The Science that Separates Us
Thomas Suddendorf teaches psychology at the University of Queensland. Three years ago, he published a book, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals. The title alone would clue you in that Suddendorf is an evolutionist. In his first paragraph, he states that humans are: organisms, animals, vertebrates, mammals, and primates. Yet on page 2, he writes: “Yet it would be prudent of me to call you an ape only from a safe distance.”
Fundamentally, humans are separate from animals (Since evolution is false, I’ll drop Suddendorf’s “other”), the author writes “because our extraordinary powers do not derive from our muscles and bones but from our minds. …Our minds have spawned civilizations and technologies that have changed the face of the Earth, while our closest living animal relatives sit unobtrusively in their remaining forests.”
The heart of the book are chapters in which he compares and contrasts recent studies on various aspects of animal behavior with human behavior. In chapter three, he presents: “Minds Comparing Minds.” Summarizing studies on apes, Suddendorf writes: “although there are reports of pretend play in great apes, the list is relatively short, and even if the reports are accepted at face value, great apes do not show anywhere near the sophistication or amount of pretend play that human children do” (48).
Chapter four is about “Talking Apes.” Human beings speak 6,000 different languages, including a language based on touch (Braille) and hand signals (sign language). It is through language that we transmit knowledge and thoughts from one human to another. When it comes to communication among the animals, apes specifically, research on “communication systems of animals have found them to be restricted to a few types of information exchanges, typically to do with reproduction, territory, food, and alarm” (81). He continues: “They do not regularly teach each other, point out things for others’ benefit, or ask for the names of things” (86).
The fifth chapter is on “Time Travelers.” In this chapter, Suddendorf deals with remembering the past and planning the future, even a fictional future. The professor of human psychology writes: “We could not find compelling evidence for anything like this faculty in other animals and argued that its emergence must have been a prime mover in human evolution” (90). “It seems safe to say that mental time travel is a significant human attribute, without which we would hardly have been able to change the face of the Earth – let alone control many of its other inhabitants” (103).
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I have frequently commented at funerals that memory is a great gift from God. Humans have it uniquely among God’s creation, at the level with which we can exercise it. “Although it is safe to conclude that animals have procedural [the “how”, p.h.] and semantic memory [facts, p.h.] systems, there is no obvious demonstration that they have episodic memory [events, p.h.]” (104). He also writes: “Thus evidence that animals can draw on accurate information about the what, where, and when of a particular event does not show that they travel mentally in time” (105).
Finally, he comments: “Richard Dawkins agrees that there is something unique about the human capacity to think about the future. Human long-term planning appears to have no obvious rivals in the animal kingdom” (106). Do you think there is a reason God gave us the ability to plan for the future?
“Yet You have made him a little lower than God, And You crown him with glory and majesty!” (Psalm 8:5).
I’ll share more of Suddendorf’s book later…
–Paul Holland
