I'm a big fan of Robert Sapolsky's writing. This month in American Scientist Online he co-authors an article with G. A. Bradshaw on the study of animal mentality. Here are a few choice quotations capturing some of the article's main points.

Charles Darwin placed human beings on the continuum of animal species nearly 150 years ago. Somehow that insight was lost. Nurture is being reconciled with nature, and boundaries that once separated academic disciplines are dissolving, all of which bring models of animal and human behavior to unity. Separation has given over to integration, and what seemed like a haphazard collection of observational anomalies is now taking form as a coherent, human-inclusive, trans-species theory of mind and body.

And...

Evolutionary theory suggests that species with a recent common ancestor are more likely to have traits in common than are distantly related species. Of course, common ancestry does not ensure identity, but as a reflexive stance, neither anthropomorphism nor anthropodenial makes sense. If morphological, physiological and genetic traits merit bidirectional inference, then there is scant reason to exclude mental states.

And again...

...the paradox of using animal models for research?that they are both categorically different from us and alike enough to study?begs resolution. The same similarities that justify the use of animals in biomedical research (an implicit anthropomorphism) clash with the dissimilarities that justify the ethics of vivisection (an implicit anthropodenial).

And finally...

Old prejudices are hard to relinquish, and humans have held themselves apart from other species for centuries, if not millennia. Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins refers to this posture as "the tyranny of the discontinuous mind." The same impetus gave rise to the medieval concept of the "great chain of being," in which humans sat above the animals but below the angels. Parasitologist Sean Nee at the University of Edinburgh attributes this self-segregation to a deep-seated fear of sameness. Regardless of its origin, bidirectional inference threatens the belief in human superiority and the self-image of those who adhere to it.

American Scientist Online - Mirror, Mirror

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