Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(8)

In my opinion, anthropomorphism is problematic only when the human-animal comparison is a stretch, such as with regards to species distant from us. The fish known as kissing gouramis, for example, don’t really kiss in the same way and for the same reasons that humans do. Adult fish sometimes lock their protruding mouths together to settle disputes. Clearly, to label this habit “kissing” is misleading. Apes, on the other hand, do greet each other after a separation by placing their lips gently on each other’s mouth or shoulder and hence kiss in a way and under circumstances that greatly resemble human kissing. Bonobos go even further: when a zookeeper familiar with chimpanzees once na?vely accepted a bonobo kiss, not knowing this species, he was taken aback by the amount of tongue that went into it!

Another example: when young apes are being tickled, they make breathy sounds with a rhythm of inhalation and exhalation that resembles human laughter. One cannot simply dismiss the term laughter for this behavior as too anthropomorphic (as some have done), because not only do the apes sound like human children being tickled, they show the same ambivalence about it as children do. I have often noticed it myself. They try to push my tickling fingers away, but then come back begging for more, holding their breath while awaiting the next poke in their belly. In this case, I am all for shifting the burden of proof and ask those who wish to avoid humanlike terminology to first prove that a tickled ape, who almost chokes on its hoarse giggles, is in fact in a different state of mind from a tickled human child. Absent such evidence, laughter strikes me as the best label for both.21

Needing a new term to make my point, I invented anthropodenial, which is the a priori rejection of humanlike traits in other animals or animallike traits in us. Anthropomorphism and anthropodenial have an inverse relationship: the closer another species is to us, the more anthropomorphism will assist our understanding of this species and the greater will be the danger of anthropodenial.22 Conversely, the more distant a species is from us, the greater the risk that anthropomorphism will propose questionable similarities that have come about independently. Saying that ants have “queens,” “soldiers,” and “slaves” is mere anthropomorphic shorthand. We should attach no more significance to it than we do when we name a hurricane after a person or curse our computer as if it had free will.

The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals. When we are considering species like the apes, which are aptly known as “anthropoids” (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. Dubbing an ape’s kiss “mouth-to-mouth contact” so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth’s gravity a different name than the moon’s, just because we think Earth is special. Unjustified linguistic barriers fragment the unity with which nature presents us. Apes and humans did not have enough time to independently evolve strikingly similar behavior, such as lip contact in greeting or noisy breathing in response to tickling. Our terminology should honor the obvious evolutionary connections.

On the other hand, anthropomorphism would be a rather empty exercise if all it did was paste human labels onto animal behavior. The American biologist and herpetologist Gordon Burghardt has called for a critical anthropomorphism, in which we use human intuition and knowledge of an animal’s natural history to formulate research questions.23 Thus, saying that animals “plan” for the future or “reconcile” after fights is more than anthropomorphic language: these terms propose testable ideas. If primates are capable of planning, for example, they should hold on to a tool that they can use only in the future. And if primates reconcile after fights, we should see a reduction of tensions as well as improved social relationships after opponents have made up by means of friendly contact. These obvious predictions have by now been borne out by actual experiments and observations.24 Serving as a means rather than an end, critical anthropomorphism is a valuable source of hypotheses.

Griffin’s proposal to take animal cognition seriously led to a new label for this field: cognitive ethology. It is a great label, but then I am an ethologist and know exactly what he meant. Unfortunately, the term ethology has not universally caught on, and spell-checkers still regularly change it to ethnology, etiology, or even theology. No wonder many ethologists nowadays call themselves behavioral biologists. Other existing labels for cognitive ethology are animal cognition and comparative cognition. But those two terms have drawbacks, too. Animal cognition fails to include humans, so it unintentionally perpetuates the idea of a gap between humans and other animals. The comparative label, on the other hand, remains agnostic about how and why we make comparisons. It hints at no framework whatsoever to interpret similarities and differences, least of all an evolutionary one. Even within this discipline, there have been complaints about its lack of theory as well as its habit of dividing animals into “higher” and “lower” forms.25 The label derives from comparative psychology, the name of a field that traditionally has viewed animals as mere standins for humans: a monkey is a simplified human, a rat a simplified monkey, and so on. Since associative learning was thought to explain behavior across all species, one of the field’s founders, B. F. Skinner, felt that it hardly mattered what kind of animal one worked on.26 To prove his point, he entitled a book entirely devoted to albino rats and pigeons The Behavior of Organisms.