> (I've also heard it claimed that it's an urban legend that frogs won't jump if you cook them slowly. But, maybe it's an urban legend that it's an urban legend.)
Come on, it only takes a moment of critical thinking to realize no animal would allow itself to be boiled alive, be it slowly or quickly.
If you're in a bath and you increase the heat until you're hot, do you keep increasing the heat or do you jump out when it's too hot?
The legend is that if they're submerged in hot water and heated slowly enough, the brain starts having problems due to the heat before the skin gets too uncomfortable.
> no animal would allow itself to be boiled alive
You're surely not suggesting frogs have a theory of self, and while there's evolutionary pressure against walking into forest fires or too hot sun-baked rocks, there are very few environments where animals would be subjected to slowly increasing water temperatures that eventually reach fatal temperatures. If it's not obvious that there's evolutionary pressure for this situation, and we don't think frogs have a conscious self-preservation, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the legend out-of-hand.
You don't need a theory of self to explain this. Frogs are living creatures with an instinct to live, and heat stroke is bad for survival. It's no different from wandering into the desert sun - you cannot thermoregulate your body past a certain point.
> The legend is that if they're submerged in hot water and heated slowly enough, the brain starts having problems due to the heat before the skin gets too uncomfortable.
By that logic people will stay outside and freeze to death from hypothermia which eventually causes people to believe they're hot while literally freezing to death, even though long before that happens any functioning human being would say "I'm cold and need to warm up now!" before suffering any significant health problems.
It's a fucking dumb legend and regurgitating it does humanity a disservice. I am aware it is a common saying and what it means. I just wish people would think more before repeating everything they hear.
The most plain reading of this statement implies both understanding of the situation, and consent, which implies an understanding of self and the implications for the self. I'm saying you clearly don't mean that... so you must be anthropomorphizing some evolved environmental response as "not allowing".
I'm arguing that very few frogs and their ancestors have been in situations where the best response to slowly rising heat is to move frantically. So, maybe the have some other evolved response that will get them out of the pot, but it's almost certainly not an evolved response to an evolutionary pressure of slowly rising water temperatures.
The best response to a hot desert is to move slowly and surely to some place to hide, which is the opposite optimal strategy for a boiling pot of water (jump rapidly, try as many times as possible in a short time). An evolved response to survive in a hot desert would work against the boiling pot situation.
> By that logic people will stay outside and freeze to death from hypothermia
This analogy makes no sense unless you think frogs have a human-like ability to understand situations and plan. Humans' response to extreme cold is dominated by their understanding of the self and their situation. Even some humans will die of hypothermia in their own homes before seeking help[0]. Humans starting to get hypothermia don't run around frantically, which is what heated frogs need to do in order to survive a hot pot. The analogy is just badly broken.
This is your second response that seems to be anthropomorphizing frogs. Frogs aren't just small slow thinking humans without opposable thumbs. Their response to situation is different in kind, not just degree, from that of humans. Reasoning by analogy with human behavior is downright misleading.
> I'm not anthropomorphizing frogs. I'm saying frogs have an instinct to survive, like any living creature.
Ah, here's the problem. They don't have an instinct to survive as such. They have a variety of evolved instinctual behaviors that have a net effect of increasing survival rate, but there's no evidence that any of these instincts involve an awareness of mortal danger an in intermediate mechanism. That is, it's not a direct instinctual response to a realization of mortal danger, like you'd get in humans and perhaps some other larger-brained species.
Particularly for smaller brained animals, to say that there's one instinct to survive ("an instinct to survive") is a sloppy over-generalization from a bunch of specific corner-case instincts.
Particularly for more simple-brained creatures like frogs, you can't reason about behaviors as if they've evolved a sense of mortal danger and then deductively reason their response to mortal danger. They have a bunch of evolved survival-enhancing responses to specific stimuli, but it's an over-generalization to say they have a generalized instinct to survive.
Take domestic sheep, for example. Given the chance, they'll often get them stuck on thin cliff edges while looking for grass, and then need to be rescued by humans or else fall to their deaths. You can't just say that sheep have evolved a generalized survival instinct and cliffs are a mortal danger and then use deductive reasoning to conclude that sheep avoid cliffs.
This sort of misuse of deductive reasoning held human civilization back for millennia, until the enlightenment brought much more widespread use of inductive scientific methods. Deductive and inductive reasoning both have their places, but I find it's human instinct to over-use deductive reasoning. (That is, there's a tendency to take overly general high-level axioms and assume they say things about all specific cases.)
> Particularly for more simple-brained creatures like frogs, you can't reason about behaviors as if they've evolved a sense of mortal danger and then deductively reason their response to mortal danger. They have a bunch of evolved survival-enhancing responses to specific stimuli, but it's an over-generalization to say they have a generalized instinct to survive.
I really think you're making something out of nothing, and this is no different from humans, and the entire argument over sense of self is an irrelevant tangent to everything I've said.
My ability to avoid dangerous situations and survive is philosophically no different from an amoeba, and I think all your arguments to the contrary are nonsensical. You can easily concoct situations where humans would die too. I'm getting weird Bible vibes honestly, since you seem to think humans are somehow special.
Well, not just humans, but large-brained animals that show evidence of understanding of their environment and an some degree of planning ahead.
If we were talking about great apes, cetaceans, or perhaps cephalopods or corvids, maybe we could find some middle ground.
But, if you believe a frog's ability to survive is greatly enhanced by its ability to understand and plan ahead, or a human's ability to survive isn't fundamentally altered by their ability to understand and plan ahead (to the extent that analogies between frog and human survival behavior break down), then we're at a fundamental impasse and we'll just have to agree to disagree.
> There are situations where death comes before the threshold of discomfort.
Not for anything we can actually sense. Volume, temperature, pressure - you will feel wildly uncomfortable long before any of these are extreme enough to seriously impact your health.
Is there any example of something we can feel, but we don't feel uncomfortable before it kills us? All I can think of are drugs.
Yes. Search YouTube for high-altitude simulation chambers and hypoxia. I seem to think Derek from Veritasium has a very good demonstration where he gets euhporic and seems unaware that he's severely mentally compromised.
Also, I once helped a friend set up and tear down an art project that was a flying remote-controlled statue, held up partially by a weather balloon full of helium. In tearing down, I didn't want to let the helium go to waste. My first breath of pure helium went fine. My second full breath of pure helium in a row, I barely had enough time to sit down, say "whoah" and cough the helium out before falling down and twitching on the gymnasium floor. A woke up right at the same time my artist friend realized I wasn't joking around. Had I died, I would have felt no pain, not even the slightest discomfort.
Breathing pure helium, I learned you have about 1-2 seconds of warning that you're hypoxic before you pass out. I figured it was more like 15-30 seconds. Luckily, I didn't die, partially because, as a low molecular weight gas, helium has a high rate of effusion, and on my back, it being lighter than air helped it escape my lungs. Argon may very well have killed me because it has a much lower rate of effusion, and (also related to its higher molar mass) it's also heavier than air.
Here's an experiment you can try at home. It doesn't prove that humans or frogs won't notice extreme temperatures, but it does show that it would be reasonable to believe that it's conceivable that some animal can only detect relative temperature.
1. Prepare three bowls of water, one cold (but bearable), one hot (but bearable), and one lukewarm.
2. Place one hand in the cold water, and the other hand in the hot water.
3. Wait a minute or two.
4. Place both hands in the lukewarm water at the same time.
"My 9th grade science teacher always said that if you put a frog in boiling hot water, it would jump out. But put it in cold water, and heat it up gradually, it would slowly boil to death."
Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) in Dante's Peak (1997)
Come on, it only takes a moment of critical thinking to realize no animal would allow itself to be boiled alive, be it slowly or quickly.
If you're in a bath and you increase the heat until you're hot, do you keep increasing the heat or do you jump out when it's too hot?