Extraterrestrial Civilizations - Isaac Asimov [4]
If we can successfully maintain that, all argument stops right there and there is no room for further investigation. We must set limits, if we are to continue. In searching for nonhuman intelligence, we can reasonably limit ourselves to such intelligence that we can recognize as such (even if only dimly) from reproducible observations and by using our own intelligence as a standard.
It is possible that intelligence may be so different from ours that we don’t recognize it at once, but do come to recognize it by degrees. However, in all the years of human association with inanimate objects, there has been no real reason to suppose any of them to have shown any sign of intelligence, however small* and it is as reasonable as anything can well be to eliminate them.
If we pass on to animate objects, we might next raise the question of how we distinguish between inanimate and animate objects. The distinction is harder than we might think, but it is irrelevant. All those objects that offer the slightest chance of confusion as to their classification, whether living or nonliving, clearly do not represent reasonable claims to the possession of nonhuman intelligence.
And of those objects that are indisputably living, we can eliminate the entire plant world. There is no recognizable intelligence in the most magnificent redwood, the sweetest-smelling rose, the most ferocious Venus’s-flytrap.*
When it comes to animals, however, matters are different. Animals move as we do and have recognizable needs and fears as we do. They eat, sleep, eliminate, reproduce, seek comfort, and avoid danger. Because of this, there is a tendency to read into their actions human motivation and human intelligence.
Thus, to the human imagination, ants and bees, which follow behavior that is purely instinctive and with little or no scope for individual variation, or for behavior change to meet unlooked-for eventualities, are viewed as being purposefully industrious.
The snake, which slithers through the grass because that is the only way its evolved shape and structure makes it possible for it to move, and which thus avoids notice and can strike before being seen, is imagined to be sly and subtle. (This characterization can be upheld on the authority of the Bible—see Genesis 3:1.)
In similar fashion, the donkey is thought of as stupid, the lion and eagle as proud and regal, the peacock as vain, the fox as cunning, and so on.
It is almost inevitable that wholesale attribution of human motivations to animal actions will lead one to take it for granted that if one could but establish communication with particular animals one would find them of human intelligence.
This is not to say that particular human beings, if pinned to the wall, will admit believing this. Nevertheless, we can watch Disney cartoons featuring animals with human intelligence and remain comfortably unaware of the incongruence.
Of course, such cartoons are just an amusing game, and the willing suspension of disbelief is a well-known characteristic of human beings. Then, too, Aesop’s fables and the medieval chronicles of Reynard the Fox are not really about talking animals, but are ways of expressing truths about social abuses without risking the displeasure of those in power—who may not be bright enough to recognize that they are being satirized.
Nevertheless, the enduring popularity of these animal stories, to which one can add Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus” tales and Hugh Lofting’s “Dr. Dolittle” stories, shows a certain readiness in the human being to suspend disbelief in that particular direction; more so, perhaps, than in others. There is a sneaking feeling, I suspect, that if animals aren’t as intelligent as we are, they ought to be.
We cannot even seek refuge in the fact that talking-animal stories are essentially for children. The recent best-sellerdom of Watership Down by Richard Adams is an example of a talking-animal