Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article “No Longer Alone: The Scientist Who Dared To Say Animals Think” by Emily Eakom(©2001 by The New York Time).

Donald Griffin was at Central Park Zoo watching the polar bears nuzzle a synthetic log smeared with peanut butter. Dr. Griffin observed as Gus, 800 pounds, tried to fit his nose into an enticingly sticky knothole. To the untutored eye it looked like just another feeding time at the zoo, but at Central Park the exercise with the log and snack does by the grander name of “animal enrichment” and is intended to stimulate the bears’ mind as well as their appetites. It’s a concept for which the bear have Dr. Griffin, 85, in large part to thank.

Twenty-five years ago he published a short book suggesting that human didn’t have the monopoly on thoughts and feelings. Animals, he argued, most likely had them, too.

Other scientists were appalled. According to the behaviorist doctrine that held sway at the time, animals were little more than “stimulus response automata,” robots with a central nervous system. The idea that an ant or an elephant might have thoughts, images, experience or beliefs was not just laughable; it was seditious.

But over the last decades alone a flood of new data have emerged that would seem to have turned the tide definitively in Dr. Griffin’s favor. In Arizona an African Gray parrot named Alex can identify colors and shapes as well as any preschooler. In Georgia a bonobo ape named Kanzi converses with his trainer via computer keyboard and watches Tarzan movies on television. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published evidence suggesting that rats dream. Animals enrichment programs featuring mental puzzles disguised as toys and treats have become a standard part of daily life at zoos. And in the spring of 2001 the University of Chicago Press issued an updated edition of Dr. Griffin’s 1992 book, Animal Minds.

If Dr. Griffin views these developments as vindication, he is too modest to say so. “We know so very little,” he said, “scientists, include me, have come to be very cautious. Early work on primate gesture and facial expressions was grossly misinterpreted.”

In fact the recent findings appear to have only intensified the debate over animal consciousness. Lately, experts on the human mind—philosophers and psychologists—have been weighing in alongside the scientists. For if it turn out that animals can think , then the idea that consciousness is unique to humans—a basic assumption in Western thought—becomes impossible to maintain.

Clearly Gus, Alex and Kanzi aren’t automatons, but just how conscious are they? Do they experience pain, desire and other sensations the humans do? (Philosophers call this phenomenal consciousness.) Are they capable of thinking about their experiences? (Philosophers call this self-consciousness.) Do they have beliefs? What about remembering the past? Do earthworms have some form of consciousness? What about salamanders? Is it even possible to study an animal’s inner life? The range of opinion on these questions is nearly as great as the number of possible answers. Tufts University philosopher Daniel C.Dennett declared the state of thinking on animal consciousness a “mess.”

On the one hand there are the pro-consciousness philosophers like Colin McGinn, a professor at Rutgers University, and Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton and a leading animal rights advocate. These scholars believe that most if not all animals have phenomenal consciousness. “I think it’s a plain common sense that animals have conscious states,” Mr. McGinn said. “Animals way down to insects have phenomenal consciousness. It’s a primitive feature of the biological world.”

On the other hand there skeptics like Mr. Dennett and Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University. What “are you seeing when you are sentience in a creature?” Mr. Dennett asked in a 1995 essay. “It is in fact ridiculously easy to induce powerful intuitions of not just sentience but full-blown consciousness (ripe with malevolence or curiosity or friendship) by exposing people to quite simple robots made to move in familiar mammalian ways at mammalian speeds.”

Dr.Griffin appears mildly amused by the debate his work has helped unleash. During his visit t the Central Park Zoo he gave a talk to donors and trustees.”Daniel Dennett calls the pursuit of animal consciousness a ‘wild goose chase,’” he told the audience with a chuckle. “But there are no neurons or synapses in the human brain that aren’t also in animals. It’s as difficult to disprove animal consciousness as it is to approve it.”