Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind (5 page)

The basis for assuming a discontinuity of mind between man and animal lay in the special interrelationship said to exist between language and consciousness. Language, it was maintained, led to consciousness, and consciousness led to the experiencing of emotions (guilt, sorrow, remorse, exultation, hatred, empathy, and so on). Consequently, the emotions on the faces of animals portrayed little more than simple passing sensations, quite different from the true emotions that were
assumed to be reserved for man alone. Science even gave the emotions of man and animals different names to emphasize this point. Thus we call a human expression a smile, and an ape expression an “open-mouth bared-teeth grin,” noting that as it is not possible to determine how apes feel when they display this expression, it is best to use terms that do not impute feeling to them.

Beginning in the 1940s, anthropology leaned toward a new version of the “human uniqueness” story. Influenced by the so-called Neo-Darwinian Synthesis, which emphasized the importance of adaptation as a metric of physical and behavioral change, anthropologists concluded that the origin of the human family involved a major shift in behavior. This shift led to a lifestyle that rapidly became distinctly different from the subsistence strategies practiced by apes and monkeys. Humans, particularly male humans, became hunters. With the emergence of Man as Hunter, and the associated behavioral changes wrought by such a lifestyle, the gulf between man and other creatures on the planet suddenly became a chasm. Hunting led to planning ahead, to home bases, to kinship ties, to tool construction, to ritual and knowledge of the seasons, and to cooperation—all characteristics thought to set the human mind apart from the ape mind. Consciousness, it was determined, awoke in the form of Man the Hunter.

The drawback of this perspective was twofold: First, it eliminated women from the “Great Changes” that defined
Homo
as different from Ape. Presumably, women evolved, to the extent that they did, because of the activities of men. Second, it put in place an irrevocable boundary between man and all other primates. However, as anthropology made the man-animal boundary central to its world view, it also finally rid itself of its racist perspective. As a result, all human races were considered equal.

The gap between humans and the rest of the animal world at once grew wider, both physically and in the realm of mind. Humans began to look like extremely special creatures, with an
ever greater discontinuity separating them from the brutes. To make this world view accommodate practical experience, scientists had to belittle the apparent accomplishment of animals, questioning animals’ every act in a way they never questioned their own.

Perhaps it is not surprising that scholars felt comfortable treating
Homo sapiens
as special in a scientific context. After all, we do
feel
special. Even Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-inventor of the theory of natural selection, could not bring himself to acknowledge the total impact of what Darwin had said. “I fully accept Mr. Darwin’s conclusion as to the essential identity of man’s bodily structure with that of the higher mammalia, and his descent from some ancestral form common to man and the anthropoid apes,” he wrote in 1889.
⁸
However, man’s intellectual powers and moral sense, “could not have been developed by variation and natural selection alone, and . . . , therefore, some other influence, law, or agency is required to account for them.”
⁹

Wallace’s reasoning was simple. “Natural selection could only have endowed the savage with a brain a little superior to that of an ape, whereas he actually possesses one but very little inferior to that of the average members of our learned societies.”
¹⁰
In other words, even humans living in “primitive societies” were more intelligent than they had to be. Adaptation by natural selection should have equipped them only for the limited exigencies of a foraging existence.

If this argument sounds like an unfounded justification for the uniqueness of man, compare it to an observation by David Premack, an ape-language researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. “Human language is an embarrassment for evolutionary theory,” he wrote in 1985, “because it is vastly more powerful than one can account for in terms of selective fitness.” Although Premack does not, like Wallace, appeal to spiritual intervention to account for the special qualities of the human mind, he nonetheless carves up the world of the mind in a similar manner.

Such personal dissections represent what Oxford University evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins calls “the
Argument from Personal Incredulity.” These arguments proceed from the individual’s personal and egocentric bias that his or her mind works in a qualitatively different manner from that of animals. Having established this private conclusion, the proponent of this theory brings into play the known and accepted principles of science for support. The trouble with this method is that not only can it be used to differentiate the animal mind from the human mind, but it also can be (and has been) used to differentiate the “criminal” mind from the “noncriminal” mind, the “male” mind from the “female” mind, the “white” mind from the “black” mind, the “Christian” mind from the “Muslim” mind, the “Catholic” mind from the “Protestant” mind, and to make any other distinction that becomes politically expedient.

During the 1950s and 1960s the thrust of anthropology continued to emphasize human uniqueness, a view in which Leslie White, of the University of Michigan, was extremely influential. Referring specifically to language abilities, he said in 1949: “Because human behavior is symbol behavior and since the behavior of infra-human species is non-symbolic, it follows that we can learn nothing about human behavior from observations upon or experiments with lower animals.”
¹¹
Indeed, so impressed by our mental superiority was Julian Huxley, grandson of Darwin’s champion, Thomas Henry Huxley, that he opined
Homo sapiens
should be removed from the animal kingdom entirely and be allotted a kingdom of its own: the Psychozoan.

Add to this the notion that only humans use tools, only humans are conscious, and only humans elaborate culture, and a firm boundary between humans and other animals is in place. “In one way or another, policing and maintaining that boundary has been a tacit objective of most paleoanthropological model-building since the late 1940s,” observes Matt Cartmill, an anthropologist at Duke University.
¹²

The first bricks in this well-policed boundary wall were dislodged in the early 1960s with Jane Goodall’s observations of tool-use and tool-making in chimpanzees, at Gombe Stream
Reserve, Tanzania. Goodall had the patience systematically to watch chimpanzees instead of making sweeping conclusions about what they could or could not do based on a few contacts. She saw them stripping twigs to use as probes in fishing for termites. Since then, observers have noted many additional kinds of tool-using behavior among these apes. Another brick fell in the early 1970s, with the demonstration of mirror-recognition in chimpanzees, cleverly documented by Gordon Gallup, a psychologist at the State University of New York, Albany. Many people had suspected that chimpanzees recognized themselves in mirrors, but Gallup offered conclusive proof. He applied a red dot of paint to the heads of a group of chimps while they slept. Upon waking, they were unaware of the paint, that is, until they happened to look into a mirror. At once they stopped, then turned and touched the red splotch on their foreheads to find out what it was.

With the man/animal boundary so deep a part of the Western psyche, it is little wonder that many resist its dismantling on both a logical and emotional level, and with great confusion manifest between the two. Man’s ability to exploit the planet, to take of its resources as he needs, and to usurp entire forests and all living creatures therein, rests upon the unwritten assumption that the chasm between himself and all other creatures is impassable. All of modern man’s activities operate from the premise that the planet is his to allot into countries, states, counties, and individual plots, because he, unlike other creatures, has been given the twin gifts of reason and expression. By assuming that other animals lack these gifts entirely, man obviates any need to listen to the wishes of the creatures with which he shares the planet. He can therefore proceed comfortably by his own lights, blind to information that is perceived as nonexistent.

To make this progression comfortable, man has wrapped his refusal to recognize the mental continuity between himself and other animals in an elaborate, ostensibly objective, scientific argument. Language, as an instrument of rational symbolic thought, has been the linchpin of that argument. By the early 1990s the boundary between man and animal was still being
policed, though a few apes were fixedly gazing into the park with very deliberate expressions on their clearly humanlike faces.

Most modern students of animal behavior, whether they work in the field or in the laboratory, count themselves as “empiricists,” meaning they accept little as meaningful data that cannot be experimentally reproduced at will. It is because of this empiricist perspective that the study of “human behavior” and that of “animal behavior” have historically been two separate fields, with few overlapping concerns or paradigms. Only a few comparative psychologists have dared to declare that a great deal can be learned about man by studying animals. It is now politically correct to view animal behavior as interesting, even important, but still irrevocably distinct from human action. This distinction is based on the empiricist view that human beings have “minds” and although we cannot know these minds nor even measure them, the minds of human beings can be revealed, one to the other, through language. Because animals lack language as we know it, students of animal behavior conclude that animals therefore cannot tell us “what is on their minds.” The empiricist doctrine relies only upon that which can be readily generated and measured at will. It is therefore forced to conclude that since animals cannot manifest minds through language, it is more parsimonious to study their behavior as though it were not generated by mind, intention, or will. However, because humans can—via language—voice expressions of mind, intention, and will, many empiricists accept these concepts as valid constructs for the study of human motivation and action.

The empiricist takes the model of physics as the starting point for the study of behavior. This model suggests that behavior can be reduced to “units” similar to protons, electrons, and neutrons and postulates that only by reducing behavior to its elemental units will we be able to understand its structure. However, unlike physics and chemistry, there is no agreement on what these units should be, nor, indeed, how we should go
about looking for them. Nonetheless, the field of animal behavior has long been dominated by a premise called Morgan’s Canon. This canon states that animal behaviorists should always seek to explain behavior in terms of the simplest possible processes. Thus, if a dog appears to be hungry, it is thought to be appropriate to define that hunger in terms of percent of normal body weight (that is, a dog that is 80 percent normal body weight is said to be hungrier than one that is at 100 percent normal body weight) or in terms of time since the last food intake. By looking to factors such as “time since last food intake” or “normal body weight,” we can avoid attributing eating behavior to “mental states” such as hunger. Of course, as humans who have experienced the state of hunger, or having a desire to eat, we are all quite aware that such a state can, at times, have little to do with either our body weight or the amount of time since we have last eaten. Students of human behavior often view such “irrational urges to eat” as conditioned “bad habits.” However, few would deny that a state of hunger in human beings is indeed a mental state and that it can be alleviated by food, as well as by many other activities.

By 1976, the discrepancy between the ways in which animal and human behavior were being investigated became so great that the well-known biologist Donald Griffin began to plead for acceptance of what he called a “common-sense view of animal mind.” In a series of three books, published in 1976, 1984, and 1992, he collected reports of animal behavior, not unlike those amassed before him by Darwin and Georges Romanes. Don Griffin echoed their argument that such observations implied awareness and cognition. Since that time, a few researchers have acknowledged that science may well be underestimating the capabilities of animals and have undertaken new techniques for the study of what has come to be called “animal consciousness” and “animal mind.” For example, Christophe Boesch, who is studying wild chimpanzees in the Taï forest, has begun to ask questions about the intentional teaching of offspring, particularly as regards the complex skills utilized by this group of apes in nut cracking with hammers and anvils. Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney have begun to ask questions
about whether or not vervet monkeys are explicitly and intentionally attempting to tell each other specific things with their calls, and if so, whether the monkeys themselves are actually aware of what they are doing. Gordon Gallup, a pioneer in the field, whose work predates that of Griffin’s, has attempted to determine whether or not various animal species have a concept of self. And of course the language-training efforts of David Premack, Beatrice and Allen Gardner, Duane Rumbaugh (with chimpanzees), Penny Patterson (with gorillas), Lynn Miles (with an orangutan), Lou Herman (with dolphins), Ron Schusterman (with sea lions), and Irene Pepperberg (with a gray parrot) have all suggested that animals must have competencies far greater than currently acknowledged. None of these efforts has yet had a major impact on the way we study human or animal behavior, nor have these two disciplines yet become linked within the field of psychology in the seamless manner that characterizes biology.