[LINK] "Can Animals Think Abstractly?"

[rfmcdonald]

Barbara King's NPR commentary is unsettling, mainly for its implications about humans. Are we really actually fully conscious?

In her January Scientific American piece titled "What Animals Know about Where Babies Come From," anthropologist Holly Dunsworth makes a convincing case that despite popular assumptions to the contrary, animals generally — and our closest living relatives, the great apes, specifically — don't understand that sexual intercourse produces babies.

Dunsworth leads off with an example (something I also wrote about here at 13.7) in which the captive gorilla Koko, who knows some American Sign Language and comprehends some spoken English, is asked to make choices among several options presented verbally and in diagram form related to "family planning." Dunsworth dismisses the suggestion that Koko is cognitively equipped to understand the four different scenarios by which she could potentially become a mother — and I couldn't agree more.

I also think Dunsworth is spot on when she argues that "reproductive consciousness" is unique to our own species. But outside the realm of strange anthropomorphic assumptions made by caretakers of media-star apes, do people really go around thinking that wild animals, farm animals or their dog and cat companions grasp where babies come from? I don't know of evidence one way or the other.

People do often assume that animals' behavioral choices are highly cognitive and strategic when they may simply be products of natural selection — and this is part of Dunsworth's main point. When a gorilla silverback male, for example, takes over a new group of females and offspring from a resident rival male, he may commit infanticide; at the point when a female's young baby dies, lactation hormones no longer suppress ovulation and she comes back into estrus, thus becoming a likely mate for the conquering male.

"We love to narrate observations of animal sex and parenting with language that implies common ground between them and us," Dunsworth writes. But, "animals may carry out all kinds of seemingly complex behaviors without actually anticipating the outcomes."