I had exactly the same reaction. It was very hard to keep listening to why “eumans” should view Jesus as being like a minotaur, and on and on. This is what happens when you divorce explanations of human behavior from science, I suspect…it just comes out as so much gobbledygook.

She seems to share a remarkable number of my beliefs and I think she’ll eventually come around to my views on DE. In the spirit of détente, I offer you and everyone else a preview of her work in progress.

http://www.ratical.org/LifeWeb/Articles/Vistas.html

and her website:

http://www.sahtouris.com/

Peace,

Jazzman

Regarding cartoon characters, they are given speech qualities that 1) seemed funny at the time and 2) are a match for the character’s other traits. Mel Blanc has stated in interviews that his interest in developing a particular voice for a character had to do with what would be funny and appropriate for that character. Remember, these cartoons were conceived at a time before political correctness made laughing at speech difficulties taboo. Why we would have found such things funny is probably best explored in a venue which deals with the psychological nature of humor in general, not in a show about anthropomorphism.

In giving animals a human voice in the first place, it is the best way for us to connect to the subject, regardless of the medium used. In literature (and in film), dialogue is a dramatic plot device that allows the reader to be in the moment, to be present in the action as if they were part of the conversation. Imagine any story in which the dialogue is replaced by ordinary third-person exposition—in effect, merely heresay passed along by the author. This not only forbids the characters from speaking for themselves, but places the reader at an emotional and psychological remove, so that they cannot readily engage the characters and identify with them. This would make for a poor reading experience.

The story “Black Beauty” goes beyond simply dialogue and tells the whole story in first person from the horse’s point of view. People have accused this novel’s author of extreme and inappropriate anthropomorphism. Certainly, Ms. Sewel could have taken a different approach in presenting the abuses suffered by horses in urban England; she could have accumulated data gathered through hours of coldly scientific detached observation and presented her findings to Parliament or had them published in the newspaper. But how effective would that have been in opening the eyes of the general population to the horrors she was trying to communicate? By giving horses a human voice, human emotions, and human thoughts, she was able to touch the public mind, awaken the public sense of empathy, in a way that was deeper, more emotionally engaging, and more psychologically proactive than any mere scientific report ever could have done.

Identifying with another is an important aspect of human psychology, and is no-doubt hardwired into our brains. In fact, a lack of such empathy is considered a pathological flaw. Identifying with another member of our own species is relatively easy since there’s an assumption of shared traits (even when there isn’t a shared language). Identifying with an animal, be it our pets or our nonhuman gods, is much more difficult because it is harder to distinguish shared traits (and, of course, there is no hope of a shared language). These creatures are foreign to us, and beyond our ready understanding. To get past this wall of incomprehension, we have to humanize them in some way—give them human voices, human bipedalism, human emotions, behaviours, morals, and intentions in order to embrace them into our lives. In effect, we anthropomorphize members of the nonhuman world in order to better connect with that world.

That we would choose animals as religious figures is rather obvious, I think. We are symbol-using creatures, our minds deal in symbolic representations of our world and our exerience with it. This may be a trait we share with other animals—what is a lion’ s mane or a bird’s vestments if not symbolic cues to their gender? Wouldn’t there be, in their minds, an abstracted representation (a symbol) of these features that says, “That individual is a male and is of my own species?” In any case, whether we share the ability to create and use symbols with other species or not, we certainly depend upon symbolic representations as a form of shorthand for expressing ideas. We have done this for a very long time, far longer than we have had writing, perhaps far longer than we have had complex speech. The readily visible aspects of an animal’s appearance and behaviour have always provided us with an ample supply of images from which to create iconic forms of ideas such as courage, strength, ferocity, wisdom, trickery, beauty, good and evil. Gods are ideas given form, and if the god in question represents the ideas of strength and leadership, then a good symbol for that might be a lion, say, or a wolf. How the relationship between animal and symbol evolves from there depends, I suppose, on history, cultural personality, and circumstance; the animal itself may become deified, or be given human arms and legs (anthropomorphised).

Gods which wear an animal’s head and a human body probably have multiple origins going back to the cave. An animal-headed god with a human body may be a symbolic representation of our efforts to identify with or be closer to the god. They may also reflect our early efforts at representing the animal, its symbolic meaning, or its spiritual principle via rituals, celebrations and dances in which our shaman or headman wore the head and skin of the animal. There is also the sympathetic magic idea which holds that wearing the skin or a mask representing the animal bestows upon its wearer the characteristics that are revered in that animal. These origins are probably all interrelated and any one may the outgrowth of any or all of the others. In every case, what the observer experiences or sees is an animal head attached to a human body.

And let’s not forget that we are like any other creature in how we define the world and its purpose: IT’S ALL ABOUT ME! If anything, we’re probably different from other animals in that we even stop for a moment to consider the feelings, life quality, needs, and futures of other species. I doubt that the blacktail deer here get together to consider the habitat dilemmas faced by their mule deer cousins, or that my neighbor’s dog feels bad when he scares my cat. That we define the world and its other inhabitants according to our own image of ourselves should come as no surprise to anyone. About the only psychological analysis needed here comes straight from a freshman Psych 101 course. No deeper psychbabble is necessary.

While anthropomorphism may not be “scientific,” may not mesh well with scientific method, it is good thing that we do it. If we didn’t, if we saw everything in the cold objective light of only observable facts, our attitude toward the nonhuman world would be even more relentlessly destructive and cruel than it is now. It is this ability and willingness to project upon the nonhuman those traits that we view as uniquely human which allows us to more easily feel empathy toward that which is “other.” It is this empathy which helps us moderate our treatment of the natural world and its nonhuman denizens. Woe to the planet should we ever forget how to anthropomorphize.

— Elisabet Sahtouris, Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution, p.10

The above quotation’s context:

(quote)

…it is the aim of this book to show that (biological application of reductionism, such as sociobiology) (presents) a misleading picture—as misleading as earlier scientists’ one-sided view of all natural selection as “red in tooth and claw,” the hard and competitive struggle among individuals on which we have modeled our modern societies.

The new view of…evolution shows, on the contrary, an intricate web of cooperative mutual dependency, the evolution of one scheme after another that harmonizes conflicting interests.

The patterns of evolution show us the creative maintenance of life in all its complexity. Indeed nature is more suggestive of a mother juggling resources to ensure each family member’s welfare as she works out differences of interest to make the whole family a cooperative venture, than of a rational engineer designing perfect machinery that obeys unchanging laws. (unquote)

— ibid.

Note: Sahtouris precedes this passage with a warning against conflating descriptive metaphor for the thing or pattern metaphorically described. And she writes:

“Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred years of science, has been to see ourselves as separate from nature, to convince ourselves that we see it objectively—at a distance from ourselves—and to perceive, or at least model it, as a vast mechanism…

…This mechanical/religious worldview superseded the older one of living nature to become the foundation of the whole Western worldview up to the present…

…But it has taken time to accumulate scientific evidence that the Earth is a live planet rather than a planet with life on it, and many scientists continue to resist the new conception because of its profound implications for change in all branches of science, not to mention society.”

— ibid. pp. 2-4

Geez. It’s mighty heartening to read such out-of-the-box philosophy from an evolutionary biologist. It seems more akin to “Live Long and Prosper” than to “So Long, and thanks for all the fish!” (Much as I love Douglas Adams!)