Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

We do not mean to be patronizing. The depth of understanding exhibited by our fellow creatures is of course limited. So is ours. We also are at the mercy of our feelings. We too are profoundly ignorant about what motivates us. Some of those beings have, as familiar aspects of their everyday lives, sensibilities wholly absent in humans. Other beings have different tastes and appreciations of the outside world—“To a worm in horseradish, the horseradish seems sweet,” as an old Yiddish folk adage has it. Beyond that, the horseradish worm lives in a world of smells, tastes, textures, and other sensations unknown to us.

Bumblebees detect the polarization of sunlight, invisible to uninstrumented humans; pit vipers sense infrared radiation and detect temperature differences of 0.01°C at a distance of half a meter; many insects can see ultraviolet light; some African freshwater fish generate a static electric field around themselves and sense intruders by slight perturbations induced in the field; dogs, sharks, and cicadas detect sounds wholly inaudible to humans; ordinary scorpions have micro-seismometers on their legs so they can detect in pitch darkness the footsteps of a small insect a meter away; water scorpions sense their depth by measuring the hydrostatic pressure; a nubile female silkworm moth releases ten billionths of a gram of sex attractant per second, and draws to her every male for miles around; dolphins, whales, and bats use a kind of sonar for precision echo-location.

The direction, range, amplitude, and frequency of sounds reflected back to echo-locating bats are systematically mapped onto adjacent areas of the bat brain. How does the bat perceive its echo-world? Carp and catfish have taste buds distributed over most of their bodies, as well as in their mouths; the nerves from all these sensors converge on massive sensory processing lobes in their brains, lobes unknown in other animals. How does a catfish view the world? What does it feel like to be inside its brain? There are reported cases in which a dog wags its tail and greets with joy a man it has never met before; he turns out to be the long-lost identical twin of the dog’s “master,” recognizable by his odor. What is the smell-world of a dog like? Magnetotactic bacteria contain within them tiny crystals of magnetite—an iron mineral known to early sailing ship navigators as lodestone. The bacteria literally have internal compasses that align them along the Earth’s magnetic field. The great churning dynamo of molten iron in the Earth’s core—as far as we know, entirely unknown to uninstrumented humans—is a guiding reality for these microscopic beings. How does the Earth’s magnetism feel to them? All these creatures may be automatons, or nearly so, but what astounding special powers they have, never granted to humans, or even to comic book superheroes. How different their view of the world must be, perceiving so much that we miss.

Each species has a different model of reality mapped into its brain. No model is complete. Every model misses some aspects of the world. Because of this incompleteness, sooner or later there will be surprises—perceived, perhaps, as something like magic or miracles. There are different sensory modalities, different detection sensitivities, different ways the various sensations are integrated into a dynamic mental map of … a snake, say, in full hunting slither.

But Descartes was unimpressed. He wrote to the Marquis of Newcastle:I know, indeed, that brutes do many things better than we do, but I am not surprised at it; for that, also, goes to prove that they act by force of nature and by springs, like a clock, which tells better what the hour is than our judgment can inform us.¹¹

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As life evolved, the repertoire of feelings expanded. Aristotle thought that “in a number of animals we observe gentleness or fierceness, mildness or cross-temper, courage or timidity, fear or confidence, high spirit or low cunning, and, with regard to intelligence, something equivalent to sagacity.”¹²

Emotions that Darwin argued are manifested by at least some mammals other than humans—chiefly dogs, horses, and monkeys—include pleasure, pain, happiness, misery, terror, suspicion, deceit, courage, timidity, sulkiness, good temper, revenge, selfless love, jealousy, hunger for affection and praise, pride, shame, modesty, magnanimity, and a sense of humor.¹³

And at some point, probably long before the first humans, a new set of emotions—curiosity, insight, the pleasures of learning and teaching—also slowly emerged. Neuron by neuron, the partitions began to go up.

ARE ANIMALS MACHINES? FOUR VIEWS

A Seventeenth-Century View: Descartes: