Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think 1st Edition

by Marc Hauser (Author)

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ISBN-13: 978-0805056709

ISBN-10: 080505670X

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Do animals think? Can they count? Do they have emotions? Do they feel anger, frustration, hurt, or sorrow? At last, here is a book that provides authoritative answers to these long-standing questions. Most popular science books t to misrepresent animals, presenting them either as furry little humans or as creatures that cannot feel at all. Marc D. Hauser, an acclaimed scientist in the field of animal cognition, uses insights from evolutionary theory and cognitive science to examine animal thought without such biases or preconceptions. Hauser treats animals neither as machines devoid of feeling nor as extensions of humans, but as independent beings driven by their own complex impulses. In prose that is both elegant and edifying, Hauser describes his groundbreaking research in the field, leading his readers on what David Premack, author of The Mind of an Ape, calls "a masterful tour of the animal mind."

Review

“A penetrating, entertaining, and up-to-the-minute book on the minds of animals.” ―Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct

“A welcome addition to the growing body of work on animal thought.” ―The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Marc D. Hauser is a professor at Harvard University, where as a Fellow of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program he performs laboratory research, supplemented by fieldwork around the world. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife and their menagerie of animals.

Product information

Technical Details

Publisher

‎Holt Paperbacks; 1st edition (March 1, 2001)

Language

‎English

Paperback

‎336 pages

ISBN-10

‎080505670X

ISBN-13

‎978-0805056709

Item Weight

‎11.2 ounces

Dimensions

‎6.48 x 0.9 x 8.28 inches

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The Guy with the Dogs

Great Book about Animal Intelligence, and the Study thereof

Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2014

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This book starts out describing how difficult it is to craft experiments with subjects that can't speak in such a way that they are not subject to interpretive biases of the experimenter. Includes numerous fascinating case histories, from Bees to gorillas.
I also recommend "Alex and Me" about a behavorial researcher and her subject Alex, an amazon gray parrot. It will open your mind to the complexities of even tiny brains, and cast further doubt on what "separates" humans from the other animals. (It's my view that this is inherently obvious; nothing "separates" us, we are just one species in a continuum of different animals.)

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SOME SUGGESTIONS ABOUT SUCH QUESTIONS AS, 'DO ANIMALS THINK?'

Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2021

Marc D. Hauser is an American evolutionary biologist and a researcher in animal cognition, who was a professor of psychology at Harvard University until in 2010 Harvard found him guilty of research misconduct (fabricating and falsifying data), after which he resigned.

He wrote in the Prologue to this 2000 book, “Do our pets really feel anxious, happy, guilty, and sad the way we do, or are their facial and bodily expressions simply good copies of what we do without the underlying feeling?... When animals communicate, are their minds filled with symbols, or are their grunts, coos, and creams the uncontrollable eruptions of passion? Do animals simply follow rules, or do they know why rules are created, why cheaters are punished, and why some actions are right and some are wrong? This book answers these questions.

“But the arguments I will develop are different from those that have been offered to date… I will show how insights from evolutionary theory and cognitive science have begun to revolutionize our understanding of animal minds. Animals do have thoughts and emotions. To understand WHAT animals think and feel, however, we must look at the environments in which they evolved… The argument I have just developed, albeit briefly, represents the man thesis of this book. The only way to understand how and what animals think is to evaluate their behavior in light of both universal and specialized toolkits, mechanisms of the mind designed to solve problems. And the only way to evaluate the validity of this approach is to test our intuitions about animal minds with systematic observations and well-controlled experiments…Sometimes… the laboratory provides a better environment for testing our intuitions.” (Pg. xiv-xv)

He outlines, “[1] Do animals think? Are animals conscious? Are some animals more INTELLIGENT than others? … I will generally avoid using the words ‘think,’ ‘conscious,’ and ‘intelligent.’ Instead, I will ask about mental phenomena that are more precisely specified, phenomena such as an animal’s capacity to use tools, to solve problems using symbols… [2] Do animals have emotions? Yes… But when we step away from the core emotions such as anger and fear… we find other emptions such as guilt… and shame that … are perhaps uniquely human, and provide us with a moral sense that no animal is likely to attain. [3] Do animals communicate? Yes. But each species’ communication system has unique design features… [4] Are animals guided by instinct? Yes, and so are we… [5] Do animals have rules by which they abide, and sometimes break? Yes, and the rules reflect the conditions under which the games of reproduction and survival are played out. But unlike our rules… Animals… don’t know that rules have been designed to preserve conventions… and … to maintain fairness.” (Pg. xviii-xix)

He observes, “though animals may reach for objects placed out of sight, it is unclear how precisely they represent the object in memory. If a banana is hidden, do they store the representation of this object as ‘edible food,’ ‘yellow, boomerang-shaped object,’ or ‘reward’? … we need other tests to determine how animals represent objects.” (Pg. 30)

He notes, “Many animals travel by referencing the sky. Depending on the scale of the environment, they also use landmarks during their travels, sometimes to find home, and sometimes to figure out the proper departure path.” (Pg. 73)

He states, “Both bird and baby therefore travel the journey to communicative competence with little explicit tutoring… both bird and baby are equipped at birth with a general set of principles that cause them to attend to the sounds that are relevant to their species’ repertoire. As long as the young individual is reared in an appropriate environment, it will acquire the native tongue. The question is, of course, what do we mean ty an appropriate environment and what is the ‘native tongue’?” (Pg. 117)

He notes, “Our current understanding of animal communication suggests that human words and animal calls are based on quite different mental tools. Animal calls generally indicate thins in the here and now. Human words indicate things in the here and now, but also in the distant past and well into the future. When we observe an animal’s behavior… we can predict with a high degree of certainty which calls it will produce. When we watch a human’s behavior, our ability to predict his or her words is relatively poor… These differences make it difficult for scientists to trace the evolutionary origins of human words back to an animal precursor. Rather, a majority of scientists conclude that words… originated somewhere along the human branch of the evolutionary tree.” (Pg. 194)

He explains, “I ask such questions as, Do animals have a sense of fairness? Do they understand the distinction between right and wrong?... These questions are not easy to answer. They do, however, focus on significant components of morality, components that ultimately guide moral action. This provides a richer understanding of how the moral mind evolved, and the extent to which other animals share in a moral fabric.” (Pg. 212)

He notes, “At present, we have little evidence that animals punish each other… rhesus monkeys were more likely to be attacked by other group members if they failed to announce their food discoveries than if they announced them by calling… Before we conclude that it is punishment, however, we need evidence that such attacks reduce the likelihood of a second or third offense… At present, however, we simply don’t have the relevant data to say one way or the other. And without such data, we are on thin ice with respect to the claim that animals punish one another when a rule if violated. Even if the capacity to punish has not evolved in animals, there must be a mechanism to cope with the consequences of aggressive interactions.” (Pg. 247)

He concludes, “The only way to understand what animals think and feel is to explore how their minds have been designed to solve specific social and ecological problems. The same is true of the human mind. Some problems are common to all animals. As a result, we find that animals are equipped with a universal toolkit, a set of mental abilities for acquiring knowledge about objects, number, and space… Highly social animals have evolved the mental tools to watch others and learn. Specializations do not make one species ‘smarter’ than the other, but they do make each species wonderfully different from the others. If the notion of intelligence has any role to play in the study of animal minds, it is in terms of how each species solves the problem of making a living. In the struggle to survive, nature is the only arbiter of intelligence. The survivors are smart enough to carry on living, while those that became extinct were not. We share the planet with thinking animals.” (Pg. 256-257)

‘Caveat emptor’ for this book’s reports of its ‘testing’; but Hauser does have some interesting observations to make on these topics.

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Laon

Thought without language

Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2001

Vervet monkeys make one cry when a cheetah approaches; a different cry when an eagle flies overhead, and yet another cry when a human is near. It's a pity Marc Hauser makes no attempt, Edgar-Rice-Burroughs-style, to transliterate that last cry: I'd like to know the vervet word for "human".
But though Hauser acknowledges the many species that exchange sounds that are very close to being "words", he argues convincingly that they do not have language. That's disappointing, of course, for those of us with that Dr Doolittle urge for closer communication with animals, but clearly how things are. And despite the subtitle "What animals really hink" Hauser concludes that we are too different ever to truly know that: not only will we never settle down with a lion or dog and exchange views about politics and sex and art; but much of their behaviour will remain enigmatic to us. We simply can't imagine or empathise our way into knowing what they are thinking. Many people, anthropomorphising wildly, like to imagine that they can. But there are always alternative explanations for animal behaviour, and no way of checking which is the correct one. Nor do animals have a "moral sense", as is argued in the final section of the book. Though animals do cooperate, and will sacrifice themselves or their interests for the benefit of others. On that question I'm not so sure that the animal form of "ethics" is really qualitively different from the human, despite the cultural ideas we heap up around concepts of "morality". But that's an argument about human thought, and therefore outside the scope of the book.
In some ways the earliest parts of the book are the most interest. Animals don't have language, but they do have tools for understanding the world: dividing reality into classes of objects, engaging in rudimentary mathematics, and creating mental maps of the physical world.
This section of the book could be usefully read by anyone still believing, along with the previous generation of French philosophers, that a chair, for example, is a linguistic construct rather than an object of a certain kind. Animals deal with reality in ways that strongly suggest that their perception of the world, and their organisation of the world into different classes of things, by edibility, animate or inert, sharp or soft, green or blue, and so on, is at the fundamental building-block level similar to ours. Clearly there is a world without language, let alone text.
The book doesn't show us, as its sub-title claims, "What animals really think", but it does contain a great deal of fascinating information on how animals organise their information about the world, the kind of guesses they make about the behaviour of others, the cries and signals that became the building-blocks of our languages, and much else besides. And it's not the most misleading title in this genre: consider the "Penguin English Dictionary". A splendid resource, certainly, but penguins don't seem to respond to any of it ... Anyway, you can't use Hauser's book to "talk to the animals either", but at least you wll know more about why you can't. Recommended.
Cheers!
Laon

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Top reviews from other countries

Gubby

not too highbrow

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 12, 2012

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a great book as it is a review and critique of many different animal research studies but put into sensical, readable and understandable format for the lay person.
although very scientifically based, the book is written in a way which means it is not too highbrow nor insutingly simple.
a great intoduction to the ways in which animals mind's work, the ample references mean that any particular works can be followed up on if desired.
thought-provoking and suprising, a great intro into the world and workings of the animal brain.

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 20, 2015

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David Douglas

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on March 29, 2017

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great book and a great service

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Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think 1st Edition

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