News & science: The definition of a Trump supporter; Ethics: Do insects experience feelings?

Definitions count: How many Americans are DJT supporters? That depends on how one defines the concept. If it means people who voted for him in 2020, then about 47% are supporters. If it means something more than merely preferring DJT over Biden, then maybe about 37% are supporters. The NYT comments: Mr. "Trump has around a 40 percent national favorability rating. Another option: Only 35 percent said they wanted him to run for president in an NBC poll taken in April."

Apparently, the Dem Party is aware of the issue. An NBC News report comments: "Democrats warn party: The threat of Trump winning in 2024 is 'very real' -- New NBC News polling shows President Joe Biden with a relatively narrow 49% to 45 % lead over Donald Trump — which is within the survey’s margin of error."

Since voting counts more than favorability, it seems that almost half of voters could be supporters.

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This segment is long, but it seems very useful to show just a little about how complex and subtle the science of sentience and ethics is and how they are done. It has taken decades of work to get to where we are now, but we're still pretty ignorant. As humans come to understand sentience better, we can adjust to that knowledge. But we usually cannot adjust to things we know nothing about. 

A Scientific American article by Lars Chittka, professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, summarizes research that suggests that insects can experience mental states such as happiness, anxiety and pain:

Do Insects Feel Joy and Pain?

15 years ago, Thomas Ings, now at Anglia Ruskin University in England, and I performed an experiment in which we asked whether bumblebees could learn about predation threat. Certain spider species called crab spiders perch on flowers to catch pollinating insects, including bees. We built a plastic spider model with a mechanism that would briefly trap a bumblebee between two sponges before releasing it. The bumblebees showed a significant change in their behavior after being attacked by the robotic spider. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they learned to avoid spider-infested flowers and meticulously scanned every flower before landing. Curiously, however, they sometimes even fled from imaginary threats, scanning and then abandoning a perfectly safe, spider-free flower. This false-alarm behavior resembled symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in humans. Although this incidental observation did not constitute formal evidence of an emotionlike state, it did move the possibility of such states in insects into the realm of possibility.

Bumblebees can learn complex tasks by observing other bees. In one study, they learned to pull strings attached to artificial flowers out from under a plexiglass plate to access a sugar reward inside.

Other research hinted that insects might also have positive states of mind. Many plants contain bitter substances such as nicotine and caffeine to deter herbivores, but these substances are also found in low concentrations in some floral nectars. Researchers wondered whether pollinators might be deterred by such nectars, but they discovered the opposite. Bees actively seek out drugs such as nicotine and caffeine when given the choice and even self-medicate with nicotine when sick. Male fruit flies stressed by being deprived of mating opportunities prefer food containing alcohol (naturally present in fermenting fruit), and bees even show withdrawal symptoms when weaned off an alcohol-rich diet.

Why would insects consume mind-altering substances if there isn't a mind to alter? But these suggestive hints of negative and positive mind states still fell short of what was needed to demonstrate that insects are sentient.

I began to consider how one might more directly test emotionlike states in insects. So-called cognitive bias tests have been developed to evaluate the psychological welfare of animals such as rats that live in captivity. These tests are essentially versions of the proverbial glass that can be half-full or half-empty: optimistic humans might view the ambiguous glass as nearly full, whereas pessimists would judge the same glass as being nearly empty. My collaborators and I decided to develop a similar test for bees.

We trained one group of bees to associate the color blue with a sugary reward and green with no reward, and another group of bees to make the opposite association. We then presented the bees with a turquoise color, a shade intermediate between blue and green. A lucky subset of bees received a surprise sugar treat right before seeing the turquoise color; the other bees did not. The bees' response to the ambiguous stimulus depended on whether they received a treat before the test: those that got the pretest sugar approached the intermediate color faster than those that didn't.

Other work suggests that bees can experience not only optimism but also joy. Some years ago we trained bumblebees to roll tiny balls to a goal area to obtain a nectar reward—a form of object manipulation equivalent to human usage of a coin in a vending machine. In the course of these experiments, we noticed that some bees rolled the balls around even when no sugar reward was being offered. We suspected that this might be a form of play behavior.

Recently we confirmed this hunch experimentally. We connected a bumblebee colony to an arena equipped with mobile balls on one side, immobile balls on the other, and an unobstructed path through the middle that led to a feeding station containing freely available sugar solution and pollen. Bees went out of their way to return again and again to a “play area” where they rolled the mobile balls in all directions and often for extended periods without a sugar reward, even though plenty of food was provided nearby.

Bees playing with balls

All this research raised the more uncomfortable question of whether bees might also be capable of experiencing pain. Investigating this issue experimentally presents researchers with a moral dilemma: if results are positive, the research might lead to improved welfare of trillions of wild and managed insects. But it would also involve potential suffering for those animals that are tested to obtain the evidence. We decided to do an experiment with only moderately unpleasant stimuli, not injurious ones—and one in which bees could freely choose whether to experience these stimuli.

We gave bees a choice between two types of artificial flowers. Some were heated to 55 degrees Celsius (lower than your cup of coffee but still hot), and others were not. We varied the rewards given for visiting the flowers. Bees clearly avoided the heat when rewards for both flower types were equal. On its own, such a reaction could be interpreted as resulting from a simple reflex, without an “ouch-like” experience. But a hallmark of pain in humans is that it is not just an automatic, reflexlike response. Instead one may opt to grit one's teeth and bear the discomfort—for example, if a reward is at stake. It turns out that bees have just this kind of flexibility. When the rewards at the heated flowers were high, the bees chose to land on them. Apparently it was worth their while to endure the discomfort. They did not have to rely on concurrent stimuli to make this trade-off. Even when heat and reward were removed from the flowers, bees judged the advantages and disadvantages of each flower type from memory and were thus able to make comparisons of the options in their minds.

This finding alone is not a decisive proof that bees experience pain, but it is consistent with that notion, and it is only one of several indicators. Bees and other insects also form long-term memories about the conditions under which they were hurt. And they have specialized sensors that detect tissue damage and are connected to brain regions that also process and store other sensory stimuli. These creatures have the necessary neural equipment to modulate pain experiences by top-down control. That is, they are not constrained by simple reflex loops when responding to noxious stimuli but display the flexibility to modify their responses according to current circumstances, in the same way as we can choose to press a hot door handle to escape a burning building.

Critics could argue that each of the behaviors described earlier could also be programmed into a nonconscious robot. But nature cannot afford to generate beings that just pretend to be sentient. Although there is still no universally accepted, single experimental proof for pain experiences in any animal, common sense dictates that as we accumulate ever more pieces of evidence that insects can feel, the probability that they are indeed sentient increases.

The fact that to date there is no smoking-gun type of proof for any animal's sentience does not mean we're off the hook. On the contrary, the reasonably strong psychological, pharmacological, neurobiological and hormonal indicators of sentience that we now have for many animals, including some insects, mean that acquiring evidence in the opposite direction is in order. We should demand reasonably strong evidence of the absence of sentience before subjecting them to interventions that have the potential to cause intense distress.

Qs: 

1. Is it silly for researchers to now be concerned about minimizing pain and suffering to insects used in research? (For context, I was in a lab that relied heavily on non-human primates, rats and mice for experiments during the time when the movement for animal welfare in science had exploded onto the scene. We went from basically unconscious researchers to people acutely aware of animal pain and suffering. Animal facilities and cages were vastly upgraded. Animal crowding in cages was strictly limited. Proposed experiments were subject to cancellation by animal welfare review boards. All animal experiment protocols had to be reviewed to make sure that animal suffering was minimized to the extent possible without making the intended experiment useless.)

2. Should there be any concern for crop pests that are killed using insecticides? (The SciAm article points out that even a vegan diet can inflict pain and suffering on insects because the foods vegans eat are also eaten by bugs. How those pests are controlled can involve unnecessary pain and suffering.)