What we can learn from birds about ourselves | Mikus Āboliņš-Ābols | TEDxRiga

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Why do we cheat? Why do we forgive? Why do we get stressed? When difficult questions like these cannot be answered using humans, we turn to other organisms. It turns out that birds have the answer …

Mikus Āboliņš-Ābols studies birds to understand how animals respond to social and environmental challenges. He believes that his work on birds can bring about fundamental insights into how stress and risk affect our social and sexual behavior.

I study birds.

I'm an ornithologist.

When I say that to people,
they usually assume

I'm one of those crazy people
that wakes up in the middle of the night,

drives across the country
to see some obscure bird.

And they're right.

(Laughter)

I've done things to see birds

that many of you
would not do to your parents.

I've gone out on a ship
in the middle of the winter storm

to count gulls.

I've spent months on a rock
in an ocean to count sea birds.

For many summers, I've woken up
at 5 o'clock in the morning

to watch amazing birds - sparrows.

I do this because I really,
really like birds.

I think they're beautiful,
and I think they're fun.

But over years,

I've come to appreciate birds
from a different perspective,

from a perspective
that's more than just fun.

Because, when you take
a closer look at birds,

when you spend more than just a second

looking at the same individual,
the same species,

you start to see these amazing parallels
between birds and us.

You start to realize
that we can study birds

to answer fundamental questions
about our behavior, ourselves,

questions that apply to us.

This is important
because there are many questions

about our behavior,
about how we are built

that we can't answer using ourselves

because of logistical
or ethical challenges.

Instead, we use model organisms.

For example, to find out
how cancer works, we use mice

because mouse cells and human cells,
mouse organs and our organs

work in much the same way.

By studying mice, we can find out
treatments for our diseases.

But we can't use mice
to study everything in humans.

And so today, I will show you
that birds are a great model system

for questions that apply to us
about our behavior, our physiology.

Birds are a great model for behavior

because their social system
is really similar to ours.

90% of birds form pairs.

They have something
that we could call a family.

In 85% of bird species,
both mom and dad take care of the babies,

much the same way as we do,

and this makes birds more similar to us
than many mammals

because biparental care
is rather rare in animal kingdom.

Birds have personalities.

They vary tremendously
in how aggressive they are,

how sociable they are,
how daring they are,

much the same way as we do.

Birds are also great models for physiology

because bird hormones
and our hormones are really similar,

and our nervous systems work
in the same way.

To demonstrate this,

I will tell you three stories

from my research
and my colleagues' research,

I will show you that we can study birds

to answer fundamental questions
about empathy, sex, and stress.

Empathy is a very important human emotion,

it's the ability to put ourselves
in other's shoes,

understand things
from other's perspective.

Empathy makes us who we are,
it allows us to forgive.

Have you ever wondered
why we have empathy?

Why care about others?

Because the principle of natural selection

seems to suggest
that we should all be selfish,

we should not care
about others, but yet we do.

Why?

We can ask this question in birds.

Birds do this thing called mobbing

where they come help each other
to drive off predators.

This cute European songbird,
the pied flycatcher,

helps their neighbors

to drive off predators
when they attack their nests.

But they are calculating little animals:

they only help each other
if they are being helped back.

It is a famous strategy in game theory

that's called tit for tat.

But this strategy is also vulnerable
to end up in a complete mess

because somebody, by accident,
at some point, will drop the ball,

fail to cooperate,

and this whole cooperation will stop.

Yet, these birds keep cooperating.

How do they do it?

A Latvian professor
Indriķis Krams and I showed

that pied flycatchers maintain cooperation

because they are able to understand
each other's circumstances.

They show empathy.

This is how it works.

The bird is attacked,
it needs help from its neighbors.

They usually come to help,
and everything is fine,

as this bird will afterwards
cooperate back.

But sometimes, the help does not come.

If you're playing
a strict game of tit for tat,

this would lead
to a breakdown of cooperation

because this animal would
never ever talk to these guys again.

But these pied flycatchers
sometimes bend these rules.

They forgive birds
that couldn't come to help

because of honest reasons,
such as they just weren't at home,

but they refuse to cooperate

with birds that didn't help
even if they were able to.

So empathy, the ability
to forgive some, but not all,

enables these birds
to keep cooperation going.

And though human empathy
surely is a much more complicated emotion,

our research shows
that it's also very ancient,

that it's shared between birds and humans,

and it likely evolved
to help us cooperate.

Birds can teach us
about our sexual behavior.

Similarly to humans,
birds appear monogamous,

which means that they form pairs,
they have something like a family,

but they also cheat, have sex
with other individuals all the time,

this happens around 30% of time.

So why is that?

Why do people and why do birds cheat?

(Laughter)

In terms of evolution, the answer
may be straight forward for males

because the more you cheat,
the more females you have sex with,

the more children you have,

and so you pass your genes on
to the next generation more successfully.

But for females, the answer
is less straight forward.

In most species, the number of children
a female can have is limited,

it's constrained to a certain number.

So why spend time and energy

trying to find different fathers
for your children

if you have a perfectly willing
partner at home?

You can imagine

how hard it would be to study
this question in humans.

Instead, we use a large population
of this gray brown American sparrow

called dark-eyed junco.

We catch these birds
that are cheating

much the same way
if we catch people who are cheating:

we use their DNA.

We compare the DNA

between the moms, their babies,
and all the males in the population,

year after year after year.

We follow the babies,
we follow the babies' babies.

The human equivalent of this

would be to study an entire town
for something like 200 years;

it's a pretty hard task.

So using these techniques,

Professor Ellen Ketterson
and Dr. Nicole Gerlach,

with whom I've had the pleasure
to work with at the Indiana University,

showed that cheating can be advantageous,

that birds that cheat
have higher evolutionary fitness.

And this is why.

Imagine two females:

one female, the faithful one,
has sex only with her partner,

the other, the promiscuous female,

has sex with her partner,
but also cheats with this other sexy dude,

and sexy in this species means older,
bigger, and this big white tale.

They both have the same number of babies
because they can only lay four eggs.

But what the promiscuous female has
that the faithful one does not

is this son that was fathered
in that promiscuous mating,

and this son grows up to be
just like his dad:

he has a lot of sex with a lot of females
and produces a lot of children.

And the result of this thing
is that the promiscuous female

has way more grandchildren
than the faithful one.

This is called the good genes hypothesis.

This shows that cheating
can have an evolutionary advantage,

that it's an evolved behavior.

I'm not saying you should go out
and cheat tonight,

that would be kind of bad,

but, if you do, you might just end up
with really sexy children.

(Laughter)

So the desire to have sex
does not stand alone,

there are many things
that affect our desire to reproduce,

and one of the biggest ones is stress.

It's a big thing in our lives.

When I am stressed,
like before this TEDx talk,

I don't want to go party,
I don't want to have sex,

and I'm sure many people
in this audience and in the backstage

feel the same way.

So why? How does stress
affect our reproduction?

Why does this happen?

We can ask this thing in birds.

We can ask this in birds

because many aspects
of stress and reproduction

are regulated by hormones,

and birds and humans share hormones
that are nearly identical.

We both have testosterone
that is produced in our gonads,

that regulates, in both males and females,
sexual behavior and development.

We both have glucocorticoids,

stress hormones that are produced
in the adrenal glands here.

We also share estrogen,
progesterone, oxytocin, adrenaline,

and the list goes on and on and on,

so our hormones, these complicated,
intricate systems, are nearly identical.

They are probably so ancient
that they were present in dinosaurs.

So we can use these parallels,
we can capitalize on these similarities

to study birds to answer
questions about ourselves,

about how stress affects reproduction.

A good candidate
for this effect is testosterone,

because testosterone
is so important in reproduction.

I asked these brown American sparrows
how the stress affects testosterone.

And it has big effects.

When you stress these birds out,
when their life is in danger,

when they perceive
that their life is threatened,

they reduce their testosterone levels,
and then they jump up.

This might not be bad,
this might actually be good

because maybe it is better to focus
your energy responding to stress

rather than being distracted by sex.

But for some of us,
stress is not just this one time thing,

it's a constant occurrence,
we are stressed day after day after day.

What happens to our testosterone?

I asked this in these birds,
and I showed that if you develop

in a really traumatic,
nerve-racking environment,

you have lower testosterone,
generally, and that's bad,

but you're also less sensitive to stress,
and that's a good thing.

So my research shows
that stress in development

can have major effects
on your testosterone.

By understanding the mechanisms

by which stress affects our lives,
by which stress affects reproduction,

we can move towards cures and solutions
for problems that affect us,

our own problems and diseases.

So we can learn from birds about stress.

You can't use birds to study everything.

It wouldn't make sense
to study cancer in birds

because their organs
are a little different from ours.

But because their physiological
and nervous systems are so similar to us,

because their behavior,
their social behavior,

is so similar to ours,

we can use birds to ask basic questions

about empathy, about cooperation,
stress, sex, and many more things.

For example, we can study birds
to study personalities.

Why are there so many personalities?
How are they regulated?

We can study birds

to understand how cities affect
our behavior and our hormones.

We can study birds to understand
how parenting works

because there aren't many animals

where both mom and dad
take care of the babies.

This cover is from the Science magazine,

one of the most famous
and influential magazines in science.

In this edition, scientists showed

that we can learn from birds
about speech development

because song development in birds
and development of speech in humans

share many parallels
at the physiological level.

So there is much more to birds
than just their looks.

As ornithologists - we're crazy people -

we wake up at 5 o'clock in the morning
and drive across the country

not only because we want to marvel

at the birds, at their beauty,
and how fun they are

but also because we want to learn
fundamental truths about ourselves,

abut how nature works,
about how evolution works.

In fact, one of the birds that tells
the most about ourselves

is this seemingly unremarkable
gray brown American sparrow.

But when you take a look at it,
when you spend some time looking at it,

you realize how much
you can learn from it.

So next time you see a bird, ask yourself,

"Can I learn something from you?"

Thank you.

(Applause)