Passage IV

NATURAL SCIENCE: Passage A is from the bookAnimal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures by Virginia Morell. Passage B is from the essay “Big Love: The Emotional Lives of Elephants” by Carl Safina.

Passage A by Virginia Morell

One of the more striking discoveries in neuroscience in recent years is the finding that elephants, whales, great apes, and humans all possess a peculiar kind of brain cell. These neurons were first discovered in human brains in the nineteenth century and were named von Economo cells after the Romanian anatomist Constantin von Economo, who identified them. At first, these spindle-shaped neurons were touted as the cells that “make us human,” because they’re connected to our feelings of empathy, love, emotional suffering, and sociality. Then, in 1999, two other researchers, Patrick Hof and John Allman, spotted von Economo cells in the brains of all the great apes; others recently found them in monkeys. Allman has searched without luck for the cells in more than a hundred other species, from sloths to platypuses. So it was big news when, in 2007, he discovered spindle cells in the brains of whales, dolphins, and elephants. But it was a puzzling discovery, too. Why should such a disparate group of animals have these specialized cells?

From an evolutionary point of view, it’s not surprising that primates and humans have von Economo cells, since we are in the same lineage. But primates and humans haven’t shared an ancestor with whales or elephants since about the beginning of the mammalian lineage, some sixty million years ago. It seems that cetaceans and elephants evolved their spindle cells independently. What factors would produce such emotionally specialized brain cells?

Allman thinks part of the answer lies in the size of the animals’ brains—most species that have spindle cells also have notably large brains—and in the location of the cells. Von Economo cells are always found in two regions of the cortex associated with emotionally charged, visceral judgments, such as deciding whether a fellow animal is suffering. And part of the answer lies in the size of the spindle cells. They are unusually large, enabling them to act like high-speed circuits, fast-tracking information to and from other parts of the brain, while bypassing unnecessary connections. These are the kind of cells, Allman argues, that would be especially useful to an animal living in a complex society—a society in which making accurate, intuitive decisions about another’s actions (or facial or vocal expressions) is crucial for your family’s and your survival.

Passage B by Carl Safina

Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to animals, inanimate objects, or natural phenomena.

In establishing the study of animal behavior as a science, it had originally been helpful to make anthropomorphism a word that raised a red flag. But as lesser intellects followed the Nobel Prize–winning pioneers,anthropomorphism became a pirate flag. If the word was hoisted, an attack was imminent. You wouldn’t get your work published. And in the academic realm of publish or perish, jobs were at stake. Even the most informed, insightful, logical inferences about other animals’ motivations, emotions, and awareness could wreck your professional prospects.

But what is a “human” emotion? When someone says you can’t attribute human emotions to animals, they forget the key leveling detail: humans are animals. Human sensations are animal sensations. Inherited sensations, using inherited nervous systems.

All of the emotions we know of just happen to be emotions that humans feel. So, simply deciding that other animals can’t have any emotions that humans feel is a cheap way to get a monopoly on all of the world’s feelings and motivation. People who’ve systematically watched or known animals realize the absurdity of this. But many others still don’t. “The dilemma remains,” wrote author Caitrin Nicol recently, “how to get an accurate understanding of the animals’ nature and (if appropriate) emotions, without imposing on them assumptions born of a distinctly human understanding of the world.”

But tell me, what “distinctly human understanding” hampers our understanding of other animals’ emotions? Is it our sense of pleasure, pain, hunger, frustration, self-preservation, defense, parental protection? We never seem to doubt that an animal acting hungry feels hungry. What reason is there to disbelieve that an elephant who seems happy is happy? We can’t really claim scientific objectivity when we recognize hunger and thirst when animals are eating and drinking, exhaustion when they tire, but deny them joy and happiness as they’re playing with their children and their families. Yet the science of animal behavior has long operated with that bias—and that’s unscientific. In science, the simplest interpretation of evidence is often the best.

Passage A: Excerpt(s) from ANIMAL WISE: THE THOUGHTS AND EMOTIONS OF OUR FELLOW CREATURES by Virginia Morell, copy- right © 2013 by Virginia Morell. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

Passage B: ©2015 by Carl Safina. Used by permission of Carl Safina in care of the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency, Inc. ([email protected])