Ethology: The Narrative Turn

Distinguishing their work from the causalist approaches of objectivist ethology, sociobiology, or cognitive ethology, a growing number of ethologists lay claim to the possibility of describing what animals do through more or less complex narratives. Narration becomes a methodological tool in its own right. Animals thus become characters as in novels. This is an epistemological choice. Our capacity to perceive the complexity of animal lives is tied to our capacity to tell ourselves stories in which animals are the heroes. These animals are not robots. They are subjects, individuals, and even persons. From this results a new and transpecific form of third-person narration. This approach still relies, however, on a set of very carefully collected field data and requires a great familiarity with observed animals. It then becomes possible to concern oneself with the individual strategies of particular animals rather than solely with behaviors that would be common to all members of a given species. The recourse to narrative as a means of understanding animal intelligence is especially pertinent as we become increasingly aware that animals themselves tell stories and that our concepts of narrative must expand beyond the human. Knowing whether animals have narrative structures is a philosophical question before it is a biological one. The desire to extend narrativity to the animal necessarily modifies what narrativity signifies. We perceive in animals a processual narrativity, a behavioral narrativity, and a fictional narrativity. The study of animals forces to rethink what a fiction is and compels one to consider its phylogensis in a rigorous manner without locating its origins in Homo sapiens.

¿Hay realmente inteligencia animal? Una revisión filosófica.

In the context of philosophical research on animal intelligence, there are different traditions that deny that nonhuman animals are intelligent. In this article we mention some of these traditions, such as Cartesian mechanism and behaviorism. However, we will focus our attention on the proposals of the analytical philosophers John McDowell and Donald Davidson as representative of this philosophical tradition. His main idea is that by not having a language like that of human beings, the rest of the animals cannot be rational and, therefore, not intelligent either. Our position is that such an analytical tradition flatly ignores the scientific and philosophical evidence against it. We will give some relevant data in favor of animal intelligence. In addition, we will give an account of a trend that is manifested with increasing force among ethologists according to which there is a continuity between animal and human intelligence, considering the latter as the result of an evolutionary process and, therefore, as a result of a series of skills acquired by different species at some point in their formation.

Dale Alan Russell (1937-2019): Voyageur of a Vanished World

We review the distinguished and varied career of our friend and colleague, palaeontologist Dr. Dale A. Russell, following the recent news of his death. Dale relished his work, and approached his research—whether it be on mosasaur systematics, dinosaur extinction, or the evolution of animal intelligence—with great gusto. A deep and contextual thinker, Dale had a penchant for metanarrative rarely equaled in these times of increased research specialization. This quality, combined with his outgoing and collaborative nature, allowed Dale to make friends and colleagues with highly varied research interests throughout the world. We remember Dale fondly, and cherish the opportunity to share the stories of his adventures (and misadventures) across the globe.

Do French media miseducate the public about intelligence research?

This article provides an assessment of French media coverage of intelligence research. The analysis is based on articles published between 1992 and 2020 in French nationwide newspapers, local newspapers and science magazines. Two themes regularly appear in nationwide newspapers and science magazines: environmental effects on IQ and animal intelligence. High-IQ children are often covered in local newspapers. A substantial proportion of articles on the genetics of intelligence, IQ in general and behavioural genetics in general contain statements contradicting the conclusions of mainstream intelligence research; the tendency is even more pronounced in science magazines than in nationwide newspapers. Implications for relationships between scientists and journalists are discussed.

Human Intelligence and General Collective Intelligence as Phase Changes in Animal Intelligence

The hypothesis that human intelligence represents a phase transition in animal intelligence is explored, as is the hypothesis that General Collective Intelligence (GCI), which has been defined as a system that organizes groups into a single collective cognition with the potential for vastly greater general problem-solving ability than that of any individual in the group, represents a phase transition in human intelligence. At these phase transitions, cognition can be demonstrated to gain the capacity for exponentially greater general problem-solving ability. If valid, then when generalized as an Nth order pattern, these N phase transitions represent successively more powerful super-intelligences, where each of these super-intelligences can potentially be implemented as an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or as a General Collective Intelligence (GCI).

Animal Representation in Recent Anglophone Science Fiction: Uplifting and Anthropomorphism in Nnedi Okorafor’s "Lagoon" and Adam Roberts’s "Bête"

Science fiction in the last decades has often empowered machines and provided humans with enhanced characteristics through the use of technology (the limits of artificial intelligence and transhumanism are frequent themes in recent narratives), but animal empowerment has also been present through the concept of uplifting, understood as the augmentation of animal intelligence through technology. Uplifting implies providing animals with the capacity to speak and reason like humans. However, it could be argued that such implementation fails to acknowledge animal cognition in favour of anthropomorphized schemes of thought. Humankind’s lack of recognition of different animal types of communication has been portrayed in fiction and often implies the adaptation of the animal Other to human needs and expectations, creating a post-animal that communicates its needs to the reader through borrowed words. The main objective of this article is to analyze the use of uplifting as a strategy to give voice to animals in two science fiction novels written in English, both published in the twenty-first century: Lagoon (2014) by Nigerian-American Nnedi Okorafor and Bête (2014) by British author Adam Roberts. This article examines, from ecocritical and human-animal studies (HAS) perspectives, the differencesand similarities in the exploration of the theme in both novels, which are often related to humankind’s willingness or refusal to regard the Other as equal.