WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST NOW:

For most of the past century, the official answer leaned toward: nothing much, really. With a few notable exceptions, scientists defined animals as instinct-driven and incapable of thought, or else governed by simple stimulus-response conditioning. Human intelligence was treated as singular, differing from other animals not merely in degree, as Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, but in kind. To assert otherwise was to invite the invalidating taint of anthropomorphism: imputing human characteristics to objects that don't have them, not unlike a child playing with stuffed animals. It was unscientific.

How times have changed: What once was considered anthropomorphic thinking is now mainstream science. That's not to say researchers have come to see other animals as simply furred or feathered versions of ourselves. But they are increasingly attentive to the shared biology of human and animal consciousness. A consensus is emerging that to study animals is to appreciate not only their differences from us but also their deep similarities. As the primatologist Frans de Waal writes in Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? "anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think."

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