[HN Gopher] Insect memories may not survive metamorphosis
___________________________________________________________________
Insect memories may not survive metamorphosis
Author : pseudolus
Score : 147 points
Date : 2023-07-27 10:28 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.quantamagazine.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.quantamagazine.org)
| [deleted]
| amelius wrote:
| So from the insect's perspective, this is like dying?
| pfdietz wrote:
| I have no clear conception of what "the insect's perspective"
| is.
| rf15 wrote:
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| It is extremely unlikely that these animals have any sense of
| self, in which case they would be completely unaware of
| what's happening to themselves.
| _Microft wrote:
| Why is it unlikely in your opinion?
| simonh wrote:
| 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.
| quonn wrote:
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| 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.
| adammarples wrote:
| That's seems backwards. Everything is highly unlikely, a
| priori. To say that something isn't unlikely is the
| assertion which requires evidence.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| quonn wrote:
| 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).
| MrBodangles wrote:
| 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.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Your 1) and 2) both describe biobots, and neither
| description relates to memory.
| getarofilter wrote:
| [dead]
| bennyschmidt wrote:
| > Insect memories
|
| That time a flea saw the Eiffel Tower - gone.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| 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.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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.
| usrusr wrote:
| Another interesting perspective is to look at it not as a
| more elaborate form of exoskeleton shedding, but as hatching
| from a very sophisticated egg.
| derefr wrote:
| 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.
| cvwright wrote:
| This sounds strangely similar to the code for the Morris
| worm.
| alserio wrote:
| In a sense organizing tissues is the thing multicellular life
| does.
| simonh wrote:
| 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.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Frogs go through this process too though, and they don't have
| wings.
| Tagbert wrote:
| 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.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| > pause growth and then resume it
|
| 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.
| wonderwonder wrote:
| 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.
| simonh wrote:
| Sure, the reasons why some creatures evolved this sort of
| behaviour could be different to others. I was specifically
| talking about Endopterygota.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| 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.
| omginternets wrote:
| It also prevents adult insects from competing with juveniles.
| xwdv wrote:
| 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.
| rrgok wrote:
| 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?
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| 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.
| burnished wrote:
| Where does a stack of stones go after it is toppled?
| solardev wrote:
| 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.
| jallasprit wrote:
| Interesting idea, but I wonder how DNA error correction is
| going to function over artificially extended lifespans
| joker_minmax wrote:
| 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.
| xwdv wrote:
| 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.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Who is going to raise a baby with the mind of an adult?
| solardev wrote:
| Advertisers? Sponsoring baby content makers, baby
| athletes, baby celebrities... babies with six packs
| wearing designer diapers, riding their hipster
| e-strollers. Shit's dystopian, man.
| xwdv wrote:
| Well this would be included in your payment for the
| service, a day care type home for regenerated humans.
| Maybe covered by insurance even.
| gagged_s_poster wrote:
| 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.
| saagarjha wrote:
| 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.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Paul Atreides and the Fremen.
| Pigalowda wrote:
| Porn companies.
| mock-possum wrote:
| Or a horrifically fascinating take on religious belief in
| reincarnation.
| cosmojg wrote:
| This idea is a major plot point in one of my favorite
| webcomics: https://www.genocideman.com/?p=483
| bpiche wrote:
| Reminds me of Bruce sterling's holy fire a bit
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Kafka was wrong.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| To be fair, most human politician's memories don't survive
| election, so let's not go throwing stones in _that_ glass house.
| romusha wrote:
| 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"
| [deleted]
| Rhinobird wrote:
| That reminds me of Pak Protectors from Larry Niven's Known
| Space stories
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pak_Protector
| falcor84 wrote:
| 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.
| robinduckett wrote:
| 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.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| 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..
| tsol wrote:
| 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
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| DNA persists, so of course behaviors in it also persist.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| But can learned behavior persist in DNA? Could a gene
| activated by environmental triggers be later still be
| activeated after metamorphosis?
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
| ggm wrote:
| Quite right. I argue this point frequently in connection with
| AI. Undoubtedly artificial, no intelligence!
| mannykannot wrote:
| Thank you for another example of where arguments from
| language semantics and usage fails to address a complex
| issue!
|
| This example happens to contain all there is to Searle's
| "Chinese Room" argument.
| weard_beard wrote:
| You just lost, "The Game".
| cosmojg wrote:
| It's been a while since I lost the game.
| SpikyBlackHard wrote:
| And I was on a real heater too. Why does this keep
| happening.
| stevenhuang wrote:
| AI has a degree of intelligence.
|
| Preclude even that and you preclude some humans from the
| same.
| tremon wrote:
| 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).
| flangola7 wrote:
| Motivation has nothing to do with intelligence
| burnished wrote:
| What? Can you give an example of a being that does (or
| could) be considered intelligent without the ability to
| engage in self directed actuons?
| irrational wrote:
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| 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.
| burnished wrote:
| Ooh good word choice. Lying and hallucinate have felt
| inadequate, I agree with you that confabulation best
| captures what is going on.
|
| Plus I think its kind of archaic now, so it has less
| baggage to contend with/be translated between folk
| seeknotfind wrote:
| 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?
| koeng wrote:
| 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.
| momirlan wrote:
| more importantly : does their soul survive metamorphosis ?
| Juliate wrote:
| First, you need to define what a soul is, and how to spot one.
| derbOac wrote:
| I thought it had already been demonstrated that butterflies
| retain memories acquired premetamorphosis? Eg,
|
| 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.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| 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.
| samstave wrote:
| Yes! Monarch butterflies have a multigenerational migration in
| which every third generation is the super generation with the
| migration memory
| samstave wrote:
| The origin of the term "entomologist" has alwas bugged me.
| rcme wrote:
| That's pretty much the opposite of memory, as the behavior is
| completely innate.
| samstave wrote:
| There are so many interesting stories on them,
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=npr+talk+monarch+butterflies&atb=
| v...
|
| But one thing thats reall interesting is that we have been
| decimating their only foodsource and breeding grounds ;
| milkweed.
|
| We treat milkweed, as a weed and its decimated by RoundUp
| (monsatan)
|
| https://www.nwf.org/Garden-For-Wildlife/About/Native-
| Plants/...
|
| 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
|
| https://imgur.com/gallery/acxne3V
|
| This was a regular for me in elemetary school...
| mock-possum wrote:
| BRB, grabbing milkweed to plant in my yard
| samstave wrote:
| Does a "Mock-Possum" Play *Live* to enscape capture?
| [deleted]
| ryanblakeley wrote:
| 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.
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