"Louise Barrett's latest book is a beacon of hope for anyone who worries that the study of the evolution of cognition is being reduced to nothing but sensationalistic claims about the nature of the animal mind. With delightful prose, she makes a strong case that overinflated notions regarding how human minds work have tragically distorted our view of other animals. Barrett's book is a highest-priority must read for the next generation of scientists interested in the evolution of cognition."--Daniel J. Povinelli, University of Louisiana

"A delight to read, this very ambitious book furnishes a fresh perspective on animal behavior. Barrett synthesizes a broad literature from fields as diverse as ethology, ecological psychology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and philosophy, and masterfully weaves the different strands together into an iconoclastic but coherent view of cognitive behavior. A reader could not wish for a clearer guide into this new field."--Carel van Schaik, Anthropological Institute and Museum, University of Zürich

"This is an excellent book about comparative cognition, how minds and brains evolve, and how to think about the minds of animals."--Nicola S. Clayton, University of Cambridge

"Clear and engaging, this thought-provoking book is an excellent synthesis of new directions in cognitive science and evolution. The use of everyday and humorous examples is effective, and the scholarship is impressive in its breadth and rigor, combining ideas from ecological psychology, robotics, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. A stimulating read, it will have scientists questioning conventional wisdom about the nature of cognition and species difference."--Robert Barton, Durham University

"Arguing that observed animal behavior is substantially organized by both an organism's physical structure and environmental affordances, this book raises interesting questions about the role of cognition in behavior and the attribution of complex behaviors to cognitive processes similar to those purportedly supporting human behavior. An intriguing and engaging book."--Bennett Galef, McMaster University

"Louise Barrett's latest book is a beacon of hope for anyone who worries that the study of the evolution of cognition is being reduced to nothing but sensationalistic claims about the nature of the animal mind. With delightful prose, she makes a strong case that overinflated notions regarding how human minds work have tragically distorted our view of other animals. Barrett's book is a highest-priority must read for the next generation of scientists interested in the evolution of cognition."--Daniel J. Povinelli, University of Louisiana

"A delight to read, this very ambitious book furnishes a fresh perspective on animal behavior. Barrett synthesizes a broad literature from fields as diverse as ethology, ecological psychology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and philosophy, and masterfully weaves the different strands together into an iconoclastic but coherent view of cognitive behavior. A reader could not wish for a clearer guide into this new field."--Carel van Schaik, Anthropological Institute and Museum, University of Zürich

"This is an excellent book about comparative cognition, how minds and brains evolve, and how to think about the minds of animals."--Nicola S. Clayton, University of Cambridge

"Clear and engaging, this thought-provoking book is an excellent synthesis of new directions in cognitive science and evolution. The use of everyday and humorous examples is effective, and the scholarship is impressive in its breadth and rigor, combining ideas from ecological psychology, robotics, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology. A stimulating read, it will have scientists questioning conventional wisdom about the nature of cognition and species difference."--Robert Barton, Durham University

"Arguing that observed animal behavior is substantially organized by both an organism's physical structure and environmental affordances, this book raises interesting questions about the role of cognition in behavior and the attribution of complex behaviors to cognitive processes similar to those purportedly supporting human behavior. An intriguing and engaging book."--Bennett Galef, McMaster University

BEYOND THE BRAIN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Chapter One

In March 2009, a short research report in the journal Current Biology caught the attention of news outlets around the globe. In the report, Mathias Osvath described how, over a period of ten years, Santino, a thirty-one-year-old chimpanzee living in Furuvik Zoo, Northern Sweden, would collect rocks from the bottom of the moat around his island enclosure in the morning before the zoo opened, pile them up on the side of the island visible to the public, and then spend the morning hurling his rock collection at visitors, in a highly agitated and aggressive fashion. Santino was also observed making his own missiles by dislodging pieces of concrete from the floor of his enclosure once the supply of naturally occurring rocks began to dwindle. Santino's calm, deliberate, and methodical "stockpiling" of the rocks ahead of the time they were needed was interpreted by Osvath as unequivocal evidence of planning for the future.

Future planning has long been seen as a unique human trait because it is thought to require "autonoetic consciousness." Autonoetic means "self-knowing," which Osvath defines as "a consciousness that is very special, that you can close your eyes [and] you can see this inner world." More precisely, it is the idea that you can understand yourself as "a self," and that you can, therefore, think about yourself in a detached fashion, considering how you might act in the future, and reflecting on what you did in the past. Osvath argued for this interpretation of Santino's stockpiling behavior on the grounds that it simply wasn't explicable in terms of Santino's current drives or motivation, but only on the assumption that he was anticipating visitors arriving later in the day. In addition, over the ten or so years that Santino was observed behaving like this, he stockpiled the stones only during the summer months when the zoo was open. For Osvath, this spontaneous planning behavior—so reminiscent of our own—suggested that chimpanzees "probably have an 'inner world' like we have when reviewing past episodes of our lives or thinking of days to come."

Of course, having a large rock flung at your paying customers by a hefty male ape is not particularly good for business, and the zoo staff were a little less impressed by Santino's antics than the scientists were. Given the suggestion that Santino possessed a highly developed form of consciousness, and an "inner world" much like our own, one might suppose that the solution to a problem like Santino would capitalize on his advanced cognitive capacities: given the ability to plan ahead and understand the consequences of his own actions—given, in other words, Santino's rationality— it would seem possible to reason with him by some means, so that he would understand why his behavior was problematic. But no. The zookeepers decided that the best way to reduce Santino's aggressive tendencies, and so his rock-flinging antics, was to castrate him.

Coincidentally, the consequences of some other unwanted missile throwing were reported in the press that same week. Muntazer al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist, was sentenced, by a court in Baghdad, to three years in prison for throwing his shoes at President George W. Bush during a press conference held three months previously. Despite the fact that al-Zaidi's actions—unlike those of Santino—were apparently not premeditated but, by his own admission, reflected his inability to control his emotions, no one (thankfully) concluded that castration would be an appropriate way to curb al-Zaidi's missile throwing. So why the difference in the chimpanzee's case?

What's Wrong with Anthropomorphism?

Whenever you feel like criticizing someone, first walk a mile in his shoes. Then, when you do criticize that person, you'll be a mile away and you'll have his shoes. —Anonymous

Leaving aside the question of whether observations of one particular individual in a highly artificial setting are good evidence for forward planning—let alone autonoetic consciousness—the ambivalent nature of Santino's humanlike status and the difference in response to the same behavior in chimpanzee and human is instructive. Santino's behavior was taken to indicate the presence of a "humanlike" inner life, and yet he lives under lock and key, on a moated island, his aggressive tendencies curbed by an irreversible operation. All this suggests that, despite his humanlike cognitive skills, no one expected Santino to understand why his actions were troublesome, nor did they expect him to control his behavior appropriately according to human standards of conduct. When you get right down to it, no one regarded Santino as humanlike in any way that really counted, and it remains unclear to what degree we should assume his "inner life" is anything like our own. Are we perhaps guilty of selectively "anthropomorphizing" Santino's stockpiling behavior? Are we attributing human thoughts and feelings to him simply because his behavior looks so familiar to us, and not because we really have any good evidence that he sees the world exactly as we do? Are we missing out on discovering what really makes animals like Santino tick—and what governs the behavior of many other species besides—because we're blinkered by our own human-oriented view of the world?

My answer to all those questions is yes, but let me be clear. In our everyday lives, our tendency to anthropomorphize other animals does no harm. Quite the contrary. Assuming that our dogs love us and are "happy" to see us in the exact same way that we are happy to see them can increase our sense of well-being, and it certainly benefits the dogs themselves, who are well treated and cared for as a consequence. It is also true that dogs form strong and loyal attachments to their owners, and they often pine for us when we are away from home. But none of this proves that their view of us is the same as our view of them. If we want to understand how animals work from a scientific perspective, we have to drop our anthropomorphic stance for three interrelated reasons.

Created in Our Image

First, an anthropomorphic stance means that often we end up asking scientific questions that simply reflect our own concerns. As large-brained, forward-planning, self-aware, numerate, linguistically gifted animals, we have a tendency to view each of these attributes as an unalloyed good: they serve us well, and allow us to achieve so many diverse and useful things (wheels, the printing press, combustion engines, computers, takeout pizza) that we tend to assume that similar attributes, or their precursors, would no doubt benefit other animals. So we look to see whether they have them, make our obsessions their obsessions, and see how well they measure up. This anthropocentric viewpoint fuses with our anthropomorphic tendencies so that we inevitably end up interpreting animals in human terms, regardless of whether humanlike skills would serve any real purpose for the animal in question.

The pernicious effects of such an attitude can be seen most prominently in media reports of scientific research findings. A recent report on the BBC News Web site, for example, claimed that plants could "think and remember," and that they transmitted information from leaf to leaf in a manner similar to the electrical transmission that takes place in our own nervous systems. Although the report is littered with scare quotes indicating that "thought" and "memory" should perhaps not be taken literally, even a metaphorical interpretation is problematic because, as Ferris Jabr points out, the analogy is far from exact and creates the entirely misleading impression that plants actually do have "nervous systems" like animals, when they don't. As Jabr notes, plants are immensely sophisticated organisms that can achieve all manner of amazing things; it does them a disservice to endow them with humanlike cognitive capacities that they don't possess and don't need. Indeed, it promotes the idea that other organisms are interesting only to the degree that their capacities and abilities match our own.

An even more irritating example of this is the report of a "human-like brain found in worms" (specifically, in the marine ragworm, Platynereis dumerilii). What this study actually shows is that ragworms possess certain cell types that correspond to those found in the brainlike structures of other invertebrates, known as "mushroom bodies," and that are also found in the mammalian cortex. In other words, the study shows that invertebrate and vertebrate brain tissue must have shared a common precursor, which evolved in the last common ancestor shared by these two groups more than six hundred million years ago. To claim that a humanlike brain has been found in worms gets the actual reasoning of the scientific article entirely backward, and generates the false impression that the whole of brain evolution has been geared toward the production of specifically humanlike brains. As my colleague John Vokey pointed out, the idea that these findings have anything to do with human brains is as ludicrous as showing that ragworms display bilateral symmetry, and then declaring that the human form has been found in worms. So, again, an interesting finding, worthy of attention in its own right, gets hijacked and distorted by our strange obsession with the idea that other creatures are interesting only to the extent that they resemble us.

Whose Traits Are They Anyway?

The second reason why an anthropomorphic approach is problematic is that it cuts both ways and can create errors in both directions. While the mistaken attribution of human characteristics to other animals is the common concern, the assumption that we know exactly which traits are "uniquely human" (an assumption inherent in the concept of anthropomorphism) can result in the equivalent error of categorically denying such traits to other animals simply on the grounds that they "belong" to us. The very use of the term "anthropomorphism" in this context implies that there is something very special about humans, "bursting as they are with a whole host of unique qualities that we cannot resist attributing to other beings" even when they don't "deserve" it.

Both of the above problems with an anthropomorphic view spring from our overarching anthropocentrism: we consider ourselves as humans first and foremost, rather than as members of the animal kingdom, and, in so doing, we place ourselves above other animals, with the result that they inevitably fall short by comparison. Consider the recent blockbuster movie Avatar: the gentle Na'vi of Pandora are completely in tune with nature and recognize the interconnectedness of all organisms. Nevertheless, when they entwine the nervelike tendrils of their "neural queue" (an external part of the nervous system that looks like a human hair braid) with the external neural whip of other Pandoran animals to form "Tsahaylu"—a deep bond between their nervous systems—it is the Na'vi who control the behavior of the other animals with their thoughts, and never the other way around. But why should this be? Apparently it is simply because the Na'vi are the most humanlike of all Pandora's residents (and, although the film is chock-full of exposition, this particular aspect of Na'vi life is never explained. Apparently, it is so obvious that the Na'vi should be the ones in control that it doesn't require any explanation; it is, as they say in anthropology, "an unmarked category").

This kind of anthropocentrism also means that we cannot fully appreciate our own place in nature because we are too blinkered by the traits we regard as "special." Let's consider Santino again. His behavior was taken as evidence for forward planning and the presence of autonoetic consciousness. As a result, Santino was raised up to what we clearly consider to be our own exalted level of ability, rather than leading us to question the apparent complexity of our own cognition. For if it were true that Santino possessed the ability to mentally plan his own future using a brain only one-third the size of our own, then it is equally true—and perhaps evolutionarily more valid—to argue that this ability is a general ape-level capacity and not a humanlike trait. More bluntly, it would mean that we are more mundane and apelike than we suppose, rather than that Santino is as "special" as us.

Mock Anthropomorphism, Genuine Anthropomorphism, and the Intentional Stance

Finally, anthropomorphism is a problem because the attribution of human characteristics often results in confusion about what, exactly, we have explained about an animal's behavior and psychology. More specifically, there is often confusion between so-called functional explanations that can tell us why a particular behavior evolved (why the behavior evolved in a big-picture sense; that is, how it enhances an animal's ability to survive and reproduce) and explanations of the actual "proximate" mechanisms that produce behavior in the here and now (why does the animal perform that particular behavior at that particular time?). It is perfectly reasonable to use anthropomorphic language (cautiously) in the former case as a means of generating testable hypotheses. Asking, "If I were a rat/ bat/bonobo, what would I do to solve this problem?" is a useful way of going about things if we want to know why a behavior acts to increase the individual's chances of passing its genes to future generations (known as its "fitness"). This is because, as luck would have it, natural selection is a mechanism that tends to optimize behavior in exactly the way that makes this kind of intuitive sense. As John Kennedy puts it in his book The New Anthropomorphism:

there is no doubt that identifying the ultimate causes of any behaviour we observe is very gratifying to us. Because we are intentional beings ourselves who constantly think in such terms we long to know what an animal is 'up to', to 'make sense' of what it is doing.

Our natural tendency to assume that other people do things for a reason helps us make sense of how natural selection has acted to produce animals that behave in certain ways. It is, in other words, a metaphor: we treat the process of natural selection as though it were a person, with beliefs, desires, and plans. Anthropomorphism creeps in, however, whenever there is slippage between evolutionary explanations for behavior and explanations of the proximate physiological and psychological mechanisms that actually produce it.

For example, if we argue that male frogs sit and call by a pond all night because they "want" to attract a mate and "know" that calling will entice females, we are using the words "want" and "know" in a purely metaphorical sense. What we're really saying is that calling has been favored by natural selection because it increases the males' chances of achieving a mating relative to males that do not call. It doesn't mean that male frogs literally "know" that they "want" a mate, that they "know" they must call in order to attract one, and that they "believe" that if they call, then a female frog is sure to appear. Making any of these assumptions is anthropomorphic because we're attributing a proximate mechanism to the frogs that is, in fact, our own. Evidence in support of the former statement—that calling frogs have been favored over evolutionary time because they are more successful at attracting mates—does not provide any evidence or data regarding the specific nature of the mechanisms that lead male frogs to call at ponds on any given evening. There is a clear distinction to be made between this kind of "mock anthropomorphism," which refers to the metaphorical use of anthropomorphic language in evolutionary explanations, and "genuine anthropomorphism," which refers to our tendency to assume an animal's current motivations are the same as our own without any evidence that this is the case.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from BEYOND THE BRAINby Louise Barrett Copyright © 2011 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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