Animals and People.

When I read about some new use of tools by animals, I’m glad to see they can manipulate their environment, glad that psychology is learning, but generally find people underestimate animal behavior.

Driving home one night I saw a dog, by itself and with empty streets, wait for the light to change before it crossed at a crosswalk. Anyone with a dog or cat has experienced their non-human companion’s cries at the bored and anxious suffering that is waiting, be it for a walk or being fed. Humans don’t like waiting, but it turns out neither do animals.

Tools? Most pets can muzzle a door open. They use their paws as tools, obviously, but they also use the ground as a tool: during winter when the air is dry dogs and cats alike (and, I imagine, plenty of other furry creatures) will rub their backs on the dirt to try to reduce the static electricity in their coats. Deer bucks rub their antlers on small trees, and birds and insects and squirrels all make nests.

The mirror test gets brought up: can the animal notice itself? Oh, it can’t? What a dummy! But that may simply be an instinct and not a cognitive incapacity. An animal that pays too much attention to its reflection at the watering hole may get eaten enough to discourage such fixation.

Or maybe not. Maybe seeing oneself in a mirror is a staple of smarts.

None of that is to say that animals are that bright compared to humans. But they are psychologically different, the same way that some humans are different, or that alien psychology might differ from ours. If you want to understand a being’s psychology, you look first to its ecological niche, and secondly to the individual’s circumstances or departures.

If earth had grown up with trees that had mirror bark, a good many of the animal kingdom would know their reflections if only to avoid running into trees. (And if people keep building with windows, birds facing evolutionary pressure will eventually learn to avoid them if we don’t otherwise deter them.)

Human intelligence is odd. Animals tend to only be as smart as their environment requires them to be. To become smart outside of any special need is hard to understand. The levels of intelligence among non-human animals fits certain ranges, and often there are limited skill specializations (like how well a chipmunk can dive into its hole compared to diving into any arbitrary hole).

Understanding how intelligence evolved is simple compared to understanding how human-level intelligence came about. What peculiar circumstances allowed for such general ability? Was it abundance? Hardship? Physiology? Random mutation?

It was probably community. The fact of having extended groups that could help one another meant that if any succeeded, the rest could join in the success. Knowledge could be passed on, and through successions of knowledge sharing mankind selected for intelligence even more.

It’s an old idea. Back in the 1990s, as the internet was coming into view, it was largely the consensus: we can all use this network of networks to communicate and work together, to coordinate and make humanity even better. But as large corporations were birthed to handle the capacities necessary, we skipped a few beats and lost the melody a bit. Let’s hope that we can rehearse that song and sing it again.