The next paragraph is both an exercise in debunking and an exercise in producing good academic prose. One-sentence paragraphs of under 30 words, the norm in such exploits as tabloid journalism, are the antithesis of academic work. Those producing academic prose should feel free to let their paragraphs get long: expressing a complex idea can require lengthy sentences, and articulating the steps in logic that make up an overall point requires one to assemble multiple sentences into the ‘unit of sense’ that is a paragraph. If the overall point and its constituent steps in logic are complex, a paragraph can exceed 500 words and still do its job properly, and if that job is a complex one, that paragraph should be long; a norm in my own writing is to try to limit my paragraphs to about 700-800 words, but longer paragraphs are sometimes necessary. Skill is needed to get this right, though: doing a complex point justice requires good implicit sign-posting in the form of, for example, the humble adverbs ‘nonetheless’ and ‘however’, or well-judged colons and semi-colons, and the longer one’s paragraph, the clearer such sign-posts must be, to keep one’s weary reader to the path of one’s logic. To foster this skill (amongst others) in undergraduate students, in 2023 I designed an assessment which asked students to debunk a claim of their choosing in just one paragraph, limited to 800 words (with no minimum word-count). My colleagues and I applied this word limit only to manage the workload of the markers, and I fought for the limit to be this high, even though it struck some of my colleagues as much too high, and for several reasons: to do well at the debunking aspect of the assessment, students would have to work hard to fit their ideas into 800 words, which required them to practise re-drafting their work for brevity, while prohibiting the students from breaking their work into multiple paragraphs also required them to at least practise the skill of maintaining a clear line of logic across something like 10-20 sentences using implicit signposting alone. Such constraints stimulate creativity. I did not leave these students without help, though: at the beginning of the module, when I issued the instructions for the assessment, I also gave the students an example of a submission that would score a mark of over 90 according to our criteria of assessment (i.e. exceptional in all regards and of publishable quality with no more than minor revisions). I spent about a week writing that exemplary submission myself, determined to inspire the students, even if none of them would even achieve a mark above 70 (i.e. first class) for this first-year, first-semester, mid-module assessment, because all of them had the potential to achieve first-class marks before the end of their degree, and to achieve that, they would have to start practising early. I am quite proud of it. Here it is, comprising 799 words in 19 sentences. Spot the signposts.
In his popular-history work Sapiens (2011), Yuval Harari argues that only humans are capable of imagining things that do not exist, offering as ‘evidence’ at one point the assertion that “[y]ou could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven” (p27). In popular use the term ‘monkey’ means ‘all simians except apes’, and so excludes humans’ closest cousins, but more recently Harari has argued more ambitiously: in a September 2014 lecture at the Royal Society of Arts, for example, Harari claimed that “[y]ou can never convince a chimpanzee to do something, say to give you a banana, by promising that chimpanzee that “after you die, you know what happens, you will go to chimpanzee heaven, and there you will receive lots and lots of bananas for your good deeds”; no chimpanzee will ever be convinced by such a story to do anything” (2014, 11.51-12.09). That is, for Harari, even our closest non-human cousins are incapable of imagining an afterlife; this lecture included many such assertions of radical human/chimpanzee difference. This claim, however, has not been demonstrated. While no-one has yet shown the idea that chimpanzees cannot imagine an afterlife to be wrong, no-one has yet demonstrated it to be right, either. “Humans often look at death as a continuation of life”, primatologist Frans de Waal remarked in 2013, admitting that “[t]here is no indication that any other animal does so” (2013, p196), but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and the trend of our knowledge about human/chimpanzee difference predicts that we will find that Harari is actually wrong: de Waal spends much of his 2013 book listing various assertions of absolute differences between humans and chimpanzees that have arisen during the past century but which primatologists have since debunked, admitting that while “humanity never runs out of claims of what sets it apart, […] it is a rare uniqueness claim that holds up for over a decade” (p16). For example, primatology researchers have shown that chimpanzees collect resources to use elsewhere as tools, can throw parabolically and can recognise faces, all previously thought to be unique to humans (de Waal, 2013, p57, p14-15). We also have no reason to think that chimpanzees lack any human brain functions: as de Waal points out, human brains, though larger than chimpanzee brains, have no anatomical components that chimpanzee brains do not have (2013, p16). Indeed, evidence already exists to suggest that Harari’s claim is wrong: research on chimpanzees implies that they are capable of some basic aspects of the supernatural thinking observed in humans. For example, we have known for roughly 50 years that chimpanzees often react to extreme weather phenomena and waterfalls with threat displays – that is, as if these phenomena are alive and can feel fear (e.g. van Lawick Goodall, 1975, p163-4; de Waal, 2013, p195-6). This implies the presence of the cognitive tendency that psychologists call ‘hyperactive agency detection’, a tendency that widely prompts humans to imagine gods behind natural phenomena and the entire universe (discussed in depth in, for example, Guthrie, 1993, p178-194 and Barrett, 2000, p31-2). Even in 1980, cognitive psychologist Stewart Guthrie wrote of chimpanzee threat displays that “since they [chimpanzees] seem similarly [to humans] to attribute to phenomena a higher level of organization than these really possess, I suggest that their situation is closely analogous to that of religious people” (p193). Observations even hint at the specific category of supernatural thinking that is imagining an afterlife: chimpanzees show a degree of anxiety at the mortality of others that suggests they can imagine their own mortality (de Waal, 2013, p193-6), which involves the rudiments needed to imagine an afterlife, if the idea of an afterlife is defined very simply as an attempt to reconcile a) an awareness of one’s mortality with b) one’s own inability to imagine the experience of being dead (and so not experiencing anything). Humans are relatively bad at identifying what chimpanzees are thinking, because the fact that one trait does seem to be unique to humans (grammatical communication) makes us incapable of directly asking. But, under the sway of human exceptionalism, Harari has mistakenly classed the resulting relative lack of human knowledge about chimpanzee psychology as evidence of a lack amongst chimpanzees. Indeed, what even is the capacity to imagine things that do not exist? Is such a capacity qualitatively different from the capacity to imagine things that do exist? Both are just versions of the same capacity to extrapolate, from one’s observations, an idea of what is not currently observable in one’s immediate surroundings, and evidence that chimpanzees can do that is abundant. If we could communicate the ‘banana-heaven reward’ promise to a chimpanzee, we have no reason to think the chimpanzee would be unable to understand it.
References
- Barrett, Justin L. (2000) ‘Exploring the natural foundations of religion’, Trends in Cognitive Science, 4(1), p29-33.
- de Waal, Frans (2013) The Bonobo and the Atheist. London: W.W. Norton.
- Guthrie, Stewart E. (1980) ‘A Cognitive Theory of Religion.’ Current Anthropology, 21(2, April), p181-203.
- Guthrie, Stewart E. (1993) Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Harari, Yuval N. (2011) Sapiens. London: Vintage.
- Harari, Yuval N. (2014) A Brief History of Humankind [Lecture]. Royal Society of Arts, Royal Society House, London. 9 September. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Vllgib842g
- van Lawick Goodall, Jane (1975) ‘The chimpanzee’, in Vanne Goodall (ed.) The quest for man. New York: Praeger, p131-70.
