The Daily Telegraph - Features
Swat at your peril – fruit flies may have feelings too
Scientists believe consciousness could be more widespread among animals than was previously thought. By Ed Cumming
Elephants mourn their dead, octopuses play catch, grey parrots recognise themselves in the mirror. But how about crabs that weigh up decisions, bees that play games and fruit flies that dream?
The past decade has seen rapid developments in the field of research, upending widely held assumptions about which animals exhibit signs of consciousness.
The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, signed by 39 scientists and academics last week, aims to reframe the conversation.
“Striking new results have hinted at surprisingly rich inner lives in a very wide range of other animals,” says the declaration, “including many invertebrates, driving renewed debate about animal consciousness.”
It follows the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in 2012, which recognised possible consciousness in cephalopods, birds and non-human mammals, and reflects a fast-changing field.
“We want to create a moment to get people to notice this emerging science of animal consciousness,” says Jonathan Birch, an associate professor in philosophy at LSE. “It’s a topic that has long been marginalised in science. It’s only in the past 10-15 years that there has been a broadening of the ambitions of consciousness science to also study the experience of other animals.”
The most persuasive example of non-mammal intelligence are cephalopods, whose behaviour has been made famous by documentaries such as the Oscar-winning film My Octopus Teacher, in which a filmmaker forms a friendship with a common octopus who plays with him.
“During my training in the early 2000s, animal sentience and consciousness were conspicuously ignored in serious scientific discourse,” says Dr Alexandra Schnell, a leading researcher. “However, the burgeoning field of animal sentience has revitalised these topics, allowing discussions about subjective experiences in animals to flourish.”
They aren’t the only sea creatures surprising researchers. For Prof Bob Elwood, at Queen’s University Belfast, the starting point for his research was a chance encounter with the chef Rick Stein. When Elwood explained his specialism in animal welfare, Stein asked him if lobsters could feel pain.
He decided that while he couldn’t prove they were feeling pain, in a human sense, he could try to find out if they were responding just by reflex. “I ran a whole series of experiments,” he says. “When I started, I was concerned about being thought odd at even considering the idea they might feel pain.”
His results were remarkable. He found that crabs will rapidly learn to avoid a dark shelter in which they receive electric shocks and use another that is safe.
“No one of these experiments is critical in suggesting consciousness or pain,” he says. “But when you see again and again, with different studies asking different questions, and they start agreeing, and you get evidence supporting the idea of pain, you cannot dismiss it.”
Lars Chittka’s career has been a similar journey of discovery on the subject of bees. He is a professor at Queen Mary University in London and the author of The Mind of a Bee. “I really think we are witnessing a Copernican revolution in the understanding of animal minds,” he says.
His experiments found that bees could learn about a predation thread, which they did “just fine”. Subsequent experiments showed them playing and responding in a non-reflex-like manner to painful stimuli, among other behaviours.
“For each of these findings, a critic might find an alternative ‘simple explanation’ but for all of them in combination this looks increasingly hard. The truth is that we have yet to find a single convincing piece of evidence that indicates the absence of consciousness,” Chittka says.
For Bruno van Swinderen, a professor at the University of Queensland, the humble fruit fly offers a way to examine the origins of consciousness mechanistically. “I am at the bottom of the pecking order of conscious animals,” he says. “You’ve got cats and dogs, dolphins and elephants. Even bees do interesting cognitive things. Then there’s fruit flies, which I work on. Why would they be included in this?
“We’re seeing all these conversations about AI about when machines will get conscious. From a human perspective it’s hard to understand, but from a bottom-up perspective it’s easier to understand how consciousness might evolve from a simple circuit, like a fly brain circuit.”
If we can entertain the prospect of consciousness in a computer, we must entertain it in fruit flies: a remarkable, chastening thought.
‘Striking new results hint at rich inner lives in a wide range of animals’