Do fish think? Years ago, in a famous Second City routine, Severn Darden concluded that they do, but not fast enough. For most students of animal behavior, whether they are ethologists, psychologists, or evolutionary ecologists, the question itself is absurd.
Griffin calls for the development of a new kind of science that he calls cognitive ethology, a science that would “venture across the species boundary and try to gather satisfactory information about what other species may think or feel. This . . . science . . . should not be constrained by the computer-envy that characterizes most of contemporary cognitive psychology. We must take into account subjective experience, along with information processing, problem solving, and the survival value of evolutionary adaptiveness.”
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Orthodox ethologists have claimed that this display is produced by a conflict between the desire to attack the dangerous intruder and the desire to get away from it. Virtually paralyzed by these opposing drives. the bird is supposed to go into a sort of convulsion, a series of random actions that are completely out of its control. As Griffin points out, this tortured explanation is very difficult to accept if you have ever gotten close enough to a killdeer’s nest to inspire such a display. A displaying killdeer seems to be quite in control of the situation. It watches its pursuer closely throughout its performance, and if its actions don’t inspire its enemy to follow it, it will fly back, land right in front of the intruder, and start the whole show over.
Without that idea, every move of wing or leg would have to be programmed, and all these instructions, all this software, would have to be stored somewhere in the animal’s brain–where there is really not very much space.
