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Journal of Bioeconomics (2005) 7: 99102
STEVEN JANKEMathematics Department, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, CO 80903, USA([email protected])What do you conclude when a spider monkey throws her arms around your neck
and coos? This is the rst question Marc Hauser asks as he unfolds his extensive
exploration of animal minds. Written for a wide audience including the nonexpert, Wild Minds carefully dissects animal behavior to understand exactly what
we can and cannot conclude about the way animal minds function. In the prologue, Hauser is quick to say that he thinks questions like Do animals think? or
Are some animals more intelligent than others? are not helpful. Instead, he asks
more focused questions to illuminate precisely what an experiment has shown.
When a tamarin monkey uses a cane to pull inaccessible food forward, does she
understand the cane as a tool, or would she pull any similarly colored object
towards her? When bees ignore the dance of a forager who seems to be indicating
that food is in the middle of a lake, do they actually have a mental map of the
area?Our culture is not known for its consistency in dealing with animals. Disney
dresses them in human clothes and makes them talk; but we also raise them, often
carelessly, for food. Our pets are smart, but they are certainly not in the same
moral category as our children. This makes it particularly tough to objectively
consider the idea of animal intelligence. Much of our conception of animal minds
comes from anecdotes like the story of Binty, the gorilla at the Chicago zoo, who
saved the little boy after he fell into the enclosure or like the reports of dogs
nding their owners after a cross-country trek. Hauser is critical of anecdotal evidence particularly when it includes the language of intention. To say that an animal wants this or that is overlaying our mental framework where it might not
belong. Notions of compassion or empathy are traps when interpreting animal
behavior. For Hauser, repeatability is the key measure of soundness, but he is not
ruthless about discarding data. Many of our observations of the animal world,
particularly in natural surroundings, have to be of the one-of-a-kind variety.
Hauser recognizes this and uses these observations to ask additional...