Evolving Thoughts

So wrote the renaissance humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam: Man is to man either a god or a wolf. Here, courtesy of Leiter, is an article in The Telegraph, in which philosopher Mark Rowlands describes his life with a wolf, and how he ended up learning, as he puts it, how to be a human from the wolf.

Few animals are as similar in their social behaviour to humans as wolves. The domesticated dog is subordinated to human breeding goals, but the wild wolf is itself - a pack animal with dominance psychology, capable of identifying intentions in other agents, of exploring, teaching and playing. And by evolutionary convergence, it is like humans in many respects. Not identical, of course; we have a lot of cognitive and psychological faculties wolves and their kin do not, but the similarity is what enabled us to domesticate them in the first place, and arguably they domesticated us back.

For a canine in human care, the human social unit, whether a family, a police squad, or a farm, is its pack. Like Lorenz's ducklings that imprinted on him at birth, we take cubs as soon as we can and imprint them on us. And they behave in ways we find agreeable in our social context... mostly. I once knew a family in which one of two spoiled wirehaired terriers killed a six month baby. The story was tragic and old - the dog, seeing the deference the baby was receiving from the rest of the family, challenged it the way a wolf would - by biting. Being a baby, the child was killed. [The idiot media and the moron who headed the local RSPCA blamed the parents and accused them of hiding their murder by making it look like the dog did it. I have hated the media ever since I spent six months trying to counsel two teenage half-sibs of that baby in my youth group from committing suicide. The parents belatedly won a lawsuit and a half-arsed apology on page 45.]

Evolutionarily, canines are some distance from us. Inferences of their behaviour based on our motivations are misleading. They are similar but not the same, and we must always remember that. We have more direct insight into a chimp's behaviour than into a dog's, and even less into a cat's. We might be more familiar with them, but that is a matter of happenstance. Their similarity is based on a limited convergence of social structure, nothing more.