Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(7)

The lesson is that before scientists test any animal, they need to know its typical behavior. The power of conditioning is not in doubt, but the early investigators had totally overlooked a crucial piece of information. They had not, as recommended by Lorenz, considered the whole organism. Animals show many unconditioned responses, or behavior that develops naturally in all members of their species. Reward and punishment may affect such behavior but cannot take credit creating it. The reason all cats responded in the same way derived from natural feline communication rather than operant conditioning.

The field of evolutionary cognition requires us to consider every species in full. Whether we are studying hand anatomy, trunk multifunctionality, face perception, or greeting rituals, we need to familiarize ourselves with all facets of the animal and its natural history before trying to figure out its mental level. And instead of testing animals on abilities that we are particularly good at—our own species’ magic wells, such as language—why not test them on their specialized skills? In doing so, we will not just flatten Aristotle’s scale of nature: we will transform it into a bush with many branches. This change in perspective is now feeding the long-overdue recognition that intelligent life is not something we must seek at great expense only in the outer reaches of space. It is abundant here on earth, right underneath our nonprehensile noses.18


Anthropodenial

The ancient Greeks believed that the center of the universe was right where they lived. What better place, therefore, than Greece for modern scholars to ponder humanity’s place in the cosmos? On a sunny day in 1996, an international group of academics visited the omphalos (navel) of the world—a large stone shaped like a beehive—amid the temple ruins on Mount Parnassus. I couldn’t resist patting it like a long-lost friend. Right next to me stood “batman” Don Griffin, the discoverer of echolocation and author of The Question of Animal Awareness, in which he lamented the misperception that everything in the world turns around us and that we are the only conscious beings.19

Ironically, a major theme of our workshop was the anthropic principle, according to which the universe is a purposeful creation uniquely suited for intelligent life, meaning us.20 At times the discourse of the anthropic philosophers sounded as if they thought the world was made for us rather than the other way around. Planet Earth is at exactly the right distance from the sun to create the right temperature for human life, and its atmosphere has the ideal oxygen level. How convenient! Instead of seeing purpose in this situation, however, any biologist will turn the causal connection around and note that our species is finely adapted to the planet’s circumstances, which explains why they are perfect for us. Deep ocean vents are an optimal environment for bacteria thriving on their superhot sulfuric output, but no one assumes that these vents were created to serve thermophile bacteria; rather, we understand that natural selection has shaped bacteria able to live near them.

The backward logic of these philosophers reminded me of a creationist I once saw peel a banana on television while explaining that this fruit is curved in such a way that it conveniently angles toward the human mouth when we hold it in our hand. It also fits perfectly in our mouth. Obviously, he felt that God had given the banana its human-friendly shape, while forgetting that he was holding a domesticated fruit, cultivated for human consumption.

During some of these discussions, Don Griffin and I watched barn swallows flying back and forth outside the conference room window carrying mouthfuls of mud for their nests. Griffin was at least three decades my senior and had impressive knowledge, offering the Latin name of the birds and describing details of their incubation period. At the workshop, he presented his view on consciousness: that it has to be part and parcel of all cognitive processes, including those of animals. My own position is slightly different in that I prefer not to make any firm statements about something as poorly defined as consciousness. No one seems to know what it is. But for the same reason, I hasten to add, I’d never deny it to any species. For all I know, a frog may be conscious. Griffin took a more positive stance, saying that since intentional, intelligent actions are observable in many animals, and since in our own species they go together with awareness, it is reasonable to assume similar mental states in other species.

That such a highly respected and accomplished scientist made this claim had a hugely liberating effect. Even though Griffin was slammed for making statements that he could not back up with data, many critics missed the point, which was that the assumption that animals are “dumb,” in the sense that they lack conscious minds, is only that: an assumption. It is far more logical to assume continuity in every domain, Griffin said, echoing Charles Darwin’s well-known observation that the mental difference between humans and other animals is one of degree rather than kind.



Ape gestures are homologous with those of humans. Not only do they look strikingly human, they occur in roughly similar contexts. Here a female chimpanzee (right) kisses a grizzled alpha male on the mouth during a reconciliation after a fight between them.

It was an honor to get to know this kindred spirit and to make my own case regarding anthropomorphism, another theme at the conference. Greek for “human form,” the word anthropomorphism came about when Xenophanes, in 570 B.C., objected to Homer’s poetry because it described the gods as if they looked like people. Xenophanes ridiculed the arrogance behind this assumption—why couldn’t they look like horses? But gods are gods, far removed from the present-day liberal use of the word anthropomorphism as an epithet to vilify any and all human-animal comparisons, even the most cautious ones.