From Tom Bourbon [930818.1600]
[From: Bruce Nevin (Wed 930818 12:33:13 EDT)]
( Tom Bourbon [930817.1435] )
This about the wild mice of J. Lee Kavanaugh is really quite marvellous,
isn't it! But I wonder what exactly was going on when "the animals"
"adjusted" light intensity and "created" a cycle of light intensity with
the same rhythmicity as the natural one, and "adjusted the lights to suit
their activity levels" ("their" activity levels!), and so on. Did he
monitor individuals in a way that it was possible to observe how
individuals maintained their socially shared environment? Or is it to be
presumed that all the mice had the same reference levels from their
genetic endowment and their experience in the wild, with no significant
variation, so that whichever mouse happened to be close to the controls
would reach the controls first with the aim of adjusting light intensity
to its individual reference level, which just happened to coincide with
that of all the others? Or something in between, where some individual
effects a change and no other cares to oppose it because it's close
enough (why and how is it close enough?)? Or were some individuals more
"powerful" in this regard than others? Or more highly motivated to
counteract if some change by another mouse didn't suit? And so on. This
is after all a social situation among mammals--social animals--that is
being described.
The problem was in my reporting. Each animmal was in the chamber alone
and Kavanaugh presented data for each individual. Since all of them did it,
I carelessly lapsed into using collective phrases like, "the animals did"
and "when it was time for mice to play." To use Phil Runkel's terminology,
Kavanaugh's results are from the study of specimens, one at a time, and he
identified invariants that distinguish the species as a natural kind.
Let me try to recast a summary of his results so that it more clearly
identifies the individual nature of the data.
Each member of the species of mouse he tested resisted his disturbances to
variables it controlled. Each animal set certain variables to "preferred"
states or levels and then defended them. When an animal had a means to
affect the light intensity and remained in the chamber for an extended time,
it created cycles of intensity resembling those seen in nature and the
intensity set by the animal at any time matched the activity level in which
the animal was about to engage.
With all of that out of the way, you can see that the experiments I
summarized were not social. Now the question is whether Kavanaugh ever did
these studies with groups of animals. I don't know, but I would like to. I
will look for additional information on his work. I wonder if his
equipment, or anything resembling it, is still available. Wouldn't it be
interesting to test some of the possibilities you addressed in your
questions? I think it could be en elegant series of experiments. If only
there were an Institute for the Study of Living Control Systems.
For me, one of the fascinating things about Kavanaugh's work is that it
severely challenges traditional ideas about "causes" of the animals'
behavior. Kavanaugh knew it; he repeatedly poked and jabbed at
conventional ideas about causality and control, with the data to back
his words. Rather than being creatures under the control of instincts or
environmental stimuli, he showed that wild mice are beautiful little
general purpose control systems, able to achieve control through any medium
they find, no matter how "unnatural" and domineering the setting might seem
to an observer. And there is no way evolution or the mice, prior to their
captivity, could have forseen those settings.
Every time I think about the data on cycles, I imagine a mouse thinking,
"It's time to play. Guess I'll go turn on the stars." Or, "Time for some
shut eye. I'll go switch on the sun." Maybe he didn't go that far (at least
not in publications) but part of the beauty of what Kavanaugh wrote was in
his repeated comments that, whatever the mice controlled in the lab, they
also controlled in the wild, including the light dark cycle. He said *they*
went into and out of burrows and open places, as a way of controlling the
light level. The guy had it right.
Kavanaugh is identified on his publications as a zoologist. Does anyone
know anything about him? It might have been interesting had he been
in communication with PCT people back then.
Until later,
Tom Bourbon