Animals R Us, or Are They?

When I was first hooked on psychology, in the late 1950s, it was taken for granted that humans were psychologically no different from other animals. We read Clark Hull and Edward C. Tolman on how rats behave in mazes, and in the lab we put rats in Skinner boxes and gave out little reinforcements when they pressed levers. Later, pigeons replaced rats, and we taught them to peck at keys. Rat, pigeon, human—the laws of behavior were the same. There was even a half-hearted attempted to add worms to the menagerie. Or maybe it was a joke.

That was the era of behaviorism. It even permeated clinical psychology, when a 1949 conference in Boulder, Colorado established the scientist-practitioner model. Clinical practice was to be based on scientific behavioral principles, not depth psychology of the sort practiced by the psychoanalysts. Freud, we thought, was a bit of a laugh.

Little did I know at the time, but it had also started to unravel in the late 1950s. The defining moment seems to have come on the second day of a conference held at MIT, on September 11, 1956, the day after my 20th birthday. There were talks on artificial intelligence and information theory, and perhaps above all, Noam Chomsky introduced his work on generative grammar, which was published the following year in his monograph Syntactic Structures. In that same fateful year, 1957, the behaviorist B.F. Skinner published Verbal Behavior, a monumental attempt to explain language in terms of behavioral principles—a book subsequently attacked in a famous but strongly worded review by Chomsky. It was a declaration of war; the cognitive revolution was under way.

As though lured by some Pied Piper, the rats slowly vanished from the laboratories, and the pigeons maybe just flew away. These animals were largely replaced by a more compliant species, the human undergraduate, often reinforced with course credit—or at worst, chocolate fish. And it seemed that Darwin was wrong. Humans were not just animals after all. They were machines, with computational minds.

Clinical psychology also seemed to drop hard-core behaviorism, but prudently seemed to want to have it both ways. Cognitive-behavior therapy was born.

What became cognitive science has had a good run, reinforced by computer science and robotics, and by something of a return of depth psychology. But the animals have fought back—not so much the vanquished rats and pigeons, but rather the large-brained apes and smart birds like corvids which seem in many respect to think in the way we humans do—or think we do. And Chomsky himself seemed to wildly overstep the mark by insisting that language, that most complex and computational of activities, emerged in a single step, even in a single individual, within the past 100,000 years. This was well after Homo sapiens had surfaced as a separate species. That’s about as anti-Darwinian as it’s possible to get.

For myself, I am driftwood in the sea, swept this way and that by the ebb and flow of the tide. Once the cognitive revolution hit, I too tried to define human uniqueness—in language, brain asymmetry, in our ability to travel mentally backward and forward in time. But the more I investigate these things, the less distinctively human they seem. I’m somehow back in the 1950s, not so much peering into the Skinner box as trying to understand how the human mind evolved. The biggest challenge is language, and my attempt to explain it in Darwinian fashion is related in my 2017 book The Truth about Language.

But be warned. The tide may yet turn again.