Extraterrestrial Civilizations Read Free

living, we can eliminate the entire plant world. There is no recognizable intelligence inthe most magnificent redwood, the sweetest-smelling rose, the most ferocious Venus’s-flytrap. *
    When it comes to animals, however, matters are different. Animals move as we do and have recognizable needs and fears as we do. They eat, sleep, eliminate, reproduce, seek comfort, and avoid danger. Because of this, there is a tendency to read into their actions human motivation and human intelligence.
    Thus, to the human imagination, ants and bees, which follow behavior that is purely instinctive and with little or no scope for individual variation, or for behavior change to meet unlooked-for eventualities, are viewed as being purposefully industrious.
    The snake, which slithers through the grass because that is the only way its evolved shape and structure makes it possible for it to move, and which thus avoids notice and can strike before being seen, is imagined to be sly and subtle. (This characterization can be upheld on the authority of the Bible—see Genesis 3:1.)
    In similar fashion, the donkey is thought of as stupid, the lion and eagle as proud and regal, the peacock as vain, the fox as cunning, and so on.
    It is almost inevitable that wholesale attribution of human motivations to animal actions will lead one to take it for granted that if one could but establish communication with particular animals one would find them of human intelligence.
    This is not to say that particular human beings, if pinned to the wall, will admit believing this. Nevertheless, we can watch Disney cartoons featuring animals with human intelligence and remain comfortably unaware of the incongruence.
    Of course, such cartoons are just an amusing game, and the willing suspension of disbelief is a well-known characteristic of human beings. Then, too, Aesop’s fables and the medieval chronicles of Reynard the Fox are not really about talking animals, but are ways of expressing truths about social abuses without risking the displeasure of those in power—who may not be bright enough to recognize that they are being satirized.
    Nevertheless, the enduring popularity of these animal stories, towhich one can add Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus” tales and Hugh Lofting’s “Dr. Dolittle” stories, shows a certain readiness in the human being to suspend disbelief in that particular direction; more so, perhaps, than in others. There is a sneaking feeling, I suspect, that if animals aren’t as intelligent as we are, they ought to be.
    We cannot even seek refuge in the fact that talking-animal stories are essentially for children. The recent best-sellerdom of
Watership Down
by Richard Adams is an example of a talking-animal book for adults that I found profoundly moving.
    —And yet, side by side with this ancient and primordial feeling of cousinship with animals (even while we hunted them down or enslaved them) there is, in Western thought at least, the consciousness of an impassable gulf between human beings and other animals.
    In the Biblical account of creation, the human being is created by God through an act different from that which created the rest of the animals. The human being is described as created in God’s image and as being given dominion over the rest of creation.
    This difference can be interpreted as meaning that the human being has a soul and that other animals do not; that there is a spark of divinity and immortality in human beings that is not present in other animals; that there is in human beings something that will survive death, while nothing of the sort is present in other animals.
    All this falls outside the purview of science and can be disregarded. The influence of such religious views, however, makes it easier to believe that human beings alone are reasoning entities and that no other animal is. This, at least, is something that can be tested and observed by the usual methods of science.
    Nevertheless, human beings have not