Elephants lead complex, intelligent lives that defy standard tests (Image: Michael Nichols/National Geographic Creative)

“IT SEEMS reasonable since art copies nature, and men can make various automata which move without thought, that nature should produce its own automata much more splendid than the artificial ones. These natural automata are the animals,” wrote Descartes in a letter to the British philosopher Henry More on 5 February 1649.

For the past 60 years, partly due to Descartes, the cognitive sciences have focused on human intelligence as though it were unique or qualitatively different from that of all other creatures on Earth. While this view of cognition has not gone uncriticised, the most pernicious scientific effect is its misleading assumption that knowledge, judgement, emotions and other cognitive functions are largely, if not exclusively, manifest in language-like representations in the brain. Alongside that comes a troubling inability to appreciate, respect, or learn from our fellow animals.

In Beyond Words, Carl Safina sets about redressing that. He is, of course, not alone in paying due regard to non-human animal cognition and emotions. There are centres of canine cognition (one of the best is at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany), many studies of whale and dolphin culture, and a few lone naturalists, such as Jane Goodall.

But Beyond Words stands out as one of the best-written, most entertaining and informative books in this area. It is not a scientific treatise bristling with experiments, methodologies or statistics. Rather, it is a report from the field about what animals do, and how they are studied in the wild. This is a service for which we are in debt, not only to Safina, but to the researchers he features.

Safina divides his book in four, discussing elephants, orcas, wolves, and the deficiencies of lab-based cognition experiments versus field research. Each section highlights a cognitive, emotional, or social aspect of the outer and inner lives of animals, along with the research approaches.

Safina’s key proposition is that the relationship between human and non-human animals could not be more “fundamentally miscomprehended”, arguing we can “do a better job of looking deeper”. And he does look deeper and more effectively at the selfhood of all animals. His journey ranges far, from mood swings in honeybees to the use of symbols and language by elephants and cetaceans, varied manifestations of intelligence, and the nature of communication. There are even “trading” dolphins that are rewarded by their handlers with fish in exchange for bits of trash they bring as they clean up their own pools. The dolphins learned that dead gulls get bigger rewards, so they began to hold back some of the fish they received for normal cleaning to use as bait to catch gulls in exchange for proportionately more fish from their handlers.

We meet Cynthia Moss and her “elephant team” in Amboseli, Kenya. After years of living among particular groups of elephants, Moss and her staff have learned to recognise them by name on sight, and talk about their particular personalities, emotional states, families and other social relations.

This kind of work is certain to draw fire for failing to adopt proper scientific objectivity, and for the dangers of falling into anthropomorphising Descartes’s “automata”. Safina, however, counters with the excellent point that what we can say about non-human relationships, reasoning and emotions must be said on its own terms. It makes no more sense, he says, to evaluate what animals feel using human standards than it does to interpret human behaviour based on what elephants do.

Remember Thomas Nagel’s famous paper “What is it like to be a bat”? There he wrote: “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.” Nagel raises the subtle issue of evaluating what some other creature “feels” like. This gets crucial when Safina borrows a definition of consciousness from leading neuroscientist Christopher Koch. His definition, which is about as good as it gets, says consciousness is “the thing that feels like something”. It clearly imputes consciousness to non-human animals (possibly insects and, though Safina rejects the idea, maybe even to plants).

And then there’s philosopher John Searle, with his four-way distinction between objectivity, subjectivity, ontology and epistemology. To Searle, what it feels like to be a whale or a human is a question that is personal by nature, that is, it is ontologically subjective. But this feeling is also epistemologically objective, that is, we are able to study it.

So we should be able to study how non-human animals feel – not so much by experiment as by field research, according to Safina, because their feelings can be studied even though they remain personal to that particular animal.

What we know already, after decades of research into the physical basis of emotions, is that when handling emotions non-human animals and humans use similar regions of the brain. This suggests that we all feel the same emotions, that our emotions interact with and trigger the same hormones, that we all form bonds with families, with social groups, and that we all learn strategies for coping with environments.

It may be technically correct to say that only humans use words, but there are selves, qualities of life and languages “beyond words”. Descartes’s error about animals and those who agreed with him through the centuries, have done animals, including ourselves, a grave disservice.

“Descartes’s error about animals has done animals, including ourselves, a grave disservice”

Beyond Words goes past this, to a fresh, you-are-there narrative exposing the inner worlds of our fellow travellers like few books I have read. It is essential reading for all who want to expand their understanding of cognition, culture and life on Earth.

AwajĂşn wives use the threat of suicide to make men behave better (Image: Victor Rojas)

From female suicide to the nature of being civilised, probing tribal life in the 21st century needs an unflinching, critical eye

ON 26 January 1987, Time magazine ran an article in which US presidential candidate George H. W. Bush, replying to the suggestion that he should consider where to take the country, was quoted poking fun at “the vision thing”. This was widely ridiculed in the US because it violated the clear expectation of Americans that their leaders have such a “vision”.

Nothing strange there: most societies expect their leaders to have a view of how they think the future will or should be, and how this defines their duties to those they lead.

Vision of one sort or another plays a big role in Upriver by . This is his effort to understand the spiritual and political beliefs and practices of the AwajĂşn people, who live in the Peruvian Amazon at the foothills of the Andes. The book details his research as he lived with them between 1976 and 1978, as well as his later reflections on experiences and observations gained during subsequent visits.

Brown has a passage that could easily have described what Americans expected of their president. He writes that the Awajún “believed that the well-being of men, and, to a lesser extent, of women, depended on the acquisition of powerful visions”.

Upriver is one of the best books I have read on Amazonian peoples in a long while. Brown is even-handed and insightful, and he writes with flair and clarity. He takes an unflinching, clear-eyed look at tribal life and at the Awajún’s difficult encounters with the outsiders with whom they have had varying degrees of contact with for almost 500 years.

And there’s an old question, dating back at least to the 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that concerns him deeply. He writes of the “contrast between the civilized and the not”, claiming that “there is no more foundational question in the social sciences” than understanding this contrast. He links this to the Awajún’s struggles over the past 40 years to maintain their identity, their security and their lands against strong multinational forces.

The question of what it means to be civilised recurs in many books on Amazonian peoples. What makes Brown’s book stand out is his willingness to criticise all sides, including the Awajún, in his quest to arrive at a deeper, non-sloganeering understanding of the dynamics between the Awajúns and “civilizados”, and among the Awajún themselves.

Along the way he makes observations that will bother those who idealise tribal societies. For example, he asks why the AwajĂşn offer astoundingly shallow characterisations of the inner psychological states and motivations of other AwajĂşns, as well as outsiders.

This superficiality is deeply curious, given the potential advantage in understanding the motives of other Awajún’s for killing and suicide. After all, more than half of all deaths of Awajún men are due to murder, while more than a third of deaths among Awajún women are suicide.

Suicide is unknown in some Amazonian societies – the Pirahã for example – and common in others, such as the Suruwahá. In Awajún society, suicide functions partially as a threat for women to ensure that men treat them better. This is because when a woman commits suicide, her husband is likely to be condemned by the community – an act potentially culminating in his deceased wife’s male relatives murdering him. Clearly, men fear this danger, and the book gives examples of them treating their wives better on the basis of the belief that they might commit suicide otherwise.

In passing, though, Brown illustrates the pettiness and self-righteous silliness of some of his fellow anthropologists. He berates their unfortunately common tendency to flip between research and advocacy, between just doing good science – and standing up for tribal communities.

“Brown shows the pettiness and self-righteous silliness of some of his fellow anthropologists”

Diverse benefits

Brown also looks at sorcery, violence, daily life and sex, at the ways in which AwajĂşn society is like or unlike other Amazonian societies, at the larger Peruvian culture, at peace, health and illness. His experiences, descriptions and understandings will resonate with all who have had the privilege of living among a tribal society. And for those who have never enjoyed this experience, Upriver will make you wish you had.

But perhaps the book’s most important lesson is its portrayal of human diversity as crucial for the understanding of our species. Although the book doesn’t successfully answer its core question – explaining the contrast between “civilised” and tribal societies, and what being “civilised” means now – Brown does show a plurality of visions the Awajún people have for their own future. And through these visions, we are better able to understand this Amazonian society and, ultimately, our species.

This article appeared in print under the headline “One world, many visions”

Online exclusive

I have often thought of the mind as an intellectual engine that burns mental fuel. I have never gone to the Amazon jungle without reading for pleasure and for research. Each new article and book I read gives me ideas, often ideas that are not really in the book at all.

Early in my career, Chomsky’s writings were a major source of inspiration for me. I returned again and again to such books as Lectures on Government and Binding or Manufacturing Consent. After I concluded that Chomsky’s proposals were largely sterile, I begin to develop my own views of language and grammar, moving my reading habits elsewhere.

And while my favourite fiction authors these days are Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, David Lodge, Henry James and Mark Twain, the writer to whom I return time and time again, the one that inspires me more than all others is William James. James’s philosophy of pragmatism, especially the latter’s critical evaluation of the concept of truth, have affected me more than any other. I own the Library of America edition of his collected works from 1878-1910. These two volumes are never far from me. The essays of this collection that have affected me most are “The Will to Believe”, “The Meaning of Truth” and “Pragmatism”.

James’s advice in all these works is that evolved primates ought not to have too high an estimation of their ability to understand things as they “really are”. Rather, we should be happy to find ideas that are useful to ourselves and to society and to pursue these conscientiously, but not to take them or ourselves too seriously.