Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [19]
Scientists before Darwin had suggested that humans are connected by heredity to other life forms. But in the middle of the nineteenth century, Darwin brought it all together in his search for the natural laws governing biological systems. He traveled around the world for five years on a ship and took a repertory of as many living species as possible. Then he laid out the evidence in his 1859 masterpiece, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, arguing that living organisms including humans all evolved from a common source. If humans descend from animals, how can animals be machines?
The whole point of Darwinâs theory was that humans have much in common with other life forms. To test his ideas Darwin put animals in front of mirrors to see if they showed signs of recognizing themselves. The apes he tested demonstrated certain forms of self-awareness: They gazed at their reflection in surprise, shifted perspectives to look again, and struck various poses while observing themselves. In his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin described animals with self-awareness and emotions. And he thought that even simple creatures like earthworms and ants have intelligence. He wrote: âA little doseâ¦of judgment and reason, often comes into play, even in animals very low in the scale of nature.â
Darwin wrote about the mental faculties of ants in his book The Descent of Man (1871): âAnts certainly communicate information to each other, and several unite for the same work, or for games of play. They recognize their fellow-ants after months of absence, and feel sympathy for each other. They build great edifices, keep them clean, close the doors in the evening, and post sentries. They make roads as well as tunnels under rivers, and temporary bridges over them, by clinging together. They collect food for the community, and when an object, too large for entrance, is brought to the nest, they enlarge the door, and afterwards build it up again. They store up seeds, of which they prevent the germination, and which, if damp, are brought up to the surface to dry. They keep aphides and other insects as milk-cows. They go out to battle in regular bands and freely sacrifice their lives for the common weal. They emigrate according to a pre-concerted plan. They capture slaves. They move the eggs of their aphides, as well as their own eggs and cocoons, into warm parts of the nest, in order that they may be quickly hatched; and endless similar facts could be given.â In view of such evidence, Darwin concluded that âthe mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, though immensely in degree.â
I felt exhilarated reading Darwin. Here was a fellow who traveled to the end of the world in search of knowledge and who delighted in observing all manner of creatures, no matter how small. Darwin rose above centuries of religious belief and argued that humans have kinship with nature. Here was a shaman among scientists.
But Western culture has a long history of setting humans apart from nature. It would take more than a century for the implications of Darwinâs work to sink into the minds of the majority of scientists dealing with animals. In fact, the twentieth century was the heyday of treating animals like machines and conducting experiments on them on a massive scale.
Why?
As a child of the twentieth century and of Western culture, I wanted to understand the origin of our blinders regarding nature. I paced around the cabin for days, thinking and listening to dissonant music. Snowstorms came and went. I was happy to be snowed in.
The twentieth century marked the triumph of machine-driven industry. This influenced the way scientists considered nature. But intellectual conditions also played a part. A crucial development occurred when British zoologist and psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan proposed the following rule for those who study animal behavior: âIn no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the