by BRANDON KEIM
PHOTO/Aurora/The Chronicle Review
The new anthropomorphism
M y suburban neighborhood is one of those fortunate places inhabited by plenty of animals as well as people. Crows cavort outside my window; down the street is a pond where frogs lurk in the reeds and swallows patrol the surface, and my running path takes me past browsing deer and along a creek where turtles bask and sunfish nest.
I keep an eye out for them all. Animal-watching is like people-watching at a streetside cafe, engrossing me in imagined stories. To watch a chickadee is to live for a moment in the trees. And when I encounter my nonhuman neighbors, I often wonder: What’s on their minds?
It’s a scientifically exciting moment to ask that question. For most of the past century, the official answer leaned toward: nothing much, really. With a few notable exceptions, scientists defined animals as instinct-driven and incapable of thought, or else governed by simple stimulus-response conditioning. Human intelligence was treated as singular, differing from other animals not merely in degree, as Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, but in kind. To assert otherwise was to invite the invalidating taint of anthropomorphism: imputing human characteristics to objects that don’t have them, not unlike a child playing with stuffed animals. It was unscientific.
How times have changed: What once was considered anthropomorphic thinking is now mainstream science. That’s not to say researchers have come to see other animals as simply furred or feathered versions of ourselves. But they are increasingly attentive to the shared biology of human and animal consciousness. A consensus is emerging that to study animals is to appreciate not only their differences from us but also their deep similarities. As the primatologist Frans de Waal writes in Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? “anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think.”
Are We Smart Enough is the latest in a profusion of books by scientists and popular-science writers: See also Carl Safina’s Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, Nathan H. Lents’s Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals, Jonathan Balcombe’s What a Fish Knows: The Inner Lives of Our Underwater Cousins, and Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds, all published in the last year or so. New research describes qualities among nonhuman animals that were once considered exclusive to us: empathy, mental time-travel, language, self-awareness, and altruism. Journals overflow with studies of animal minds, frequently described in language also used to describe human minds, and feats of animal intelligence seem to go viral weekly: an octopus escaping its tank, crows gathering to mourn their dead, fish solving problems, monkeys grieving, and snakes socializing.
The Chronicle of Higher Education for more