A recently released paper – “Whale and dolphin behavioural responses to dead conspecifics”
by Giovanni Bearzi, et al. (and discussed in the Science article
“Do dolphins feel grief?”
by Virginia Morell) – examines “postmortem attentive behaviour” (PAB) in cetaceans and argues that, “Encephalisation was an important predictor of PAB across taxa.” In
other words, brain power matters. Simple emotional responses may be
within the scope of simpler brains (and there are a lot of simple brains on our planet), but more complex emotions are likely
to be restricted to animals with more complex brains.
The final paragraph of the paper reads:
“Interest in, and attentive behaviour towards the dead is not an attribute exclusive to our species (Archer, 1999; King, 2013; Anderson, 2016). Whether or not cetacean PAs realise the finality of death, mammals as evolutionarily distant from Homo sapiens as cetaceans seem to share behavioural traits that include a strong, sometimes fairly long-lasting attachment to dead conspecifics. Investigating the factors triggering such behaviour and its underlying mental processes would require a willingness on the part of cetacean researchers to engage (e.g. through scholarly collaborations) with other disciplines such as affective neuroscience (Panksepp, 1998), comparative psychology, neurophysiology and cognitive ethology (Ristau, 2013).”
In the above “PA” is an abbreviation for “postmortem attender.” The paper is framed cautiously, though the authors are clearly aware of the larger philosophical implications of their work. In the penultimate paragraph we read:
“Focusing on the measurable expressions of stress in cetaceans during and after an encounter may contribute to our understanding of ‘what it would be like to be a cetacean’ (paraphrasing Nagel, 1974) confronted with the death of a conspecific.”
The reference is to Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, “What is it like to be a bat?” (which I have quoted many times).
Insofar as an expression of grief is consciousness of loss, grief indicates a time consciousness that extends beyond the present, and which possibly includes an understanding of the finality of death, which the authors explicitly mention. Grief as an awareness of death and the significance of death may be regarded as being on the cusp of historical consciousness – the point of transition from what Husserl called internal time consciousness to historical consciousness, which is time consciousness extended beyond the internal to include a social time consciousness.
Consciousness of loss among human beings has given rise to rituals of death and grieving, and perhaps the most significant ritual of death is burial, which in many early civilizations becomes an occasion for monumental architecture. Anthropologists and archaeologists have been, then, interested in the origins of burial rituals and their earliest attestations in the historical record.
There has long been a controversy over whether Neanderthals (and therefore hominids prior to anatomically modern human beings) engaged in burial of their dead. The claim has been controversial because the evidence has been ambiguous, though several recent studies point to burial as, “…the parsimonious reading of the evidence.” The paper from which the latter quote is derived,
Evidence supporting an intentional Neandertal burial at La Chapelle-aux-Saints by William Rendu, et al., concludes:
“Whatever the status may be of other purported Neandertal burials, the evidence from the bouffia Bonneval at La Chapelle-aux-Saints serves to establish the existence of intentional Neandertal inhumation in the European Middle Paleolithic.”
With improved documentation and study of grieving in other species, we may have to push grieving rituals not only beyond modern human beings, but beyond the hominids, including at least some primates and some cetaceans. This can be understood as part of a larger scientific trend to push studies that began with human beings and human institutions back further into natural history than had previously been the custom in science. For example, the expanding discipline of primate archaeology employs the techniques of archaeology to study the history of primates beyond the hominids.
In so doing, i.e., by expanding science in this way, we find scientific inquiries verging on philosophical questions, which the authors of the paper on grief among cetaceans have acknowledged. In this way, we find ourselves brought back to what was once called “natural philosophy,” though that way of referring to what scientists do has been out of fashion for more than a hundred years. Nevertheless, the direction in which science is going may make “natural philosophy” as legitimate a way to refer to such research as “natural science.”
Note added Thursday 09 August 2018: A story on the BBC,
Killer whale still carrying dead baby after 16 days, describes a notable instance of postmortem attentive behavior.