The author doth protest too much, methinks. The disastrous Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds

It's one of the most famous misquoted lines in the English language, spoken by Lady Gertrude (Hamlet's mom) during the intense scene featuring a play ("The Mousetrap" aka The Murder of Gonzago) within a play, intended by Hamlet to be "the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King." The character in "The Mousetrap" has delivered some sappy lines about commitment and widowhood, designed to flush out the King and Gertrude. But you know all that. The frequently-mangled line is "The lady protests too much, methinks." It's a great line and it works out to something like "she's overdoing it" spoken by a person who is literally the subject being portrayed. When we say "the lady doth protest too much" we usually mean "they're overacting so much that now it seems even they don't believe what they're saying."

That's how Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Animal Minds," felt to me. Simon Conway Morris is hellbent on digging a conceptual moat around human cognition, desperate to isolate it from non-human cognition so that it can receive metaphysical shipments from on high. If that sounds harsh, it is—and it is exactly what the chapter is about.

Tragically, in his zeal to dig that moat, he:

• unweaves the tapestry he wove himself in the previous chapter, which correctly dispensed with "missing links" through convergence and evolution-as-a-bushy-tree;
• separates himself (not just his audience) from the threatening facts of non-human cognition; and far worse,
• separates himself from his colleagues, whom he disparages with poop-flinging like this:

Rather than seeking a mysterious factor X, a grafting on of some strange capacity, or trying to maintain the fiction that whatever separates us from animals is only a matter of degree, we need to take a metaphysical perspective. (p. 204)

If you unwisely read this book, you'll be accustomed by Chapter 5 to Conway Morris' disingenuous conversion of big questions and unresolved disagreements into "myths." That quote is just one more canard in this cringe-inducing cavalcade, so maybe you're not yet impressed by how dismissive he really is. Consider, then, the next couple of sentences.

Entirely alien to the materialist, this viewpoint insists that humans have entered new realms. These are ones of ideas and imagination where the unobservable is real, a world of concepts and generalizations working in easy harmony.

Yeah, so after reducing one legitimate position in a robust, deeply interesting ongoing debate about human cognition to "maintaining a fiction," the author asserts that the "realms" of ideas and imagination are "entirely alien to the materialist." That slur is aimed at many (maybe most) of his colleagues, and it's aimed at me and at every other person who is unconvinced by stories of the supernatural. Either the author doth protest too much, or... he's portraying an ignorant, arrogant ass in a farcical play. I expected better from Simon Conway Morris, and now I regret that.

Notice that I haven't yet written about what he explores, biologically, in the chapter. As in the rest of the book, the chapter is a deep dive into current science with characteristically energetic excursions into behavior and cognition of diverse non-human animals. Which is mostly good. But there is a big ugly flaw in the middle of the argument. It's bad enough that it stopped me cold, and it's worrying enough that I briefly wondered if the whole book contains contagion like it. After all, I'm a neuroscientist and thus able to follow the details of the chapter (which is another way of saying that I'm hard to fool when it comes to cognitive science). Might I have missed other big flaws in chapters outside my expertise? (Remember the blooper about mutation hotspots? That's also an area I know well.) I've read the whole book, and I'm reasonably confident that there aren't any more. (The final chapter is flat-out kooky, but not built on falsehoods that I could identify.) But this one is bad, and I'll discuss it in the next post.

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Image credit: Edwin Austin Abbey, The Queen in "Hamlet", 1895, Smithsonian American Art Museum.