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March 21 - March 22, 2022
The same wall between them and us was noted by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, when he famously declared, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”
as Werner Heisenberg put it, “what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
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
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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.
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.
evolutionary cognition, which is the study of all cognition (human and animal) from an evolutionary standpoint.
“I am not for one moment disparaging the value of the rat as a subject for psychological investigation; there is very little wrong with the rat that cannot be overcome by the education of the experimenters.”
Behaviorists sought to dictate behavior by placing animals in barren environments in which they could do little else than what the experimenter wanted. If they didn’t, their behavior was classified as “misbehavior.”
Ethologists, on the other hand, are more interested in spontaneous behavior.
in 1955, the American psychologist John Garcia claimed he had found a case that broke all the rules: rats learn to refuse poisoned foods after just a single bad experience even if the resulting nausea takes hours to set in.44
Cognition relates to the kind of information an organism gathers and how it processes and applies this information.
Capacities that were once thought to be uniquely human, or at least uniquely Hominoid (the tiny primate family of humans plus apes), often turn out to be widespread.
I feel like recalling my know-thy-animal rule here, according to which we can safely dismiss a philosopher who thinks that wild chimpanzees sit there pounding and pounding hard nuts with rocks, an average of thirty-three blows per consumed kernel, for generation after generation, for no good reason at all.
During the fall, our monkeys in Atlanta collected so many fallen hickory nuts from nearby trees that we’d hear frantic banging sounds the whole day in our office adjacent to the monkey area. It was a happy sound, because capuchins seem to be in their best mood when they are doing things.
To stress this point, a “percussive stone technology” site (including stone assemblies and the remains of smashed nuts) was excavated in a tropical forest in Ivory Coast, where chimpanzees must have been opening nuts for at least four thousand years.
In an aviary at Oxford University, Betty was trying to pull a little bucket out of a transparent vertical pipe. In the bucket was a small piece of meat, and next to the pipe were two tools for her to choose from. One was a straight wire, the other a hooked one. Only with the latter could Betty get a hold of the bucket’s handle. After her companion stole the hooked wire, however, she faced the task with an inappropriate tool. Undeterred, Betty used her beak to bend the straight wire into a hook so as to pull the bucket from the tube. This remarkable feat was a mere anecdote until perceptive
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Every cognitive capacity that we discover is going to be older and more widespread than initially thought.
Plato proposed that humans were the only creatures at once naked and walking on two legs. This definition proved flawed, however, when Diogenes brought a plucked fowl to the lecture room, setting it loose with the words “Here is Plato’s man.” From then on the definition added “having broad nails.”
“He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.”
scientists were dumbfounded by the complaint of former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin that tax dollars were going to useless projects such as “fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.”70 It may sound silly to some, but the humble Drosophila has long been our main workhorse in genetics, yielding insight in the relation between chromosomes and genes. A small set of animals produces basic knowledge applicable to many other species, including ourselves.
Uuuuggh I remember this dumbass statement so clearly. I was angry for a week.
One study, in arid Namibia, followed free-ranging elephants equipped with GPS collars. It discovered that these animals are aware of thunderstorms at enormous distances and adjust their travel routes to precipitation days before it actually arrives.
Reality is a mental construct. This is what makes the elephant, the bat, the dolphin, the octopus, and the star-nosed mole so intriguing. They have senses that we either don’t have, or that we have in a much less developed form, making the way they relate to their environment impossible for us to fathom. They construct their own realities.
In captivity, octopuses react to us in ways that we find hard not to anthropomorphize. One octopus was fond of raw chicken eggs—each day it would accept an egg and break it to suck out its contents. One day, however, this octopus accidentally received a rotten egg. Upon noticing, it shot the egg’s smelly remains over the edge of its tank back at the surprised human from whom it had received it.
Octopuses have an odd life cycle. Most live only one or two years, which is unusual for an animal with their brainpower. They grow fast while trying to stay away from predators until they have a chance to mate and reproduce, after which they die. They stop eating, lose weight, and go into senescence.25 This is the stage about which Aristotle observed: “after giving birth … [they] become stupid, and are not aware of being tossed about in the water, but it is easy to dive and catch them by hand.”
The deep irony of animals calling one another by name is, of course, that it was once taboo for scientists to name their animals. When Imanishi and his followers started doing so, they were ridiculed, as was Goodall when she gave her chimps names like David Greybeard and Flo. The complaint was that by using names we were humanizing our subjects. We were supposed to keep our distance and stay objective, and to never forget that only humans have names.
Brains adapt to ecological requirements, as does cognition.
How much more refreshing was David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who held animals in such high esteem that he wrote that “no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men.”
’Tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform, that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours; and the same principle of reasoning, carry’d one step farther, will make us conclude that since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes, from which they are deriv’d, must also be resembling. When any hypothesis, therefore, is advanc’d to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both.
