Elephants lead complex, intelligent lives that defy standard tests (Image: Michael Nichols/National Geographic Creative)
“IT SEEMS reasonable since art copies nature, and men can make various automata which move without thought, that nature should produce its own automata much more splendid than the artificial ones. These natural automata are the animals,” wrote Descartes in a letter to the British philosopher Henry More on 5 February 1649.
For the past 60 years, partly due to Descartes, the cognitive sciences have focused on human intelligence as though it were unique or qualitatively different from that of all other creatures on Earth. While this view of cognition has not gone uncriticised, the most pernicious scientific effect is its misleading assumption that knowledge, judgement, emotions and other cognitive functions are largely, if not exclusively, manifest in language-like representations in the brain. Alongside that comes a troubling inability to appreciate, respect, or learn from our fellow animals.
In Beyond Words, Carl Safina sets about redressing that. He is, of course, not alone in paying due regard to non-human animal cognition and emotions. There are centres of canine cognition (one of the best is at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany), many studies of whale and dolphin culture, and a few lone naturalists, such as Jane Goodall.
But Beyond Words stands out as one of the best-written, most entertaining and informative books in this area. It is not a scientific treatise bristling with experiments, methodologies or statistics. Rather, it is a report from the field about what animals do, and how they are studied in the wild. This is a service for which we are in debt, not only to Safina, but to the researchers he features.
Safina divides his book in four, discussing elephants, orcas, wolves, and the deficiencies of lab-based cognition experiments versus field research. Each section highlights a cognitive, emotional, or social aspect of the outer and inner lives of animals, along with the research approaches.
Safina’s key proposition is that the relationship between human and non-human animals could not be more “fundamentally miscomprehended”, arguing we can “do a better job of looking deeper”. And he does look deeper and more effectively at the selfhood of all animals. His journey ranges far, from mood swings in honeybees to the use of symbols and language by elephants and cetaceans, varied manifestations of intelligence, and the nature of communication. There are even “trading” dolphins that are rewarded by their handlers with fish in exchange for bits of trash they bring as they clean up their own pools. The dolphins learned that dead gulls get bigger rewards, so they began to hold back some of the fish they received for normal cleaning to use as bait to catch gulls in exchange for proportionately more fish from their handlers.
We meet Cynthia Moss and her “elephant team” in Amboseli, Kenya. After years of living among particular groups of elephants, Moss and her staff have learned to recognise them by name on sight, and talk about their particular personalities, emotional states, families and other social relations.
This kind of work is certain to draw fire for failing to adopt proper scientific objectivity, and for the dangers of falling into anthropomorphising Descartes’s “automata”. Safina, however, counters with the excellent point that what we can say about non-human relationships, reasoning and emotions must be said on its own terms. It makes no more sense, he says, to evaluate what animals feel using human standards than it does to interpret human behaviour based on what elephants do.
Remember Thomas Nagel’s famous paper “What is it like to be a bat”? There he wrote: “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.” Nagel raises the subtle issue of evaluating what some other creature “feels” like. This gets crucial when Safina borrows a definition of consciousness from leading neuroscientist Christopher Koch. His definition, which is about as good as it gets, says consciousness is “the thing that feels like something”. It clearly imputes consciousness to non-human animals (possibly insects and, though Safina rejects the idea, maybe even to plants).
And then there’s philosopher John Searle, with his four-way distinction between objectivity, subjectivity, ontology and epistemology. To Searle, what it feels like to be a whale or a human is a question that is personal by nature, that is, it is ontologically subjective. But this feeling is also epistemologically objective, that is, we are able to study it.
So we should be able to study how non-human animals feel – not so much by experiment as by field research, according to Safina, because their feelings can be studied even though they remain personal to that particular animal.
What we know already, after decades of research into the physical basis of emotions, is that when handling emotions non-human animals and humans use similar regions of the brain. This suggests that we all feel the same emotions, that our emotions interact with and trigger the same hormones, that we all form bonds with families, with social groups, and that we all learn strategies for coping with environments.
It may be technically correct to say that only humans use words, but there are selves, qualities of life and languages “beyond words”. Descartes’s error about animals and those who agreed with him through the centuries, have done animals, including ourselves, a grave disservice.
“Descartes’s error about animals has done animals, including ourselves, a grave disservice”
Beyond Words goes past this, to a fresh, you-are-there narrative exposing the inner worlds of our fellow travellers like few books I have read. It is essential reading for all who want to expand their understanding of cognition, culture and life on Earth.
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