Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [17]
Winter came. I delved further into the scientific literature on intelligence in nature. No matter how much wood I burned, the nineteenth-century cabin remained cold by contemporary standards. I insulated the windows, which were old and single pane, but the cold still came through. Central heating and the twentieth century had made me soft. Huddling by the fire was often the only option for warmth. I wore layers of clothes including thermal underwear and gloves with holes at the fingertips so I could type. Strangely, I found these circumstances satisfying, because they turned intellectual activity into a physical challenge.
As I reviewed the recent science on the intelligent behavior of organisms, I was struck by its contrast to the biology I had learned in high school in the 1970s. Back then, most scientists seemed to make a point of considering plants and animals as objects devoid of intention. Jacques Monod, one of the founders of molecular biology, wrote in his book Chance and Necessity: âThe cornerstone of the scientific methodâ¦consists of systematically denying the existence of purpose in nature.â This method considers living beings as if they were mechanical. For example, Monod wrote about bees: âWe know the hive is âartificial,â in so far as it represents the product of the activity of the bees. But we have good reasons for thinking that this activity is strictly automaticâimmediate, but not consciously planned.â
Since Monod, scientific views have evolved. Now bees are no longer considered to be mindless automatons. American biologist Donald Griffin, a pioneer in the study of animal cognition, recently said: âHoneybees do a lot of learning. They have to learn every day where the food is and then communicate itâ¦. So the idea that theyâre rigid and a little mechanicalâone of my colleagues at Cornell speaks of it as looking at honeybees as though they were flying toastersâis misleading. Theyâre actually quite complicated. Though itâs very limited compared with what mammals do, itâs not completely different. It seems to me, more likely than not, that there is some sort of continuum extending from the mental world of bees to us.â
Mentalities within the scientific community have changed to the point that Donald Kennedy, the editor in chief of the journal Science, declared in 2002: âAs more and more is learned about the behavior of animals, it becomes for me at least more and more difficult to get closure on a set of properties that are uniquely and especially human, [and] can be defined unambiguously in that way. So, as we learn more and more about the neural and behavioural capacities of animals, I think the zone of what we think of as uniquely human is gradually shrinking. And as we learn more about how their brains work it may well change our attitudes about how different we are from them, thus reducing our sense of being all that special. And that takes me, I must tell you, into a space Iâm not entirely comfortable with. Thereâs this awkward growth of knowledge. It might in the long run change our view of our place in the living world.â
It no longer seems a virtue for scientists to consider animals as automatons or machines. An awkward growth