Putting the God in cod: We learn about ourselves from animals, says Colin Tudge, but refuse to believe they, too, have emotions

DESMOND MORRIS in The Human Animal (BBC1, Wednesday) is taking 'a zoologist's view of the human species'. This may seem innocent, but Morris knows well that he will be attacked by three powerful lobbies, two of which have a destructive line in sarcasm and one of which has at times resorted to violence. Strength to his arm, however. The ideas he is developing are important, and could, I think, help to bring about a more enlightened age in which we may have greater control over our excesses and a far more humanitarian attitude to our fellow creatures. Television critics have already attacked Morris for triviality. What is the point, one asked, of comparing the smile of a human being to the grimace of a chimpanzee? This is the first lobby: Britain's educated classes, in whom a reflex antipathy to all things scientific has been expensively honed, and reinforced by the Thatcherite conceit that science has no purpose except to create wealth. Even if Morris's programme were pure whimsy, so what? Can't a scientist be whimsical? Would such critics ask Bernini why he sculpted a human head in marble?

The second two attacks will come, as in the past, from within science. For although Morris is primarily concerned to explore humans by looking at animals, the reverse also applies: we can learn about them by observing us. But this opens the trap of anthropomorphism - the attribution of human thoughts and values to non-human entities, including animals. Through most of this century animal psychology has been dominated by behaviourism in which anthropomorphism is the mortal sin.

Behaviourism has two kinds of roots. One runs back to Rene Descartes in the 17th century who decided that animals cannot think because they lack human language, and therefore should be regarded merely as 'machines'. The other lies in the positivist tradition: the notion that science must deal only with things that can be measured because what lies beyond the measurable is too uncertain. The supposed states of mind of animals - emotions and thoughts - are not directly measurable. All that can be measured is what the animal does. Hence behaviourism developed explanations of animal psychology with no reference to thoughts or emotions. The idea that animals thought or suffered was at best unnecessary, at worst obscurantist, and in either case was simply 'anthropomorphic'.

To be sure, there are good reasons to reject nave anthropomorphism. A child does a frog no favours when, shocked by its clamminess, she tucks it up in a nice warm bed. It is cruelly anthropomorphic to imagine, as children do, that elephants enjoy the romp and clamour of the circus.

But in the past few decades more and more biologists have realised that the behaviour of animals cannot be explained simply by comparing them to machines; or not, at least, unless the machines are assumed to be as complex as the animals, which makes such comparison pointless. Bit by bit the notion that other animals do indeed have 'states of mind' has crept back in. Many scientists now openly speak of animals 'thinking'. Everyone from zoo keepers to professors of psychology discusses animal 'stress', 'happiness', 'depression', 'boredom': feelings that once were considered exclusively human are now assumed to offer insights into the animal's 'mind'. The human being is now widely considered to provide at least as good a 'model' of animals as is the alarm clock or the steam engine. In short, anthropomorphism applied sensibly is illuminating.

We could be entering an age in which it is at last intellectually respectable to argue that if a seal mother appears to show grief when her pup is clubbed, then that is because she is indeed grieving. The human species could for the first time in its history adopt a humanitarian attitude to other animals based on a robust appreciation that they too have feelings not so different from our own. Studies such as Morris's, which help to show in detail where the parallels lie and where they do not, are moving us towards this new enlightenment.

But Morris is focusing at present on what we can learn about our own behaviour from other animals - and this kind of inquiry has sometimes provoked a violent response. The fear here is of 'genetic determinism'. For Morris, after all, is seeking the evolutionary roots of our behaviour: an endeavour called 'sociobiology'. The implication is that we have all inherited tendencies to behave in particular ways: ways that were shaped within our ancestors by natural selection. The supposition is that we inherit particular genes that predispose us to particular forms of behaviour.

In fact, most modern biologists would concede this point. But then the waters become muddied and often unpleasant. For in practice some students of sociobiology who lack Morris's restraint have gone on to argue that our genes determine our behaviour; that they provide us with a prescription for action. some have seemed to imply that we effectively have no free will: that in the end we simply do what our genes tell us. If we have no free will then the concept of morality is compromised: we cannot be held responsible for what we cannot control.

Nave protagonists of sociobiology have argued that the behaviours allegedly prescribed within our genes have been favoured by natural selection and therefore must predispose to survival; for otherwise natural selection would have weeded them out. Whatever is in our genes is also, by definition, 'natural'. So then the argument goes - with a respectably Utilitarian ring - that since the behaviour 'in our genes' promotes survival then it cannot be bad and hence must be 'right'.

Grotesque justifications have sometimes flowed from this argument. Thus crude numerical sociobiology suggests that it is best for males to produce as many offspring as possible but best for females to induce a male to help them to raise the relatively few offspring that they are able to produce. Thus it is 'natural' and therefore 'good' for men to philander and even to rape, but women should be monogamous.

Such crude argument is as absurd a misapplication of a basically useful idea as the circus elephant is a misuse of the potentially valuable notion of anthropomorphism. It fails on three distinct counts. First, to argue that 'men should philander' to scatter their genes is simply bad sociobiology. If it were true that males in general would do best by producing as many offspring as possible then all male animals would philander, and rape would be frequent. In practice, rape in nature is rare but monogamous males are commonplace, as in gannets and many birds of prey. In practice - and natural selection favours what actually works - men in our modern society probably produce the optimum number of viable children by being, well, modern men.

Second, and perhaps more profoundly, the notion that 'natural' means 'right' has been challenged by moral philosophers for millenia, and from all kinds of angles. St Paul railed against promiscuity in general though this may seem all too natural, but also against homosexuality expressly because he perceived it to be unnatural. It was hard to win with St Paul. David Hume simply pointed out that there is no logical connection between 'is' and 'ought'; a notion consolidated by G E Moore at the start of this century when he wrote of the 'naturalistic fallacy'. To base morality on biology was, said Moore, simply arbitrary.

Finally, it is nonsense to assume that free will is threatened just because some of it has a genetic basis. If we did not have at least some gene-based behavioural programs then we could hardly get through a day; each second would be an agony of Hamlet-like indecision. For most mundane purposes our genes provide us with an appropriate response. But we can and do override these programs through our own cogitations. Genes provide us with programs, but no excuses.

Does this mean that biology has nothing of ethical importance to say? I think not. Linguisticists have argued that human language has a 'deep structure' common to all, with a superstructure of syntactical variants in different cultures; and such a notion seems to me to apply by analogy to ethics. Thus we might seek, as did Immanuel Kant, to define a bedrock of ethical principles which would apply to all species - all thinking species, that is - that have free will. But the particular biology of different species would still be relevant. For example, we consider abortion to be a central ethical issue. The deep principles here have to do with the taking of life, and with human responsibility for other human beings. But to a hypothetical thinking codfish, which habitually produced two million offspring, abortion would be a non-issue. Infanticide would be a serious matter for the fish as it is for us, but for different reasons. The ethical cod would have to accept megadeath, but would need to ponder the method of selection: should the lucky fry be chosen on merit or by lottery? Yet the deep motives of the fish might be the same as ours: to minimise suffering, and to conserve respect for fellow beings in the face of apparent necessity.

Good luck then, Desmond. Intellectuals of many kinds will be critical, even vicious, as they have been in the past. But the day is coming when we perceive without self-consciousness or rancour that we really do have things to learn from animals, and that we can learn about them by looking at us.

Colin Tudge's latest book, 'The Engineer in the Garden', was shortlisted for the 1994 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book of the Year Award.

(Photograph omitted)