Needing a new term to make my point, I invented anthropodenial, which is the a priori rejection of humanlike traits in other animals or animallike traits in us. Anthropomorphism and anthropodenial have an inverse relationship: the closer another species is to us, the more anthropomorphism will assist our understanding of this species and the greater will be the danger of anthropodenial.22 Conversely, the more distant a species is from us, the greater the risk that anthropomorphism will propose questionable similarities that have come about independently. Saying that ants have “queens,” “soldiers,” and “slaves” is mere anthropomorphic shorthand. We should attach no more significance to it than we do when we name a hurricane after a person or curse our computer as if it had free will.
The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals. When we are considering species like the apes, which are aptly known as “anthropoids” (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. Dubbing an ape’s kiss “mouth-to-mouth contact” so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth’s gravity a different name than the moon’s, just because we think Earth is special. Unjustified linguistic barriers fragment the unity with which nature presents us. Apes and humans did not have enough time to independently evolve strikingly similar behavior, such as lip contact in greeting or noisy breathing in response to tickling. Our terminology should honor the obvious evolutionary connections.
On the other hand, anthropomorphism would be a rather empty exercise if all it did was paste human labels onto animal behavior. The American biologist and herpetologist Gordon Burghardt has called for a critical anthropomorphism, in which we use human intuition and knowledge of an animal’s natural history to formulate research questions.23 Thus, saying that animals “plan” for the future or “reconcile” after fights is more than anthropomorphic language: these terms propose testable ideas. If primates are capable of planning, for example, they should hold on to a tool that they can use only in the future. And if primates reconcile after fights, we should see a reduction of tensions as well as improved social relationships after opponents have made up by means of friendly contact. These obvious predictions have by now been borne out by actual experiments and observations.24 Serving as a means rather than an end, critical anthropomorphism is a valuable source of hypotheses.
Griffin’s proposal to take animal cognition seriously led to a new label for this field: cognitive ethology. It is a great label, but then I am an ethologist and know exactly what he meant. Unfortunately, the term ethology has not universally caught on, and spell-checkers still regularly change it to ethnology, etiology, or even theology. No wonder many ethologists nowadays call themselves behavioral biologists. Other existing labels for cognitive ethology are animal cognition and comparative cognition. But those two terms have drawbacks, too. Animal cognition fails to include humans, so it unintentionally perpetuates the idea of a gap between humans and other animals. The comparative label, on the other hand, remains agnostic about how and why we make comparisons. It hints at no framework whatsoever to interpret similarities and differences, least of all an evolutionary one. Even within this discipline, there have been complaints about its lack of theory as well as its habit of dividing animals into “higher” and “lower” forms.25 The label derives from comparative psychology, the name of a field that traditionally has viewed animals as mere standins for humans: a monkey is a simplified human, a rat a simplified monkey, and so on. Since associative learning was thought to explain behavior across all species, one of the field’s founders, B. F. Skinner, felt that it hardly mattered what kind of animal one worked on.26 To prove his point, he entitled a book entirely devoted to albino rats and pigeons The Behavior of Organisms.
For these reasons, Lorenz once joked that there was nothing comparative about comparative psychology. He knew what he was talking about, having just published a seminal study on the courtship patterns of twenty different duck species.27 His sensitivity to the minutest differences between species was quite the opposite of the way comparative psychologists lump animals together as “nonhuman models of human behavior.” Think for a second about this terminology, which remains so entrenched in psychology that no one takes notice anymore. Its first implication, of course, is that the only reason to study animals is to learn about ourselves. Second, it ignores that every species is uniquely adapted to its own ecology, because otherwise how could one serve as a model for another? Even the term nonhuman grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something. Poor things, they are nonhuman! When students embrace this jargon in their writing, I cannot resist sarcastic corrections in the margin saying that for completeness’s sake, they should add that the animals they are talking about are also nonpenguin, nonhyena, and a whole lot more.
Even though comparative psychology is changing for the better, I’d rather avoid its leaden baggage and propose to call the new field evolutionary cognition, which is the study of all cognition (human and animal) from an evolutionary standpoint. Which species we study obviously matters a great deal, and humans are not necessarily central to every comparison. The field includes phylogeny, when we trace traits across the evolutionary tree to determine whether similarities are due to common descent, the way Lorenz had done so beautifully for waterfowl. We also ask how cognition has been shaped to serve survival. The agenda of this field is precisely what Griffin and Uexküll had in mind, in that it seeks to place the study of cognition on a less anthropocentric footing. Uexküll urged us to look at the world from the animal’s standpoint, saying that this is the only way to fully appreciate animal intelligence.
A century later we are ready to listen.
2 A TALE OF TWO SCHOOLS
Do Dogs Desire?
Given the prominent role that jackdaws and little silvery fish known as three-spined sticklebacks—my favorite childhood animals—played in the early years of ethology, the discipline was an easy sell to me. I learned about it when, as a biology student, I heard a professor explain the zigzag dance of the stickleback. I was floored: not by what these little fish did but by how seriously science took what they did. It was the first time I realized that what I liked doing best—watching animals behave—could be a profession. As a boy, I had spent hours observing self-caught aquatic life that I kept in buckets and tanks in our backyard. The high point had been breeding sticklebacks and releasing the young back into the ditch from which their parents had come.