Evolutionist jellies: Humans are the only species that cries as a result of strong emotion. I'm curious how you explain this.

Feeling less depressed and controlling pain could be an advantage. And being aggressive 24/7 wouldn’t make you too popular with the opposite sex.

Elephants cry. It does not affect this question, I just wanted to mention it.

That’s a very interesting question.

Evolution doesn’t represent that human beings are “totally evolved” or that the process of selection is linear. Most mutations do not produce viable new species. Most of the rest of them produce negligible changes that may or may not result in a selection for fitness, and if they do it may be only for a limited environment or time.

And because multiple changes in outward behavior, function, and appearance may result from a dingle mutation of DNA, it’s the combined “survivability” of all those changes that determines whether they become incorporated in a replacement species, not any one of them.

To look at a single facet of a species and try to decide whether it’s “natural” or “supernatural” is probably not very enlightening. But I will say, that dogs appear to have behavior that plays a role similar to crying in humans. If one dog plays too roughly with another, the victim will cower and whimper and lick the dominate dog. In most dogs, this elicits improved social behavior.

I could certainly see how tears might provide human beings (or our forebearers) with a way too communicate, “Please, no more. You win. Can we be friends/lovers/family again?”

Good question. I would think that is just a trait we gained over time. Being emotional and having emotions. It’s like how some fish at the bottom of the sea don’t need eyes. We’re just really, really, really different from a lot of organisms in a lot of ways.

Also other organisms, I don’t THINK, have the relationships and emotional attachment to others that we do. So they probably wouldn’t be so upset in the first place.

Elephants cry?

@JilltheTooth Yes, and they also never forget. They hold grudges.

@JilltheTooth And man can they poop!

If we could just digest elephant dung, we could be the boss species!

Lots of animals express emotion vocally when upset (as any dog owner can verify!) so I assume you are referring to shedding tears. Some other animals, such as seals, do shed tears, although not due to emotion.

Biologist Randy Cornelius believes that tears evolved as a type of emotional display, which makes sense. Tears don’t do much on furry faces as a communicative sign, but work well on our bare faces,

Just ran across “Women’s Tears Tell Men to Back Off” at http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/648601.html

Is whining the same thing as crying with out shedding tears, because my dog does it whenever he is unhappy about something.

@JilltheTooth Here’s a nice piece about emotionality in elephants and other animals as well. Most higher order mammals seem to display emotions.

It’s interesting you mention elephants, as I though of them when I first saw this question. They too have a unique feature given to them by evolution—their trunks. What other species boasts a nose useful for pulling up trees, harvesting tasty leaves from tree tops, drinking water, taking showers, grasping small objects, smelling, breathing and vocalizing. It is a pretty amazing adaptation unique to their evolutionary branch..

Um, I’m with @crisw and, not for nothing, but I’m curious to think what the ‘non-evolutionist’ explanation for tears would be.

@Simone_De_Beauvoir I think crying is a way that the Creator designed for us to get rid of chemicals and hormones that would make us feel agitated and upset all the time if we didn’t get rid of them.

Have you ever owned a dog? They don’t make tears, but you see emotion in them that is unmistakable as grief.

@ChocolateReigns

Got any studies to back that up? And why wouldn’t other animals have the same need?

@crisw No, I don’t have any studies, but in school yesterday my science book said that’s what crying does for you.

@ChocolateReigns – That’s cool. But evolution doesn’t give an explanation as to why we do everything we do or have everything we have. Some things are clearly beneficial. A lot is just holdover because it didn’t make a difference one way or another.

So if there’s a biological benefit to it, it may be explained by evolution if it provided some form of competitive or survival advantage. If not, and there’s no clear benefit, there’s no need to require an explanation from an evolutionary perspective – that’s important to remember. And it’s probably why, if you were wondering, there wasn’t one given if it was absent in your class…

@iamthemob No, I wasn’t wondering why the book didn’t give an explanation. I was just wondering how well my thinking would stand up and what other people would say to it.

@ChocolateReigns – Any general statement that specific behaviors were meant by a creator or designer to perform a certain benefit biologically, etc., stand up fine when talking about a reason why things happen. However, that’s mutually exclusive from showing scientifically how it happened to be that way and what mechanisms were at work that got it there.

It’s only contentious when those mechanisms are given a purpose…or when creation or design might be used to determine that it was the mechanism and not evolution.

But that’s more the thing you might not want to get into. ;-)