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Animal behavior has long been a battleground between the competing claims of nature and nurture, with the possible role of cognition in behavior as a recent addition to this debate. There is an untapped trove of behavioral data that can tell us a great deal about how the animals draw from these neural strategies: The structures animals build provide a superb window on the workings of the animal mind. Animal Architects examines animal architecture across a range of species, from those whose blueprints are largely innate (such as spiders and their webs) to those whose challenging structures seem to require intellectual insight, planning, and even aesthetics (such as bowerbirds’ nests, or beavers’ dams). Beginning with instinct and the simple homes of solitary insects, James and Carol Gould move on to conditioning; the “cognitive map” and how it evolved; and the role of planning and insight. Finally, they reflect on what animal building tells us about the nature of human intelligence-showing why humans, unlike many animals, need to build castles in the air.
- Sales Rank: #1503380 in eBooks
- Published on: 2012-03-06
- Released on: 2012-03-06
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
In order to elucidate the thought processes of animals-and those processes' evolution-the Goulds (The Animal Mind) consider those animals' egg caches, cocoons, webs, nests and other structures. According to the authors, "complex nervous systems exist to make sense of the world"; therefore, by examining the material construction sprung from those nervous systems, one can begin to understand how those systems function. It makes a fascinating journey, with plenty of surprises. Beginning with the simplest structures of ants, wasps and bees, the authors introduce concepts of neural mapping to show what levels of brain complexity are necessary for the construction of such structures. Distinguishing instinctual neural program from questions of spontaneity and creativity, the Goulds suggest that creatures as small as wasps can react with spontaneous problem solving behaviors. The creativity of bower birds and beavers is more astounding: the former is known to build and decorate "maypoles," clearly demonstrating aesthetic sense; and the latter display abstract reasoning, and even insight, in the maintenance and repair of their lodges, dams and canals. This book is filled with fascinating vignettes illuminating the intelligence capabilities of species us humans would like to think of as inferior; again and again, the Goulds show that human beings aren't necessarily the smartest kids in class.
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The Goulds (he's a leading animal behavior expert, and she is a science writer) present an eye-opening survey of an underappreciated facet of animal life--the building skills of insects, birds, and mammals. Because most animal architecture is hidden from human view, we are unaware of the extent of animal ingenuity, so the revelatory tour the Goulds conduct elicits one wow after another. They dissect the sophisticated construction and elegant aesthetics of coral reefs, webs, cocoons, hives, nests, dams, lodges, and towers, marveling at the resourcefulness of animals in terms of the materials they produce and collect, the tools they fashion, and the "astonishing complexity" of their structures. They also dispel the old assumption that animals are simply programmed to build, creating out of instinct. Instead, as painstakingly gathered evidence reveals, animals invent new skills to solve problems and communicate their intentions. As our ancestors knew, there is much to be learned from other species, especially now as we endeavor to create ecologically sound human architecture and technologies. Donna Seaman
Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"A notable achievement... highly readable... Animal constructions are fascinating, and the authors provide some useful insights into them." (Nature) "One of the best popular science books of recent years." (The Spectator) "In Animal Architects, James R Gould and Carol Grant Gould beautifully describe some of the architectural wonders of the animal kingdom...there is no doubt that the Goulds succeed in... captivating the reader with their enthusiasm and encyclopaedic knowledge of the biology of building." (Times Literary Supplement) "The story of this amazing and beautifully written little book is one of humans very gradually, and only through gritted teeth, admitting that other animals, down to the apparently humblest insects, are more intelligent than was ever suspected." (Guardian)"
Most helpful customer reviews
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Mixed review
By Anna Karenina
Gould and Gould write about a fascinating subject. Unfortunately, the book is not as readable as it could have been. The authors have a bad habit of getting into new topics with a welter of detail and only then coming back to basics or making larger points or providing context. The result is that I'm often lost--what's the species they're talking about? What are the basic facts about it? I keep asking myself who their intended reader is. I think they intend to speak to a general audience, but they don't think enough about this audience's needs. The book is written in a plain textbook-like style, without much poetry, context, allusion to bigger issues, or the like. Still, I have learned quite a bit by reading it.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Maps charting reasoning
By Stephen A. Haines
Asking a lone wasp dragging a cricket across a paddock how she finds her way home won't elicit much response. Interrogating a honeybee about why she's doing this task now, while she was engaged in something entirely different a short time ago will net you little information. The Goulds, however, delve into some of the motivations behind animal behaviour. In this easily accessible volume, they provide some interesting and challenging answers to the question of how animal minds work. In doing so, they overturn some long held misconceptions - most notably the one that declares only humans have broken the bonds of innately determined behaviours.
This is highly speculative material, but the proposals are well thought out and amply supported by the workers cited. The underlying proposal is simple: the other animals are only slightly more prompted by innate drives than we are. Categorizing the behavior of other animals as "just intuition" is demonstrably fallacious. Whether we label it "reasoning power" or "cognitive ability" is irrelevant. The point is that even that solitary wasp is confronted with the need to make decisions that will take her from a fixed path. She can, and does, survey changed conditions in order to achieve a desired goal. She is not fixed in her responses and can adapt using her mental resources efficiently.
The authors use various forms of "mappings" to explain how variations of cognitive capacity and ability are found in nature. That solitary wasp, for instance, needs to locate the burrow where she's left her egg. Somehow, tucked in her miniscule brain, there's record of landmarks around that tiny hole in the soil, allowing her to move with confidence. Shift the landmarks - a stone or twig - and she's confused. Her Local Area cognitive map has become unreliable. Yet, if she's typical, she'll have other nests - each with their own landmarks to tax her mental map. Moving up the cognitive ladder, there are wasp groups who build nests of mud or paper. They must perform a sequence of operations in the construction process to ensure the nest is the proper shape, weight and balance. From this start, the Goulds demonstrate how animal constructions reflect cognitive abilities requiring decision-making and adaptive variations. From the complexities of spiders building webs, birds constructing an extensive variety of nests and beavers' wide-area engineering projects, "animal architects" refute our common belief that "instinct" is the central controlling factor.
The Goulds propose that cognitive mapping can be shown to advance from the individual and its surroundings, through various levels of complex reasoning needed to complete the organism's task to complete a goal. It's important to note that these are in no way predictable, hence, innately driven, steps. Adjustments must be made for local conditions. When those adjustments mean interacting with co-workers in different ways, then the group must make decisions. The authors use bees as a significant example. Too often classified as a "socialist" species, the Goulds demonstrate honeybees are the finest example of free enterprise in Nature. Individuals must shift roles as conditions change, with each bee making independent decisions on a course of action. The steps involved require the insect to sift through several available options, using mental processes the authors describe as "Tiers". Sets of Tiers may include Local Area Mapping, Social Mapping - which likely includes Hierarchical Mapping of status, and the ultimate, Network Mapping where many forms are brought together to complete one or several tasks.
This book is awarded five stars with some reluctance. Although the ideas themselves are well presented and supported by good examples, a glance at the "Readings" for each chapter gives one pause. The list suggests that little on these topics has been published during the past generation - except their own, of course. The authors deal with many forms of life, with insects predominating. Yet, their only reference to Edward O. Wilson is a single work. John Alcock's studies don't appear, nor do those of Bert H�lldobler, Thomas Eisner, Bernd Heinrich or other workers. None of those researchers' efforts would challenge the Goulds' proposals and their omission is an enigma. Instead, there are long renditions of the pioneers in various related fields. Valuable, but necessarily incomplete. Even so, this work is too innovative and challenging to ignore or dismiss lightly. Cognition, whether human or other animal, is a significant field, growing rapidly. The authors list many topics requiring further study. One can only hope this book will inspire younger readers to take them up and help resolve them. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Alien Intelligences, and How To Evaluate Them
By Rob Hardy
What do animals think? That is a pretty advanced question; after all, a lot of human thought has gone into denigrating even the possibility of thought in animals. We accept, perhaps reluctantly, that some animals can hear better than we can, for instance, and certainly some are faster or stronger or bigger. It is well accepted, too, that we do a better job of thinking and abstracting ideas than any other creature does. It is also clear that any thinking that animals do is a lot different from what we do, since our thinking is so heavily freighted with symbolic language. "Mental activity is, by its nature, private; what goes on in the brain has to be inferred. In tracing the evolution of cognitive strategies, the most tangible evidence is found among animals that build - in what they build and how they build it." So write James R. Gould and Carol Grant Gould in Animal Architects: Building and the Evolution of Intelligence (Basic Books). The book is packed with examples of animal creations and thoughtful, careful, unexaggerated attempts to understand what is going on in the minds of the builders from the insect, bird, and mammal worlds. The thinking of other animals is, by turns, quite different and quite similar to our own, and throws light upon evolution of brains and behavior in general and upon our own evolution.
The Goulds are always on the lookout for the most parsimonious explanation of behavior. For centuries, people thought that animals just acted on instinct and nothing more, and indeed there are plenty of examples here of such behavior. Many insects, the Goulds say merrily, "... lead intellectually unchallenging lives." But spiders and the social insects show that they are not acting like mere robots, but have some understanding of the larger purpose of their activites. Flexibility and understanding are surely shown by many birds, although plenty of their behavior is robotic. Nest building is often a planned activity and can be studied and experimented upon. Pigeons just toss sticks at their nest site, and the friction between the rough twigs holds them together eventually. If you give pigeons only smooth dowels to build with, the result is an unstable mess; if you give both dowels and twigs, they will preferentially use the twigs. Complex behaviors in nest building evolved from scraping sand or twigs together; once birds had learned to build a platform for a nest, they developed ways of piling sticks or mud and sticking the results together with saliva. Nest-building is an activity that cannot be completely hardwired, because in general no two nesting sites are the same; there has to be flexibility in behavioral options that can be selected, ordered, and modified to achieve the goal of a functional nest. Nests are practical structures, but bowerbirds make their elaborate creations with no purpose other than to impress other bowerbirds. They stack the bowers and decorate them with paint from berries and with shells and rocks and butterfly wings. The variety of the bowers seems to indicate that building behavior is not encoded in instinct and is also not due to rote memorization. Observations over the past 125 years show that builders go through fads of favoring one flower as a bower decoration over another. Darwin wrote that bowerbirds have a sense of beauty, and the proposal that bowerbirds have an aesthetic sense is not frivolous.
The many examples given here show that there is evidence for some degree of understanding in many of our fellow creatures. When experimenters can manipulate the circumstances of the building of structures, it is clear that some animals can compensate for unusual situations, use novel materials, and have an understanding of an end goal. (Beavers seem to do this in the highest degree, engineering their dams and lodges.) The building of structures and the manipulation of objects toward a purpose are things we ourselves probably started doing as primates, starting out with less skill than some of the animals described in this book. It is probably impossible for us to fully understand the alien intelligences of spiders or birds, but the Gould's book is a welcome reminder that intelligence does not belong to us alone.
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