Often, when human visitors walk up to the chimpanzees at the Yerkes Field Station, an adult female named Georgia hurries to the spigot to collect a mouthful of water before they arrive. She then casually mingles with the rest of the colony behind the mesh fence of their outdoor compound, and not even the best observer will notice anything unusual about her. If necessary, Georgia will wait minutes with closed lips until the visitors come near. Then there will be shrieks, laughs, jumps, and sometimes falls, when she suddenly sprays them.
This is not a mere "anecdote" as Georgia does this sort of thing predictably, and I have known quite a few other apes good at surprising naive people. And not only them. Hediger (1955), the great Swiss zoo biologist, recounts how even when he was fully prepared to meet the challenge, paying attention to the ape's every move, he nevertheless got drenched by an old chimpanzee with a lifetime of experience with this game.
Once, finding myself in a similar situation with Georgia (i.e., aware that she had gone to the spigot and was sneaking up on me), I looked her straight into the eyes and pointed my finger at her, warning, in Dutch, "I have seen you!" She immediately stepped away and let part of the water drop, swallowing the rest. I certainly do not wish to claim that she understands Dutch, but she must have sensed that I knew what she was up to, and that I was not going to be an easy target.
The curious situation in which scientists who work with these fascinating creatures find themselves is that they cannot help but interpret many of their actions in human terms, which then automatically provokes the wrath of philosophers and other scientists who work with domestic rats, or pigeons, or not with animals at all. Unable to speak from firsthand experience, these critics must feel confident indeed when they discard accounts by primatologists as anthropomorphic, and explain how anthropomorphism is to be avoided.
Although no reports of spontaneous ambush tactics in rats have come to my attention, these animals could conceivably be trained with patient reinforcement to retain water in their mouth and stand amongst other rats. And if rats can learn to do so, what is the big deal? The message of the critics of anthropomorphism is something along the lines of "Georgia has no plan; Georgia does not know that she is tricking people; Georgia just learns things faster than a rat." Thus, instead of seeking the origin of Georgia's actions within her, and attributing intentions to her, they propose to seek the origin in the environment and the way it shapes behavior. Rather than being the designer of her own disagreeable greeting ceremony, this ape fell victim to the irresistible rewards of human surprise and annoyance. Georgia is innocent!
But why let her off the hook that easily? Why would any human being who acts this way be scolded, arrested, or held accountable, whereas any animal, even a species that resembles us so closely, is considered a mere passive instrument of stimulus-response contingencies? Inasmuch as the absence of intentionality is as difficult to prove as its presence, and inasmuch as no one has yet demonstrated that animals differ fundamentally from people in this regard, it is hard to see the scientific basis for such contrasting assumptions. Surely, the origin of this dualism is to be found partly outside science.
The dilemma faced by behavioral science today, and the grand theme underlying the present volume, can be summarized as a choice between cognitive and evolutionary parsimony (de Waal, 1991). Cognitive parsimony is the traditional canon of American behaviorism that tells us not to invoke higher mental capacities if we can explain a phenomenon with lower ones. This favors a simple explanation, such as conditioning of a response, over a more complex one, such as intentional deception. Evolutionary parsimony, on the other hand, considers shared phylogeny. It posits that if closely related species act the same, the underlying mental processes are probably the same, too. The alternative would be to assume the evolution of divergent processes for similar behavior; a wildly uneconomic assumption for organisms with only a few million years of separate evolution. If we normally do not propose different causes for the same behavior in, say, dogs and wolves, why should we do so for humans and chimpanzees, which are genetically as close, or closer?
In short, the cherished principle of parsimony has taken on two faces. At the same time that we are supposed to favor low-level over high-level cognitive explanations, we also should not create a double standard according to which shared human and ape behavior is explained differently. If accounts of human behavior commonly invoke complex cognitive abilitiesand they most definitely do (Michel, 1991)we must carefully consider whether these abilities are perhaps also present in apes. We do not need to jump to conclusions, but the possibility should at least be allowed on the table.
Even if the need for this intellectual breathing room is most urgently felt in relation to our primate relatives, it is limited neither to this taxonomic group nor to apparent instances of complex cognition. Students of animal behavior are faced with a choice between classifying animals as automatons or granting them volition and information-processing capacities. Whereas one school warns against assuming things we cannot prove, another school warns against leaving out what may be there: even insects and fish come across to the human observer as internally driven, seeking, wanting systems with an awareness of their surroundings. Inasmuch as descriptions from the latter perspective place animals closer to us than to machines, they adopt a language we customarily use for human action. Inevitably, these descriptions sound anthropomorphic.
~~Anthropomorphism, Anecdotes, and Animals -ed- Robert W. Mitchell, Nicholas S. Thompson, H. Lyn Miles
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