Human and animal minds
sara abdulla
Wednesday, 12 August 2009 12:48 UTC
Two recent Opinion pieces in Nature have swelled our post bag. Johan J. Bolhuis and Clive D. L. Wynne urged that “for comparative psychology to progress, we must study animal and human minds empirically, without naive evolutionary presuppositions”. Frans De Waal rebutted that “evolutionary theory predicts cognitive similarities based on the relations between species and their habitats”. Correspondents have lined up in favour of both approaches, lets call them similarity and difference for short.
What do you think?
Updated 13 August 2009 11:19 UTC
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Replies
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I’ve always found it distressing that people have carried out experiments on other animals in hope of understanding human behaviour better. To me this seems odd, humans are very unique compared with the rest of nature, i understand you could state that about any two species of different generas, but humans do possess unique qualities such as; intelligence and self-awareness/consciousness. Civilization is the product of such uniqueness,its so impressive, overwhelmingly impressive.
I understand we’re still animals, we still have basic instructions in our genes, so why not assume that we could better understand our behaviour by studying our closest relatives? -
It seems very consistent that relate the processes of perception between species and its habitat: “Evolutionary theory predicts cognitive similarities based on the relations between species and their habitats”
The perception and cognition of humans and other species have evolved depending on their habitat (is closely linked).
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