No, it's very clear that we are the odd men out. Odd Men indeed. We do have mental circuits to delight in, and protect, our own babies, so that the later Mickey Mouse converged on the outline of a three-year-old toddler, as did E.T. It is no wonder that so many people paid his phone bill.
But we also go daft about cuddly juveniles of far too many other kinds. Biologically, this is very odd.
A by-product of our finding other species' babies so attractive has clearly been the domestication of dogs, cats, goats, horses, elephants, hawks, chickens, cattle ... These symbioses have given immense pleasure to billions of people, and to their animals, and have contributed greatly to our nutrition. Those who feel that we have exploited the animals unfairly should consider the alternatives for the animals, in the wild, where nearly all of them are eaten alive as babies, without even the benefit of a quick death.
Agriculture can perhaps be attributed to our other propensity, storytelling: the seed becoming the plant has served as an image for so many new words and thoughts, metaphors, new understandings of nature. And the wealth generated by agriculture permitted people to afford princes and philosophers, peasants36 and popes. The cultural capital has grown as we have passed our knowledge on to succeeding generations. But it's more comfortable to enjoy that culture if there are a couple of warehouses full of barley for beer, wheat in the fields and cows in the meadows.
We have very recently made the whole business of symbiosis with plants and animals much more technical -those controversial 'genetically modified organisms' -and we have lost a lot by taking our animal helpers out of the system, especially dogs and horses, and replacing them with machinery.
We could not have predicted what the animal and plant symbioses did for us, for our extelligence, and we don't know what losing them will do. Events like that explode on us as the bicycle ride that is extelligence careers down this long technical hill, and can have totally unexpected effects.
Yes, the Ford Model T made motoring affordable to many more people -but a socially much more important change was that it gave privacy in comfort for the first time, so that a large proportion of the next generation was sired on the upholstery of the car's back seat. Similarly, the dog coming in as a symbiont meant that we could hunt more successfully. Then, as a guard dog, it meant that private farms could be protected, and there was help with rounding up the animals and keeping away predators, including human ones. Lapdogs probably affected our sexual courtesies, particularly in eighteenth-century France, and dog and cat shows have stirred our upper-middle classes with, in modern England, the lower aristocracy.
Think for a moment about what we've done to dogs and cats. More than horses and cows, they grow up in our families. We play with them, like we play with our own children, and the play often involves our own children. As with our own children, this interaction begets minds in our pets. Even human children don't do much good on the mind front if they don't play. And Jack found, and showed Ian, that even invertebrates, bright invertebrates like mantis shrimps, can acquire minds if they're involved in play activities. We described in Figments of Reality how this happens. Let's just note here that we have uplifted37 our symbionts into the world of mind. Dogs worry about things, much more than wolves do. So dogs have at least some sense of themselves as a creature that lives in time, with some kind of awareness that it has a future as well as a present. Mind is catching.
Usually we think of the domestication of the dog as a selection process driven by human intentions. The process may have started accidentally, perhaps with a tribe bringing up a wolf pup that the kids had brought into the cave, but at a relatively early stage it became a deliberate training programme. Proto-dogs were selected for obedience to their master and for useful skills such as hunting. As time passed, obedience evolved into devotion, and the modern dog arrived on the scene.
However, there is an attractive alternative theory: the dogs selected us. It was the dogs that trained the humans. In this scenario, humans that were willing to allow wolf pups into the cave, and had the ability to train them, were rewarded by the dogs, for example by a willingness to assist in the hunt. Those humans that performed best at these tasks found it easier to acquire new pups and train new generations. The selection on the human side would have been cultural rather than genetic, because there hasn't been enough time for genetic influences to make a lot of difference directly. However, there may well have been selection on the genetic level for having enough intelligence to appreciate how useful a trained wolf could be, or having the generalised teaching skills, such as persistence, to carry out successful training. At any rate, the tribe as a whole benefited from those few individuals who could train proto-dogs, so that the selective pressure in favour of generalised dog-training genes must have been slight.
This isn't one of those either-or choices: we are not obliged to accept one theory to the exclusion of the other. And this is a point we should make very firmly, for this and many other theories: things happen, all over the place and apparently in some confusion, and afterwards mankind goes and chops it all up into 'stories'. We need to do it like that that, but occasionally we should stand back and realise what it is we are doing.
In the case of the dogs, there is in all likelihood a fair amount of truth in both theories, and what happened was a complicit co-evolution of dogs and people. As dogs became more obedient and easier to train, people became more willing to train them; as people became more willing to consider possessing a dog, the dogs became more adept at playing along and making themselves useful.
The situation is, perhaps, more clear-cut with cats. Here it was very much a case of the cats being in the driving-seat. Rudyard Kipling's Just-So Story of 'The Cat That Walks By Itself' is too naive an acceptance of the impression that cats set out to give - that they do things their own way and merely tolerate those people who play along -but in most cases you can't train a cat. Very few cats are willing to perform tricks, whereas many dogs visibly enjoy performing for human pleasure. To the ancient Egyptians, cats were tiny gods on Earth, personified in the cat-goddess Bastet. Bastet was originally worshipped around Bubastis, in the Nile delta, and she had a lion's head; later, this transmuted (transmogrified?) into a cat's head. Bastet-worship then spread to Memphis, where she became conflated with Sakhmet, a local lion-headed goddess. Bastet was a generalised goddess of things that were especially important to women, such as fertility and safe childbirth. Cats were also worshipped, as godling avatars of Bastet -and they were often mummified because of their religious significance. There was a sort of dog-god, the jackal- headed Anubis, but the difference was that he had a substantial 'hands-on' job: he was the god of embalming, and his role was to assist (or impede) the passage of the dead through the underworld. Anubis judged whether the dead were worthy of the afterlife. The only duties that the cat-godlings had were to allow humans to worship them.
Nothing new there, then.
Even today, cats assiduously give the impression of being independent; they seldom come when called, and are liable to depart at a moment's notice for reasons that are never very clear. All cat- owners know, however, that this impression is superficial: their cats need attention, and know it.
But this need shows up indirectly. For example. Ian's cat 'Ms Garfield' usually comes out to the front of the house to greet the arrival of the family car, but her pleasure at the car's appearance is heavily disguised as a strident harangue: 'Where the bloody hell have you lot been?' After absences on holiday or overseas, family members find that whenever they are in the garden, the cat coincidentally is in the same part of the garden -but either asleep or apparently just passing through. It looks as though house-cats are slowly losing the domestication battle, but putting up a strong fight. Feral cats are another matter, and real working cats like farm cats are often genuinely independent. These days, though, many farm cats are treated much like house-cats. At any rate, there are some good research projects still to be carried out on the co-evolution of ancient humans and their livestock and pets.