杏吧原创

IT IS an innocent-sounding question, but one that has provoked tremendous strife among scientists and non-scientists alike. Try telling a dog-lover that their pet is devoid of consciousness and personality. Yet there are those who insist that only humans have minds worthy of the name, because it is only humans who have complex language. Others apply the definition to humans and some other primates. Others still ascribe a mind of some description to all animals, and claim we just need more research to determine what sort of minds they have.

Now we are on the verge of a revolution that may settle the question. Over the past decade in particular, evolutionary biologists, comparative psychologists, ethologists and neuroscientists have started to uncover astonishing similarities in the development of all life forms, including their brain structure and chemistry. They have also found evidence suggesting that certain animal groups possess skills specific to their species.

This is why New 杏吧原创 has decided to pose the 鈥渁nimal minds鈥� question in this special edition. We are also hosting a debate on it at the Cheltenham Festival of Science this week.

Our authors have uncovered some big surprises. Culum Brown finds that the cognitive powers of fish have been hugely underestimated: they can do things like analyse the social status of others, which were until recently considered exclusively human activities.

Robin Dunbar looks at the mind-reading abilities of non-human primates. He has come up with a scale for intentionality 鈥� I think that you think that I think, and so on 鈥� that places humans at the 鈥渢op鈥�. But be careful: it鈥檚 a hierarchy with a sting in the tail.

Alex Kacelnik reminds us of Daniel Dennett鈥檚 idea that the real task is to characterise the kind of mind each species has, rather than assuming that the way we think about the world is the only way. His own research into the toolmaking abilities of crows has certainly proved ground-breaking.

Why have sheep acquired their reputation for stupidity? Keith Kendrick argues that it is undeserved. They possess a whole set of unexpected recognition skills, he says, such as being able to recognise individuals from photos taken from different viewpoints, even when they have been trained to recognise them from only one.

Personality is often argued to be exclusively a preserve of humans. But Sam Gosling has become a convert to the opposite point of view. After studying hyenas, dogs and humans, he concludes that there are good evolutionary reasons to believe that some measures of personality cut right across the animal world.

Finally, is your dog really talking to you? Kate Douglas reports on attempts to test whether humans can interpret reliably what different acoustical patterns in a dog鈥檚 repertoire mean. The results seem certain to cause a stir.