Theories on Animal Intelligence in the Nineteenth Century

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Theories on Animal Intelligence in the Nineteenth
Century

• By Jessica Ouellette

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Charles Darwin

• Argued against the idea that animals were solely
  governed by instinct and humans by reasoning
• Learning Processes
• Language and communication
• Moral sense/conscience
• Occurrence of Higher Intelligence based on two
  mechanisms
• 1. Lamarckian Principle
• 2. Sexual Selection

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Herbert Spencer

• Studied the evolution of the nervous system in
  animals and humans
• Reflex
• Memory, Repetition and Habit
• Learning processes and the Law of Association

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Spencer and Jack London

• He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance
  against a man with a club. He had learned the
  lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot
  it. That club was a revelation. It was his
  introduction to primitive law (51)

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Douglas Spalding

• Imperfect instincts
• Following Reaction
• Behavior- inheritance and experience
• Conscience

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Thomas Huxley

• Conscious Automata (Machines)
• Reflex
• Molecular changes in the brain
• Cause and Effect
• Free will
• Morality

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Huxley and London

• Their stringy muscles seemed founts of
  inexhaustible energy. Behind every steel-like
  contraction of muscle, lay another steel-like
  contraction (203).
• He glanced at the hand that held the brand,
  noticing the cunning delicacy of the fingers that
  gripped it, how they adjusted themselves to all
  the inequalities of the surface, curling over and
  under and about the rough wood and those same
  sensitive and delicate fingers being crushed and
  torn by the white teeth of the she-wolf (195).

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George Romanes

• Subjectivity- consciousness
• Free will
• Feelings and Experiences
• Instinct and Reflex action
• Sensation and Perception
• Dual Origin of Instincts

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Romanes Dual Origin of Instincts
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Lloyd Morgan

• Objectivity and Instinct
• Inheritance and Experience
• Trial and Error
• Imitation and Tradition- generation to generation

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Morgan and London

• There was one strange thing about this wall of
  lightHis father had a way of walking right into
  the white far wall and disappearing. The gray cub
  could not understand this. Though never permitted
  by his mother to approach that wall, he had
  approached other walls, and encountered hard
  obstruction on the end of his tender nose. This
  hurt (224).

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Animals Learning Process

• http//abcnews.go.com/WN/Story?id3222942page1

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• Thank you!
• Questions?