Proposed New Paradigm in Animal Cogition -- From Observation and Experimentation to Making Contact

[jordan179]

I was watching a Nova special on corvids, and it mentioned that the meaning of over 250 distinct calls in one species of crow had been deciphered. And I got to thinking about the implications of this, combined with our recent discoveries of syntactical language in prairie dogs and natural sign language in bonobos. I concluded that we should make

Comments

[polaris93]

Can we really understand anthropology, sociology, or history if we only have the nature, society, and deeds of one sapient species to study? It is, perhaps, like trying to grasp linguistics with only one known language. One could imagine such an effort, but it would be handicapped by ignorance and fraught by error.

An excellent reason to try to establish communication in some form with other species -- and a possible clue that the reason no one has set up a formal project of that sort is because we don't want to know our nature, psychology, society, and history that way. For example, I know from long experience as well as from research that cats have societies in which status, friendship, and kinship are important, and their interactions with one another include a wealth of meaningful experiences -- triumph, tragedy, need, generosity, you name it. They may be different from us, but not that different, and their minds are similar to ours in many ways. But try telling that to many people and they'll deny it flatly -- and want nothing to do with evidence. Why? Maybe they don't want to learn more about themselves.

[jordan179]

I very much agree. The reason why we aren't attempting "contact" with sapient animals is that doing so implies an acknowlegement of equality with us on a fundamental level as fellow "people," while simply observing and sometimes experimenting on leaves them relegated to the status of "things." Which suits most humans just fine.

I have, since learning about the sapience of nonhuman animals, encountered no end of attempts to deny clear evidence of animal intelligence (such as toolmaking among chimps and New Caledonian crows) and communication (such as the syntactical language of prairie dogs). The standard formulation "Oh, that's just [lower-status processing word]," with the utterer apparently believing that changing the terminology changes the reality being discussed -- which is not a very good advertisement for the height of human intelligence!

[polaris93]

The problem is that many people have a crying need to feel superior to something, anything, the more, the better, indicating deep-seated social insecurity and other, related problems. They may have had authoritarian, even abusive parents as children, or have had to deal with bullies and others whom they couldn't get out from under. So they need to feel superior, and it shows in their projection of themselves onto our whole species, and a projection onto its species of the animal under discussion. And too many scientists who study animals have that problem, which is why the sort of study project you'd like to initiate hasn't been done.