My father, a neurobiologist, sent me an email this morning that included a paragraph about animals and feelings:
"We are all made of the same stuff. The amazing thing is how small the differences are, especially between the higher mammals and us. Even at the tissue level things are the same...same components just arranged a little differently. So when you see a brain, and eyes, and ears it seems to me a silly argument that many basic feelings...pain, sorrow, fear are not shared between animals and us."
1 comment:
I couldn't agree with your dad more! For so many years 'objective' biologists have been belittling what they saw as the sentimental tendency of so many of us to 'anthropomorphize' (sp?) animals and mistakenly assume they're like us. But it doesn't make any sense to assume that any mammal species is radically different emotionally from any other (though Temple Grandin's suggestion that they may be a bit more like functional autistics is interesting).
It's possible that biologists inadvertently fell from their objective and scientific positions and unknowingly, embarrassingly, slipped into the grandly discredited notion of The Great Chain of Being from Shakespeare's time, in which slugs or mollusks (I think) were the lowliest of creatures, way down at the bottom, poor people were somewhere below the middle but maybe above mammals (thought the people who this system most flattered must have had an awful time putting them above horses), women might have had their own spot somewhere near the poor and animals (or did I make that up?), kings ruled by divine right because they were so clearly second from the top and God was all the way up there, and the whole system was really His, therefore not to be questioned.
If only one of us had had the juevos to confront them with that. But professors have a lot of practice winning at that sort of thing. (to digress, I think too many of them bored and easily irritated.)
Ah, you should have gone to college in the 50's when geologists insisted that the continents had never been connected and only fools took their shapes to mean otherwise.
And then there were the food groups.
Never mind. Your dad's a smart fellow. He ought to be a scientist or something. :-)
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