Human Review by Justine Gregg – How Big Are Your Favorite Person? | Science and nature books

IIn the 1970s, a former Soviet Navy officer named Igor Charkovsky popularized a concept that became known as dolphin-assisted birth. Possibly inspired by New Age theories, he urged expectant mothers to dive into the cold waters of the Black Sea, communicate with dolphins, and give birth underwater. He claimed that in the “very near future, a newborn baby will be able to live in the ocean with a pod of dolphins and feed on dolphin milk.”

The most unusual thing about Czarkovsky was not his theory, but its remarkable flexibility within both Soviet and Western culture, as Justin Gregg shows in his bright and lively new book. Greg’s work is both a dissection and an ode to the irresistible pull of anthropomorphism, our tendency to apply human characteristics to non-humans, whether animals, objects, artificial intelligence, or God. An expert in animal cognition who also teaches improvisation, Greg deftly guides us through our fascinating, destructive, and wrong-headed fantasies about everything from marine mammals to our iPhones.

The guiding spirit of this book is the seventeenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon: “Human understanding, he wrote, is like a false mirror which receives light irregularly, and then distorts and discolours the nature of things by mixing their own nature with it.” How distorted and discolored this mirror is, a less accurate reflection of a dolphin or a dog or a computer than a crooked mirror at a carnival.

Greg introduces us to dog owners who insert a “testicle,” an implanted artificial testicle, into their castrated pets to alleviate the shame of castration. This is pure Freudian drama. The UK’s Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons line that silicone implants offer no benefit to the dog at all. I laughed at these clips, until Greg moved on to our assumptions about cats, where I have more skin in the game. My cat is so enmeshed in my family’s psychodrama that Greg’s gentle questioning of the facts of feline cognition left me unmoored. We all, in one way or another, cling to the game of anthropomorphism, imagining the inner thoughts of our pets, naming our cars, and determining the gender of God; If Czarkovsky is unhinged, it’s only a matter of degree.

Anthropomorphism has long been a dirty word among those who study animal behavior, but Greg sees it as a positive force if used reflexively. For example, the late primatologist Jane Goodall urged its judicious use. “Just because you feel an animal has a human-like characteristic, you can’t assume that’s the case,” she said. “Intuition alone is not enough – but it is a great basis for further questioning, testing, and ultimately proving yourself right or wrong.”

Some of Greg’s case studies point the other way, showing how our expectations cause disaster. In 1977, Nippon Animation released Rascal Racoon, an animated television series depicting the idyllic relationship between a young boy and a raccoon in the American Midwest. The series prompted the Japanese to import thousands of raccoons as pets, unaware that adults can bite them, and when bored, they can easily tear apart a small apartment. Nearly 50 years later, there are only a few pet raccoons left, but many live in the countryside, feeding freely on native species such as salamanders and crayfish.

I appreciated this book more when it touched on Greg’s area of ​​expertise, non-human cognition. His stories have surprised me time and time again, upending my assumptions about other species, especially reptiles. He cites research on crocodiles that demonstrates their ability to play and socialize. Through subtle shifts in perspective and focus, one can reimagine these staple villains of wildlife documentaries as hilarious, albeit dry-landed.

When there are doubts about whether a non-human animal possesses consciousness, Gregg urges a kind of Pascalian reasoning: it is better to assume that a spider can feel suffering than to deny it and risk harm. He draws a firm line between animals and the large language models that power tools like ChatGPT, and the latter cannot be said to possess anything resembling consciousness, which has biological roots. (Given this situation, I might gently question his frequent use of “hard wiring” in relation to the human brain; as Siri Hustveit notes, such metaphors do not help us understand how different our minds are from machines.)

It is a strange paradox that as we discover more about the workings of other minds, our tendency to project our dreams onto them does not diminish. For Gregg, anthropomorphism is a function of separation (he says it is illogical to invoke anthropomorphism in relation to some indigenous cultures where wild animals and humans are considered to be of the same blood). If disconnection can be measured by the decline of wild species, or the hours we spend online alone, then ours truly is the age of anthropomorphism. Charkowski had not yet had his day in the sun.