More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The credo of experimental science remains that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If we fail to find a capacity in a given species, our first thought ought to be “Did we overlook something?” And the second should be “Did our test fit the species?”
It occurred to no one that perhaps we, the investigators, didn’t get the elephant. Like the six blind men, we keep turning around and poking the big beast, but we need to remember that, as Werner Heisenberg put it, “what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”
It takes human ingenuity indeed to know how smart an animal is. It also takes respect.
Would anyone test the memory of human children by throwing them into a swimming pool to see if they remember where to get out? Yet the Morris Water Maze is a standard memory test used every day in hundreds of laboratories that make rats frantically swim in a water tank with high walls until they come upon a submerged platform that saves them.
No one has ever proposed permanent food deprivation for university students.
To learn! Yet, scientists do it to animals all the time to test their overall intelligence and abilities to learn and remember. What a farce!
Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early critic of the hunger reduction model. He argued that intelligent animals learn mostly through curiosity and free exploration, both of which are likely killed by a narrow fixation on food.
