By explaining the smartness ofanimals either as a product of instinct or simple learning, we have kept human cognition onits pedestal under the guise of being scientific.
I doubt most scientists would deny that their abilities are a combined effort of instinct and simple learning.
A real scientist should avoid any and all anthropomorphism,which is why hard-nosed colleagues often ask us to change our terminology.
Peres-Labourdette blatantly establishes the topic of his argument--the similarities between humans and animals--with a somewhat condescending tone.
At this point, you need only to point to a tickling spot, not even touching it, and hewill throw another fit of laughter.
Reminds me of Jaak Panksepp's study on rats' ultrasonic laughter.
TICKLING a juvenile chimpanzee is a lot like tickling a child.
What about adult Chimps?
Yes,dogs hide under the table when they have done something wrong, yet the most likelyexplanation is that they fear trouble.
Don't some dogs cry in appropriate circumstances?
It makes no sense to compare our cognition with one that isdistributed over eight independently moving arms, each with its own neural supply, or onethat enables a flying organism to catch mobile prey by picking up the echoes of its ownshrieks. Clark’s nutcrackers (members of the crow family) recall the location of thousands ofseeds that they have hidden half a year before, while I can’t even remember where I parkedmy car a few hours ago.
If intelligence puts humans at the top of the animal hierarchy, then why not use that as a standard? Which animal is more likely to go extinct in a hundred thousand years, Clark's nutcrackers, who specialize a particular skill for a specific environment, or humans, who can essentially adapt to any sort of environment?
Anyone who knows animals can come up with a few more cognitivecomparisons that are not in our favor.
A specialized skill does not suggest cognition or intelligence. Someone could specialize in memorizing ten thousand digits of pi, but no one would describe him as intelligent if that is his only skill. What other ability does this suggest other than an extraordinary memory? The same concept applies to Clark's nutcrackers.
Since thiscapacity has by now been confirmed by other studies, including one on a cockatoo, we cansafely do away with the 1949 book “Man the Tool-Maker” by the British anthropologistKenneth Oakley, which declared tool fabrication humanity’s defining characteristic. Corvidsare a technologically advanced branch on the tree of life with skills that often match those ofprimates like us.
Author is mixing the definitions of tool-making and tool-using. Tool-making refers to the construction of apparatuses for a specific purpose, whereas tool-using just requires the animal to attempt to use it. Betty's demonstration of bending a steel wire is no different than building a nest of sticks.
Convergent evolution (when similar traits, like the wings of birds, bats and insects, appearindependently in separate evolutionary branches) allows cognitive capacities to pop up at themost unexpected places, such as face recognition in paper wasps or deceptive tactics incephalopods. When the males of some cuttlefish species are interrupted by a rival duringcourtship, they may trick the latter into thinking there is nothing to worry about. On the sideof his body that faces his rival, the male adopts the coloring of a female, so that the otherbelieves he is looking at two females. But the courting male keeps his original coloring on thefemale’s side of his body in order to keep her attention. This two-faced tactic, known as dual-gender signaling, suggests tactical skills of an order no one had ever suspected in a species solow on the natural scale. But of course, talk of “high” and “low” is anathema to biologists, whosee every single organism as exquisitely adapted to its own environment.
What makes this cognition? An overtly complicated method of deterring mating rivals, while there are other, more effective methods, is not a sign of intelligence, but a indication of unsuccessful evolution progression.
Saying that ants have “queens,” “soldiers” and “slaves” is mereanthropomorphic shorthand without much of a connection to the way human societies createthese roles.
Is there a need to accept how animals perceive these roles? Humans and animals have different morals. Ie. Female mantises and spiders eat their partners after breeding. While there isn't really a role to give to the dyad, ie. "queens" or "soldiers", does it matter how we describe our perception of them?
insight
Not necessarily insight, some understanding perhaps of altitude and length. Proof of problem-solving, though.
We still hear this argument, not so much for tendencies that we consider animalistic(everyone is free to speak of aggression, violence and territoriality in animals) but rather fortraits that we like in ourselves.
The morality of human actions to animals is called into question if concepts such as empathy and understanding is brought up.
Giveneverything we know from controlled experiments in captivity, such as the ones I conductmyself, these speculations are not far-fetched.
Author is an artist. What kind of controlled experiments has he done?
Our brains share the samebasic structure with other mammals
So far all the examples are on mammals. How would author comment on differences between humans and insects?
Unjustified linguistic barriers fragment the unity with which nature presents us.
Whereas some mammals display actions with perhaps similar intent as humans, ie. kissing, they also display other actions that differ from those of humans, especially in the modern era. For example, wild chimps in the African region eat Colobus monkeys alive, tearing their limbs off as they screamed for help. Describing such acts with anthropoidic linguistics would promote even more of a distasteful view on mammals, that is not taking into account of the actions of other animals, say, insects, which I give the examples of female mantises and spiders eating their partner after breeding.