Before I explain the rot at the heart of this chapter (Chapter 5 of From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution, "The Myth of Animal Minds," by Simon Conway Morris), I'd like to show you my workspace as I sullenly trudge toward the end of this task.
That's my fun little Chromebook 2-in-1, and the barely-visible tartan mouse pad is from my dad. You'll see my toolkit of sticky notes and a stack of (some of) my books on consciousness and human cognition. Conway Morris' book is open to the pages (155-157, in a section called "An unbridgeable gulf?") that stopped me in my tracks.
See all the sticky notes in the book? There's a big blue one in the upper right that marks my current place in the Notes section (it's 170 pages long). When I'm reading a book like this one, with a lot of notes and references, I need to be able to flip back and forth between text and notes. Why even mention this? Because in this crucial section of the disastrous Chapter 5, the notes help reveal the rot. They are few in number but—worse—are misleadingly cherry-picked or curiously irrelevant. The diagram on the left is chaotic and uninformative, seemingly a sketch in someone's notebook, and neither the diagram nor the discussion in the text is accompanied by a citation. If you look carefully, you'll see why: the diagram is bafflegab labelled as "the cognitive architecture of humans." Even if it were properly labelled as "Simon's conception of human cognitive architecture," it would be an embarrassment.
The silly diagram is cited in the text in support of this claim: "the capacities that make us human are intimately intertwined and very deeply rooted." That's blandly true, but the diagram doesn't help us understand. Then, yikes, here's the next sentence: "It is almost as if we were parachuted onto the planet." Sorry, what? I don't see 'non sequitur' on the diagram, but that's just the beginning of the problem with this section. In support of that sentence, Conway Morris cites an obscure sociology paper that's not about sudden evolutionary change (or teleportation) but about how culture drives human evolution.
The next paragraph is worse. Conway Morris tries to establish that the "intertwined" nature of human cognition is "robust to insult," meaning that it can persist in the presence of major damage. He provides a single cherry-picked case to support this claim. First, note that the authors of that report suggest precisely the opposite of what Conway Morris wants us to believe, writing (emphasis mine):
Therefore, the pattern of responses revealed in this case of severe agrammatic aphasia attests to a dissociation between grammar and cognition and to the modular nature of mature brain functioning. Grammar may play a vital role in configuring cognitive processes, but once these processes have been established, cognition can operate without grammar.
But the more troubling problem with this section should be obvious to anyone who's read Oliver Sacks or V.S. Ramachandran or Antonio Damasio. Conway Morris is wrong when he writes that "the associated gallimaufry of cognitive capacities that enshrine causal reasoning and theory of mind lie far deeper and stay operative in the face of serious injuries."
Why is he making that claim in the first place? Why should it matter that humans can lose their connection to half of their world, after a particular brain injury? The answer is in the following paragraph, on page 157, in the sentence that is the heart of the rot. Conway Morris writes (italics are his):
Equally trying to persuade ourselves that animal A has this nascent cognitive capacity or animal B has another one is to miss the point. If beast A or B had language or any other part of our cognitive battery (figure 5.1), it would have all of them, either directly expressed or with the obvious potential for expression.
Uh, bullshit. We know this is false. Conway Morris should know that it's false, but it's hard to tell whether he's actually read much on the topic—this kind of malpractice is usually the result of mining, not reading.
Unfortunately, this flaw in the chapter is not just a mistake. It is the backdrop, the raison d'être, of the 40+ pages that follow. In those pages, Conway Morris tours numerous experiments and observations in non-human animal cognition, probing for weaknesses but mostly just chanting the mantra about the vast gulf between non-human animals and humans. Without the central falsehood about "it would have all of them," readers might correctly perceive that the chapter is nothing more than a recitation of how one particular professor reckons the size of the gulf to be.
I guess my hope for readers is that they'll see the game even without the insight into the flaw at the heart, since the bulk of the chapter is a teeter-totter of "look at this cool thing" followed by "yes but"—enough yesbuttery to perhaps trigger the Gertrude reflex. Let's hope.
The final sad point to make about the chapter is that, to my mind, Conway Morris vandalized his own good work in order to dig his moat. All of the preceding chapters have reinforced the power of evolutionary algorithmic "creativity." (Those are my words, to be clear.) Think of Chapter 1, where the author argued that evolution has discovered all there is to discover. Or of Chapter 3, where he convincingly argues that mass extinctions speed innovation because so much of the discovery has already been done. How about Chapter 4, in which our hero dynamites a myth of "missing links" that mostly churchgoers repeat, but in the process helps us all see that innovations generally bubble up from tools established long before? Why on earth is everything suddenly different when the topic is human cognition?
I think I know the answer to that last question. That we have ended up with that question, and that answer, in a book that purports to oppose myths and "received wisdom" ... is irony that would make Shakespeare blush.
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