Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (46 page)

As noted in
Chapter 1
, the concept of mind as we human beings experience it—that is, mediated by symbolic language and carrying a cogent essence of self-awareness—has for many people come to represent an unbreachable boundary between humans and nonhumans. Man stands safely on his side of the wall, declaring his separateness from the rest of nature. In part he has done so because the societies he has constructed have isolated animals from his daily existence. Animals no longer share the forest or the plains with us and only through the medium of television can we be impressed by the ways in which they cope with life. In most zoos and laboratories, it is difficult for animals to engage in behavior that displays intelligence, as their food is provided for them and their social groups are temporary, making it difficult, if not impossible, for them to establish traditions.

When we take animals such as dogs into our homes, they often seem to do things that appear intelligent, but scientists are taught, early in their career, to beware of any interpretations that smack of anthropomorphism—the fear is that the intelligence may be in the eyes of the observer rather than in the mind of the animal. By labeling most interesting descriptions of animal behavior as anthropomorphic anecdotes, we unwittingly eliminate the need for serious scientific attempts to understand such behavior. That is, by assuming that the complex and interesting behavior is in the mind of the observer rather than the
animal, it becomes the human observer rather than the animal that we seek to understand.

But perhaps the deeper reason we so readily declare our uniqueness from animals is to assure ourselves that we are indeed reasoning creatures with a culture created by our own hand and mind. By setting ourselves apart from animals, we experience some small measure of safety. If we
Homo sapiens
are truly different by virtue of reason, we can look to reason to protect us from falling into the trap of reacting instinctively and losing the evolutionary game. When we look at animals we do not see cities or villages or agriculture or possessions—and their way of life does not look like that to which we would aspire, no matter how much we enjoy watching movies of wildlife. Therefore, it is comforting to assume that we have reason and culture by nature and that these abilities will always keep us from returning to any sort of animal state.

But at the expense of gaining some comfort in our ability to plan our future, we risk alienating ourselves psychologically from all of the other creatures on this planet. After all, we have all evolved together. As a species, we are just beginning to understand that it is our view of separateness that has led us blindly to exploit the world of nature, be it by destroying natural habitats or performing experiments on animals with insufficient concern for the effect of these actions either upon the animals or upon ourselves as moral beings.

It is becoming increasingly evident, not only from work with apes, but from studies of species as varied as dolphins, parrots, sea lions, elephants, and wolves, that man has deluded himself by focusing on this separateness. As we come to understand other animals better, our current notion of human uniqueness will likely change and we will realize that future generations may view us as having looked at animals through a distorted lens, much as we now look back at the early explorers who thought that different races of man reflected different levels of evolution.

To recognize the connection between our intellect and mind and those of other creatures on our common planet, we must permit ourselves to ask questions in a careful and serious
way about behaviors that reflect animal intelligence in complex situations. As we begin to do so, we will have to alter our focus from the test paradigms that closet our thoughts. These closet paradigms are experimentally correct, but their very structure limits the behavioral options animals may exhibit to an array of simple responses. Such limitations, carried out for the purpose of upholding the scientific method and preventing self-deception, have unwittingly forced the egregiously erroneous conclusion that animals show little capacity for what we call inference, insight, reasoning, or thought.

These closet paradigms came about as post-Darwinian inquiries into behavior sought to follow the models set by physics and chemistry. But behavior can never be successfully understood using these models. Living organisms, as subjects of treatments, are not the same from one test to another. Each action upon a living organism alters it in some manner, making it impossible to recreate the former conditions. Researchers have tried to get around this fact by repeating the stimulus presentation until the behavior is stable. Unfortunately, this technique serves only to create the illusion of control over behavior. In fact, it manufactures an artificial situation that limits the options available to the animal and thereby causes it to appear to be under the control of the stimulus. A more fundamental problem arises when researchers attempt to follow the models of physics and chemistry by concentrating on the antecedents of one or two behaviors or even a set of replicable behaviors. Such attempts assume that behaviors can be mixed and matched something like a set of chemical elements, and that an orderly and predictable reaction will follow. Unlike chemicals, behaviors cannot be reasonably separated from the entire context in which they occur. That context encompasses both the actions of the animal across time and the events within the environment across time. Indeed, behavior is fundamentally a time-based phenomenon.

Behavior is nothing more than, and nothing less than, changes in patterns of action that take place only in the domain of time. Chemical reactions by contrast, though they may require time, are transmutations of inanimate compounds in the
spatial domain. That is, they are structural alterations that manifest themselves on a physical plane. Behaviors manifest themselves on the temporal plane. While they may require chemical alterations within the nervous system to drive them, the patterns of behavior are neither explainable nor fully predictable by those chemical reactions—for they are always in a constant state of flux as responses to the changing environment that surrounds the organism.

For most organisms with a complex nervous system, the world is experienced as a constantly altering series of events. Though some events may seem similar to previous experiences, in the real world, unlike the laboratory, they are never really the same. The organism must constantly adjust to a new state of affairs and select the behavioral options that are most appropriate. Decisions that put certain options into play will themselves alter the range of options available in the immediate and distant future. All organisms with complex nervous systems are faced with the moment-by-moment question that is posed by life: What shall I do next?

The world out there is never precisely the same from one moment to the next; consequently, the behavior that occurs in response to perceived events can never be the same, nor should it be, if the organism is functioning in a normal manner. Only when behavior becomes abnormal do organisms engage in repetitive patterns of behavior that do not take into account the constant environmental changes around them. When we see this happen, we call such patterns stereotypies and recognize that they are abnormal. Yet, in our attempts to follow the models of physics and chemistry, many laboratory studies of behavior unwittingly create behaviors that are analogous to stereotypies. In our attempts to present the same stimulus conditions across repeated trials, we destroy the very phenomenon we set out to study.

As long as behavioral scientists follow in the footsteps of Descartes, assuming that nonhuman animals are merely robots made of meat and bone, they will refuse to give up their paradigms built upon the methods of physics and chemistry.

Using these models, they will continue to come up with
experimentally solid and verifiable scientific data to support their initial hypothesis. Indeed, their very goal will be to design experiments to support these hypotheses. In so doing, behavioral scientists do not, as did Einstein, look and wonder at physical phenomena out there in the world. By the design of their laboratory and their apparatus, they inadvertently create the animals’ physical world, thereby limiting the potential responses even before they frame their hypothesis. It would be as if Einstein had designed space and time and, having done so, arrived at the theory of relativity and then decided to test it.

The physical world that surrounds us is of a different order from the animal world. The greater the degree of development of the nervous system, the more these two worlds differ in kind. The purpose of complex nervous systems is to permit flexible actions, unique to each situation. To the extent that organisms take in environmental information and make decisions about future actions, they become increasingly different from inanimate matter and require different paradigms for their study.

Once organisms have developed nervous systems sufficiently complex to postulate presumed goals and/or intentions for other living creatures, a world based on the moment-by-moment interpretations of the intent of others will arise. That is, it will be the presumed intent behind the behavior, rather than the specific actions themselves, that will mold the response of the observer. Certainly, humans and apes have entered the world of interpreted intent, and I suspect that a number of other animals have done so as well.

Some students of animal behavior have sought to escape the limitations posed by the laboratory by engaging in fieldwork. They rightly argue that by observing an animal in its natural habitat, one does not arbitrarily constrain the range of options available to it. The view that the behavior of animals is fundamentally different from that of man nonetheless manages to hold sway, even among those who do field observations. This is, in part, because a special language has been devised to
describe and label behaviors of animals in nature. This devised language carefully avoids using any terms that we would apply to similar human behaviors. The taboo against using terms reserved for humans to describe the behavior of animals becomes most apparent when we observe apes. If a chimpanzee frowns and presses his lips together in a display of anger, either feigned or real, fieldworkers do not say he was mad; they say he displayed a bulged lips face. When he smiles and hugs another animal after a fisticuffs, they say he displayed an open-mouth bared-teeth grin and an arm around. Field researchers are admonished to speak in this manner in order to avoid the bugbear of anthropomorphism—the act of attributing human emotions to animals.

Consequently, out of fear that we might see a humanlike emotion where it does not exist, we design ways of speaking that permit us to talk about animal behavior without attributing any humanlike emotion to the animals whatsoever. We therefore approach the study of the animal mind with the unwritten assumption that it would be an error of the greatest magnitude if we were to conclude wrongly, in any circumstance, that an animal (even one that shares 99 percent of our DNA) felt as we do when angry or happy. Thus, even when we observe the animal in nature, the way we are taught as scientists to ask our questions, to structure our data, and to discuss what we see, constrains the conclusions we permit ourselves to find.

What if we were to assume at least partial continuity of emotional expression and intelligence between animals and man and thus permit ourselves to talk about animal behavior in a new light? We might risk the error of sometimes attributing capacities that did not exist, but we would surely find humanlike capacities that do exist but are currently hidden from us by the blinders we press over our eyes. Would the error of sometimes erroneously attributing capacities that did not exist be greater than that of never discovering any emotional or intellectual capacities that were continuous with our own? I think not. At the very least, if one scientist made a mistake and attributed some capacity to an animal that was far beyond its true ability, another scientist would come along and correct this mistake. As
the situation currently stands, we don’t even have the right to make the mistake. We should be able to ask questions about how animals perceive their worlds, their roles in those worlds, and what kinds of events or relationships alter these perceptions. It seems to me that this is what a science of animal behavior should be about.

I am not the first to suggest that we need to look at animal behavior through a different lens. Donald Griffin has been urging us to do so since the 1970s. Why are so many behavioral scientists still unable to break out of their constraints? The problem lies in part in the omniscience we attribute to the human mind, an omniscience that we believe is made possible by the gift of language. Even students of behavior who would not deny minds to animals nonetheless maintain there is no way of gaining access to the animal mind; consequently, they believe the issue is, like that of religious experience, beyond science. I suggest that we expand our ways of doing science to encompass such questions.