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THROUGH OUR EYES ONLY DAWKINS (German Edition)

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Dawkins is a lecturer at Oxford, and this book reads like an afternoon in the classroom with her. She uses that annoying convention teachers have developed for dealing with hung-over, inattentive students where she first tells you what she's going to tell you, then she tells you, then she tells you what she just told you. It makes a short book longer, but the reader may not appreciate being treated like a 17-year old.

It isn't until the final chapter that Dawkins even begins to address the issue of what 'consciousness' is. She recounts the Behavioralists screed that if it can't be measured and counted, it can't be studied, and then goes on to say that what passes for consciousness can be inferred from behavior. If she had just taken this tone from the beginning of the book, instead of couching everything in terrified scientific caution, her book might have had the power of Kristin von Kreisler's "Beauty in the Beasts," which shares its cover and subject matter.

Dawkins is a student of (figuratively if not literally) Donald Griffin and Griffin's own "Animal Thinking" presents much the same argument in a tidier package.

Neither author however is willing to take the leap to assigning consciousness in varying degrees -- to them it's an all-or-nothing, black-or-white distinction. Either you have it -- or you don't.

It seems much more likely to me that consciousness is not a threshold, but a continuum, with some animals and humans being intensely self-aware and other animals and politicians having only the dimmest idea of their place in the world.

Marian Stamp Dawkins (born 1945) is professor for animal behaviour at the University of Oxford, where she heads the Animal Behaviour Research Group. She has written books about animal welfare (e.g., The Future of Animal Farming: Renewing the Ancient Contract and Animal Suffering: The Science of Animal Welfare). (She was also married to biologist Richard Dawkins, author of books such as The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design and Climbing Mount Improbable.)

She states in the Preface to this 1993 book, "This book is an attempt to give an account of what we now understand of the experiences of other species, without, I hope, losing the sense of mystery that any attempt to explain or even describe consciousness seems always to carry with it. It is aimed at anyone who has ever wondered about the phenomenon of conscious experience in themselves and the possibility of it in other species.... It is a book which I hope will be read by people who are not scientists and yet would like to know what scientists have been up to in their quest for this, one of the greatest remaining of all biological mysteries."

She writes, "we have, then, at least some evidence that animals can 'think.' The evidence is not as substantial as we might like but then the study of thought in animals is a relatively recent one. We can at least say, however, that it is no longer an impossibly vague hope that we might one day find better evidence than we have now. We can even see what that evidence might be."

She concludes on the note, "The study of animal consciousness is already much more accepted than it was even 20 years ago, and we now know a little of what goes on in the minds of animals with the promise of being able to learn a great deal more in the future. I hope that this book has shown that we can proceed on this journey into animal consciousness and still be scientific about it."

The author does a good job of surveying a great deal of research involving animal cognition, but fails to go into deeper discussions about whether or not these animals are conscious. Of course, it is difficult to take any kind of stance when we're dealing with animal consciousness, but I wasn't really sure if the author believed that any nonhuman animals were conscious or not. All in all, there were lots of interesting anecdotes about what animals can do...