Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [76]
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P. 48: DARWIN
Darwin (1872) wrote: âMany years ago, in the Zoological Gardens, I placed a looking-glass on the floor before two young orangs, who, as far as it was known, had never before seen one. At first they gazed at their own images with the most steady surprise, and often changed their point of view. They then approached close and protruded their lips towards the image, as if to kiss it, in exactly the same manner as they had previously done towards each other, when first placed, a few days before, in the same room. They next made all sorts of grimaces, and put themselves in various attitudes before the mirror; they pressed and rubbed the surface; they placed their hands at different distances behind it; looked behind it; and finally seemed almost frightened, stared a little, became cross, and refused to look any longerâ (p. 140). Darwin (1998, orig. 1871) wrote: âSome naturalists, from being deeply impressed with the mental and spiritual powers of man, have divided the whole organic world into three kingdoms, the Human, the Animal, and the Vegetable, thus giving man a separate kingdom. Spiritual powers cannot be compared or classed by the naturalist: but he may endeavor to show, as I have done, that the mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree. A difference in degree, however great, does not justify us placing man in a distinct kingdomâ¦â (p. 152). The first quote in the main text is from Darwin (1968, orig. 1859, p. 234). The quote on ants is from Darwin (1871, pp. 152â53).
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P. 50: MORGANâS CANON
See Morgan (1894, p. 53). According to Griffin (1976): âOccamâs razor and Morganâs canon have been so seriously adhered to since the 1920s that behavioral scientists have grown highly uncomfortable at the very thought of mental states or subjective qualities in animals. When they intrude on our scientific discourse, many of us feel sheepish, and when we find ourselves using such words as fear, pain, pleasure, or the like we tend to shield our reductionist egos behind a respectability blanket of quotation marksâ (p. 47).
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P. 50: HUXLEY
The quote is from Huxley (1923, pp. 105-6).
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P. 51: JAPANESE PRIMATOLOGY
Asquith (1997) writes: âSome of the effects of different conceptions of the human/animal relationship on Japanese and Western studies of primates have been noted. Japanese reports about animalsâ motives, personalities and lives were, in their Western colleaguesâ eyes, highly anthropomorphic. As rationality is so central to the Western debate about human uniqueness, it is not surprising that the strongest invectives against anthropomorphism are about attributing rationality to other animals. Emotionality for the Westerner comprises a subset of arguments about rationality and, as mentioned, there is not universal agreement about it, even among scientists. To the Japanese researchers, questions about the rational uniqueness of humans did not arise and their reports were filled with mentalistic language. Western response to such reportage as unscientific, and hence dismissable, resulted in more than two decadesâ lag behind the Japanese in certain theoretical developments in primatologyâ (p. 29). De Waal (2001) writes: âWhen Japanese primatologists went to Africa to observe great apes in their natural habitat, they arrived with excellent training and their hallmark approach of persistent, long-term data gathering that was to become the standard. Like Goodall, they habituated