B. H. Manners

Bill,

Or they would classify them as demons out to trick everyone.

Stumpy

I don't know about animals, but <a href="http://www.somalihome.com/islam/tomato.shtml" target="_blank">tomatoes</a> sure seem to know Allah!

Bokonon

Elephants have a burial ritual with their dead. They cover the corpses with branches. I don't think that translates into thinking they have a god, but it certainly shows a knowledge of death and ability to mourn.

Francois Tremblay

How the heck does burying one's dead alone translate into knowledge of death ? Why can't it be an instinct that arose for a more practical reason, such as not attracting predators ? We have no evidence otherwise that elephants are any bit intelligent.

ksagnostic

1) Other than human beings, healthy elephants do not have any significant predators, so your theory seems unlikely. Whether that means that they cover their dead as part of the mourning process, I wouldn't presume to know.

"Teresia and Trista became frantic and knelt down and tried to lift her up. They worked their tusks under her back and under her head. At one point they succeeded in lifting her into a sitting position but her body flopped back down. Her family tried everything to rouse her, kicking and tusking her, and Tallulah even went off and collected a trunkful of grass and tried to stuff it in her mouth. Finally, Teresia got behind her again, knelt down, and worked her tusks under her shoulder and then, straining with all her strength, she began to lift her. When she got to a standing position with the full weight of Tina's head and front quarters on her tusks, there was a sharp cracking sound and Teresia dropped the carcass as her right tusk fell to the ground. She had broken it a few inches from the lip well into the nerve cavity, and the jagged bit of ivory and the bloody pulp was all that remained.

They gave up then but did not leave. They stood around Tina's carcass, touching it gently with their trunks and feet. Because it was rocky and the ground was wet, there was no loose dirt; but they tried to dig into it with their feet and trunks, and when they managed to get a little earth up they sprinkled it over the body. Trista, Tia, and some of the others went off and broke branches from the surrounding low bushes and brought them back and placed them on the carcass...By nightfall they had nearly buried her with branches and earth."

Cynthia Moss, ELEPHANT MEMORIES, 1988.

2) There is plenty of evidence that elephants are quite intelligent, as well as socially complex creatures, as indicated by the long term studies of, among others, Cynthia Moss,Joyce Poole, and Iain Douglas-Hamilton. And every elephant keeper I have known would laugh at the statement that "we have no evidence otherwise that elephants are any bit intelligent". I myself have seen two Asian Elephants pick up pails and carry them away from their keepers. When a keeper got close to a bucket, the elephant would pick up the bucket again and move it out of reach. I have also been pelted with crude (and fortunately soft) snowballs by an African Elephant (No, I am not an elephant keeper but I have volunteered at our local zoo for 12 and a half years. While I myself have worked more with and for great apes, I have also worked with a number of keepers, who have worked with elephants.).

3) Elephants live a long time and take a long time to develop. Their brain size at birth is approximately 35% of what it will be in adulthood. Intelligence, long term social bonds, and complex behavior are all what one would expect in large mammals with large brains, slow development, and long life spans.

[ April 07, 2002: Message edited by: ksagnostic ]</p>

DarkDruid

It would also explain a few of his followers.

sullster

There is no evidence in the least that any creature other than us has any god-concept. This really shows that god is a creation of the human mind exclusively and is not a part of the natural world. God is just a human invention and the rest of the natural world gets along quite nicely without a diety.

Mageth

I agree that it appears that no animals share a concept of what we humans call "god."

I think what Sagan and Druyea were saying was not that chimps necessarily have a "god-concept" comparable to humans, but that chimps exhibit behaviour which may be a primitive parallel of what their H. sapiens cousins have developed into an art form. Their purpose was to call into question the various human traits that many assert make us (divinely) distinct, and superior to, animals. Our ancestors may have had similar behaviors that evolved into the god-concept. I find this a reasonable hypothesis.

echidna

Bill, I’m not familiar with the book however it would seem that some animals can achieve a rudimentary symbolism. If Discovery Channel has any credibility (eek, there goes my own cred), there are studies where chimps can equate some degree of physical conceptualisation (banging together 2 cymbals was associated with banging together 2 blocks of wood), or where a mature gorilla can associate a model room with a real room while a 4 year old child cannot.

Agreed it’s a far cry from associating a cigarette with an erect phallus, but not entirely literal either. To my thinking it would not be possible for many animals to survive without some form of rudimentary symbolism. After all, isn’t symbolism simply a more complex form of pattern recognition ? When does one become the other ?

But I agree, given that belief in the supernatural is based on superstition, and that superstition can be based on inferential association with experience, I’d only go so far that animals exhibit guilt and fear in anticipation of expected threats.

Without clear communication it’s impossible to speculate how they view and “understand” their world. But with fewer thought processes to think symbolically, one would expect them to be more secular than ourselves.

[ April 12, 2002: Message edited by: echidna ]</p>

Proxima Centauri

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I have watched chimpanzees in the Gombe reserve on television. It has sometimes seemed to me that chimpanzees have the rudiments of what evolved into human morality.

Chimpanzee morality is a twisted morality by any acceptable decent standards. On thing which it seems to include is that it is right to attack courageously chimpanzees from other tribes, kill them if they are isolated, and take over their land.

How often have humans followed twisted morality like that? Remember Hitler's Germany. Remember the Old Testament massacres. Many of the OT massacres are unrealistic but one fact stands out a mile. The (human) writers of the OT would have aproved of such massacres if they had happened. Almost certainly smaller scale massacres did happen.

I'm waiting to be told the above is unscientific. Other explanations of the chimpanzee behaviour are possible. Chimps who weaken other chimp tribes and take over their land are adding to the resources of their own tribe so they and their relatives can pass on their own genes more successfully.

I'm in no way suggesting that we should behave like 'Nazi' chimpanzees. I'm trying to work out how human morality might have evolved. If we don't look after others from our community then when we are in trouble nobody will look after us. Moral behaviour also helps us to survive.

Fortunately we have more choice in what moral code we accept than do chimpanzees. We can choose to reject clearly harmful moral codes like Nazi morality or Old Testament morality.