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If a Lion Could Talk: Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of Consciousness

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The point of this book is to "prove" that only people think. Anything a non-human, be it a bacteria or a gorilla, does that looks like thinking actually isn't. It's all programmed by evolution. He cites study after study to prove his point, even when the study appears not to prove it at all.

Some examples of anthropomorphism, of course, are clearly erroneous - the famous example of the counting horse, and the way evolution seems almost spooky in its apparent "intelligence." Certainly he's right in saying that it's hubris on our part to compare animals intelligence solely in terms of ours. And it's not very accurate either; at a wolf refuge in Washington state, called Wolf Haven, they tell you that researchers have determined that a German Shepherd dog is as intelligent as a 4-year old child, but a wolf is as intelligent as a 12-year old. There are very few four-year-olds, or 12-year olds, for that matter, who could survive and thrive in the wild, hunting their food successfully and finding safe places to sleep, avoiding predators and hunters along the way.

But then he jumps from those errors, with a few bashes at Decartes along the way, to the conclusion that only people think. There is little difference, he says, between the behavior of a simple computerized model of a cricket and a real cricket.

And, by extension, there's little difference between that computer toy and a chimpanzee, at least in terms of its behavior. Bernd Heinrich, in his fascinating book Mind of the Raven, discusses his frustration at being unable to publish articles with results that appear to demonstrate raven's abilities to figure out problems. It didn't matter how carefully he was able to construct the studies, and how accurate the results appeared, the scientific community doesn't want to hear it.

Certainly it's accurate (apparently) that only humans use language in any real sense, and much of what separates human behavior from the behavior or "lower" animals is that language and what it enables us to do. But that's not enough for him, he wants to have people be the only animals that think at all, and he goes through study after study to demonstrate this fact, whether the studies show that or not.

One example: a study had chimpanzees, pigeons, and college students look at a series of pictures of birds, to learn to pick out the kingfisher. Once they could do it, they got a second set of different bird pictures, from which they were supposed to identify the kingfisher. All three groups did very well on the test (80-90% right) but on interviewing the human participants, the researchers learned that they had simply been picking out the most colorful bird, rather than correctly identifying the kingfisher. So they reran the second part of the test, using brightly colored birds with the kingfisher pictures, and the scores of the apes, the pigeons, and the college students all dropped by about 10%. This proves, apparently, that animals can't think the way people do.

It's unfortunate, because he does make some very good points. For instance, the things which set apart human brain function from other animals: language, planning, playing chess, the ability to do mathematics, are precisely those things which computers can do well - in fact, far better than we -- while the things that "even animals" can do, such as recognizing a face, or navigating across a room without bumping into anything, computers have so far been almost perfect failures at. Although he doesn't say it, it seems pretty clear to me that this is an indication that we understand things like mathematics and language much better than we do our own ability to recognize faces. What you don't understand, you can't program.

So, if you want to be reassured that the "Tenko the Robotic Puppy" your child wants for Christmas this year is just the same as a real puppy, but without the walks and the droppings, this book is for you.

A new class of science writer has emerged in recent years. Where science journalism was once an effort to bring often arcane material to a wider reading public, there is a new approach - debunk science whenever possible. Budiansky, in his opening to this book, is quite open about his agenda. Science, particularly the studies of animal behaviour, is actually driven by New Age animal protection schemes. This must come as a shock to those who have spent years of field and laboratory work trying to understand why various animals, including humans, act as they do.

Budiansky takes us through numerous animal studies, particularly that of primates. His theme is begun with the story of a zoo gorilla who purported(ly?) "saved" a child. That the media hype over this story is based on the fallacious assumption that these huge animals are a threat to humans never seems to have occurred to him. He is only concerned over whether it is "natural" for gorillas to "save" children. Are scientists, as Budiansky charges, over enthusiastically applying human values to our animal relatives?

From a false starting point, he continues with copious accounts of behaviour studies. Each is presented as if the research teams had claimed far more than they actually have done. This is precisely the kind of selective quotations technique others have used in attempting to refute evolution by natural selection. It's the use of whole paddocks of straw creatures that clearly lack substance or value. It also demonstrates that Budiansky is devoid of understanding how science works. Research builds up snippets of information from a great deal of work. In cognition, we're still learning to ask the proper questions, never mind the completeness of the answers.

The book goes on to address the issues of animal "self-awareness", deception, forms of communication and, of course, pain. Since he's keen to refute those seeking greater protection for animals other than ourselves, it's important to Budiansky to limit any meaning to any of these concepts. The irony in all this is that he attributes other animals with talents such as mapping, distance assessment, deception, survival strategies and other attributes without granting these traits any real value. The book is filled with self-contradictions which neither Budiansky nor his editor appear to have noticed. It's as if the manuscript was typed, then rushed into print to meet a deadline.

Budiansky's "references" make abundantly clear that he's failed to consult the more prominent animal behaviourists. John Alcock, Thomas Eisner or Bernd Heinrich are noticeably absent from the list. He gives Seyforth and Cheney ["How Monkeys See the World"] lengthy coverage, only to lambaste them for misrepresenting their findings. He cites Daniel Dennett frequently, but in doing so simply adopts a limited definition of consciousness from what he's used elsewhere in the book. While he claims to have a handle on the evolutionary roots of behaviour, it's clear he has no real grasp of the development of cognition. When he arrives at language, of course, he soars with flowery rhetoric. There's no doubt that language gives humans a special cognitive ability. Does that thus relegate the rest of the animal kingdom to a subordinate role in life? Budiansky thinks so, and wants his readers to follow his lead. It's a false trail. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

This is a very slippery book on a very slippery subject. What Stephen Budiansky is trying to do is demonstrate from his reading of the literature, including experiments published in peer-reviewed journals, that there is a distinction to be made between the minds of humans and all other animals. Budiansky seems not to believe that intelligence and consciousness are matters of degree, but matters of threshold. Following philosopher Daniel Dennett he attributes this nearly absolute difference between us and them to our ability to use symbolic language.

The reason the subject is so slippery is that an adequate definition of both intelligence and consciousness is lacking. The reason the book is contentious naturally follows from this, but additionally Budiansky seems to have an agenda or, call it a thesis. He writes: "Consciousness is a wonderful gift and a wonderful curse that, all the evidence suggests, is not in the realm of the sentient experiences of other creatures." (p. 194)

How true or not his statement may be really depends on the definition of consciousness. Unfortunately Budiansky does not give one, and so all his conclusions about the differences in consciousness between humans and other creatures are murky at best. The closest he comes to a definition is on page 193 where he asserts that "...language is so intimately tied to consciousness that the two seem inseparable." Using this "definition" it is only a matter of demonstrating that animals do not have language in order to demonstrate that they don't have consciousness.

However even in this I don't think Budiansky is successful. Much of the book is given over to showing how so many experiments using chimps and monkeys, pigeons and dogs, etc., that seem to demonstrate that language use by animals is just signaling. This position is well known. The argument is that humans are the only animals with grammatical, syntactical and symbolic ability built into their brains. Other animals cannot construct sentences because they have no syntax. They have no "theory of mind" because they cannot think symbolically.

But this is not proven, as Budiansky acknowledges. What is obvious is that whatever language ability other animals have is rudimentary compared to that of humans. And almost everyone would agree that the consciousness demonstrated by animals varies considerably. By the way, here's a quick definition of consciousness: awareness, identify, and self-awareness. A lot of confusion results because when people talk about consciousness, one person may have in mind "awareness," while another may be talking about "self-awareness" only, or about "self-identity." Awareness includes past, present and future events, and places here and elsewhere. We are very good at all of this, whereas other creatures are apparently not so good at anything other than the here and now. Because of our extended awareness, people like Budiansky are persuaded that we are on a consciousness level above other animals that should be recognized as different in kind.

Notice, by the way, that the idea that consciousness depends on language is by this definition obviously false. Sentient beings can be aware of many things without using language. Also there are different kinds of languages. Budiansky is talking about the kind of language that linguists study, the kind of language that Norm Chomsky analyzed to come up with his discovery that syntax is innate. But mathematics is a language, and when mathematicians are thinking about equations, they are conscious to the same extent that I am when I am thinking about how to put an idea into a sentence. Ditto for chess players and musicians. The languages that humans use are of one kind. We do not yet understand the languages the whales and dolphins speak.

What I don't like about Budiansky's insistence on a difference in kind is that when you stop to think about it, such a difference would be surprising since all life forms on this planet as far as we know evolved from a single ancient ancestor--unless of course you believe in a divine and separate creation.

Some other points at issue:

Budiansky wants to debunk the idea that animals are "worthy of special consideration" because their "behavior resembles" that of humans (see, e.g., p. xiii). I agree. We should appreciate other living things for what they are and not for how much they resemble us.

Consider the example of a chimpanzee holding out her hand to another in an appeasement gesture only to attack the other when he got near. Budiansky writes that a "theory of mind" interpretation would be that the tricky female knew the male would be misled in approaching and took advantage. But the "behaviorist spoilsport" interpretation is that the female had done this in the past and it worked and so did it again without recourse to reading the other's mind. (p. 182) This example illustrates just how difficult it is to say what is going on in another's mind. Personally I think the notion of a "theory of mind" should stay in the philosophy department.

One of the things that Budiansky makes clear is why some animals cry out when a predator appears. (See Chapter 6, "Speak!") Such calls seem altruistic to the point of being impossible from an evolutionary perspective; however Budiansky shows that such cries actually help the crier because their pitch either fools the attacking hawk so that it looks in the wrong direction, or the calls bring out other victims who go running about, thereby confusing the attacker or giving the attacker targets other than the crier.

Another nice thing that Budiansky does is show in sharp detail that the language accomplishments of chimpanzees and gorillas in some famous studies reveal not so much a human-like ability, but demonstrate the great gulf that exists between our use of language and theirs, which is not the kind of truth some people want to read.

Stephen Budiansky begins this fascinating and mind-altering book by debunking a classic story of animal intelligence and near-human understanding. It's the 1996 account of the female gorilla in Chicago's Brookfield Zoo who picked up a little boy and protected him from other gorillas when he fell into their enclosure. As reported in the newspapers and shown on TV, the story made everyone believe that the gorilla had shown concern for the boy and, in a sense, made an inter-species contact, but it turns out that previously, prior to giving birth, she had been trained by her keepers in maternal care with a baby doll. As for the other gorillas, they were kept away from the scene of the accident by fire hoses shooting water at their feet. Budiansky's demolition of an appealing myth rudely challenges our consoling assumptions about animal behavior, intelligence and consciousness, and prepares us for a rigorous and unsentimental investigation of those very attributes.

The title of the book comes from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: "If a lion could talk, we would not understand him." And Budiansky, in a careful survey of a wide range of research, shows how far we are from understanding the thinking of other animals--how anthropomorphic assumptions infect our testing of them in the lab, how human logic influences our observations of them in the field, how sentimental emotions govern our treatment of them in the home. Parsing out the differences, he advances the provocative hypothesis that all animals have basically the same intelligence working to satisfy their needs, only working through different anatomies and modalities, and so appearing unequal to us. The horse, the pigeon and the fish do equally well with what they've got---hoof, wing and fin; they eat, mate and get around with equal skill. We tend to rate their intelligence not by their performance in their own domain, but by how well they respond to us, or how human their actions appear. We set up IQ tests for them that favor human attributes: visual acuity, manual dexterity and problem solving with geometrical shapes. Or we teach them varieties of sign language, which feed back our own symbols to us and may mean nothing to them.

Ultimately, no matter how refined the experiment, it seems impossible to get beyond the wall separating animals and man, chiefly because they do not speak and every experiment devised by man inserts the human element. A sort of biological uncertainty principle emerges in which the experimenter foils the experiment. Budiansky is left imagining that we are most like other species when we are performing but not talking to ourselves, enjoying the zen-state so desperately sought by hyper-conscious man. Animals, he concludes, have their own ways, their own dignity and beauty. (I saw no bashing of animal rights claimed by other reviewers.) He moves perhaps into a realm of philosophy, leaving the reader bereft of easy assumptions. You will see the world of nature in a new way after reading this scintillating work.

Post scriptum. Although Budiansky does not explore the issue, his study has devastating implications for both scientists and Trekkies hoping to make contact with aliens. If ever we were to discover extraterrestrials, our approach to them inevitably would embody the same human preconceptions. Even if they were close to us anatomically, the prospect of finding common ground for communication is scant. The DNA of a chimpanzee differs from that of a man by only a couple of percentage points, yet the main thing we have been able to learn from our closest kin is that they want another banana.

On page 108, Budiansky writes: "[Birds]can fly reliably in a preset compass direction...but many such birds have no mental map or spatial memory to go with this compass. If shifted laterally off course, they do not adjust their direction to keep heading toward their habitual wintering spot, but instead continue to fly on the same preset magnetic compass bearing--and they wind up displaced laterally from their destination."

This does not represent the findings of the largest bird migration study ever conducted, that by Dutch biologist A.C. Perdeck. Over the course of several years, Perdeck captured 11,000 migrating starlings at their autumn stopover sites in Britain and France. He ringed them and transported them by aircraft to Switzerland, 375 miles to the SE, where they were released. Perdeck found that juvenile birds that had never migrated before continued to fly on their original directional heading and ended up in southern France or Spain. Adults who had migrated before, however, reoriented themselves and flew via different headings to their normal wintering grounds in England and northern France.

Perdeck repeated the experiments with migrating chaffinches captured in Holland and released in Switzerland. Again, juvenile birds continued on with their original directional heading, SW, but adults reoriented and flew NW to their traditional wintering grounds in Britain. (In nature, the birds fly in mixed flocks of adults and juveniles.)

Budiansky doesn't footnote his statement and in the chapter notes only cites the general popular reference work, "The Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior," not even pointing to a specific article in this work. In other words, the source of the information for his statement is effectively obscured.

I am sympathetic to Budiansky's point of view, but I am very, very disappointed in the way he has presented his arguments. In short, his book is not a reliable report of research findings on animal "intelligence."

I'm a bit shocked by the seeming backlash to this work. So much so I'm going to read it again. I read it about 6 months ago and thought it was a fine piece of work.

I don't agree with all the authors conclusions, or even some of his definitions. But the book does one thing and it does it well.

It points out clearly just how careful we have to be in trying to infer conclusions from experiments. We are all subject to little soundbites on the news about this new fact or other coming from science, and yet we get no background on the methodolgies employed to arrive at these pronouncements of truth, the personal biases of the researchers or who has funded the research in the first place.

We are just encouraged to accept the new 'fact' and integrate it into our reptoire of knowledge. But as this book eloquently illustrates, if we shift perspective and rigourously subject the experimental methodology to the same degree of scientific scrutiny which we subject the phenomenon under the microscope we can often find that the results are less than definitive.

In the Behavioural Sciences, this is of supreme importance if the discipline is to provide society with valuable contributions to the knowledge base. For example, to train an animal to provide a response and to include stimuli which we recognise as numbers in that process does not mean the animal has any conception of the concept of number whatsoever. It just means the training has been effective. Replace the numbers with pictures of random objects and repeat the experiment, are the results the same? If the animal can be trained to replicate the same behaviour in the absence of numerical stimuli, the 'evidence' that a rabbit can count evaporates.

When I read his book, I sensed no 'agenda' which other reviewers are so vehemently convinced are the driving points of his motivation. Indeed I am forced to question if such emotionally driven responses to a simple book on general science are not the result of people being offended by his conclusions as opposed to being objective in their evaluation of the intent behind his work.

If you work in the behavioural sciences I strongly recommend that before you design your next experiment, you read this book and ask yourself if the behavioural test you are intending to conduct is going to provide you with insight into the animals behaviour, on its terms, not ours.

For the rest of us, if you have an objective interest in the application of the scientific method, then you'll find this book a damn good read.

You may not agree with SB, but you will appreciate the efforts he has made and enjoy the insights which are contained. Take these and develop your own conclusions and avoid the trap of soapboxing just because someone elses views are not aligned with your own.

Reading If A Lion Could Talk by Stephen Budiansky took a great deal of mental strength to resist the temptations to put the book down. It was not the messages that were at most weakly linked together that drove this desire to stop wasting my time, but the gross generalizations and incessantly closed minded nature of the author. This alone made reading the dialogue a painful experience. The book's cover is probably the best thing about it. Sadly, Budiansky touches on a point that really needs some open minded exposure within the world; that of our need to find related anecdotes of fellow animals that parallel our own actions and thoughts in the world at large. However, he hammers this to death throughout the 200 pages of this book, with gross generalizations on animal related studies that today have had their methodology and results questioned for many years. Of the more promising research from leading scientists in the field of "enlightened" animal behaviour, his review and findings of their studies pass over much of the result, in search for a small window in which he can cry the awful word "anthropormophism". From the start Budiansky attempts to recreate Man's pedestal above all other living beings, and flitters and flutters across a wide range of studies, comments and summaries to attempt to build a case for our superiority.

In the remaining pages he makes a pitiful attempt to separate suffering and pain in a manner that can only justify our own experience as superior over all other beings. Sadly, it seems as if the critical issues that needed to be investigated with regards to his central thesis, were not properly looked at; his closed minded investigation and tendency to lump together billions of beings (both human and non), into nice and neat little boxes. Boxes that created a landscape in which nothing other that Budiansky's menial conclusions could be realized.

If you are actually interested in learning something on this subject then I suggest ignoring every study he supports, and investigate the ones he critizes. In there will lie a truer picture of "animal intelligence and the evolution of consciousness". One that may not support every claim of every researcher, but nonetheless will find a middle ground that knocks Budiansky off his ignorant pedestal and plunges him into an ocean of understanding.

It was comical how once he reached humans as a final topic, his tried and trusted evolutionary and reductonistic arguments are discarded due to their inability to properly describe us Humans. It is with this wall that his argument crumbles to pieces, and it is within his generalizations that make the book more value to those seeking to use other animals for their own personal benefit then to those who have a genuine interest in investigating the minds of other sentient beings that share the planet with us.

Budiansky's "profoundly self-centred definition of intelligence" is one no different than the tales of remarkable animal achievement which he so vehemently critizes. It is one that has no real room for growth, and for our sake will disappear with the change of the seasons.

I give this book a big one thumb down, and reiterate a wise comment from a fellow book reviewer that "if a lion could talk he would say don't buy this book."

Budiansky performs a valuable service in this book: he casts a skeptical eye on a lot of very enthusiastic theorizing. I enjoy his sense of humor, and wish he had kept it up. The book bogs down. I got bored reading about the umpteenth clever experiment in which some animal presses, or does not press, a lever at some stimulus. Bored and envious: while I'm working for a living, these people are raking in good grant money for playing with chimpanzees? I should have studied biology!

The last chapter's attacks on evolutionary psychology didn't sit well with me. Budiansky has deliberately chosen the more untenable theories to attack, and ignored the field's provocative contributions. He could have down without a lot of the shouting.

As to Budiansky's central arguments, he would have profited greatly from the on-line, off-line thinking Derek Bickerton put forth in "Language and Human Behavior."

Discussions about animal language and consciousness miss a point: language is first and foremost a tool, and even trained apes don't use that tool. They miss the first criterion of language, that it is something to be used. I have never read an account of Chimp A using ASL with Chimp B, or transmitting it to Chimp C. Human language is the most efficent communcation device in the animal kingdom. If gorillas and chimpanzees do grasp the concepts of language, why don't they use it with each other?

In closing these random remarks, let me comment that I for one am just as happy lions can't talk. Little could be more disconcerting than walking across the savanna and hearing a voice from behind some bushes saying, "Oh goodie, just when I was so hungry, it's one of those delicious hairless things that can't run very fast."

If you like having things you think you know challenged by a rigorous scientific thinker and expert debater, you'll like this book. You'll also learn a heck of a lot -- not only about animals and how they evolved, but about humans and how we evolved. As well as about how some of the advantages evolution has given us actually fog our thinking on issues such as animal intelligence.

If you're not a rigorous scientific thinker, or can't stand to risk having a sacred cow gored (if I may use a term redolent of speciest violence against animals, or some such claptrap), don't bother reading this book. You'll only wind up giving it a one-star review and shrieking tediously about your violated sense of oneness with the Earth.

This is a nasty little book. Budiansky's approach is thoroughly dishonest, and frankly, rather cheap. At times, it reads more like a religious tract than a body of serious scholarship.

Budiansky has an axe to grind, and no amount of evidence is going to get in his way. His idea is neither original nor very convincing: humans are in some magical way unique from other animals. Again and again, evidence of non-humans thinking and behaving in ways that are obviously intelligent is either ignored or seriously misrepresented. It is true that it is possible to over-interpret behavioural experiments; however, what is needed is a more scientific approach, not a less scientific one. Moreover, the first step for anyone writing a book like this is to read the literature properly: this is something which Budiansky has clearly not done.