Do Animals Think?
Rebecca Lann
http://www.dooneyscafe.com/stories.php?story=04/04/23/8458681
by Stan Persky -- The answer to the title question of Clive Wynne's
book, "Do Animals Think?", is: Not very much. I mention this right off
the bat not only to dispel unnecessary suspense but because Wynne, a
University of Florida psychology prof and the author of an earlier
textbook on animal cognition, writes so charmingly about the behaviour
of honeybees, bats, pigeons, and dolphins that one almost forgets that
for considerable stretches of Do Animals Think? he says very little
about thinking at all.
But his survey of what we do and don't know about non-human animal
thinking and doing is a useful antidote to widespread sentimentality
about what goes on in the brains of birds, beasts, and the rest of us.
Students in the first-year university philosophy classes that I teach
often believe that their dogs, cats, budgies, and goldfish are
thinking pretty much the same thoughts they are.
Unfortunately, some of them are right, I point out—but I point it out
only when I'm in a grumpy mood.
Wynne, a peripatetic academic who grew up on the Isle of Wight, begins
his consideration of animal minds by noting the wide "range of
attitudes in our society toward animals," from moral extremists to
mindless burger-consumers. He recalls that in the early 1990s, his
native outcropping, one of the sleepier of the British Isles, was
awakened by a series of bombings set off by a nutty animal rights
activist named Barry Horne. Wynne's point is that Horne represents the
extreme of false certainty about the nature of animals and their
treatment by humans. Such people are so certain of their beliefs that
they're prepared to blow up those who disagree—an extremism hardly
confined to animal rights issues, of course. (Horne, by the way, died
in prison in 2001, while on a hunger strike against animal
experimentation, thus proving once again that fervent sincerity is not
a guarantee of good sense.) Wynne, who actually knows a lot about
animals, is much less certain about the natural world. At his
broadest, he asks: "Are we human beings alone on this planet in our
consciously thinking minds, or are we surrounded by knowers whose
thoughts are just too alien for us to understand?" Or as Wittgenstein
famously suggested, If a lion were to speak, we would not understand
what it said.
Wynne also notes, "Human beings have always lived among other species,
and we fret, now perhaps more than ever, over the correct way to deal
with them."
Part of the reason we fret is because of the moral questions about
human (and inhumane) treatment of non-human animals, questions first
raised in the early 1970s by philosopher Peter Singer in his book
Animal Liberation, which spawned a movement for animal rights. But an
equally important reason for our interest in the question that Wynne
asks is that we're interested in the nature of human being, and we
think that the answers to questions about non-human minds might tell
us something about human ones. That line of thought has gathered
increasing momentum in the past half-century as more of us have come
to believe that minds and thinking are natural features of embodied
human brains rather than supposing that immaterial substances, souls
or divine agency are involved in the process of producing words and
thoughts.
Although people are fascinated by animals, Wynne observes, not many of
them know much about animals or about the scientific work of the last
century to improve our understanding of animal minds. In place of
knowledge, there are lots of urban and jungle legends. "If I had a
penny for every time I have been told that chimpanzees are genetically
as nearly identical to us as makes no difference and, given
appropriate training, can communicate in human language," Wynne says,
"I would have a great pile of small change." Ditto for tales about
dolphins using "an elaborate language among themselves that we are not
smart enough to decode," to say nothing of whale songs, weeping
elephants, and loyal hounds. "What I want to do," Wynne proposes, "is
sweep all the debris of traditional views of animals, now mixed up
with mauled science, right off the table and start again—that is,
start with the reliable knowledge we have of what animals do."
Wynne's schema for thinking about all this, which employs the awkward
metaphor of a "similarity sandwich," is a three-level distinction of
differences and similarities between human and non-human animals. "The
bottom layer is a layer of dissimilarity," he explains. Each species
has unique sensory capabilities, from the sonar of bats and dolphins,
to the ultraviolet light seen by birds, and the sensitivity to
electric and magnetic fields experienced by some fish. "The obscure
Australian duck-billed platypus can tell if a battery has any current
left in it," Wynne notes in one of dozens of oddball factoids he
provides, then deadpans, "though there are easier methods of testing
batteries." The point is to recognize the diversity of the animal
kingdom at this level.
The middle layer of Wynne's sandwich, an admittedly squishy layer
(more like cream cheese than ham, Wynne says), refers to "basic
psychological processes like learning and some kinds of memory, along
with simple forms of concept formation, such as identifying objects as
being the same or different from other objects… All of these seem to
be common to a wide range of species and to operate in similar ways in
animals as diverse as chicks and chimpanzees."
At the top level we return to dissimilarity. "After forty years of
trying we can say definitively that no nonhuman primate (or any other
species) has ever developed anything equivalent to human language,"
Wynne reports. Unlike humans, "even chimpanzees, though they may
recognize themselves in mirrors, are very slow to understand the
motives of other individuals. They seem no better able to place
themselves imaginatively into the shoes (or paws or hoofs) of another
individual than are autistic children. This is a very surprising fact,
and one that animal behaviour scientists have been reluctant to face
up to. There really is a difference between humans and other animals.
A pretty big difference." Since this a controversial claim, it's a
topic that Wynne takes up later in some detail, making his way through
the findings of primate language acquisition studies, whose modest
conclusions turn out to be far from the enthusiastic popular accounts
of tool-using, sign-language conversant chimps.
Though humans are distinct, if not utterly unique, Wynne is not at all
suggesting that some "divine intervention separates us humans from all
the rest of creation. In denying human-style language to any other
species, I am not sneaking back in some special vital spark in the
human case, I am not trying to lift humans up from the beasts and
closer to God… To admit that humans are different does not return them
to the centre of the universe." That is, Wynne is a straightforward
Darwinian and, like thinkers including Daniel Dennett, Richard
Dawkins, and Owen Flanagan, is prepared to argue that evolutionary
development is the best explanation of human intelligence and
communication capacities.
Do Animals Think? contains a series of intermittent chapters in which
Wynne describes and enthusiastically marvels over honeybee hive life,
bat echolocation techniques, and pigeon homing methods. Along the way,
he tells engaging stories of how various scientists figured out what
we know about these behaviours. Although minuscule bee brains, and
those of birds and bats (the smallest of mammals) are apparently
capable of memory, communication, bits of learning, and rudimentary
reasoning, none of this activity approaches anything we would call
thinking.
Wynne has a bit of fun with philosopher Thomas Nagel's well-known 1974
essay (well-known, at least, in philosophy circles), "What Is It Like
to Be a Bat?", in which Nagel argues that we cannot know what it is
like to be a bat, even if we shut our eyes, make little squeaks, and
listen for the returning echoes, as we try to imagine ourselves
flapping our leathery batwings. As Wynne summarizes Nagel's argument,
"Bats have subjective experiences. But what these experiences feel
like to a bat, that is impossible for us to know. We could guess…
[but] our guesses would be reflections of our human concerns, not the
accounts bats would give of themselves." Later, Wynne twits Nagel by
asking, "What is it like to be a philosopher?" So, instead of
wondering about bat subjectivity and the impossibility of our
experiencing it, Wynne goes on to look at what we can and do know
about bats, which is considerable.
While I'm certainly in favour of having fun at the expense of
philosophers, Wynne's handling of Nagel points to some of the
weaknesses in Do Animals Think? In asking his odd question, what Nagel
was after is the irreducible subjectivity of consciousness, and his
point was that many philosophers tend to ignore the notion that "there
is something it is like" to be an X when they offer naturalist or
materialist accounts of minds and brains. Wynne tends not to say
enough about consciousness or brains in his book, nor does he really
ask, as philosopher Martin Heidegger repeatedly did, "What is
thinking?" That's not to say that Nagel's argument has secured
anything like agreement among philosophers and neuroscientists.
Probably a more relevant question for our concerns about how human
minds work (and what they feel) is something like, "What is it like to
be a person with Down's syndrome?" That is, such a question might tell
us something about how "normal" brains work by better understanding
the thinking of human brains damaged by Down's syndrome, and here at
least, we have the ability to acquire accounts of how the world is
experienced by such people. For instance, if some people with Down's
syndrome have difficulty understanding a bus schedule or a class
timetable, that might help us understand the kind of conceptualization
and reasoning performed by "normal" brains.
For most of the animal kingdom and nature, "red in tooth and claw," it
looks like instinct, or hardwiring with some adaptive capacities as we
would say nowadays, handles most of what in humans involves thinking.
And conversely, most of what humans think about doesn't occur to the
brains of non-human animals. In case there's any doubt about nature
being red in tooth and claw, Wynne provides a brief account of digger
wasp reproduction. One species of the wasp forgoes the time-consuming
task of digging holes to deposit their eggs, "and lays its egg
straight into the body of a mole cricket. The cricket is temporarily
paralyzed but quickly recovers and goes back about its business. After
a week or so, the tiny wasp larva emerges and feeds on the cricket
from inside out. Within a few weeks the grub is full grown, and the
mole cricket has been destroyed." It's not the subject of a Disney
animated movie, as far as I know.
The grisly habits of wasps is the example Wynne uses to recall the
work of French naturalist J. Henri Fabre, whose The Hunting Wasps
(1919) tells us most of what we need to know about animal hardwiring.
In a chapter called "The Wisdom of Instinct," Fabre describes (and
Wynne redescribes) the ingeniousness of the mother wasp's instinct for
provisioning her young. The wasp digs a burrow in which she deposits
the egg, then "the otherwise vegetarian adult wasp turns to insect
hunting solely to secure suitable food for her egg," catches the
insect (a beetle or locust), paralyzes but doesn't kill it with a
self-produced poison, puts it down at the lip of the burrow, goes in
to check that the egg and burrow are okay, returns to the burrow
mouth, drags in the paralyzed insect, then collects some tree resin to
seal the burrow, and flies away. The baby wasp emerges from the egg,
munches on the fresh meat of the paralyzed insect (if it died it would
be inedible), and digs out into the big world.
In the subsequent chapter, "The Ignorance of Instinct," Fabre says,
"The wasp has shown us how infallibly and with what transcendental art
she acts when guided by the unconscious inspiration of her instinct;
she is now going to show us how poor she is in resource, how limited
in intelligence, how illogical even, in circumstances outside her
regular routine."
When Fabre moved the paralyzed locust, even slightly, from the lip of
the birthing burrow while the wasp was inside inspecting it, when the
wasp came to the lip and noted the altered location of the insect, she
moved it back to the lip and then went back into the burrow to check
it out once more. "And she would repeat this inspection for as long as
Fabre could find the patience to test her; with each new disturbance,
the mother wasp repeated the inspection of her burrow." I seem to
remember reading elsewhere—I think it was Daniel Dennett's Elbow Room
(1984), which uses a similar example—that one sadistic researcher
repeated the business of moving the paralyzed prey some 40 times, and
each time the wasp went through the whole rigamarole.
Students in the philosophy classes I teach are only momentarily
persuaded by such examples. Invariably, they return to the question,
"But how do you know that Fido and Felix aren't thinking just like
us?" Well, I say, they give no evidence of such thinking in their
behaviour or in their communications, presumably because they don't
have the kind of brains that have evolved to do that sort of thing.
"But maybe they're thinking thoughts, anyway," they insist, perhaps
thinking of oppressed people under dictatorial regimes who have
thoughts they don't utter. "And maybe they have their own way of
communicating them," the students add, as prepared to entertain the
notion of animal psychic powers as they are to consider human
psychics. Even my concession that their pets are thinking about their
arrival home from school, and are happy to see them, and are thinking
about food, walks, taking a pee or digging up a well-remembered buried
bone, doesn't appear to satisfy them. They seem resentful that I deny
that their dogs and cats are pondering the prospects of the local
Vancouver hockey team to win the Stanley Cup this year.
That brings us to the central chapters of Wynne's book, the ones about
other primates, since they're the creatures who are the most likely
candidates for thinking. "I want to start," he says, "by considering
the various attempts that have been made over the last century and a
half to train animals to use human language. The critical question to
bear in mind is, Has any animal succeeded in learning an open-ended
language system like our own, or have other species only mastered
communication in a more closed manner…?" Wynne then reprises the
history of language acquisition efforts with chimpanzees and gorillas.
The notion of chimpanzee speech acquisition achieved a "colossal
breakthrough" in 1970 when two researchers, Allen and Beatrice Gardner
of the University of Oklahoma, taught a chimp named Washoe to use
about 125 Ameslan or deaf language signs. "Suddenly, what had been the
standard view was overturned," Wynne says. "Prior to the Gardners'
research, the prevailing position was that chimps were incapable of
learning human language because they lacked the specialized brain
structures that underpin its comprehension and production. With the
publication of Washoe's feats, the new received wisdom became that
chimpanzees only lacked the ability to speak." What happened after
that was curious. The story of Washoe passed into educated popular
wisdom, and it became a staple of urban legend. Even today, one can
find instances of the widespread assumption of chimp linguistic
capabilities. In a current issue of a philosophy magazine, the author
of an article about animal rights asks, "How can we really say that
other animals—especially the 'higher' mammals such as chimpanzees—do
not have their own set of verbal complexities unique to their
particular species? Only hubris could allow us to think this, given
the accumulating pile of evidence to the contrary." (Jeremy Yunt,
"Shock the Monkey," Philosophy Now, Jan.-Feb. 2004.)
It's the subsequent "pile of evidence" that is to the point. While the
signing chimp story passed into popular currency, other researchers
were discovering the limits of chimp language acquisition. Herbert
Terrace of Columbia University published Nim in 1979, an account of
his work with a chimpanzee he named Nim Chimpsky, with a little
intended malice toward linguist Noam Chomsky. Terrace began with a
predisposition favouring environmental factors in language learning as
opposed to the innate language acquisition mechanisms proposed by
Chomsky. At the end of several years' work with Nim, Terrace
concluded, according to Wynne, "that what Nim was doing had little to
do with language as we normally understand it. Instead… the chimps had
achieved a simpler form of learning: that making certain signs led to
certain consequences. The chimps had learned to produce certain arm
and hand movements to demand things they wanted: 'I do this; I get
that.'"
Terrace also noted several other limits to chimp learning. The
vocabulary acquired by apes, about 250 words over three or four years,
is pretty modest compared to human infant acquisition rates. The
chimps never experienced the "spurt" of language learning that occurs
in humans at about age two. Although there is a bit of controversy
about particular primates and their vocabularies, Wynne reminds
readers that "though it is always fashionable to bemoan the limited
vocabulary of contemporary youth, the average U.S. high school
graduate knows around 40,000 words." I'm not sure I've observed 40,000
word vocabularies in most of my students, but even a half or a quarter
of that puts it beyond mere quantitative comparison with Nim. Of
course, the argument about vocabulary size is subject to the objection
of the irrelevance of criticising dancing dogs, since the wonder is
that they can dance at all.
But while humans are stringing together little sentences at age 3,
"this never happened to Nim. The average length of his utterances
remained stuck at only a little over one word throughout his training
period." Even more important, neither Nim or any of the subsequent
language-acquiring chimps of the 1980s and 90s ever demonstrated
anything close to a minimal grasp of grammar. "And grammar," argues
Wynne, "is what makes the difference between being able to express a
number of ideas equal to the number of words you know and being able
to express any idea whatsoever." Grammar is what turns lexicons into
open-ended systems, and without it, you don't develop what we call
thinking. Yes, there's a little thinking going on in other primate
species, but not much. Wynne comes to similar conclusions about
non-human primate tool-use, self-identification and "culture." Yes,
there's a bit of it, "but on the other hand—how slight this culture
is."
"For all the excitement and all the TV documentaries," Wynne
concludes, "the so-called 'language-trained' apes have not learned
language… They sign or press buttons because doing so gets them what
they want. They can be drilled to string a couple of signs together
but usually can't be bothered. Although some of them have been in
training for decades, there is nothing to suggest that any of them
ever comprehend grammar. Grammar is the crucial lubricant that opens
language up from being limited by our vocabulary to being completely
infinite in its expressive possibilities." As Wynne says at another
point, "Without grammar there is no language." And maybe, without
language, there isn't much thinking.
Although my interest in the question of animal thinking is primarily
connected to questions of human consciousness and the nature of minds
and brains, most people are interested in the moral issues involved in
how humans treat animals. Wynne takes up the issue of animal rights at
the end of his book, particularly the demands made in the "Declaration
on Great Apes" by a number of respected thinkers who call for giving
other primates "legal personhood and some of the rights now reserved
for humans." This is a complicated debate whose details are beyond my
purview here. Wynne is, to my mind, appropriately skeptical about the
animal rights argument advanced by Peter Singer and others, and
appropriately sympathetic to a world view that regards other animals
as intrinsically valuable and deserving of protection against cruelty,
especially human cruelty.
Do Animals Think? is valuable because it is directed to general
readers—no specialized knowledge required to enjoy it. The writing is
lively, and Wynne is very helpful in debunking popular myths about
what goes on in animal brains, without in any way undercutting the
wonders of the natural world. His is the sort of book worth trying out
on students thinking about the philosophy of mind.
Copyright © 2002 Dooney's Cafe
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jennifers...@gmail.com
and i'm sure some animals are thinking more than us human beings who are stupid enough to spend all of their time on t.v and other useless things.