In my pursuit to understand how cognition appears it seems
natural that I would be inclined to read about how animals process the information
around them. It was indeed necessary to take into consideration the idea that all
the research and study into animal intelligence carries a powerful bias, that
of anthropocentrism. The fact that we as humans are bound to our own experience
of consciousness, of how we perceive the world around us, limits the understanding
of other experiences, namely of that which other animals might have.
Budiansky’s account of cleverly designed experiments is a
proof that we need to take into consideration a lot of factors and conditions
before we can state something about the way in which a different species reacts
based on the stimuli it receives. The very nature of our sensory organs bounds
us “to see” only a part of the environment, the one that is the most important
to our own survival. Because we are social specie we put emphasis on the
accurate perception of those signals that can offer information about other
members of our specie (the social position, symbols of power or wealth,
relations amongst ourselves) much like other social species: monkeys,
chimpanzees, dogs, horses etc. We tend to consider these signs as those of
greater intelligence, just because we are used to intelligence being expressed
in this manner.
Every organism learns through associations during its
lifetime. Animals do that all the time and it’s a big advantage to their
survival to do so. Learning and responding appropriately to the environment
guarantees a better chance at transmitting the genes, and continue the legacy
of every species. Only those organisms that adapt can maintain a competitive
edge against other members of their species. Associations between stimulus and
a response from environment (reward: food, water, sex, inclusion in the social
environment etc., or punishment: food deprivation, injuries etc) are a powerful
tools in learning. Dogs and other social animals exhibit this feat mostly
because we know how to perceive it, but other animals do to. Budiansky offers a
great amount of evidence to support this.
Some remarks are so true that I feel compelled to mention
them. For instance: “Many animal
researchers are fairly confident that more-sensitive experiments will show that
apes, at least, do possess some ability to attribute mental states. But the
entire search has been a vivid reminder of the dangers of anthropocentrism. The
things that apes are good at are the things they evolved to do to survive in
their particular ecological niche. And the things an animal is good at generally
do not require three decades of ambiguous experiments to discover.”(p. 188)
This particular point made me think of all the implications in every aspect of
scientific research, mainly the idea that when we set ourselves to test a hypothesis
we limit the perceived reality to only a narrow bit, the one that fits into our
experimental instruments.
The final passage of the book is another idea that made me think,
mainly because it manages to sum up different ideas about evolution. “It is always dangerous to draw moral lessons
from the blindly amoral process of evolution. But if there is a lesson here, it
is that all of the creatures that evolution has fashion are remarkable in their
own right. All have hit upon unique ways to make a living against all
probability. And that is something to respect, and to treasure.”(p. 194)
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