What is obvious is that the populations of man have the means to record and to process information outside of the nervous system, and to transmit this recorded information to succeeding generations. The result is a lot of weapons innovation beyond that seen in the earlier history of animal evolution. This has given man the ability to out-compete and to prey upon most other species of comparable size, so that man’s only remaining macro-predator of significance is other men. The organism man is still an animal, and man is still evolving. Man changes the environment, and the environment changes man. The same is true for other species.

The hypothesis that man has remarkably highly-developed machinery for speech and symbolic logic is well-supported, as a difference in scale but not in kind when compared to the machinery of other animals.

First, I’d like to point out that both 1 & 2 can be criticised on the basis of some of my friend’s work on New Caledonian Crows.

A more important issue, I think, is that this is more of the same moving-the-goalposts that happens every single time an animal shows it can do something humans can. Instead of saying that animals don’t have language (which we were doing 30 years ago), we’re now arguing that they don’t have some sort of symbolic cognition. I really don’t think it’s helpful to do draw this arbitrary line between what-animals-do and what-people-do.

It’s a weird sort of checklist all-or-nothing approach to cognition (this animal can recognise itself in a mirror, it can communicate with other animals, it can plan for the future…tick!). However, Hauser is an Evolutionary Psychologist of the Tooby and Cosmides school thought, and they do like to treat cognition as a modular tick-the-boxes game.

I think Frans de Waal put it best when he said that asking whether animals can do X is like asking whether chickens can fly; they may not be able to fly like an eagle, but they can hop around trees and get stuff done. Instead of asking can they/can’t they, we should be asking questions about the extent to which they use these capabilities, how they overcome any ‘shortcomings’, and how all these capabilities interact to build a total picture of animal cognition.

–Simon