IELTSwithJurabek

READING PASSAGE 3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

What makes us human?

Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, investigates the differences between humans and other animals

Human beings do not like to think of themselves as animals. It is thus with decidedly mixed feelings that we regard the frequent reports that activities once thought to be uniquely human are also performed by other species: chimpanzees who make and use tools, parrots who arguably use language, ants who teach each other. Is there anything left?

You might think that human beings at least enjoy the advantage of being more generally intelligent than other animals. To assess this idea, my colleagues and I recently administered a set of nonverbal assessments - the equivalent of nonverbal IQ tests - to groups of adult chimpanzees and orang-utans (two of the great ape relatives of humans) and also to groups of two-year-old human children. As it turned out, the children did not do better on these tests overall. They performed about the same as the apes on the tests that measured how well they understood the physical world of space, quantities and causality. The children performed better only on other tests that measured social skills: social learning, communicating, and understanding and interpreting the intentions of others.

But such social gifts can, in fact, be all important. Imagine a child born alone on a desert island and somehow magically kept alive. What would this child's cognitive skills look like as an adult - with no-one to teach the child, no-one to imitate, no pre-existing tools, no spoken or written language? The child would certainly possess basic skills for dealing with the physical world, but these would not be particularly impressive. The child would not invent by himself or herself English, or Arabic numerals, or metal knives, or money. These are the products of collective cognition - that is, they were created by human beings, in effect, collaborating and sharing ideas.

When you look at apes and children in situations requiring them to confer like this, a subtle but significant difference emerges. My colleagues and I found that children, but not chimpanzees, expect and even demand that others who have committed themselves to a joint activity should stay involved and not avoid their obligations. When children want to opt out of an activity, they recognize that they are members of a group - they know that they must, in their own way, 'take leave' and ask permission to withdraw. Humans structure their collaborative actions with joint goals and shared commitments to which they feel honour-bound.

Another subtle but crucial difference can be seen in communication. The great apes - chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans - communicate almost exclusively for instrumental reasons, that is, for the express purpose of making others do what they want. Human infants, in addition to similar reasons of obtaining their wishes, gesture and talk in order to convey information to others - they want to be supportive. They also simply want to share their emotions and attitudes freely - as when an infant points out a passing bird to its mother and squeals with pleasure. This unprompted sharing of information and attitudes can be seen as a forerunner of adult gossip, which itself ensures that members of a group can pool their knowledge and know who is or is not behaving cooperatively.

The free sharing of knowledge also creates the possibility of teaching and learning, where adults impart information by telling and showing, and children trust and use this with confidence. Our nearest primate relatives do not teach and learn in this manner.

Finally, human infants, but not apes, often pretend things. This seemingly useless play activity is in fact a first baby step toward the creation of distinctively human social institutions. In social institutions, participants typically endow someone or something with special powers and obligations; they create positions like president or teacher which are not, of course, natural positions, but rather human constructs. Presidents and teachers operate with special powers and obligations because, and only because, we all believe that they have these powers, and we typically defer to them accordingly.

Human beings have developed to coordinate complex activities, to gossip and to playact together. It is because they are adapted for such cultural activities - and not because of their cleverness as individuals - that they have been able to do so many exceptionally complex and impressive things.

Of course, human beings are not cooperating angels; they also consult each other to do all kinds of awful deeds. But such deeds are not usually done to those inside their own group. Recent scientific models have demonstrated what politicians have long known: the best way to get people to collaborate and to think like a group is to identify an enemy and claim that 'they' threaten 'us'. The remarkable human capacity for cooperation thus seems to have developed mainly for interactions within a particular group. Such group-mindedness is a major cause of strife and suffering in the world today. The solution - more easily said than done - is perhaps to find new ways to define and expand what we consider to be 'our' group.