Issue Date: 2 / 2005

Science and Man

The existence of genuine language ability in chimpanzees and honeybees suggests to some scientists a continuity and evolution of mental awareness that may develop into the future with no foreseeable limit. (Corel) Click image to enlarge.        The following article was first delivered as a paper at a conference titled "God and World Peace: An Exploration of the Significance of God for a World in Crisis," which was held December 26-29, 2002, in Washington, D.C.                In recent years a group of psychoanalysts in this country, and others elsewhere, have described how one of the major threats to health and sanity today is what they call the "existential vacuum" experienced by vast numbers of their patients: a feeling of inner emptiness, of aimless lives set down in a desert of meaninglessness. This is claimed as characteristic of modern scientifically oriented society--the result, in a word, of the widespread assumption that science is the only "philosophy" in which one can believe. The existential vacuum is regarded as due to the frustration of the most basic motivational force in man--the will to meaning. (In contrast to the Adlerian "will to power" and the Freudian "will to pleasure.") The argument is that people do not care for pleasure or for the avoidance of pain; but that they do crave profoundly for meaning. This need or demand for meaning is regarded as one of the most basic features of man.                Science of course, as we all know, answers the need for "understanding" in the more limited sense, and is opening ever enlarging vistas of the stupendous complexity and beauty of the created universe. But in general, this does not, by itself, help to assuage the need for meaning. Belief in "meaning" in this sense rests on religious faith or on an accepted philosophy or system of myths as to the nature of the world and the relation of man to it.                From the biological point of view the modern crisis was mainly generated by the theory of evolution by natural selection. I think there is no doubt that, in Western countries, the retreat from organized religion is, in the long term, mainly based on the slow dissemination of the changed world picture, especially that originating from Darwin's work with the overwhelming evidence it seemed to supply of the importance of chance in the origin and development of man. For obviously mankind, before the nineteenth century, was by no means denied a measure of satisfaction of his needs: He had it, of course, in Western countries as a result of the Judeo-Christian vision, which gave man a clear place in the world system and a faith and hope in the future.                But not only this: In Western Europe there was a very wide basic belief in (and acceptance of) a world system and man's place in it which could be held with or without the Judeo-Christian picture and which in general reinforced some of the most important of its beliefs and attitudes. This was "The Great Chain of Being"--which served to express the unimaginable plenitude of God's creation, its unfaltering order, and its ultimate unity. This "chain" or "ladder " if one likes to regard it so, was thought of as stretching from the foot of God's throne to the meanest of inanimate objects. Every speck of creation represented a link in the chain. But its importance for my story now is that the top of every inferior class touched the bottom of a superior one--so that where the steps were in contact, as at the boundary between rocks and plants or between plants and animals or between animals and man there were transitional forms in which both higher and lower grades cooperated. And so at the top the noblest entity in the category of bodies, was the human body which touches the fringe of the next class above it--namely the human soul, which occupies the lowest rank in the spiritual order.                As late as Elizabethan times awareness of this sophisticated system was widespread and basic. But by the eighteenth century the scheme was beginning to reveal flaws and was breaking down under philosophical and scientific criticism. And so the coming of evolution theory in the nineteenth century can in a way be regarded as ushering in the final destruction of that which had sustained man's thought for many centuries and had given him comfort in a mysterious world--indeed since Plato, from whose teaching the mighty plan originally grew.                I need not try to trace the process further; for threats to meaning are obvious everywhere--not least of these being the widespread monistic views of so many scientists and humanists of the present day, views which make man's spiritual side appear to be merely the superficial by-product of a material process. Again at the present day many scientists, and particularly scientific popularizers, have a lot to answer for in the way they have exhibited what has been called "the compulsive urge to disenchant" by being irresponsibly and irrepressibly smart and clever; often seeming to deliberately "bamboozle" the "common man" and his beliefs by shock and ridicule. The result has, I think, contributed to a sense of helplessness, a loss of nerve; indeed a sense of boredom and a failure to see (because life seems so complicated) that all the vast developments in science--dangerous as they are as threatening the very existence of life on this planet--have their beneficent side; and, if properly used and understood, can be, indeed must be, the means of progress to a new world order and re-awakening.                But how does today's scientific world picture affect man's view of himself and of his place in the universe? It seems to me that a very subtle and important series of changes has been taking place in recent years--changes which bear closely on our ideas of the emergence of new properties and values in the world. This is after all the key question--how and how far does quantity and complexification become quality? What is the real relation between wholes and parts? Emergent properties are the properties of a whole system not possessed by its parts. This is what one may call the orthodox scientific view.                The program with which scientists commence, is that in principle, though not yet by any means in practice, the whole should be entirely explicable in terms of their parts; and for many branches of physical science it is indeed a sound research tactic. So it seems to me that this basic program of the physicist, though being very far from complete, is undoubtedly the one which he must pursue. But we all know that physical theorizing often leads to what seem to be absurdities. For instance, the modern view is that, against all intuition (based on the special theory of relativity), there is no role for the "flow of time" or "now" in the physical world.                But before coming to biology I wish to point out the extraordinary way modern cosmology seems to come nearer to asserting that the universe is, in some surprising ways, far more appropriate for life than was at one time thought. That although, as far as we know, life is only present in this solar system and on this planet, living beings, including ourselves, are perhaps more "at home" in the cosmos than we hitherto had reason to believe The first point that can be made with certainty is that if the universe were not much as it is, neither ourselves nor other forms of life could have come into existence. If the universe were not expanding, if there were no stars, if the proton-proton force were slightly different--without a certain ratio between the basic forces of interaction and a certain relationship between the fundamental constants--without all the space and time in the world, the "universe" would be dead.                In particular the present theory of the periodic system explains the production of the heavier nuclei through the fusion of several hydrogen nuclei. These heavier elements, such as iron, are essential to life. All evidence at present points to the conclusion that it is only under the circumstances of intense gravitational contraction which leads to supernova outbursts, that the heavier elements can have been formed; and it is only as another result of supernova explosions that these elements can have been spewed out into space and so made available to stars with solar systems such as ours. So it is this chain of events which during billions of years, that has provided us with the heavy elements which we all of necessity carry around in our bodies. It is indeed the astounding coherence of the universe as a whole which had led to the present state of the cosmos being (according to current theory) due to events which took place a minute fraction of a second after the "big bang"--the very onset of time!                I have just said that the idea of the flow of time, of the present and of "now," appear to be an emergent property of ourselves and to have no counterpart in theoretical physics. Yet in the mental world such concepts have the unshakable validity of direct experience. So here science seems to have brought us to the boundary between the material and mental worlds where there does seem to be an unbridgeable gap.                Now the property above all properties which demarcates this gap is that of consciousness or self-awareness. So, in company with some neurophysiologists and philosophers, I see some form of dualism between "matter" and "mind" to be unavoidable in the future program for biology. Karl Popper, for instance, sees that no explanation of the physical world can be valid which regards the self-consciousness of man as being merely an epiphenomenon--an accidental outcome of the mechanical workings of a machine which we call the brain. This amounts to saying that there must in fact be two worlds--the world of self-knowing and the physical world which is known by the operations of the scientific method as used by the physicists and biologists. The miracle is that the "big bang" created a situation such that thousands of millions of years later a part of the universe could study the rest of itself!                Now let us return to consideration of the evidence for what, if we are dualists in the sense above used, we are forced to describe as "mind" or "the mental" or "the quality of awareness" in the biological realm, apart from man himself.                In recent years the problem as to whether or not we are justified in the assumption that some animals have some kind of mental experiences--certainly not comparable in quality and scope to our own--but evolutionarily continuous with it--has come to the forefront of biology as the result of new and highly important experiments.                There are a number of lines of research which have provided new evidence, indeed key evidence, for this question of the "mentality" of animals; all of them concerned with the modern study of communication and an increased understanding of what the word can signify, when we are considering the coordination of behavior between individuals of the same species. It similarly arises from much modern work on the nature of animal orientation--in particular, studies of the hearing of bats, the orientation of the flights of migratory and homing birds, the underwater hearing of fish, whales, and, above all (in bats and fish), their ability to orient themselves by responding to echoes of their own "voices" (i.e., by echolocation). But because of lack of time I must restrict myself to a very brief summary of recent work in two fields--namely, the ability of primates such as the chimpanzee to acquire languages taught them by human beings; and secondly, the ability of the social insects, particularly the worker honeybee (Apis mellifica) to transmit information to other members of the colony with a subtlety and precision which hitherto had been regarded as quite unthinkable.                The first, and by now widely famous, study of the language learning of chimpanzees is that of R.A. and B.T. Gardner, who achieved remarkable success in teaching a young female animal in captivity the gesture language known as the American Sign Language (ASL). This language is composed of manually produced avisual signals called "signs" which are strictly analogous to words used in speech. These are arbitrary but stable meaningless signal elements which are arranged in a series of patterns constituting minimum meaningful combinations of those elements. Not only did the Gardners' first chimp "Washoe" but also other chimps since studied, achieve surprisingly good learning of the varieties of signs; they also developed signs which can best be described as "straight inventions," in that they were quite different from signs which had, until then, been the models provided for them by their teachers.                Moreover, it is possible for such experimental animals to use pronouns appropriately. The animals can also combine previously learned signs into small groups in meaningful ways and apply them appropriately to new situations. For example, the sign for "open," which was originally learned in regard to doors, was later used correctly in requesting the opening of boxes, drawers, briefcases, and picture books. All this provides clear evidence for elementary purposiveness.                The significance of these new results is strengthened enormously by the fact that there are at least three series of experiments (with different animals and using different techniques) in which the same results have been reached. One of the reasons why it has been necessary to consider so carefully the question of animal language is because it relates to the arguments put forward by Chomsky and others that the possession of language is indubitable evidence of mentality and of some basic and innate mental structure without which the acquisition of true language and its purposive use, whether by animals or men, is inconceivable.                There has of course been a great deal of pungent criticism of the results of these studies and their interpretation. But I think the experimenters have now gone a long way, if not the whole way, towards giving satisfactory answers. As a result of the totality of chimpanzee experiments, nearly all the critical objections raised by scientists and philosophers against crediting animals with true linguistic developments have been answered by at least one animal and most of them by several. These objections amounted to the demand for the fulfillment of five criteria, namely that an animal must:                1. Demonstrate an extensive system of names for objects in the environment.                2. Sign about objects which are not physically present.                3. Use signs for concepts; not just objects, actions and agents.                4. Invent semantically appropriate combinations, and                5. Use correct order when it is semantically necessary.                Over and above the fact that all these questions have now been answered in the affirmative; still yet more relevant activities are coming to light. It has been shown that captive chimpanzees can communicate fairly complex information by some combinations of gestures or expressive movements that human investigators have not yet deciphered. In the light of these results it is very interesting to look at some of the more recent statements of philosophers and linguists (who have argued that human language is closely linked with thinking, if not basically identical and inseparable from it). In 1968 we were assured that it would be astounding to discover that insects or fish, birds or monkeys are able to talk to one another--because man is the only animal which can talk and can use symbols, the only animal that can truly understand and misunderstand. Again:--"Language is an expression of man's very nature and his basic capacity ... animals cannot have language because they lack this capacity. If they had it they would no longer be animals--they would be human beings."1                Now let us look for a moment at the communication of bees. The general story of the communication of the distance, the situation, and the direction of a food source by the dances of the returning worker bee on the vertical comb of the hive, has been known in general outline from the work of Karl von Frisch in the middle 1950s. Philosophers and linguists have made the same kind of objection to the attempt to regard this as language as I have just referred to in relation to the use of ASL by apes.                The basic correctness of the original conclusions has now been amply confirmed and established. But, far more than this, recent observations have shown overwhelmingly how adaptable, flexible, and "purposive" is the use of these signs. For instance, it has been argued that the use of the dances is rigidly controlled by the circumstances (such as the absence or presence of food). This is not so. For the dances, though most frequently used to signal the location of a food source, are, under special conditions also applied to other requirements of the mutually interdependent members of the colony of bees. After all they are not rigidly for foraging flights. When food is plentiful returning foragers often do not dance at all. The odors conveyed from one another always help to direct recruits to new sources and they alone are sufficient. Independent searching by individual foragers seems to be adequate under many conditions.                Thus the dance-communications system is called into play primarily when the colony of bees is in great need of food. But it is not tightly linked to any one requirement. On the contrary it may be used for such different things as food, water, and resinous materials from plants (propolis). Moreover when a colony of bees is engaged in swarming, the scouts search for cavities suitable to serve as the future home for the entire colony and report their location by the same dances--which are now performed when crawling over the mass of bees which makes up the swarm cluster.2,3                When Lindauer observed the scouts of a swarm of bees which had moved only a short distance away from the original colony, he found that the same marked bee would sometimes change her dance pattern from that indicating the location of a moderately suitable cavity to one signaling a better potential site for a new hive. This occurred after the dancer had received information from another bee and had flown out to inspect the superior cavity. Thus the same worker bee can be both a transmitter and receiver of information within a short period of time; and in spite of her motivation to dance about one location, she can also be influenced by the similar but more intense communication of another dancer.                As Griffin said in 1976, "There is no escape from the conclusion that, in the special situation when swarming bees are in serious need of a new location in which the colony can continue its existence, the bees exchange information about the location and suitability of a potential hive site. Individual worker bees are swayed by this information to the extent that after inspection of alternative locations they change their preference and dance for the superior place rather than for the one they first discovered. Only after many hours of such exchanges of information, involving dozens of bees, and only when the dances of virtually all the scouts indicate the same hive site, does the swarm as a whole fly off to it."4 This consensus results from the communicative interactions between individual bees which alternately "speak" and "listen."                Here again the sweeping negativisms of Chomsky have been thrown into the arena. His main thesis as to the pre-eminence of human reason is sound and important and needs constant reiteration in these days when it is the fashion to denigrate man and all that is transcendental in his nature. But Chomsky does poor service to his cause, and merely weakens his case by scorning the proven abilities of animals. He says, "Human reason in fact is a universal instrument which can serve for all contingencies, whereas the organs of an animal or a machine have need of some special adaptation for any particular action ... no brute [is] so perfect that it has made use of a sign to inform other animals of something which had no relation to their passions for the word is the sole sign and the only certain mark of the presence of thought hidden and wrapped up in the body; now all men . . . make use of signs, whereas the brutes never do anything of the kind; which may be taken for the true distinction between man and brute."5                One of the philosophers (R.F. Terwilliger) who argues specifically against the evidence from honeybees in his efforts to support his view of the animals as Cartesian machines, says, "No bee was ever seen dancing about yesterday's honey [he means of course nectar] not to mention tomorrow's . . . Moreover bees never make mistakes in their dance."6                One of the many facts that Terwilliger and other authors of a similar persuasion ignore is that bees can be stimulated, by extreme food deficit, to dance during the middle of the night (a thing which they normally very rarely do) about a food source they have visited the day before, and will almost certainly visit again the next morning. In these circumstances a bee which has been dancing right up to sundown will, as soon as the morning comes, fly out to the same source, now, of course, taking a very different direction relative to the sun, in its morning position.                It is not so very surprising to find true linguistic ability in a primate with a brain-construction so similar to that of ourselves. But it is indeed in a sense "shocking" to find it in an insect, with its vastly simpler central nervous system.                A prominent student of "machine intelligence" has said "an organism which can have intentions is, I think, one which could be said to possess a mind, provided that it has the ability to form a plan and make a decision to adopt the plan."7 And to "decide on and adopt a plan" implies purpose. From all this it appears that the presence of mental images and an ability to provide introspective reports on self-awareness and intentions or purposes emerge as criteria of mind.                So again we must ask ourselves, do studies of animal language show evidence of purpose or intention"? It seems to me extremely difficult to support a negative answer. M.J. Adler argues that if it were discovered that animals differ from men only in degree and not radically in kind, this would destroy our moral basis for holding that all men have rights and individual dignity.8 It would seem that Adler, now confronted with the present situation, would conclude that the study of communicative behavior in animals has more dangerous political consequences than nuclear physics had in the 1930s (Griffin).9                Such views raise the whole question of "emergence" which is, at rock bottom, what all this discussion is about. We have been considering the emergence of new properties in complex systems through physics up to the mind of man. In the physical sciences such emergence can often be fully accounted for in terms of the individual properties of the component particles in isolation. In a very large number of other cases this cannot be done--though it is the widely accepted research strategy to assume that, as the science develops further, it will prove possible to do so. As we proceed to biology and up towards the higher reaches of the subject, this goal appears increasingly remote and unattainable. So many are forced to the conclusion, that at least when we come to the development of the behavioral abilities of the "higher" animals and man himself, this reductive view can never suffice and we must perforce envisage truly unpredictable and unforeseeable events (emergents) for which no refinements of physical technique or theory can ever be able fully to account. If this conclusion is accepted and absorbed into the culture and consciousness of mankind--that there are real and what can only be defined as sacred values in the world which must never be denigrated or relinquished--then the dangerous moral and political consequences referred to just now can and must be avoided.                A.N. Whitehead said in 1938, "The distinction between man and animals is in one sense only a difference of degree. But the extent of the degree makes all the difference. The Rubicon has been crossed."10 I believe this must be taken with the greatest seriousness.                To summarize, very briefly, the two aspects of the present world picture as it affects our estimate of our own situation:                1. I have little doubt that the cosmological revolution, provisional though it may be, has shown us a deep relationship between ourselves, the stars, and space; and so has provided us with a universe more concordant with the life and aspiration of man than any which preceded it up to the 1930s. And although I have used the presently favored "big-bang" model, I believe the same could be argued for a "steady-state" model; or indeed a combination of the two. This is not to say that there is now a sound basis for a new argument from design. But (to quote Dr. Carling) "It is a rather strong kind of coherence that can relate the present appearance of the universe back to events a minute fraction of a second after the 'big-bang"--approximately ten thousand million years ago."11                2. When we come to realize the strength of the present evidence for the continuity of mental experience, we are led to postulate a real predisposition in the world for the evolution of mental awareness. And this brings us to contemplate a supreme miracle--"That the universe created a part of itself to study the rest of itself."                All this presents us with the great task of formulating the new prospect in a manner which the majority will welcome and understand. In this connection I cannot do better than paraphrase some remarks of Polanyi12: So far as we know, we are the supreme bearers of thought in the universe. After five million centuries of evolution, we have been engaged for only fifty centuries in a literate process of thought. It has all been an affair of the last hundred generations or so. If this perspective is true, a supreme trust is placed in us by the whole creation; and it is sacrilege even to contemplate actions which may lead to the extinction of humanity or even its relegation to earlier or more primitive stages of culture. To avoid this is the particular calling of literate and scientific man in this universe.                In this task of re-formulation perhaps the key lies in the modern development of process philosophy and process theology--based upon the thought of Alfred North Whitehead.                Considering the human brain we have come to realize that, in spite of its overwhelming complexity, it has ultimate limitations as a machine. But I belief with Whitehead that in spite of these limitations the human mind and soul which operates in liaison with it, has latent possibilities and capacities for further emergence and transcendence--capacities to which we can set no limit.                And in conclusion I would like to paraphrase some words of Louis Pasteur: "Infinity stares us in the face, whether we look at the stars or search for our own identities. A true science of life must let infinity in and never lose sight of it." Hold fast to this and we shall find that the infinity of mind seems to encompass us everywhere.                NOTES                1. M. Black, The Labyrinth of Language (New York: Praeger, 1968).                2. K. von Frisch, The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1967).                3. M. Lindauer, Communication Among Social Bees (revised edition, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1971).                4. D.R. Griffin, The Question of Animal Awareness (New York: Rockefeller University Press, 1976).                5. N. Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1972).                6. R.F. Terwillinger, Meaning and Mind: A Study of the Psychology of Language (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).                7. H.C. Longuet-Higgins, in A.H.P. Kenny, J.R. Lucas, and C.H. Waddington, The Nature of Mind (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970).                8. M.J. Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967).                9. D.R. Griffin, The Question of Animal Awareness.                10. A.N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1938).                © 2003 Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace. This article appeared as a chapter in the book God and World Peace: An Exploration of the Significance of God for a World in Crisis, published by IIFWP.         W.H. Thorpe is professor of zoology at Jesus College in Cambridge, England.