IF A LION COULD TALK : ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE EVOLUTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Rating:
Summary: Heavy in straw, but light in substance
Review: A new class of science writer has emerged in recent years. Where science journalism was once an effort to bring often arcane material to a wider reading public, there is a new approach - debunk science whenever possible. Budiansky, in his opening to this book, is quite open about his agenda. Science, particularly the studies of animal behaviour, is actually driven by New Age animal protection schemes. This must come as a shock to those who have spent years of field and laboratory work trying to understand why various animals, including humans, act as they do.

Budiansky takes us through numerous animal studies, particularly that of primates. His theme is begun with the story of a zoo gorilla who purported(ly?) "saved" a child. That the media hype over this story is based on the fallacious assumption that these huge animals are a threat to humans never seems to have occurred to him. He is only concerned over whether it is "natural" for gorillas to "save" children. Are scientists, as Budiansky charges, over enthusiastically applying human values to our animal relatives?

From a false starting point, he continues with copious accounts of behaviour studies. Each is presented as if the research teams had claimed far more than they actually have done. This is precisely the kind of selective quotations technique others have used in attempting to refute evolution by natural selection. It's the use of whole paddocks of straw creatures that clearly lack substance or value. It also demonstrates that Budiansky is devoid of understanding how science works. Research builds up snippets of information from a great deal of work. In cognition, we're still learning to ask the proper questions, never mind the completeness of the answers.

The book goes on to address the issues of animal "self-awareness", deception, forms of communication and, of course, pain. Since he's keen to refute those seeking greater protection for animals other than ourselves, it's important to Budiansky to limit any meaning to any of these concepts. The irony in all this is that he attributes other animals with talents such as mapping, distance assessment, deception, survival strategies and other attributes without granting these traits any real value. The book is filled with self-contradictions which neither Budiansky nor his editor appear to have noticed. It's as if the manuscript was typed, then rushed into print to meet a deadline.

Budiansky's "references" make abundantly clear that he's failed to consult the more prominent animal behaviourists. John Alcock, Thomas Eisner or Bernd Heinrich are noticeably absent from the list. He gives Seyforth and Cheney ["How Monkeys See the World"] lengthy coverage, only to lambaste them for misrepresenting their findings. He cites Daniel Dennett frequently, but in doing so simply adopts a limited definition of consciousness from what he's used elsewhere in the book. While he claims to have a handle on the evolutionary roots of behaviour, it's clear he has no real grasp of the development of cognition. When he arrives at language, of course, he soars with flowery rhetoric. There's no doubt that language gives humans a special cognitive ability. Does that thus relegate the rest of the animal kingdom to a subordinate role in life? Budiansky thinks so, and wants his readers to follow his lead. It's a false trail. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Rating:
Summary: Laugh and learn
Review: Budiansky performs a valuable service in this book: he casts a skeptical eye on a lot of very enthusiastic theorizing. I enjoy his sense of humor, and wish he had kept it up. The book bogs down. I got bored reading about the umpteenth clever experiment in which some animal presses, or does not press, a lever at some stimulus. Bored and envious: while I'm working for a living, these people are raking in good grant money for playing with chimpanzees? I should have studied biology!

The last chapter's attacks on evolutionary psychology didn't sit well with me. Budiansky has deliberately chosen the more untenable theories to attack, and ignored the field's provocative contributions. He could have down without a lot of the shouting.

As to Budiansky's central arguments, he would have profited greatly from the on-line, off-line thinking Derek Bickerton put forth in "Language and Human Behavior."

Discussions about animal language and consciousness miss a point: language is first and foremost a tool, and even trained apes don't use that tool. They miss the first criterion of language, that it is something to be used. I have never read an account of Chimp A using ASL with Chimp B, or transmitting it to Chimp C. Human language is the most efficent communcation device in the animal kingdom. If gorillas and chimpanzees do grasp the concepts of language, why don't they use it with each other?

In closing these random remarks, let me comment that I for one am just as happy lions can't talk. Little could be more disconcerting than walking across the savanna and hearing a voice from behind some bushes saying, "Oh goodie, just when I was so hungry, it's one of those delicious hairless things that can't run very fast."

Rating:
Summary: Laugh and learn
Review: Budiansky performs a valuable service in this book: he casts a skeptical eye on a lot of very enthusiastic theorizing. I enjoy his sense of humor, and wish he had kept it up. The book bogs down. I got bored reading about the umpteenth clever experiment in which some animal presses, or does not press, a lever at some stimulus. Bored and envious: while I'm working for a living, these people are raking in good grant money for playing with chimpanzees? I should have studied biology!

The last chapter's attacks on evolutionary psychology didn't sit well with me. Budiansky has deliberately chosen the more untenable theories to attack, and ignored the field's provocative contributions. He could have down without a lot of the shouting.

As to Budiansky's central arguments, he would have profited greatly from the on-line, off-line thinking Derek Bickerton put forth in "Language and Human Behavior."

Discussions about animal language and consciousness miss a point: language is first and foremost a tool, and even trained apes don't use that tool. They miss the first criterion of language, that it is something to be used. I have never read an account of Chimp A using ASL with Chimp B, or transmitting it to Chimp C. Human language is the most efficent communcation device in the animal kingdom. If gorillas and chimpanzees do grasp the concepts of language, why don't they use it with each other?

In closing these random remarks, let me comment that I for one am just as happy lions can't talk. Little could be more disconcerting than walking across the savanna and hearing a voice from behind some bushes saying, "Oh goodie, just when I was so hungry, it's one of those delicious hairless things that can't run very fast."

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating, Challenging, and Counter-Intuitive
Review: If you like having things you think you know challenged by a rigorous scientific thinker and expert debater, you'll like this book. You'll also learn a heck of a lot -- not only about animals and how they evolved, but about humans and how we evolved. As well as about how some of the advantages evolution has given us actually fog our thinking on issues such as animal intelligence.

If you're not a rigorous scientific thinker, or can't stand to risk having a sacred cow gored (if I may use a term redolent of speciest violence against animals, or some such claptrap), don't bother reading this book. You'll only wind up giving it a one-star review and shrieking tediously about your violated sense of oneness with the Earth.

Rating:
Summary: Intellectually Dishonest
Review: Let me be clear about something at the outset. I am not an animal rights activist, but I am a pet owner. I am not a scientist, and I eat meat. All biases fully disclosed at the outset of this review.

The fundamental problem with Mr. Budiansky's argument is that it is phony.

He is trying to prove that animals are not our equals -- that their consciousness is not equal to ours. This is like me trying to prove that Einstein knew more about physics than I do. You don't need a book for that.

But what's worse about this book, is that Budiansky botches such a simple argument. You could easily argue that humans have a higher consciousness than animals, but it seems reasonable that you would also argue that animals feel...something. To me, these do not appear to be inconsistent positions.

Yet Budiansky won't, or can't, allow this. His sham argument is absolute.

He states that what an animal perceives is unknowable, but then confidently asserts that animals perceive nothing. Their "pain is not pain". Did I miss something, or did logic go on a permanent holiday?

I may not be able to perceive the pain of an animal, or even know that it exists, but I hear the squeal of my dog when I accidentally step on her paw. I don't need to pay Budiansky to have him tell me that what she felt wasn't techically "pain" in the human sense nor do I need him to explain that my dog and I aren't going to have any deep philosophical conversations any time soon.

But he does have a decent command of syntax.

Rating:
Summary: Misrepresents study findings
Review: On page 108, Budiansky writes: "[Birds]can fly reliably in a preset compass direction...but many such birds have no mental map or spatial memory to go with this compass. If shifted laterally off course, they do not adjust their direction to keep heading toward their habitual wintering spot, but instead continue to fly on the same preset magnetic compass bearing--and they wind up displaced laterally from their destination."

This does not represent the findings of the largest bird migration study ever conducted, that by Dutch biologist A.C. Perdeck. Over the course of several years, Perdeck captured 11,000 migrating starlings at their autumn stopover sites in Britain and France. He ringed them and transported them by aircraft to Switzerland, 375 miles to the SE, where they were released. Perdeck found that juvenile birds that had never migrated before continued to fly on their original directional heading and ended up in southern France or Spain. Adults who had migrated before, however, reoriented themselves and flew via different headings to their normal wintering grounds in England and northern France.

Perdeck repeated the experiments with migrating chaffinches captured in Holland and released in Switzerland. Again, juvenile birds continued on with their original directional heading, SW, but adults reoriented and flew NW to their traditional wintering grounds in Britain. (In nature, the birds fly in mixed flocks of adults and juveniles.)

Budiansky doesn't footnote his statement and in the chapter notes only cites the general popular reference work, "The Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior," not even pointing to a specific article in this work. In other words, the source of the information for his statement is effectively obscured.

I am sympathetic to Budiansky's point of view, but I am very, very disappointed in the way he has presented his arguments. In short, his book is not a reliable report of research findings on animal "intelligence."

Rating:
Summary: Misrepresents study findings
Review: The point of this book is to "prove" that only people think. Anything a non-human, be it a bacteria or a gorilla, does that looks like thinking actually isn't. It's all programmed by evolution. He cites study after study to prove his point, even when the study appears not to prove it at all.

Some examples of anthropomorphism, of course, are clearly erroneous - the famous example of the counting horse, and the way evolution seems almost spooky in its apparent "intelligence." Certainly he's right in saying that it's hubris on our part to compare animals intelligence solely in terms of ours. And it's not very accurate either; at a wolf refuge in Washington state, called Wolf Haven, they tell you that researchers have determined that a German Shepherd dog is as intelligent as a 4-year old child, but a wolf is as intelligent as a 12-year old. There are very few four-year-olds, or 12-year olds, for that matter, who could survive and thrive in the wild, hunting their food successfully and finding safe places to sleep, avoiding predators and hunters along the way.

But then he jumps from those errors, with a few bashes at Decartes along the way, to the conclusion that only people think. There is little difference, he says, between the behavior of a simple computerized model of a cricket and a real cricket.

And, by extension, there's little difference between that computer toy and a chimpanzee, at least in terms of its behavior. Bernd Heinrich, in his fascinating book Mind of the Raven, discusses his frustration at being unable to publish articles with results that appear to demonstrate raven's abilities to figure out problems. It didn't matter how carefully he was able to construct the studies, and how accurate the results appeared, the scientific community doesn't want to hear it.

Certainly it's accurate (apparently) that only humans use language in any real sense, and much of what separates human behavior from the behavior or "lower" animals is that language and what it enables us to do. But that's not enough for him, he wants to have people be the only animals that think at all, and he goes through study after study to demonstrate this fact, whether the studies show that or not.

One example: a study had chimpanzees, pigeons, and college students look at a series of pictures of birds, to learn to pick out the kingfisher. Once they could do it, they got a second set of different bird pictures, from which they were supposed to identify the kingfisher. All three groups did very well on the test (80-90% right) but on interviewing the human participants, the researchers learned that they had simply been picking out the most colorful bird, rather than correctly identifying the kingfisher. So they reran the second part of the test, using brightly colored birds with the kingfisher pictures, and the scores of the apes, the pigeons, and the college students all dropped by about 10%. This proves, apparently, that animals can't think the way people do.

It's unfortunate, because he does make some very good points. For instance, the things which set apart human brain function from other animals: language, planning, playing chess, the ability to do mathematics, are precisely those things which computers can do well - in fact, far better than we -- while the things that "even animals" can do, such as recognizing a face, or navigating across a room without bumping into anything, computers have so far been almost perfect failures at. Although he doesn't say it, it seems pretty clear to me that this is an indication that we understand things like mathematics and language much better than we do our own ability to recognize faces. What you don't understand, you can't program.

So, if you want to be reassured that the "Tenko the Robotic Puppy" your child wants for Christmas this year is just the same as a real puppy, but without the walks and the droppings, this book is for you.

Rating:
Summary: A nasty little book, which systematically distorts the facts
Review: This is a nasty little book. Budiansky's approach is thoroughly dishonest, and frankly, rather cheap. At times, it reads more like a religious tract than a body of serious scholarship.

Budiansky has an axe to grind, and no amount of evidence is going to get in his way. His idea is neither original nor very convincing: humans are in some magical way unique from other animals. Again and again, evidence of non-humans thinking and behaving in ways that are obviously intelligent is either ignored or seriously misrepresented. It is true that it is possible to over-interpret behavioural experiments; however, what is needed is a more scientific approach, not a less scientific one. Moreover, the first step for anyone writing a book like this is to read the literature properly: this is something which Budiansky has clearly not done.