GENDER AND SPECIES DIFFERENCESown. What is it, then, that’s allowed the human mind to scale new heights
of achievement and culture? The Harvard University psychologist Marc
Hauser believes he has pinned down the four key ingredients.
According to Hauser, only humans are capable of generative compu-
tation, which is the ability to combine elements, be they words, musical
notes or math symbols, to form new meanings (although perhaps the
Ivory Coast monkeys have demonstrated this ability). Related to this is
recursion – the repeated application of a rule that allows us to embed
meanings in other meanings, potentially ad infinitum. Also said to be
uniquely human is what Hauser calls the promiscuous combination
of ideas. This is our ability to see and make links between ideas from
disparate realms such as law, music and morality. The third key factor
Hauser investigated
The field of animal cognition was rocked in 2010 when Harvard
University announced that Marc Hauser had been found guilty of
scientific misconduct and would be on leave until the autumn of 2011.
Hauser had established an impressive reputation for demonstrating
cognitive feats in monkeys that other experts had previously thought
unique to humans and great apes. With the retraction of two scientific
papers and concerns about three others, the research community
were left wondering which findings from the Hauser lab could be
trusted and which couldn’t. Frans de Waal, a renowned primatologist
at Emory University, Atlanta, told Scientific American: “It is disastrous.
This is a very small field – if one prominent person is under suspicion,
then everyone comes a little bit under suspicion.” The Chronicle
of Higher Education managed to obtain the letter, written by a lab
assistant, which had triggered the investigation of Hauser’s research.
This revealed that suspicions were first aroused during the coding of
videos of Cottontop Tamarin monkeys. Hauser’s coding suggested that
the monkeys spent more time looking at a speaker when the pattern
of sounds it was playing changed (this pattern recognition could be
an important precursor to language). But when the research assistant
and another colleague played back the video, they saw something
completely different – the monkeys were actually looking the other
way. Commentators were divided on whether Hauser was guilty of
deliberate fabrication, or if instead he had simply seen what he hoped
to see (investigations by Federal funding bodies were still underway in
September 2010). Either way, the affair exposed how tricky research on
animal behaviour can be, and how important it is that strict measures
and crosschecking are in place to ensure that scientists’ expectations
don’t contaminate results.