In the shape of man
Is it wrong to interpret all life in human terms? Ideas from theoretical physics and linguistics can illuminate how we understand the minds of animals.
anthropomorphism (n.) from Greek anthrōpos “man” + morphē "shape".
Two celebrated films in 2022 prominently featured donkeys, one set on an island off Ireland and the other trundling from Poland to Italy via nondescript exurbs on the trek between. Several critics wrote that the films spliced into their narratives a view of the world from the animal’s perspective. Never mind that it is an old argument that we possibly cannot. As I watched both films, a recent book was on my mind — An Immense World.
The author is the award-winning science writer Ed Yong. In an NYT Guest Essay timed near its release, Yong appeared to frame his second book as a corrective to the rampant error of anthropomorphism — interpreting animal behavior through the lens of ascribed human characteristics and narrative. An excellent opportunity to carry forward a recurring theme in this newsletter.
As usual with Elite Scotoma, I’m critiquing a writer I greatly admire on a specific narrow point. Long before he won his Pulitzer, Yong’s decision to quit his PhD to pursue a career in science journalism was a terrible influence on me. And he wouldn’t mind. He’s all for reexamining one’s heroes, the David Attenborough in that particular case.
Firstly, the title: How Animals See Themselves. I know writers often do not pick the titles, their editors do. But I wonder how much pushback the editor got for a title suggesting nearly the opposite of what the essay says. It’s not how animals ‘see themselves’, because that is precisely what we remain far from understanding for all the reasons the book lays out at length. The book is about how animals ‘see’ their environment or the world or ‘reality’. Whether or not the entire range of phyla that Yong discusses in the book have a sense of self to ‘see’ is very much moot. Equally, there is little doubt that they all sense their environment and manifestly use that information. And for that reason, the title makes his objection to anthropomorphism in much broader strokes even more incongruent. Your favorite exquisitely produced nature documentaries from the last ten years err because in their telling,
…animals are of interest only if they satisfy familiar human tropes of violence, sex, companionship and perseverance. They’re worth viewing only when we’re secretly viewing a reflection of ourselves. We could, instead, try to view them through their own eyes.
The logic of arguments as it emerges in word choice after editing at the highest levels has been the fixation of this newsletter from the very first post. “Only if”? That is a gratuitous sweep. But also, once you bar violence, sex, companionship and perseverance, how much really is left of life, any life?
Just on its surface, the objection jars on my ears because when it comes to writing, Yong has for years advised aspiring writers to use narratives centered on people even when reporting on a science breakthrough with specific microbes or a long-extinct species, so as to hold the attention of a human audience. At a 2019 event at Yale, Yong asked, “How do you get people to care about something that they would otherwise not care about?” The answer was stories. It comes from more direct advice by Carl Zimmer, whom Yong frequently calls his mentor: “People like to read about people”.
Of course, framing an article around the scientists at a lab behind a new paper is hardly the same as ascribing personified roles to the subjects of a documentary or that paper. But the point is that on the part of the creator of the content, the motivation comes from the same place — audience is king and audience wants stories. Dr. Claire Parkinson, author of Popular Media and Animals, agrees:
Films are human-to-human communication, so for a narrative to work there has to be a human interpretation of animal behaviour… It has to translate into a humanised story at some level, otherwise it would be incredibly difficult for us to make sense of.
Sure, today you could use CGI to artificially approximate what mockingbirds might look like to each other, enhancing the colors we cannot perceive. Or fill in the ultrasound waves or infrared light in a segment about bats or snakes, as he suggests and some films already do. But to be received and remembered well, a documentary would do well to structure it all in a narrative.
The question then isn’t why documentary filmmakers anthropomorphize narratives. The question is how big an error it is to use a familiar human trope or framing device. The key issue are things like sentience, free will, motivation, taste and intent. In a word, consciousness. The violence or perseverance is on open and obvious display. The question is, do we know that an animal is mentally involved?
How do we know how ‘intelligent’ an animal is? Experts know there are many dimensions to intelligence. I find it more meaningful to say there are many kinds of intelligences. For a telling parallel, even among humans we are quick to assess some as more intelligent than others merely because they present well on one1 axis of intelligence.
Likewise when scientists try to assess animal intelligence, the default in lab studies is to design experiments that involve solving practical problems with tools and planning. The premise straitens the concept of intelligence to the one that was critical on the evolutionary path one branch of hominids took. Regardless, let’s ignore that and address the question anyway.
Even assuming that all other species could benefit to some extent from using tools in a mechanical way, the experiments we design face a number of challenges:
Body plan
Ignore Rene Descartes. He didn’t know2 what he was talking about. There are no brains without bodies. Bodies are only as capable as the brains that they include. Brains do not just drive bodies. Brains need and use bodies in their core functions. Brains are designed as one part of a body that uses the rest of the body to help control the entire body. The design, functioning and capacities of brains are hence intricately tied to the design and capacities of bodies. In fact, many animals brains also use the environment for cognitive purposes. Spiders are the go-to example because not only do they extensively use use their built environment for cognition, they actually build it themselves!
Often when we’re designing an experiment, human scientists design it optimized for humans. In Ways of Being, James Bridle writes:
To make climbing and swinging easier, gibbons have elongated fingers. While an excellent adaptation for an arboreal lifestyle, this makes it harder for them to pick up objects lying on flat surfaces. It also, some researchers believe, makes them less likely to notice such things: their attention and interest, and therefore their problem-solving and planning, points upwards. They notice and make use of tools when they’re where (and what) they expect tools to be.
That’s a primate, in what we call an ‘android’ shape or sometimes, rather backwards, ‘humanoid’ shape. It should be obvious that as all other animal groups inhabit very different bodies, their tools would look different.
Size
In a famous example, a test of self-awareness in elephants got very different results when they finally decided to shell out for a mirror large enough for elephants!
Now consider this 2023 study with cockatoos.
There are several parts to this study, but I was stumped at the very first. There’s a complicated setup with transparent membranes and an inclined surface, and you need a firm grasp of geometry and basic material science to figure out how to get the cashew nut.
Figaro, who has never seen the setup or the tools provided before, correctly figures out which tools to use in which order within half a minute of being introduced to it. Not sure how harshly readers will judge me for this candid admission but I think I would take a similar amount of time. Longer, if I were hungry enough to bother with my captor’s nonsense for a small morsel. (More on that below.)
But more to the point I want to make, the whole apparatus is larger than the bird! Are humans equally adept at solving the same mechanical problem when it is the size of lab apparatus on an average table or scaled up to the size of a room? Imagine a visiting alien species trying to test your intelligence shoves you into a large room with glass walls. You are looking at some mechanical contraption with levers the size of drain pipes where you’re supposed to tug and try various things so you can get fed. It’s not a perfect analogy because the straw etc. are actually a suitable size for the parrot. In the wild, smaller animals like parrots usually manipulate objects that are relatively larger than what humans are used to3, partly because they have to use a beak where we have opposable thumbs. But the point I’m making is more about the visual understanding of the problem set up. Relative to the parrot’s field of vision, the various parts of the schematic are quite large.
Past experience
As mammals, human children get constant care from their parents for years after birth. All this while, babies, infants and toddlers are soaking in all the information thrown at them. Just one part of it are the physical properties of various materials. A child knows well before entering a cognition lab that plastic straws bend, wooden sticks don’t. Figaro flits in and figures that out in seconds. Again, I’m imagining that alien lab where they offer me tools made of materials I’m entirely unfamiliar with. It is possible animals are much faster at discerning the physical properties of new materials because out there in the wild, their survival depends on speed. The logic is not very different from how the effective ‘frame rate’ at which birds perceive motion is much faster than humans.
Motivation
When we test children on cognitive tasks, we don’t make them solve problems in exchange for food, assured that they’ll always be hungry enough to desperately seek the solution. With animals, it was long the norm to keep lab animals slightly starved so they will participate in studies with more enthusiasm. All the while we managed to ignore the basic effect that hungry brains are not at their peak performance. (Midday school meals in countries from the UK to India are an attempt to address precisely that unjust disparity in classrooms.) This is by far the greatest challenge for research in animal cognition. Most animals do not share any values beyond survival that motivate humans in their made-up world. You cannot make them care about money. How do you get them to attempt to solve an artificial problem you set up in the lab? The sole exception might be dogs, who can readily intuit from the smallest cues what a human wants and appear to be strongly motivated by an innate need to obey or please us, even when happily well-fed. They are driven to sustain a long-term bond. But no other animal has co-evolved with humans quite that same way. (There are related claims about kangaroos.)
Personality
This is the most recent one that scientists have begun paying attention to, also because this is an error we long made even among humans ourselves. If the same alien scientists walked into your 7th-grade class, pointed to four of your classmates you don’t like, walked away with them to their lab and then published results of their study as the definitive assessment of human adolescent intelligence would you call them reliable? People have different personalities — some are too eager to please, others neurotic and easily stressed by change, yet others, just… jerks. Turns out animals do too. That’s to not even mention the surprising interactions between social status and cognitive ability.
Increasingly, scientists are calling for inferences on animal cognition be drawn strictly from observation in wild contexts, which has its own set of challenges. Again, Yong might surreptitiously nod at Sir David.
Science is only human
Partly down to our learned biases but partly sheer dumb lack of imagination, we are hopelessly blinkered in where we even choose to look. For a long time, science wasn’t even paying attention to animals that we farm for food, perhaps too afraid to confront what we might learn. Insects are at an even weirder part of our mental Venn diagram. Two legs good, six legs bad. Told that humans might need to adapt their taste to include them in our diets as a protein source, most of us turn up our noses in instinctive disgust. Too far down the natural food chain to merit respect even as food. Cognition?! They are the last group we turned our attention to, and yet again, surprised to learn what we discovered.
In view of all the above challenges in assessing intelligence in vertebrates, why do we presume to design experiments to judge cognition in insects?
To extend the same line of argument as with body plan, just as tools look different for animals that embody different shapes, for animals that occupy distinct ecological niches their very definitions of problems is different. Their cognitive needs are different.
In the balance, it is not entirely wrong to pause on the question for a bit.
We are right to be skeptical of quick interpretation. As I’ve noted, our brains are very unreliable raconteurs. Among their bug-features, they are finely attuned to apply a theory of mind — when they see animated action, they project their best guess of the motivations of the agents involved, to be ready to respond if necessary. We read motivations based on stories we have heard. We might be overinterpreting to fit that cognitive square peg.
Moreover, we find it hard to think outside causality and narrative. Maybe animals do not need to constantly relate what is happening now directly to what happens 5 minutes later. This may sound like I’m describing quantum phenomenon, but time only matters in a shared sense. When two particles are floating around oblivious to each other, time’s “arrow” is of no meaning to either. But when they collide, each causes effects on the other and voila, time has a direction that matters!
To share anything, you need to mingle with others, take an interest in them. Only social animals have opportunity and cause to share. Perhaps we need to calibrate our interpretations of intent and causality in animal behavior on a gradient that maps to the extent that the species is social. To be social, you need memory, which is itself mapped on an axis of time. To a lesser degree, predator species briefly direct their attention to other organisms with an intention to violently ‘interact’ with them. For a few minutes, they too must be acutely aware of the direction of time.
But sometimes when people object to anthropomorphism, it sounds like they have a problem with any personification. But the latter just means assigning agency. It is a figure of speech only when applied to inanimate objects. When our brain morphology and genetics has an old shared lineage, we cannot assume an animal-human distinction in all kinds of motivations. There is little to support distinguishing us from many animals on matters like lust, gluttony or sloth. On the other hand, we do have to be more careful with attributing others like pride, greed, wrath and envy.
That is to say, language, the gift we pride ourselves on, is itself suspect in our epistemology when we assess and describe those who do fine without it.
“He chases her” to describe an animal scene is definitely not anthropomorphism. “He is desperate to catch her eye”, to me seems like a grey zone. Just semantics. On the other hand, I’d prefer we minimize the use of coloring words like ‘regret’, ‘delight’, ‘relief’ etc. even with chimpanzees. I entirely expect chimpanzees feel all of those things exactly the way we do. But we haven’t yet confirmed that. More importantly, what we don’t know is if chimpanzees ‘delight’ in the same thing we perceive or measure them to.
On which note, and this may seem particularly underhanded, I take exception to Yong’s prominent characterization of “grief” in a 2018 article about an individual orca who had met a loss in the family.
It is hardly anthropomorphic to ascribe grief to animals that are so intelligent and intensely social.
That’s a matter for a scientist to argue in a peer-reviewed journal. Until a community of scientists concurs over time4, it is not contrary to everything I’ve argued above to posit that in that case, very simply, discombobulation suffices as an explanation of why she is lugging around her dead daughter’s body. This is an orca that just doesn’t entirely understand death. There is no reason to assume every orca would, sharp as they are. There is even less basis to project complex emotion.
What does it take to make that leap? With all the caveats above in mind, controlled experiments.
In videos of several studies of animal cognition, I think I have observed a named complex emotion. The monkey who tosses away the cucumber she was perfectly content with until a mate got a grape for executing the same task and the wolf who showed the experimental equipment exactly what his jaws are capable of when it refused to dispense the treat that a peer in clear view gets.
Both hilarious videos are embedded here. The researchers call it ‘inequity aversion’ which is fine in a prosaic way, but you have to watch to the end of the videos to see why I’m also comfortable with calling what you just witnessed ‘indignation’. For a moment I thought Kaspar was just exhibiting a kind of engineer’s curiosity about why his side of the apparatus didn’t seem to work. But the next few seconds banish all doubt.
It’s my irrepressible chuckle that tips the scale for me. Laughter is a very advanced end of the evolved theory of mind. Spontaneous laughter is very hard to trigger, as any entertainer would tell you. When our brain cannot suppress it, it has recognized a situation it knows intimately well from experience. This is the rare occasion where you can rely on your brain. Watch again, after expertly aiming the cucumber to hit the offending grad student, how urgently that monkey bangs the table. It pains me to realize how, so watchful and discerning on the question of fairness among her own kind, she accepts the tiny cage, a mark of hierarchy between us and them, as a given.
Here is where I am at on adjudging charges of anthropomorphism. The species matters, and their context of course matters. In some cases, the word can seem, again, arrogantly backwards. It first assumes the distinction and then faults those who might blur it.
I’ve come to a more balanced view where I see animal lives not as “fuzzy, feathered proxies” for human lives, but rather our lives as furless featherless proxies of theirs. Much of the difference in ‘meaning’ is just a pretension, like the clothes we wear instead in mild weather. “They” vastly outnumber us, in terms of diversity of what life is and can be. The archetypical life on our planet is by far defined around food, sex, violence and perseverance. Those that escape these cycles do so either fleetingly or entirely in artifice.
The real error is not the prism of food, sex and violence itself, but the second-order imposition of human paradigms within those domains. Human life is just animal life with a second layer of content slathered on, meanings that stand on words with ancient cultural baggage. The charge of anthropomorphism feels vigilantly necessary at the second layer but much weaker at the first.
Yes, we find it hard to imagine an umwelt of electric or magnetic fields. But much of the frills in the modern human umwelt, with the comforts of technology paid for with constant toil, is imbued with imagined values. It is also why the lucky ones among humans, after attaining every kind of success and meaning, pine for companionship and recognition, just the same as the unlucky amongst us. There are many affectively biased unscientific viral examples online to teach us how similar humans and animals are, but what I find more illuminating are awards ceremonies with no animals in sight. If you read about how focused chimpanzee lives are on tallying their social status, debts and credits, then compare acceptance speeches at the pinnacle of success in a range of what you consider essentially human endeavors, whether arts or sciences, you are left to marvel at how we ever convinced ourselves our lives are any different.
Of course, none of that is to say future documentary filmmakers shouldn’t all grab a copy of An Immense World or hire Yong to consult on the CGI effects. It isn’t a case of either or. Let’s have nature films that allow for humans to relate to animals as characters in a familiar story while also emphasizing that what we can see is but a sliver of an unapproachable umwelt. That a bird navigates sensing the planet’s magnetic field doesn’t necessarily separate its yearning for its destination from a human traveler. Unless we have evidence to demonstrate that it is. I’ve said here before, that’s a question of something like faith, rather than strictly science. Rather than demanding evidence that most vertebrates are conscious much like us, I demand evidence that they are not. My valence on the question is informed by our shared evolutionary history and the fact that we know that none of the genetic or cultural step changes that make humans a peculiar species are necessary conditions for consciousness.
Yong’s typically riveting book is right. We see animal lives a little bit like how beings on a 2D plane would perceive a passing cone as a point that appears to grow into an enlarging ellipse that suddenly vanishes. On that point, if you’ve been disappointed in decades of films and TV teen dramas about werewolves where you never see anything from a wolf’s perspective, I strongly recommend a different Irish film, the inimitable 2019’s Wolfwalkers.
Minor digression, but to me it seems that on an exhaustively composite measure of intelligence, it is very likely most humans would rank very close to each other.
On that specific notion.
Partly down to the square-cube law.
On the other hand, if science were sure orcas grieve for community members, the article massively undersells what our species owes them. When that day comes, as it probably will at the very least for cetaceans, apes, corvids and elephants, it should be a seismic shift in our moral paradigm comparable to the discovery of life on a distant planet.