Book review - Thinking Animals

Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence
by Paul Shepherd
University of Georgia Press 1978
Athens, Georgia

This book has the exciting premise that the evolution of human intellect did not happen separately from other animals but because of man's interactions with them. For example, if speech is the means by which intelligence developed beyond that of the apes, the very process of thought - "searching, comparing, selecting, ordering and integrating" - parallels the skills of an early primate hunter, which is when man stopped searching for prey randomly and began to "track, stalk, intercept, and coordinate." The way we think is not only mirrored in the act of hunting. It is reflected in the carnivore's tearing apart of meat. You think what you eat, says the author of Thinking Animals, Paul Shepherd, professor of Natural Philosophy and Human Ecology. Speech allowed images to be recalled from memory and communicated; communicated images allowed for the classification and ordering of life; the objectified world allowed for the comprehension of a sense of self, or what it was to be human. We then recreated our ancient world in our own tamed image, a projection of the rationality that came with speech.

"The evolutionary sharpening of mind due to the interplay between animals" took place in open country where nutritious grasses supported large mammals and the ensuing dynamic between predator and prey. Although easy to dismiss as the power of suggestion - we're aware that early man has his origins in Africa - many visitors do describe their reactions to the East African savannah as "coming home." "If we are at home, we would not feel the need to journey there," says Malidoma Patrice Some, West African shaman, of the natural world. To Malidoma’s people, the Dagara of Burkina Faso, the trees and the plants are the most intelligent species because they don’t need words to communicate. Animals are the next most intelligent species because they use a minimum of uttered communication. Humans are the least intelligent of the three. Cursed by the speech, they are furthest from the "home" or the "source".

Thinking Animals wasn’t an easy read for me, but I did find it a brilliant one. If there were times when I didn't fully grasp what Shepherd meant, I nevertheless felt the truth in his words. Often my understanding struck me the way Shepherd describes birds (the model for human song perhaps by the way) - as ideas, flying across the sky (the inside of our heads), "coming from the unseen of the preconscious and disappearing again into the realm of dreams". The bottom line of Thinking Animals however is perfectly clear. We depend upon animals for our continued cognitive development. Our future doesn't look too bright. "A world where people are beginning to crowd one another intolerably is a world too small for animals".

04-09-2006