AGENCY
As the section on language demonstrated, human accounts of animal behaviour always makes the animal the subject, an agent that initiates actions, that does what it does deliberately.
But there is no non-human animal that can do anything on purpose. Paradoxical as it may seem, the most aggressive behaviours, as well as the most affectionate and engaging, are both responses to stimuli.
Animals are never prime movers, only reactors, even though their responses may appear proactive; for example a lion leaping on an antelope or a hawk diving on a mouse. Both behaviours are in fact the outcomes of stimulus-response chains, beginning with the first stirrings of hunger in the lion, or the mouse’s urine traces on the grass impinging on the hawk’s retina.
If events are always described from the narrative perspective, the result is bound to be a skewed view of animal behaviour. There is a mismatch between the way things are perceived and the way they actually are, due to what might be termed anthropomorphic transference.
The ‘voice’ for describing animal behaviour is predominantly active, when it should be passive. We say (correctly) that a moth is attracted to a flame; to be consistent, we should say swallows are migrated. Bears do not hibernate, they are hibernated. They are subjected to pressures, stimuli, influences of weather, the earth’s magnetic field, the circadian rhythm, but they are not the agents of what takes place.
Their behaviours are influenced by internal stimuli, of which sustenance deficit (hunger!) and oestrous attraction (sex) are the most obvious. They do not initiate their movements: their actions are triggered by sensory stimuli which come to them.
It is clear that each movement of a non-human animal results from a concatenation of determinants involving the whole organism-environment system. There are no individual agents (such as a bird pecking a berry here, another flying over there). They are all elements, or components, of the biota in constant flux within the biosphere.
The human animal is subject to the same physical conditions as other living things – of temperature, pressure, gravity etc – but her actions are deliberate, the outcome of reasoned response to signals received by the senses. They are self-determined, willed acts.
The non-human creature on the other hand, of whatever species, is responding instantaneously to signals arriving at one or more groups of sense receptors – aural, visual, olfactory etc.
These instant responses may be moderated by the interior condition of the animal, by its metabolic state (of hunger) or some disposition to sexual arousal (the rut in deer, for example). But the dynamic comes from the surroundings, the whole biosphere in which the animal is subject to sights, sounds, and every wind that blows.
The biosphere is holistic, everything interacting with everything else (the butterfly’s wingbeat theoretically influences the development of a hurricane on the other side of the planet). Individual organisms are just conglomerates of atoms, moved about by the forces and waveforms of the biosphere.
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, the noted researcher on primates, has stated: “All organisms with complex nervous systems are faced with the moment-by-moment question that is posed by life: ‘What shall I do next?’” But the truth of the matter is almost the exact opposite: the only species actually faced with that question is homo sapiens, the only species capable of asking it.
The ability to choose how to respond to natural forces, and even exert control over some of them, makes humans the only autonomous agents on the planet. For all other species the basic cycle is response to stimuli. Only humans have the power not to respond to stimuli, a power that is termed free will, or volition.
Agency is intrinsically an “if…then” situation – if situation A arises, then the agent does x, or perhaps chooses y. But such situations are time-governed; x, or y, can only take place after A. This makes agency and time integral to each other.
Although there appears to be foresight in some animal behaviour – for example some seem to ‘freeze’, others try to decoy potential predators – there does not have to be a temporal component consciously experienced by the animal.
A piping-plover may fly directly at a cow which blunders towards its nest, apparently to scare it off. However if a fox or other kind of predator appears it will do a ‘broken-wing’ dance, in an attempt to lure the predator away (Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds). This is the kind of narrative humans weave around the behaviour, but all that is occurring is a moment-by-moment response to stimuli in the daily struggle for survival.
‘For animals, moving muscles and moving the focus of attention sum up the possible reaction to a moment…’(John McCrone, Going Inside, p198).
The difference between animals and humans can best be shown by comparing the saccades (simultaneous eye movements) of human eyes with those of non-human animals.
In one experiment, human subjects were shown a picture, then asked a series of questions about what was in it. The pattern of their saccades – the points in the picture that their eyes rested on – was plotted, and found to vary according to the topic being searched. For example, the question ‘How old are the people in the picture?’ resulted in saccade-points clustering on the faces of the people in the picture. ‘What social class do they belong to?’ gave a much more open pattern, as the viewers scanned the dress of the people, and the furnishings of the room.
With animals, such an experiment would not be possible. Researchers trying to determine how rhesus monkeys perform saccades have to place their heads in a clamp, and train them to move their eyes to left or right by rewarding them with squirts of fruit juice into the throat. The resulting neural activity is then analysed to determine which neural pathways become activated.
The stimulus used on the monkeys thus differs fundamentally from that of the picture-scanning experiment performed by human subjects, in one major respect; the monkeys move their eyes as a result of conditioning – humans do it in response to an abstract idea.
Agency could reasonably be defined as ‘the exercise of will at a point in time outside the moment of sensory stimulus’. Since animals experience only the present, and respond instantly to stimuli, they must be incapable of meeting this test for agency.
If we seek precisely what it is that causes animals to do what they have to in order to survive, the finger points to the gene (or germ-line replicator):
“The thesis that I shall support is this. It is legitimate to speak of adaptations as being ‘for the benefit of’ something, but that something is best not seen as the individual organism. It is a smaller unit which I call the active, germ-line replicator. The most important kind of replicator is the ‘gene’ or small genetic fragment. Replicators are not, of course, selected directly, but by proxy; they are judged by their phenotypic effects. Although for some purposes it is convenient to think of these phenotypic effects as being packaged together in discrete ‘vehicles’ such as individual organisms, this is not fundamentally necessary. Rather, the replicator should be thought of as having extended phenotypic effects, consisting of all its effects on the world at large, not just its effects on the individual body in which it happens to be sitting.”( (p4))
And again:
“Genes manipulate the world and shape it to assist their replication. It happens that they have ‘chosen’ to do so largely by moulding matter into large multicellular chunks which we call organisms, but that might not have been so. Fundamentally, what is going on is that replicating molecules ensure their survival by means of phenotypic effects on the world. It is only incidentally true that those phenotypic effects happen to be packaged up into units called individual organisms.”( Richard Dawkins The Extended Phenotype (p 5))
Dawkins gives as examples of extended phenotypes the beaver and the dam it constructs, and the caddis-fly larva and the case it makes out of sand grains. The spider’s web and the elaborate bower made by the bower-bird to attract his mate are other examples. His ‘central theorem’ is as follows:
An animal’s behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes ‘for’ that
behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular
animal performing it.
Conscious human beings, from Charles Darwin to Richard Dawkins, have provided the most plausible narratives to date about how the world works. As human beings, they could not do otherwise than in the dimension of time. Their central narrative is the story of evolution, with lots of organisms in constant struggles for survival: the whole biota in a state of flux within the biosphere. But there is only one in all those millions of species which can be said, uniquely, to possess agency (free will): homo sapiens.
