I’m going to limit my typical tirade against anthropocentrism to three sentences for the sake of brevity and boredom prevention: Human brains did not evolve in a vacuum; as neuroanatomists have noted for close to 200 years, there are scarcely any differences in kind between the monkey brain and the human brain, merely differences in degree. People act surprised at the fact that other animals have emotions and the ability to infer. Which is why psych is such a radioactive pile of cow dung; it has a flawed view of just how deep the roots of our cognitive and emotional attributes go and why they came to be in the first place.

Ok, done. And yeah, I guess I cheated by using semicolons, making it five sentences not 3. But my blog. My bandwidth. Deal.

This is not a problem I have. Luckily for me, I wasn’t raised in an epistemological framework of unjustified humanism (whether religious or atheistic in nature), but rather was taught to appreciate the commonalities of all living things. Especially monkeys. Not only that but I’ve had a lot of face time with them. I’ve been tricked, outsmarted, beaten, berated, bitten, and generally abused by several species of monkeys originating from three different continents. I have no doubts as to their intelligence or as to the fact that they think just like we do, just in a less sophisticated manner.

A new study from Harvard researcher Dr. Marc Hauser highlights the ability of monkeys to make inferences about situations they’ve never encountered before.

Monkeys keep turning out to be smarter than people think they are. Researchers have shown that they can count to four and are aware of differences between languages like Dutch and Japanese, even though they don’t known what is being said. Now, Harvard psychologists find that monkeys can draw correct conclusions about novel situations. For example, shown a white towel that turns blue, a blue knife, and a glass of blue paint, they can figure out that the paint not the knife is responsible for the change in color.

“Our studies reveal a striking continuity between humans and monkeys in their capacity to draw causal inferences without the help of familiarity with the events or situation,” says Marc Hauser, a Harvard professor of psychology. “This ability highlights the richness of the monkey mind in terms of its understanding of the material world.”

Thank you, Dr. Hauser. And I mean that wholeheartedly. Both scientists and the public need to understand that there isn’t very much that makes humans unique, not because I’m one of those ‘human rights for great apes’ freaks, but simply because we can’t develop a conception of who we really are unless we understand just how we’re related to others.

Anyway, moving on to the experiment itself:

Next, they saw the glass of water and two halves of an apple. Following this, a knife was lowered, and two apple halves seemingly became a whole apple.

To a human, even an infant who had never seen such things before, the last two apparent happenings would never really happen. Can monkeys infer the same outcomes? Evidently, the answer is “yes.” They looked longer when a glass of water appeared to cut the apple than when a knife seemed to do the same. The longer look signaled disbelief.

Surprisingly, they didn’t fail. Without ever having seen a glass of water and two apple halves, or a blue knife and blue and white towels, the monkeys inferred that water cannot cut fruit and knives can’t change the color of towels.

And that’s the key here, just by looking at the objects, the monkeys were able to figure out what their actions were. Inference at its finest.

The experiments, then, answer a key question about human versus monkey intelligence. Is the capability for figuring out what is possible and not possible when you see something for the first time uniquely human? For Hauser, Spaulding, and a lot of scientists who read their report in the May 2 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the answer is a resounding “No.”

“Humans are not alone in their capacity to draw causal inferences from limited experiences,” the Harvard researchers write. “This capacity is part of the evolved psychology of rhesus monkeys and most likely other animals as well.”

Which really says it all, I’d head to the article itself since it ends with a great David Hume-bashing ending. I’m not much of a fan of philosophers either (although I’m a fan of philosophizing), like the psych establishment, they seem to have an allergy to the real world.

The saddest thing about this whole business is that people like Dr. Hauser have to go out and prove something that should simply be assumed based on parsimony.

I’ll end this by saying that, as I’ve mentioned before in my psych rantings, unless we understand the selective forces that led to the differentiation of the primate brain from those of other mammals, and the forces that led to the gigantic increase in encephalization between hominins and other primates, we won’t really understand what the brain was designed to do. And if we don’t understand that how the hell can we know when something is actually wrong with it?