Dawkins: Well, Aubrey, we've got a lot in common, we both trained in
ethology, the biological study of animal behavior by Niko Tinbergen
at Oxford, you perhaps 10 years ahead of me.
How do you think ethology has changed
a since our student days? Manning: Well you
obviously speak of those times with affection and so do I. It was a
wonderful
introduction to Behavioral Research, Niko there with a
a gang of students and we were a very tight
knit kind of group, and he was like a great sort of uncle for us.
I think the thing that's changed most is the
emphasis that was then on animals cooperating in their lives that...
okay you'd have conflict between two males but they will resolve this conflict
and then they would court females and the male and the female were
synchronized in their behavior, and so on. Now we realize how much more subtle
animal communication, animal behavior, is. I think there has been
wonderful advances. Perhaps one of the first
places where we really extended the old idea of
what and why animals were doing anything from time to time, I think Mike Palin was
very influential with optimum foraging theory, and the fact that,
you know, as you watch a bird forging a field, it's not just an
appetitive behavior, a solitary act, as we used to think of
but the bird is assessing how long since I last had a food item? was it a good food
item?
How much energy will I spend to fly
a quarter mile to the next place? Of course, they're not consciously thinking this.
Those kind of capabilities
are built in. Dawkins: I think mike was enormously
influential in all sorts of ways, a kind of
unsung hero. Manning: Yes Dawkins: One thing I wanted to ask you:
I'm feeling slightly disloyal and heretical here, but,
one of the things I feel about the work not just of Niko but
really everybody in that world
was that what they - we - were finding out
was not really so much truths about the animals that would stand for all time
but elegant illustrations to put in text books.
So, things like the stickleback fights
red dummies. Or, herring gulls will,
herring gull chicks will peck at
a long pencil with stripes on it, and things. Those are beautiful illustrations of some
principal, and they go into text books
as an illustration, but you wouldn't actually say that's like
Watson and Crick getting the shape of the double helix -
I don't mean in importance, but, this is a fact about herring gulls,
its not so much a factor about herring gulls,
it is almost a
neat thing to put in a text book to illustrate... You've written
the leading ethology textbook of our time
so you know that. Would you agree that
there was something of that in the sort of research that was going on?
Manning: Well yes, but there is,
I think we shouldn't I'm best underestimate the
the value of the principal there that,
I think the principle of up sign-stimuli was quite an important one
generally and remains so that the
animal is picking out certain
key... natural selection has found important aspect to the environment...
Dawkins: Ignoring the rest. Mullins: Yes, that you you go for this.
And, of course you can take the principle too far but I think it was
quite valuable as a way of indicating how the behavior
is organized. Dawkins: I agree, and I think that's what I'm saying, its just that
it wasn't so much a finding about sticklebacks
it was a a tentative and probably true generalization about animals generally.
Manning: Yes.
Dawkins: And, nobody actually looked to see whether
it had to be red, blue might have done just as well!
Manning: Well, you know, one thinks of Hans Cook's
very good and very honest and frank biography of Niko, in which he points
out that
a lot of the early experiments were pretty flawed, actually.
Dawkins: Statistically, certainly. Manning: Well,
I always remember Niko said, 'oh, don't bother with it, if you do enough experiments
you don't need statistics [laughs]. Dawkins: Yes.
If you look at some of the data rates in some of his early experiments
Phyllanthus orientating to its nest, you know, I mean, its
ridiculous. I mean one case it's 66 reactions to zero the other case is
0 reactions to
eighty-five, and so on [laughing]. Dawkins: Philanthus, the digger wasp.
Manning: Thats right. Dawkins: Yes.
Manning: Wouldn't you agree that what's really -
the real influence of Lawrence and Tinbergen
was they've got going on an approach to animal behavior which really extended - the
animal: think on the environment into which it's evolved. think all the forces
which bit acting on it
in the evolutionary past, and acting on it in the moment,
and that's the way you go. And this was such a breath of fresh air
after the American Experimental Psychology Dawkins: Yes it was a breath of fresh air.
But the other thing about Niko especially, more than Lawrence,
was that he thought of it in mechanistic terms. He thought of the
the animal in its wild state with natural selection bearing down upon it
and evolution, but nevertheless there was a clockwork in there,
there was a mechanism in there, and you understood it in mechanistic terms
rather than in
subjective terms, that was very important part of
Niko, I think. Manning: I think certainly was, and it
makes me think of
what he would feel about this new
and quite growing area of research which calls itself
cognitive ethology in which a lot of
speculation is made about what is going on inside animals' head
I remember Niko being very dismissive
of any attempt to look
at the final subtleties of
what's going on in the animal. We can't
something like, since we have no means of knowing what's going on inside
the animal's mind it is
quite valueless too to speculate about it.
Well I don't know about you but personally
I feel I do want to speculate about that
and, I think not in any
of many extreme way. I mean Morgan's cannon: 'you shan't explain anything
in a complex way if a simpler way will do' remains
I think one of the great contributions behavioral
science
can make. Nevertheless I think sometimes in the past
we've tended to underestimate what animals can do. Dawkins: Yes I agree about that.
I think that one of the slight dangers of
of cognitive ethology is that it makes respectable
the kind of person who says 'well, you do science, I mean I know what my dogs
thinking'.
There is a lot of that and it actually can kinda creep
into a sort of anti-scientific feeling
and in a way you could say, 'well, any fool knows what their dogs thinking in a way'.
If science were as easy as that we wouldn't
need to do all the things that we do do. It was an extremely valuable
thing that
Nico and the other early ethologists did was to
say: 'no we actually have got to think mechanistically',
not that we don't believe that animals have a subjective consciousness
but that's not the way to proceed and get anywhere in science.
Manning: I think thats absolutely right it was was a very necessary
- whats the word I'm looking for? It wasn't shock because that suggests that
we were all of us the thinking in
in the way Lloyd Morgan did, you know, that
Beavers can understand hydrology when they build their dams.
But, it was a necessary antidote to that.
I do agree. But, the
mechanisms are essential,
but sometimes I'm reminded of old
Steven Walker's book, I think, a man who began as a Skinnerain, you know, Skinner boxes
and all that,
saying, sometimes explanations can be too simple to be sensible, and... Dawkins: Yes.
Manning: I do feel that in a way.
Oh! We are joined by an animal,
whether or not you wish him to stay or not...
There he is. He'll settle down, probably. I think thats
completely right. But I am
I'm struck by how careful modern workers are.
People like Irene Pepperberg, working with these extraordinary parrots... Dawkins: Yeah.
To be careful that they're not giving
unconscious clues, as, you know, the famous case and Clever Hans the horse,
where the horse is not looking at the blackboard, it was looking at
just the owners chin, that went up by two millimeters! Dawkins: [laughs]
Manning: Clever Hans was clever, wasn't he? Dawkins: Not in quite that way.
Manning: Not in the way one thinks.
But, where Niko I think might be a little happier
about cognitive ethology
is that it relies on the old ecological skills of careful observation.
Don't deduce more than you can see. Try and set the thing up to give the animal the
maximum chance.
Dawkins: Yes.