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There isn’t a dog owner in the land who isn’t convinced that Fido understands
everything that is said to him. Dogs, canine-lovers tell the rest of us,
are just like humans, but happen to be dressed in fur coats, have four legs
and speak a different language. Not only are dogs intelligent and have feelings,
but, like humans, they are also conscious of those feelings, or so we are
assured.

Harvard biologist Donald Griffin has great sympathy for this view,
although he would express it in somewhat more scholarly terms. For the past
two decades he has been conducting an often lonely crusade to encourage
his fellow researchers to take seriously the notion that animals have minds
as well as brains. That is, he believes that animals think about options
open to them, and decide on appropriate action: ‘Animals want some things,
fear others and expect that actions will lead to certain results.’ All
animals, he argues, from the lowliest insects to the most sophisticated
primates, experience their world through a real, if limited, skein of consciousness.

In his bid to build a case for animal awareness, Griffin has compiled
several volumes of experimental and field observations of animal behaviour,
the latest being Animal Minds, published in 1992. Griffin’s research credentials
are impeccable. In the 1940s, he made the ground-breaking discovery, with
his colleague Robert Galambos, that bats use radar for navigation (echolocation).
Yet his own voyage on animal consciousness has been no smooth ride.

Many animal behaviourists see Griffin’s goal – to ‘reopen the basic
question of what life is like, subjectively, to non-human animals’ – as
taboo. ‘Animal cognition (or thinking), but not animal consciousness, is
fair game for science,’ wrote Andrew Whiten, a psychologist at the University
of St Andrews, in a review of Griffin’s last book. ‘(Cognitivists) are simply
at a loss in scientifically distinguishing the conscious and the nonconscious
in nonhumans.’

Animals as sleepwalkers

‘Interesting and infuriating’ is how Sonja Yoerg, a psychologist at
California State University at Hayward, describes Griffin’s last book. Interesting,
because the examples of animal thinking or cognition make a persuasive
case for the phenomenon. Infuriating, because ‘(Griffin) simply does not
grasp why most behavioural scientists have not joined him in making the
study of animal awareness a research priority’. The problem is one of scientific
accessibility, says Yoerg: ‘It is in distinguishing empirically between
mental events and mental experiences that we run aground.’

Griffin chides such commentators for succumbing to a ‘self-inflicted
paralysis of inquiry’. He states bluntly that ‘the customary view of animals
as always living in a state comparable to that of human sleepwalkers is
a sort of negative dogmatism.’

In the early decades of this century, psychologists would have broadly
agreed with him. At that time animals were certainly held to have thoughts.
How else could animals process the mental information needed to perceive
their environment and act appropriately? Animals’ minds, nevertheless, were
considered to be limited in their scope, focusing on the present, immediate
past, or near future, and concerned with the practicalities of life rather
than abstractions.

But then came behaviourism. Beginning in the 1920s, the common-sense
model of animal behaviour was swept away, partly by a new, aggressive enthusiasm
for a ‘more scientific’ approach to psychological research. Led initially
by John B. Watson of Harvard University and later by B. F. Skinner of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the behaviourists considered as unjustified
any interpretation of animal behaviour that included rational thinking
and insight.

The behaviourist paradigm insisted that all behaviour, no matter how
complex, must be explained in the context of learned responses, with no
reference to subjective reflection. Strict behaviourists denied the existence
of cognition and consciousness in nonhuman animals. And while less radical
behaviourists did not dismiss conscious thinking, they saw it as a private
phenomenon that was unmeasurable and therefore outside the scope of scientific
study. Animal behaviour was defined as what could be observed and measured
in the laboratory, and the study of it became part of the reductionist
triumph of modern biology: the idea that we can understand nature most
effectively by dismantling it.

Behaviourism dominated psychology and, subsequently, biology for more
than half a century. Thinking about thinking was taboo for the serious scholar
of animal behaviour. As a student at Harvard in the 1930s, Griffin was in
the thick of the behaviourists’ hegemony. His thesis supervisor was Karl
Lashley, a leader of the new movement. ‘There was a tremendous desire to
get away from the ‘fuzziness’ of earlier psychological work,’ Griffin recalls,
‘and an enthusiasm for doing good, clean, controlled experiments.’

Hive mentality

Inevitably, his own work followed the behaviourist line very closely,
and his discovery of echolocation fits the mechanistic tradition. Nevertheless,
Griffin felt intuitively that animal brains were more than unconscious mental
machines. ‘I didn’t challenge the behaviourist position at the time,’ he
explains. ‘I was just a student, and I was aware of the social pressures
to conform to the intellectual norm.’

It was Karl von Frisch’s discovery of the significance of the waggle
dance in bees that prompted Griffin to pursue animal cognition more closely.
The discovery, made in the late 1940s, helped to establish the field of
ethology and earned von Frisch a share in the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physiology
or Medicine. What caught Griffin’s attention about the bees’ dance was its
apparent symbolic content.

The dance communicates distance, direction and desirability of a food
source. But it is also symbolic, as bees perform it at a great distance
from the food and well after seeing it. ‘The behaviourist approach I had
been brought up on would not have predicted something like this,’ says Griffin.
‘It seemed to confirm what I felt to be true about animal awareness, and
gave me a way of approaching the subject.’

As a result Griffin came to see communication as the window into animal
consciousness. Humans infer consciousness in other individuals principally
through communication, including non-verbal communication. Griffin’s insight
was that perhaps the same could be true for nonhuman animals, an idea he
now sees as naive. ‘I wouldn’t suggest that every communication signal necessarily
implies the animal is thinking something,’ he observes, ‘but it seemed to
be a promising entering wedge to a difficult scientific problem.’

Warm corpse

Communication remains the central pillar of Griffin’s argument for animal
awareness, although his search has widened in recent years to include versatility
of behaviour and physiological signals that might be associated with consciousness
. And over the past three decades, other researchers have joined the quest
to understand animal thinking, slowly giving birth to what Griffin calls
the discipline of ‘cognitive ethology’. A key step was the move out of the
laboratory and into the wild. As field observations of animal behaviour
accumulated, everyone began to realise that animals were smarter and more
versatile than the conditioned-response creed of behaviourism could accommodate.
Today behaviourism is effectively dead, even if, as Griffin suspects, its
corpse is not yet completely cold.

So what was Griffin’s role in this revolution? ‘He made talk about animal
minds respectable,’ says Mark Bekoff, a biologist at the University of Colorado
who has extensively studied the history of behaviourism and cognitive ethology.
‘It was liberating to be reminded of the taboo we had all erected about
mentalistic hypotheses,’ says Peter Marler, a former colleague of Griffin’s
at Rockefeller University who is now at the University of California at
Davis.

Nevertheless, most cognitive ethologists, Marler included, remain sceptical
about animal consciousness, even though most accept the reality of animal
cognition. One complaint is that Griffin fails to provide a theory of mind
which can explain the wealth of observational data he has accumulated. ‘It
is disappointing to find a biologist so concerned with the existence of
this phenomenon offering no theory of what distinguishes consciousness as
a biological process,’ laments Whiten. What specific role should we ascribe
to consciousness in the realm of perception, information analysis and action?

Griffin’s reply is that it is impossible to prove rigorously the existence
of subjective experience. ‘In other realms of scientific endeavour we have
to accept proof that is less than a hundred per cent rigorous,’ says Griffin.
‘The historical sciences are like that – think of cosmology, think of geology.
And Darwin couldn’t prove the fact of biological evolution in a rigorous
way.’ Psychologists and ethologists have seemed to be ‘almost petrified
by the notion of animal consciousness’ – a manifestation, he suggests,
of ‘a lingering behaviourism’.

As with Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the force of Griffin’s work
is in the cumulative effect of many examples. But this ‘weight of evidence’
approach is not seen as conventional science, particularly in these reductionist
times. ‘It works as a common sense approach,’ concedes Whiten, ‘but I am
wary of it as a scientific approach.’ Marler finds it troublesome. ‘It leads,’
he fears, ‘to a temptation to overindulge in rich interpretations of animal
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Some blame the tendency to succumb to this temptation on a widespread
urge to impute human motives to animals. ‘Anthropomorphism must take its
slice of the blame for a sort of malaise that has lately afflicted ethology,’
writes John S. Kennedy, former professor of animal behaviour at Imperial
College, London, in his book The New Anthropomorphism. The malaise in question
is presumably the notion of animal minds.

Griffin has no doubts about the Darwinian benefit of consciousness in
animals. ‘Consciousness confers an enormous advantage by allowing animals
to select those actions that are most likely to get them what they want
or ward off what they fear,’ says Griffin. Paraphrasing a comment on humans
by the British philosopher Karl Popper, Griffin asserts that ‘animals that
think consciously can try out possible actions in their heads without the
risk of actually performing them solely on a trial-and-error basis.’ In
other words, consciousness, even at a minimal perceptual level, allows behaviour
to be flexible and therefore more sophisticated.

To Helena Cronin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford
and the London School of Economics, this argument is weak. ‘All that Mr
Griffin’s animal stories illustrate is the immense power of information-processing
machinery to produce versatile and complicated behaviour,’ she wrote in
a New York Times review of Griffin’s latest book. Like computers, animals
can be programmed to do complex things, but this need not involve consciousness.

‘(Griffin) vastly underestimates genes,’ Cronin continued. ‘He thinks
the only alternative to plodding genetic clockwork is a takeover by the
liberating army of conscious deliberation.’ Cronin does not categorically
deny consciousness to non-human animals – and in fact is ‘convinced that
. . . chimpanzees are conscious’ – but rather argues that there is no logical
necessity for it.

Natural selection is powerful enough to produce behaviours that might
seem to be the result of subjectivity. ‘I think Cronin has fallen into the
philosophical trap of assuming that if something is affected by genetics
and selection, it can’t have a conscious, subjective component,’ retorts
Griffin. ‘I see no reason why animal consciousness shouldn’t be the product
of evolution. This is speculative, I agree, and I don’t know how to test
it. But I would say it is at least as plausible as Cronin’s proposition.’

The debate comes down to both sides asserting that their brand of brain
operation – programmed versus reflective – can produce complicated behaviour.
Griffin likes to suggest that cognition and consciousness allows for greater
flexibility of behaviour than can be achieved by programming for a wide
range of possibilities. ‘This is the more parsimonious position,’ claims
Griffin. ‘I’d say it is so plausible that I would put the burden of proof
on Dr Cronin, Dr Yoerg, or anyone else to tell me why it would not be useful
for animals to think consciously.’

Further reading: The Question of Animal Awareness (1976); Animal Thinking
(1984); and Animal Minds (Chicago University Press, 1992).

* * *

What makes animals conscious beings?

There are three lines of evidence that nonhuman animals are conscious,
says Donald Griffin:

Versatile behaviour

Certain neotropical assassin bugs use ‘tools’ to capture termites. First,
they use pieces of material from the outer surface of the termite nest as
camouflage. They then lurk at the nest’s entrance and capture a single termite.
When the juices have been sucked from the termite’s body, the bug dangles
the corpse near the nest’s entrance. This draws out other termites, which
are speedily dispatched.

Some species of bird also use tools in inventive ways, such as certain
Galapagos finches and marabou storks, but Griffin particularly likes the
example of the green-backed heron. Most herons fish by slow stalking and
rapid capture. Griffin tells of a green-backed heron in a Japanese city
park colony that breaks twigs into small pieces, and then, standing at the
water’s edge, repeatedly floats one of the pieces as bait. Minnows that
are attracted to the twig finish up as lunch. Another individual in the
same colony drops the artificial bait from a branch overhanging the water,
and then captures the minnows on the wing.

Nut cracking by chimps, elaborate cooperation by lionesses in a hunt,
prey selection by starlings and wagtails, the building of beaver dams –
these and many more types of behaviour contain elements of versatility that
may imply mental processes beyond unconscious programming.

Physiological signals

Griffin states that there is no specific neuroanatomical structure that
is known to be essential for conscious thinking in humans. He also says
all central nervous systems are assembled from the same basic components,
and that the functioning of neurons and synapses is common to all such
systems. Hence, there is no a priori reason to rule out the possibility
of conscious thinking in nonhuman animals.

Physiologists have long pored over electroencephalographs as measures
of brain activity. A subset of these ‘brain waves’, known as event-related
potentials, may be related to conscious thinking, suggests Griffin, because
they are not a direct response to sensory input and are affected by internal
processes, such as previous experience. One component of ERPs, the so-called
P300 wave, is elicited by stimuli that are unexpected and yet relevant to
current circumstances. They are seen in nonhuman animals during experimental
tasks associated with appropriate responses to sounds and other signals.
In humans, the P300 wave occurs when the subject is known to be conscious
of information that is relevant to a current task. Therefore, argues Griffin,
it is reasonable at least to consider the possibility that the P300 wave
in nonhuman animals is also a physiological signal of conscious thinking.

Communication

Communicative signals in nonhuman animals have tended to be seen as
involuntary responses to internal states. Such communication is therefore
equivalent to gasps of surprise or groans of pain in humans. Griffin calls
this ‘the groans of pain’ (or GOP) interpretation of animal communication.

A key factor in distinguishing between communication of the GOP kind
and intentional communication, says Griffin, is the effect of the signal
on the audience. At the very least, intentional communication requires an
audience while GOPs do not.

One of the most thoroughly studied examples of animal communication
is that of vervet monkeys (see ‘Inside the mind of a monkey’, ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ,
4 January 1992). These animals have a small repertoire of alarm calls for
specific predators, and frequent, low-level vocalisations in social situations.
Investigations of these calls often involve playback experiments, which
monitor the effect on individuals of calls made earlier by different group
members under a range of circumstances. As a result, it is clear that the
calls carry a much more varied range of information (about individuals
and context) than had been expected. More significantly, there appears
to be a surprising degree of flexibility in the calls themselves and in
other monkeys’ responses to them.

Griffin cites the symbolic nature of the honey bees’ waggle dance. Weaver
ants similarly recruit nest members to go to new food sources and to attack
intruders. Different body and head gestures are used for these two purposes,
and the messages are passed from one individual to the next. Nobody would
argue that consciousness could be an important survival tool in highly cooperative,
social groups. But by suggesting that the phenomenon applies to insects
as well as to mammals and primates, Griffin goes further than most ethologists.

The fact that monkeys and apes apparently sometimes deceive their fellows,
to gain advantage in the quest for sex or food, is held to be strong evidence
of some degree of consciousness. To deceive by giving false alarm calls,
suppressing calls, or concealing actions, the animal must have a sense of
how other individuals perceive it, and therefore must have a sense of self.

That apes learn and use symbols is evidence, says Griffin, of an evolutionary
continuity between human and nonhuman communication and thinking. Many ethologists
would agree with this. However, fewer would be as enthusiastic as Griffin
is about the reported abilities of Alex, an African green parrot, who seems
able to answer questions about the shape, colour and similarity of objects,
using English words appropriately. Alex’s gifts, say critics, reflect robotic
conditioning.