Letter: We're animal-like

From Drew Rendall and John Vokey, University of Lethbridge

We enjoyed your recent series of articles on animal minds (12 June, p 41). The research programmes on animal cognition that these articles summarised are an exciting component of modern evolutionary biology and psychology. The findings that demonstrate similarities between the problem-solving performance of various animal species and that of humans are debunking the old but stubbornly persistent view that there is a yawning gap between animal and human minds. This view flies in the face of now entrenched ideas about the fundamental continuity inherent in the evolutionary process.

However, we were disappointed to see that your authors all stuck to only one of the possible interpretations that follow from these results, namely that animals are far more like humans than previously realised. None considered the obvious alternative: that humans are far more like other animals than previously realised.

The two may seem indistinguishable, but in fact there is a subtle difference that leads to two critically different conclusions: either that the psychological processes subserving these abilities in animals are far more sophisticated than ever before imagined, as your authors concluded, or that the psychological processes subserving the same phenomena in humans are somewhat simpler than previously assumed, though no less interesting for it.

The first interpretation leads to the position that animals and humans can be said to be similar only if animals are found to be doing amazing things, rather than when humans are found to be doing surprisingly mundane things. This betrays an anthropocentrism eerily reminiscent of that which justified the original, simplistic theories of psychological dualism that your authors are at pains to challenge.

More troubling is the implication that our respect for other species should be measured in proportion to how amazingly human-like their abilities are.

Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada