assemblages For Restoration And Experimentation: A New Method That Can Simultaneously Converge On Average Trait Values And Maximize Functional Diversity, David C. Laughlin, Loïc Chalmandrier, Chaitanya Joshi, Michael Renton, John M. Dwyer, Jennifer L. Funk

Biology, Chemistry, and Environmental Sciences Faculty Articles and Research

1.Restoring resilient ecosystems in an era of rapid environmental change requires a flexible framework for selecting assemblages of species based on functional traits. However, current trait‐based models have been limited to algorithms that select species assemblages that only converge on specified average trait values, and could not accommodate the common desire among restoration ecologists to generate functionally diverse assemblages.

2.We have solved this problem by applying a nonlinear optimization algorithm to solve for the species relative abundances that maximize Rao's quadratic entropy (Q) subject to other linear constraints. Rao's Q is a closed‐form algebraic expression of functional diversity …

Wild Horse Country: The History, Myth, And Future Of The Mustang, Seth J. Dettenmaier

Human–Wildlife Interactions

No abstract provided.

Jealousy In Dogs? Evidence From Brain Imaging, Peter Cook, Ashley Prichard, Mark Spivak, Gregory S. Berns

Animal Sentience

Domestic dogs are highly social and have been shown to be sensitive not only to the actions of humans and other dogs but to the interactions between them. We used the C-BARQ scale to estimate dogs’ aggressiveness, and we used noninvasive brain imaging (fMRI) to measure activity in their amygdala (an area involved in aggression). More aggressive dogs had more amygdala activation data while watching their caregiver give food to a realistic fake dog than when they put the food in a bucket. This may have some similarity to human jealousy, adding to a growing body of evidence that differences …

Researchers, Not Dogs, Lack Control In An Experiment On Jealousy, Jennifer Vonk

Animal Sentience

Cook and colleagues (2018) have developed a clever method to measure fMRI in awake dogs in response to a number of interesting stimuli. As a result, they are able to determine neural correlates of observable behavior. They report that dogs may experience something akin to jealousy because they show greater amygdala activation in response to food being given to a fake dog versus food being placed in a bucket. However, several critical controls are missing which prevent the authors from being able to speak of jealousy.

Finding The Green-Eyed Monster In The Brain Of A Dog, Peter Singer

Animal Sentience

That dogs show behavior suggestive of jealousy has long been known and has been demonstrated under controlled conditions. Cook et al. have now shown arousal in the amygdala when dogs see a caregiver feeding another dog. This finding has ethical significance in two respects. First, the consideration shown by the investigators for the welfare of their experimental subjects sets an example for other researchers using animals. Second, the greater understanding of the emotional lives of animals should lead to more concern for their needs.

Jealousy, Competition, Or A Contextual Cue For Reward?, Thomas R. Zentall

Animal Sentience

Emotions are difficult to assess, even in humans. The attribution of jealousy in an animal like a dog is especially difficult because performance of a particular behavior in the context of another animal receiving a reward may not be easily distinguishable from intra-species competition or simply a response to a contextual cue for the availability of reward. The authors provide distinguishing evidence in the form of fMRI data to show that in the presence of a “fake” dog being fed, there is bilateral activation in the amygdala, an area associated with anxiety, anger, fear, and even jealousy in humans.

What Can The Social Emotions Of Dogs Teach Us About Human Emotions?, Dean Mobbs

Animal Sentience

It has long been believed that social emotions such as guilt and jealousy are only expressed in humans. In the case of jealousy, its adaptive value has been linked to the prevention of sexual infidelity or fairness. So why would dogs feel jealousy? I suggest that understanding how social emotions have been bred into dogs can help us understand our own emotions, including their functionality — and potentially their mechanisms.

Can Neuroimaging In Dogs Have Practical Implications?, Tiffani J. Howell

Animal Sentience

Jealousy, or at least aggression, can be observed in dogs using neuroimaging techniques, but this response attenuates quickly following repeated exposure to the aggression-inducing stimulus. This may have a practical application. Early socialisation as a puppy, and habituation as an adult dog, could help prevent undesirable behaviours such as predatory behaviour. It is unclear whether these processes are the same, and affected only by the dog’s age. Neuroimaging could help us understand whether the same neurological processes underlie socialisation and habituation, and whether self-rewarding behaviours such as predatory behaviour could be stopped using socialisation/habituation techniques.

Lessons From Behaviour For Brain Imaging, Carolyn J. Walsh

Animal Sentience

Integrating physiological and behavioural arousal with social context is fundamental to understanding affect in dogs. Cook et al. (2018) have made a worthy start towards illuminating the neural basis of dog affect underlying resource loss. However, their study depends on retrospective behaviour reports versus direct testing, and an interpretation of differential neural activation that is based on too few dogs. Research groups conducting canine brain-imaging work might: (1) consider collaborative approaches to augment sample sizes and replicability, and (2) take a recent lesson from dog behavioural research regarding a more cautious approach to applying functional labels to physiological and/or behavioural …

On Jealousy, Envy, Sex Differences And Temperament In Humans And Dogs, Eddie Harmon-Jones, Sylvia K. Harmon-Jones

Animal Sentience

Cook, Prichard, Spivak, and Berns (2018) find that dogs’ levels of trait aggression are positively correlated with their amygdala activation when observing their caregivers giving a food to a fake dog. The authors conclude that this may provide neural evidence in dogs for the experience of jealousy, an emotion that some psychologists consider to be unique to humans. Here we explain the difference between the emotions of jealousy and envy, suggesting some ideas for future experiments that may help disentangle the experience of jealousy from that of envy in dogs. We also propose ideas for future research that may yield …