In the study of animal behavior, this means following each and every move of the species one is interested in, preferably under a wide range of circumstances. Behavior makes sense only in the larger context of the animal's natural history, social organization, general temperament, adaptations to its environment, and so on. One cannot expect predators to react the same as prey, solitary animals the same as social ones, visionoriented animals the same as those relying on sonar, and so on.
I came across an amusing illustration in the scientific literature of the pitfalls for those who fail to pay attention to the whole animal. In 1979 Bruce Moore and Susan Stuttard reported a replication of a 1946 study widely cited as demonstrating the ability of cats to work their way out of a puzzle box, a container whose door was operated by moving a rod. The earlier study, done by Edwin Guthrie and George Horton, documented in great detail how cats rubbed against the interior of the box with stereotyped movements. In the process, they moved the rod and escaped. Guthrie and Horton had deemed it significant that all the cats in the experiment showed the same rubbing pattern, which they believed they had taught the animals through the use of food as rewards. This proved the power of conditioning.
When Moore and Stuttard repeated the experiment, their cats' behavior struck them as nothing special. The cats performed the usual head-rubbing movements that all felines, from ocelots to jaguars, use in greeting and courting. Domestic cats often redirect these movements to inanimate objects, such as the legs of a kitchen table. Moore and Stuttard showed that food rewards were absolutely irrelevant: the only meaningful factor for the cats in the box was the visibility of people. Without training, every cat that saw people while in the box rubbed its head, flank, and tail against the rod and got out. Cats who didn't see people just sat there. Instead of a learning experiment, the 1946 study had been a greeting experiment!24
The lesson is painfully obvious: before testing an animal, one needs to know a bit about its typical behavior. Yet behaviorists of the old school thought of animals as interchangeable. They rea soned that if the laws of learning are universal, one animal is as good as another. As B. F. Skinner, one of the founders of the discipline, bluntly put it in A Case History in Scientific Method: "Pigeon, rat, monkey, which is which? It doesn't matter."r
Laboratory approaches to animal behavior sometimes overlook natural patterns of behavior, such as the affectionate headrubbing of cats against the leg of a favorite human companion. (Gravure based on a drawing by T. W. Wood in Charles Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872).
Behaviorism started losing its grip, and was forced to adopt the premises of evolutionary biology, with the discovery that learning is not the same for all situations and species. In the best-known example, John Garcia reported that rats, which normally link actions with effects only if one immediately follows the other, are able to learn to avoid foods that make then sick even with a delay of hours between consumption and the negative sensation. Apparently, animals are specialized learners, being best at contingencies important for survival. Needless to say, if natural selection has shaped what is being learned, and what is not, the interchangeability of animal species is in trouble.26
In the old view, differences in intelligence were nothing else than differences in learning ability. Some animals have larger brains than others, which means that they learn faster, but reward and punishment still motivate all animals. But is a monkey brain really no more than an expanded rat brain, and is the human brain no more than a large monkey brain? Wouldn't it be surprising if evolutionary adaptation affects every anatomical feature one can think of-from limbs and teeth to stomach, eyes, and lungs-except for the brain?Z7 If this were the case, the species with the largest brain would be superior in every respect.
This is clearly not so. Pigeons, for example, do better than humans at mentally rotating visual images, and some birds have an amazing memory for the location of hidden objects. Clark's nutcrackers store up to 33,000 seeds in caches distributed over many square kilometers and find most of the caches again months later.28As someone who occasionally forgets where he has parked an item as large and significant as his car, I am impressed by these peanut-brained birds.
Smoke and Mirrors
Biologists readily accept that the ability to recall locations makes perfect sense for an animal that relies on stored food, but to this date such specializations annoy behaviorists. And so, when Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at the State University of New York at Albany, demonstrated in a 1970 article a cognitive gap between apes and all the rest of the animal kingdom, including monkeys, his findings were sufficiently upsetting that two generations of behaviorists have broken their teeth on them.29
Gallup noticed that chimpanzees and monkeys respond differently to mirrors. Like most other animals, a monkey reacts to its reflection as if it were a friend or enemy, whereas an ape appears to realize that the image in the mirror is itself. Chimpanzees soon use the mirror to inspect parts of their bodies that are normally out of sight, such as the inside of their mouths or (in the case of females) their swollen pink behinds. Anyone who has ever seen an ape do this realizes that the animal is not simply opening its mouth or turning around accidentally: the ape's eyes closely monitor the movements of its body in the mirror.
To corroborate the observational evidence, Gallup designed an elegant experiment in which chimpanzees needed a mirror to detect a small change in body appearance. Known as the mark test, the experiment consists of painting a dot above the eyebrow of an anesthetized animal. Once the animal wakes up, it is shown a mirror. It cannot see the dot directly, but can detect its presence only in the mirror. In these experiments, the ape would stare at the dot in the mirror, then bring a finger to the real dot on its own face and inspect the finger afterward-a clear sign that the animals linked their reflections to themselves. Apart from humans and apes, no other animals have convincingly passed this test, despite valiant efforts by many scientists.
Gallup spoke provocatively of self-awareness, and of the mental uniqueness of the hominoids, the family of animals made up of apes and humans. This triggered one of the greatest travesties in behavioral science: an attempt to demonstrate the same ability in pigeons. Surely, if pigeons have self-awareness, these critics reasoned, the quality can't be so special. In 1981, B. F. Skinner and colleagues reported that, with enough trials, food rewards, and patience, they had managed to get pigeons to recognize themselves in a mirror. The birds pecked at dots projected onto their bodies, dots the birds could not see directly because they had bibs around their necks. A marvel of conditioning, no doubt, but the experiment did not convince many people that what these birds were doing after extensive human intervention was the same as what chimpanzees do spontaneously, without any help. Furthermore, attempts to replicate the results have remained suspiciously unsuccessful.30
Fifteen years later, another skeptical behaviorist tried a different approach. Cecilia Heyes, who was making a name for herself in Great Britain as a critic of the growing field of apeintelligence studies, zoomed in on apes' responses to mirrors. Without the benefit of familiarity with primates, she came up with the creative suggestion that self-recognition might be a by-product of the anesthesia that is part of the mark test. Perhaps a chimpanzee recovering from anesthesia has a tendency to touch its own face in a random manner that pro duces occasional contacts with the dot. What other scientists had interpreted as self-inspection guided by a mirror might be a mere accident.
Heyes's idea was quickly disproved by an experiment in which Daniel Povinelli and his colleagues at the New Iberia Research Center carefully recorded which areas of the face chimpanzees touched in the mark test, and how soon after recovery from the anesthesia. They found that the touching is far from random: it is specifically targeted at the marked areas, and it peaks right after the ape's exposure to the mirror. This is, of course, exactly what the experts had been claiming all along, but now it was official.
What makes critics such as Heyes un
fathomable to me is their total absence of humility when faced with a group of animals they have never worked with. Behaviorists really do believe that they can generalize from rats and pigeons to all other species. But their "which is which?" approach to the diversity of life, and their talk of higher and lower forms, is essentially pre-Darwinian: it ignores the fact that every animal is a unique product of natural selection in both body and mind. Only those scientists who try to learn everything there is to know about a particular animal have any chance of unlocking its secrets. All others will keep tripping over the cat.
And so we return to scientists who erect no artificial barriers between themselves and other life forms, who respect animals sufficiently to realize that they can catch only a glimpse of what makes them tick, and who are not afraid to identify with them, project emotions onto them, or trust their own intuitions about them rather than relying on preconceived notions.
To test the claim that chimpanzees randomly touch their face after recovery from anesthesia in front of a mirror, Povinelli and co-workers compared the number of contacts made with marked areas (black) with those directed at control areas (white). It was found that chimpanzees specifically target the marked areas, meaning that they are able to link their mirror image with their face. (Drawing by Donna Bierschwale, courtesy of the University of Louisiana-Lafayette, Cognitive Evolution Group).
I often see a parallel with so-called computer geeks. In the same way that some kids love animals, others spend all their time clicking away at computers, playing electronic games, browsing the World Wide Web, testing software, and so on. A few lucky people with this inclination are now highly visible billionaires, but they didn't start out with wealth in mind. They were just obsessed with the technology. Similarly, ethol ogists and naturalists are driven by a power beyond their control to work with animals, watching them for inordinate amounts of time. Their science follows naturally. The only difference, sadly, is that they never get rich.
The study of animal behavior is among the oldest of human endeavors. As hunter-gatherers, our ancestors needed intimate knowledge of flora and fauna, including the habits of their prey as well as the animals that prey on humans. The humananimal relationship must have been relatively egalitarian during this period.32 Hunters exercise little control: they need to anticipate the moves of their prey and are impressed by the animals' cunning if they escape. A more practical kind of knowledge became necessary when our ancestors took up agriculture and began to domesticate animals for food and muscle power. Animals became dependent on us and subservient to our will. Instead of anticipating their moves, we began to dictate them.
Both perspectives are recognizable today in the study of animal behavior, and, to be successful, we need both the observer/hunter and the experimenter/farmer. But whereas the first can exist without the second, the second gets into all sorts of trouble without the first.
Are We in Anthropodenial?
The human hunter anticipates the moves of his prey by attributing intentions and taking an anthropomorphic stance when it comes to what animals feel, think, or want. Somehow, this stance is highly effective in getting to know and predict animals. The reason it is in disrepute in certain scientific circles has a lot to do with the theme of this book, which is how we see ourselves in relation to nature. It is not, I will argue, because anthropomorphism interferes with science, but because it acknowledges continuity between humans and animals. In the Western tradition, this attitude is okay for children, but not for grown-ups.
In one of my explorations of this issue, I ended up in Greece with a distinguished group of philosophers, biologists, and psychologists. 33 The ancient Greeks believed that the center of the universe was right where they lived. On a sundrenched tour of the temple ruins in the foothills of Mount Parnassus, near Delphi, we saw the omphalos (navel) of the world-a large stone in the shape of a beehive-which I couldn't resist patting like a long-lost friend. What better location to ponder humanity's position in the cosmos? We debated concepts such as the anthropic principle, according to which the presence of human life on earth explains why the universe is uniform in all of its directions. Next to this idea, the Greek illusion of being at the navel of the world looks almost innocent. The theme of our meeting, the problem of anthropomorphism, related very much to the self-absorbed attitude that has spawned such theories.
Anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism are never far apart: the first is partly a "problem" due to the second. This is evident if one considers which descriptions of animal behavior tend to get dismissed. Complaints about anthropomorphism are common, for example, when we say that an animal acts intentionally, that is, that it deliberately strives toward a goal. Granted, intentionality is a tricky concept, but it is so equally for humans and animals. Its presence is as about as hard to prove as its absence; hence, caution in relation to animals would be entirely acceptable if human behavior were held to the same standard. But, of course, this is not the case: cries of anthropomorphism are heard mainly when a ray of light hits a species other than our own.
Let me illustrate the problem with an everyday example. When guests arrive at the Field Station of the Yerkes Primate Center, near Atlanta, where I work, they usually pay a visit to my chimpanzees. Often our favorite troublemaker, a female named Georgia, hurries to the spigot to collect a mouthful of water before they arrive. She then casually mingles with the rest of the colony behind the mesh fence of their compound, and not even the sharpest observer will notice anything unusual. If necessary, Georgia will wait minutes with closed lips until the visitors come near. Then there will be shrieks, laughs, jumps, and sometimes falls when she suddenly sprays them.
Georgia performs this trick predictably, and I have known quite a few other apes that were good at surprising people, naive and otherwise. Heini Hediger, the great Swiss zoo biologist, recounts how even when he was fully prepared to meet the challenge, paying attention to the ape's every move, he never theless got drenched by an experienced old chimpanzee. I once found myself in a similar situation with Georgia. She had taken a drink from the spigot and was sneaking up to me. I looked straight into her eyes and pointed my finger at her, warning, in Dutch, "I have seen vou!" She immediately stepped back, let some of the water fall from her mouth, and swallowed the rest. I certainly do not wish to claim that she understands Dutch, but she must have sensed that I knew what she was up to, and that I was not going to be an easy target.
Georgia's actions are most easily described in terms of human qualities such as intentions, awareness, and a taste for mischief. Yet some scientists feel that such language is to be avoided. Animals don't make decisions or have intentions; they respond on the basis of reward and punishment. In their view, Georgia was not "up to" anything when she spouted water on her victims. Far from planning and executing a naughty plot, she merely fell for the irresistible reward of human surprise and annoyance. Thus, whereas any person acting like her would be scolded, arrested, or held accountable, some scientists would declare Georgia innocent.
Such knee-jerk rejections of anthropomorphism usually rest on lack of reflection on how we humans go about understanding the world. Inevitably, we ourselves are both the beginning and end of such understanding. Anthropomorphism-the term is derived from the Greek for "human form"-has enjoyed a negative reputation ever since Xenophanes objected to Homer's poetry in 570 B.c. because it treated the gods as if they were people. How could we be so arrogant as to think that they should look like us? If horses could draw pictures, Xenophanes joked, they would no doubt make their gods look like horses. Hence the original meaning of anthropomorphism is that of misattribution of human qualities to nonhumans, or at least overestimation of the similarities between humans and nonhumans. Since nobody wants to be accused of any kind of misattribution or overestimation, this makes it sound as if anthropomorphism is to be avoided under all circumstances.
Modern opposition to anthropomorphism can be traced to Lloyd Morgan, a British psychologist, who dampened enthusiasm for liber
al interpretations of animal behavior by formulating, in 1894, the perhaps most quoted statement in all of psychology: "In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty, if it can be interpreted as the outcome of the exercise of one which stands lower on the psychological scale."34 Generations of psychologists have repeated Morgan's Canon, taking it to mean that the safest assumption about animals is that they are blind actors in a play that only we understand. Yet Morgan himself never meant it this way: he didn't believe that animals are necessarily simpleminded. Taken aback by the one-sided appeals to his canon, he later added a rider according to which there is really nothing wrong with complex interpretations if an animal species has provided independent signs of high intelligence. Morgan thus encouraged scientists to consider a wide array of hypotheses in the case of mentally more advanced animals.35
Unfortunately, the rider is not nearly as well known as the canon itself. In a recent assault on the "delusions" of anthropomorphism in the behavioral sciences, John Kennedy proudly holds up the behaviorist tradition as the permanent victor over naive anthropomorphism. He confidently claims in The New Anthropomorphism: "Once a live issue, a butt for behaviorists, it [anthropomorphism] now gets little more than an occasional word of consensual disapproval." In almost the same breath, however, the author informs us that "anthropomorphic thinking about animal behaviour is built into us. We could not abandon it even if we wished to. Besides, we do not wish to."36
This seems illogical. On the one hand, anthropomorphism is part and parcel of the way the human mind works. On the other hand, we have all but won the battle against it. But how did we overcome an irresistible mode of thinking? Did we really manage to do so, or is this a behaviorist delusion?
The Ape And The Sushi Master Reflections Of A Primatologist Page 5