Citation

Author Website

https://english.tau.ac.il/profile/jablonka

https://evolution-institute.org/profile/eva-jablonka-and-simona-ginsburg/

Commentary Type

Invited Commentary

Thread

Andrew Crump, Heather Browning, Alex Schnell, Charlotte Burn, and Jonathan Birch, Sentience in decapod crustaceans: A general framework and review of the evidence

Abstract

On the basis of the target article by Crump and colleagues, we suggest a more parsimonious scheme for evaluating the evidence for sentience. Since some of the criteria used by Crump et al. are not independent and some are uninformative we exclude some criteria and amalgamate others. We propose that evidence of flexible learning and prioritization, in conjunction with relevant data on brain organization, is sufficient for assigning pain-sentience to an animal and we suggest a scoring scheme based on four criteria.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Author Biography

Eva Jablonka is an evolutionary biologist and philosopher of biology. She is a retired professor in the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas in Tel-Aviv University. Her main work has been on inclusive inheritance, the extended evolutionary synthesis, and the evolution of consciousness. Website

Simona Ginsburg is a neuroscientist, retired associative professor of the Open University of Israel. She co-authored (with Eva Jablonka) the books: The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origin of Consciousness (1991) and Picturing The Mind: Consciousness through the Lens of Evolution (2022), both by the MIT Press. Website

DOI

10.51291/2377-7478.1713