Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [20]
Some biologists resisted this view, however. For example, English biologist Julian Huxley wrote in his Essay on Bird Mind (1923): âThere is a large school today who assert that animals are âmere machines.â Machines they may be: it is the qualification which does not fit. I suppose that by saying âmereâ machines it is meant to imply that they have the soulless, steely quality of a machine which goes when it is set going, stops when another lever is turned, acts only in obedience to outer stimuli, and is in fact unemotionalâa bundle of operations without any quality meriting the name of a self. It is true that the further we push our analysis of animal behavior, the more we find it composed of a series of automatismsâ¦. the more we have cause to deny to animals the possession of anything deserving the name of reason, ideals, or abstract thought. The more, in fact, do they appear to us as mechanisms (which is a much better word than machines, since this latter carries with it definite connotations of metal or wood, electricity or steam). They are mechanisms, because their mode of operation is regular; but they differ from any other type of mechanism known to us in that their working isâto put it in the most non-committal wayâaccompanied by emotion.â
Japanese scientists went further. Coming from a culture that places humans and animals on the same plane, they tend not to subscribe to a mechanical view of nature. Japan generally has a Chinese-modified Buddhist cultural background in which humans, animals, and gods exist on the same plane and can turn into one another, and in which humans are not considered to be the only ones with souls. In the 1950s, Japanese researchers pioneered the study of the mental lives of primates by reporting observations about the animalsâ motives, personalities, and lives. Japanese primatologists came up with a new way of observing animals in the wild. It consisted of looking closely and quietly without interfering, and identifying monkeys individually and following them around for long periods. This revealed what relationships each individual monkey has with others. The Japanese scientists found that kinship is important for monkeys. They also observed a macaque monkey learning how to dip sweet potatoes into a stream in order to wash them; then they documented how this learned behavior spread through the entire troupe. They called this âpreculture.â Japanese scientists also first reported that monkeys practice infanticide, and that chimpanzees use stone tools. For several decades, these reports, which relate to activities previously thought to be exclusively human, were either ignored by Western scientists or dismissed as highly anthropomorphic. But now the Japanese approach to doing fieldwork among primates has become the scientific standard. By treating primates like humans, Japanese primatologists moved leaps and bounds ahead of their Western colleagues. By treating animals with intelligence, they found intelligence.
Through most of the twentieth century, Western science was dominated by the view that animals are mechanical. Some scientists went so far as to consider animals as interchangeable âstimulus-response machines.â As B. F. Skinner, one of the founders of behaviorism, wrote: âPigeon, rat, monkey, which is which? It doesnât matter.â
Even an open-minded biological commentator such as Lewis Thomas wrote in 1974: âA solitary ant, afield, cannot be considered to have much of anything on his mind; indeed, with only a few neurons strung together by fibers, he canât be imagined to have a mind at all, much