http://helene.ehclients.com/index.php/site/index/ en helene.guldberg@spiked-online.com Copyright 2012 2012-04-19T08:25:00+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/the_national_trusts_imagination_deficit/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/the_national_trusts_imagination_deficit/#When:08:25:00Z Last week, conservation charity the National Trust launched a nationwide campaign titled 50 Things to do Before You’re 11¾ with the aim of encouraging ‘sofa-bound children’ to take to the outdoors and ‘enjoy classic adventures’. The 50 things children should do before their twelfth birthday included everything from running around in the rain, skimming stones, building dens and bug hunting, to setting up a snail race, damming a stream, flying a kite and making a mud pie.Growing up on the outskirts of Bergen, in Norway, I was given a lot of freedom to roam outside from a very early age. Norwegians have a strong traditional love of outdoor pursuits and are therefore a lot more reluctant than people in other countries to restrict children’s freedom to play outdoors. The local children, including my siblings and I, were always outdoors, whether in sunshine, rain, sleet or snow. There was never an excuse for staying indoors (not that I remember us looking for one). As Norwegians say: ‘Det finnes ikke dårlig vær, bare dårlige klær’ (‘There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing’). We had all kinds of adventures catching grasshoppers and frogs with our bare hands, finding our own little hiding places, building dens, climbing trees and exploring the woods. We learnt to skim stones by the fjord and spent hours trying to catch tiny little crabs on the beach. When it wasn’t too unbearably cold, we would swim in the fjord and sometimes managed to catch purple jellyfish, again with our bare hands, while trying to avoid the orange stinging ones. I can proudly claim to have done the vast majority of the National Trust’s list of 50 fun activities. Although my enthusiasm for some of the activities has waned (or completely disappeared, as in the case of catching bugs, frogs and jellyfish with my bare hands), I still enjoy skimming stones, having snowball fights, making grass trumpets, and have therefore introduced my children to these joys. For my son’s seventh birthday, we organised a den-building party. I woke up with dread the morning of the party on hearing the rain pelting down outdoors and finding out that the weather forecast was for rain all day. Forgetting that we used to play outdoors whatever the weather, I feared the party would be a great big flop. But, of course, the children loved it and didn’t care one ounce about the rain – in fact, it seemed to add to the sense of adventure. If only the National Trust had stuck with the aim of inspiring children to explore and enjoy the natural world. Fiona Reynolds, director-general of the National Trust, said: ‘Building a den, picking flowers, climbing trees – the outdoors is a treasure trove, rich in imagination.’ So far so good. But unfortunately she then went on to state: ‘It brings huge benefits that we believe every child should have the opportunity to experience. And there are huge costs when they don’t.’ Alongside 50 Things to do Before You’re 11¾, the National Trust published a report titled Natural Childhood by naturalist, author and TV producer Stephen Moss. ‘Evidence of a long-term and dramatic decline in children’s relationship with the outdoors is “overwhelming” and urgent action is needed to bridge this growing gap before it’s too late’, Moss scarily warns. Like so many reports on childhood these days,Natural Childhood paints a bleak picture of modern living. We are warned about ‘epidemics’ of mental illness and obesity and a host of other deficits and disorders that children purportedly suffer from, including ‘nature-deficit disorder’. This medical-sounding term was coined by Richard Louv, co-founder and chairman of the US organization Children and Nature Network, in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Louv argues that children are suffering from ‘diminished use of senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses’ as a result of their ‘alienation from nature’. He argues that modern life is narrowing our senses until our focus is mostly visual, appropriate to the dimensions of a computer monitor or television screen. Louv’s ideas are reflected throughout the National Trust report. Just as ‘alienation from nature’ is presented as the root of all problems, so a reconnection with nature is presented as the answer to everything. The report claims that exposure to the natural environment can ‘reduce stress and aggressive behaviour in all children, and give them a greater sense of self-worth’. It can improve ‘concentration and self-discipline’, ‘awareness’, ‘reasoning and observational skills’, ‘reading, writing, maths, science and social studies’ and much more. ‘Even short-term “doses” of nature can make a marked impact on mental health’, we are told. But that is not all. ‘There are also positive outcomes for communities and society as a whole.’ Apparently there is ‘strong evidence that even the lightest contact with nature makes for stronger communities; studies have shown that even in cases where the only variable is the view of green space from a window, incidences of crime are reduced by as much as 50 per cent’. The conclusion we should draw from the fact that ‘years of academic research and a steady stream of surveys on the subject’ can be presented to show all of the above benefits is not that exposure to the natural world is a panacea for all ills, but that data can be interpreted and spun so as to back up any old argument. If Moss had delved a little deeper - and critically evaluated many of these studies - he might have found that the story was not so simple. Despite the fact that woodland, fields and streams can provide an abundance of excitement, and wondrous places to explore, children who grow up in cities – and maybe never get the chance to climb trees or catch insects – do not suffer from a disorder of any kind. The wonderful thing about children (which is also what makes them so frustrating to parents at times) is their natural curiosity and constant desire to explore and learn. The delight that flashes across children’s faces when they make a discovery or learn something new is truly inspiring. But they do not need to be exploring streams or woodlands to experience these delights or to have adventures. Children can have hours of fun on street corners, in back gardens or in local parks – being rained on, feeling the wind in their faces, balancing on walls, kicking a ball around, play-fighting with their mates, and just messing around – if only they are allowed to. We should not be fretting about whether every child has tried skimming a stone, flying a kite or cooking on a camp fire (but by all means find ways of inspiring them to try these activities). The issue that should concern us is the lack of unsupervised play, not a newfangled nature-deficit disorder. Children should be allowed to play, mess around, explore, experiment with taking risks (within a sensible framework provided by adults), test boundaries, have arguments, even fights, and learn how to resolve conflicts - without adults hovering over them. Natural Childhood does make some good points on risk-taking: ‘Being outdoors can also confront children with less enjoyable experiences: being frightened, getting cold and wet, and even sometimes being hurt. But consider the alternative: that our children grow up without ever encountering these “difficult” things, and enter the adult world unprepared for the challenges it might bring.’ The issue today is that children and young people are given less and less freedom to roam outdoors at all. To reverse this trend requires a major cultural shift. That means challenging a culture that prizes ‘safety’ above all else. It also means confronting a culture of mistrust in other adults. Ultimately parents will give children the independence they need only if they have sufficient trust in other adults – trust in them not harming but looking out for other people’s children. Instead of warning (unconvincingly in my view) about the disastrous consequences of a lack of connection with nature, I wish the National Trust had concentrated on showing how nature’s many wonders can capture a child’s imagination. 2012-04-19T08:25:00+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/ignore_these_pedlars_of_panic_-_the_kids_are_all_right/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/ignore_these_pedlars_of_panic_-_the_kids_are_all_right/#When:14:43:51Z Report after report tells us that children are sad, lost and in need of expert intervention. Real-world evidence suggests otherwise.‘Unhappy childhoods afflict one in 10 youngsters.’ So said newspaper headlines in the UK last week, following the publication of a ‘landmark survey’ by the Children’s Society of 30,000 eight- to 15-year-olds. Britain’s happiness guru, Lord Layard, co-author of a previous Children’s Society report titled A Good Childhood: Searching for Values in a Competitive Age, said: ‘Everybody involved in shaping children’s lives should sit up and take note of this report.’ I beg to differ. The phrase ‘Lies, damned lies and statistics’ springs to mind when reading the new survey, A Good Childhood Report 2012. One can manipulate numbers in amazing ways to bolster a weak argument, and the Children’s Society has been particularly creative in this regard. In the foreword, the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, warns: ‘The fact that, at any one time, half a million children between the ages of eight and 15 suffer from low subjective wellbeing should be a wake-up call to us all.’ Talk about the glass being half empty! Surely we should celebrate the finding that at any given time 90 per cent of children are happy with their lives? Only those who believe ‘happiness’ is the be all and end all of human existence would think it was a massive problem that nine per cent of eight- to 15-year-olds have ‘low levels of subjective wellbeing’ at any given time. Among older children, the figure was slightly higher: 14 per cent of 15-year-olds were found to have ‘low subjective wellbeing’ compared with four per cent of eight-year-olds. Yet this means that 86 per cent of teenagers are, on the whole, content with their lives. I, personally, had a pretty miserable time during my teenage years and I would not relive them for anything. I have long assumed that misery and introspection were par for the course for teens. In fact, it seems that ‘teenage angst’ is not necessarily the norm and that many young adults are pretty happy through their adolescence. The authors of the Children’s Society report have not tried to interpret their findings with any degree of objectivity. Instead, they seem to have done their utmost to find some bad news. And of course, the bad news they have dredged up is the kind that requires policy interventions shaped by the Children’s Society’s own expertise. Elaine Hindal, director of the society’s Campaign for Childhood, said, ‘We know that, right now, half a million children are unhappy’, and ‘unless we act now’ we risk creating ‘a lost future generation’. So in Promoting Positive Wellbeing for Children, a report ‘for decision-makers in parliament, central government and local areas’ published alongside A Good Childhood Report 2012, the Children’s Society ‘gives advice for decision-makers in formulating and evaluating the impact of policy on children’s wellbeing’. This report highlights a statement made by prime minister David Cameron before he entered government: ‘It’s time we admitted that there’s more to life than money and it’s time we focused not just on GDP but on GWB – general wellbeing. Improving our society’s sense of wellbeing is, I believe, the central political challenge of our time.‘ Cameron was following in the footsteps of the New Labour government, which had introduced ‘happiness classes’ into schools. The Children’s Society seems to be aware that it is pushing at an open door. But that’s no excuse for the paucity of convincing arguments in its two new reports. Some of the claims it makes beggar belief. In Promoting Positive Wellbeing for Children, it claims: ‘The evidence shows that a low level of subjective wellbeing is associated with a wide range of social and personal problems. These include: poor mental health, through increased depression; social isolation, through increased loneliness and likelihood of victimisation; and involvement in risky behaviours, such as running away from home and sexual exploitation.’ The report concludes that ‘improving levels of subjective wellbeing and preventing the resulting negative outcomes will reduce the personal impact to children and their families, and help ensure every child growing up in the UK has a good childhood, and positive life chances’. Here, the society is explicitly arguing that young people’s low levels of subjective wellbeing are the cause of myriad social and personal problems. So apparently, all we need to do is make children feel more positive about themselves and their life chances will improve. And of course, this means getting experts involved in guiding teachers and parents to help promote children’s positive wellbeing. ‘Children need to see themselves in a positive light, and deserve to feel, and be, respected by all adults and other children’, the society says. The Children’s Society argues that decision-makers ‘can take some simple practical steps to promote positive wellbeing for children’. Government initiatives should include: introducing ‘positive relationship education’; the ‘national roll-out of free parenting classes for parents with children under five’; and ‘increased funding for relationship advice for teenagers’. Given its track record, I doubt the coalition government will feel any compunction about taking on board these recommendations on the need to educate us all about how we should relate to each other and feel about ourselves. But surely we should have more faith in adults’ and young people’s ability to work out their personal lives and relationships for themselves, rather than relying on academics poring over survey results to teach us all how to speak, act and feel? It is time we took a more critical look at today’s pessimistic view of human beings and the incessant doom-mongering about children and their relationships. Those who believe we are going to hell in a handcart unfortunately have a disproportionate influence in policymaking circles. Thankfully, though, there are some exceptions. In the 2009 report, The Impact of the Commercial World on Children’s Wellbeing, commissioned by the then Labour government, Professor David Buckingham and his team warned against the idea of ‘toxic childhoods’, which they said ‘provides an extremely negative representation of contemporary childhood’: ‘Children are portrayed as vulnerable and helpless victims, rather than in any way resilient or competent – or indeed happy.‘ Hitting the nail on the head, Buckingham and his team argued: ‘[Children] are seen to be suffering from a litany of ills and problems; the more positive aspects of modern childhood – for example, in terms of the range of opportunities children enjoy – are largely ignored. The possibility that most children (and their parents) are reasonably well-adjusted and doing fairly well is rarely entertained.’ Indeed. As I argue in my book, Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, there have been many positive changes in children’s lives over the past century. A little bit of historical perspective would be useful in these discussions. A couple of hundred years ago, children as young as six would have had to work long hours – longer than many adults would put up with today – in atrocious working conditions. A Daily Telegraph article from January 1860 (quoted in Karl Marx’s Capital) graphically describes the working conditions of children in the lace trade in nineteenth-century Britain: ‘Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three or four o’clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into stone-like torpor.’ (1) In the mid-nineteenth century, average life expectancy was 40; today it is nearer to 80. At the turn of the twentieth century, 150 in every 1,000 babies born in the UK and 100 in every 1,000 babies born in the USA died before they reached their first birthday. Nutrition was poor and lack of vaccinations led to deaths from smallpox, diphtheria, measles, typhoid and cholera, among many other diseases. Today, the infant mortality rate has dropped to five in every 1,000 babies born in the UK and seven in every 1,000 babies born in America. Children’s lives today are so much better in so many ways than a hundred or two hundred years ago. These changes were not brought about by children being taught to feel more positive about themselves, but by social progress – by economic development, improvements in housing and sanitation, medical advances, and much more. This is not to say that ideas – subjective factors – are unimportant. The great leaps forward of the past two centuries would not have come about if previous generations had not had a belief in their ability to change society for the better. Will today’s generation of young people, who are constantly told that they are vulnerable and in need of expert guidance, feel a similar kind of confidence towards shaping the future? Of course, we should never stop fighting to improve society and the lives of current and future generations. But in order to do that, we need a far less fatalistic discussion about the problems we face and how we might overcome them, and we need to move away from blaming individuals and their ‘low self-esteem’ for every social ill. Helene Guldberg is author of Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, published by Routledge. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK)). Taking the debate further spiked would like to organise an online debate that brings together teachers, childcare professionals, researchers, academics, policymakers, media commentators and the general public to take a more critical look at today’s doom-mongering about children. Rather than blaming individual inadequacies and labelling children as fragile and easily damaged, we need to try to identify what the real problems are – and how much they matter. We need to make sure more sensible forward-looking voices get more of a hearing, rather than allow the doom-mongers to monopolise public and policy discussions. In order to organise such an online debate – including designing, programming, commissioning and marketing the debate, and putting together a report for policymakers - we need to raise sufficient funding. If you have any ideas for who we could approach for funding, or would like to help, please email . children and risk, parents and kids, education, mental health 2012-01-16T14:43:51+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/anti-bullying_campaigns_doing_more_harm_than_good/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/anti-bullying_campaigns_doing_more_harm_than_good/#When:13:49:17Z ESSAY: Of course extreme cases of bullying should be tackled, but let’s not pathologise normal childhood relationships.According to figures released by the Anti-Bullying Alliance (ABA) last week – to launch Britain’s anti-bullying week – one in four children has been ‘verbally bullied’ in the past year. The annual anti-bullying week is an initiative launched by the ABA, founded in 2002 by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) and the National Children’s Bureau. The aim of this year’s anti-bullying week was to challenge the old ‘sticks and stones’ adage with the slogan ‘Stop and think – words can hurt’.  Commenting on the findings, Ross Hendry, chair of the ABA, said: ‘These figures highlight how much of a problem verbal bullying is.’ But considering ‘verbal bullying’ is defined as anything from name-calling to the ‘casual use of derogatory language’ could one not equally argue that these figures highlight how sanitised playgrounds have become? Surely in the course of a whole year the vast majority of children have at some point been at the receiving end of hurtful putdowns, name-calling or other ‘casual derogatory language’? Alternatively, the findings could indicate that the majority of children don’t share the current obsession with bullying – and the flabby definition used by the anti-bullying industry – and quickly forget verbal putdowns, name-calling and other ‘derogatory language’ (even if they were deeply distressing at the time) without categorising themselves as the victims of bullying. Or - bearing in mind that this is advocacy research - the figures may not tell us very much at all. The anti-bullying industry continually warns us that bullying is widespread and has a devastating effect. Those who don’t take its messages seriously risk being branded ignorant and complacent. The conclusion is always that much more needs to be done to combat bullying. Few people are prepared to challenge these assumptions. I would argue that the messages emanating from the anti-bullying industry are not only unhelpful and depressing, but damaging. Firstly, they present a very negative view of children: portraying them either as nasty little brutes or as helpless victims. Children’s relationships with other children are assumed to be damaging, and children are tacitly encouraged to look upon their peers with trepidation and suspicion. Consequently there is a raft of behavioural codes that now regulate playground behaviour, and an increasingly interventionist role for adults in children’s disputes. And as more and more forms of behaviour are labelled as ‘bullying’, more and more children become labelled as ‘bullies’ or ‘victims’. On its website, the ABA describes bullying as the ‘repetitive, intentional hurting of one person by another, where the relationship involves an imbalance of power’. ‘Means of bullying’ may involve ‘pushing, hitting, punching, kicking’, or ‘yelling abuse at another, name-calling, insulting someone, using verbal threats’, as well as ‘spreading rumours, social exclusion, [or] disclosing another’s secrets to a third party’. Is it any wonder that the ABA finds that the prevalence of bullying is so high? Beat Bullying, one of the ABA’s member organisations, states on its website: ‘Bullying is not just a problem for a minority of children; it is a widespread problem that can affect the culture and climate of a whole school.’ Pointing to findings from the 2006 National Bullying Survey – described as ‘the largest, most comprehensive survey of its kind’ – Beat Bullying tells us ‘69 per cent of children in the UK report being bullied’, and ‘87 per cent of parents reported that their child had been bullied in the past 12 months’. The survey may have been large, but it was not comprehensive or representative: it was a self-selected internet survey. The high proportion of children claiming to have been bullied could be explained by those children being bullied being more likely to take part in such a survey. There is quite a discrepancy between the claims made by the anti-bullying industry and research published in peer-reviewed journals. In a 2010 meta-analysis – that is, a statistical technique for reviewing a large number of peer-reviewed research studies – assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, Clayton Cook, and colleagues found that ‘between 10 per cent and 30 per cent of children and youth are involved in bullying’. The prevalence rates vary significantly as a function of how bullying is measured, they point out. These rates are a lot lower than most anti-bullying campaigns claim. But the peer-reviewed research on bullying also has a number of limitations [see box below for a summary]. It is likely that the prevalence rates reported in peer-reviewed research exaggerate the problem as well. There is little to back up the overblown claims by the anti-bullying industry about how widespread bullying is or about how far-reaching and devastating the effects of bullying are. The reality is that the evidence for a long-term effect of bullying is not there. That does not mean that it doesn’t have a negative effect on some individuals. But equally it may have a positive effect on others. Without a doubt some children can and do come out of difficult situations stronger and more resilient. Some childhood experiences are extremely hurtful. I do find it heartbreaking when my six-year-old son, who we adopted two years ago and who understandably finds rejection hard to deal with, is reduced to floods of tears because he has been told by another child that ‘I’m not your friend any more’ or has been excluded from his gang of ‘bros’ because of losing all the races against the other ‘bros’. But the fact that he is devastated does not mean that these experiences are harmful. He, like all children, needs to learn to deal with rejection. Nobody is likely to go through life never experiencing rejection of any sort. Melissa Witkow, assistant professor of psychology at Willamette University, carried out a large-scale study with colleagues, investigating the effect of hostile relationships on children’s development. ‘While the study of reciprocated friendships has a long tradition, mutual antipathies, or mutual dislikes, have only recently begun to be investigated’, the authors of the study write (1). Much of the research to date has found that mutual friendships are associated with positive outcomes. It is generally assumed that having enemies, or mutual dislikes, may have the opposite effect – being associated with negative outcomes. But Witkow and colleagues found that the effects of children’s positive and negative relationships were a lot more complex than previously indicated. In fact, their study found that having ‘mutual antipathies’ was associated with ‘fewer signs of maladjustment’ (2). In other words, it may be perfectly healthy to dislike, and show your dislike, of certain children, who in turn may reciprocate the feeling. Also, as adults it is perfectly normal not to like certain people. There are some people we will go out of our way to help, and others we will go out of our way to avoid. Similarly it is fine for children not to like all their classmates and peers, and to gravitate to some and not others. ‘As adults, there are people we don’t like, but we’re not beating them up. We’re not harassing them. A lot of adults think that kids should only have positive relationships, but that’s not possible’, Witkow told Time magazine. Similarly, it is perfectly healthy to express negative thoughts or emotions. In a review of the literature on aggression, William Bukowski, professor of psychology at Concordia University, and Maurissa Abecassis, associate professor at Colby-Sawyer College, argue that the use of aggression – whether verbal or physical – is a normal part of growing up. They write: ‘Who has not felt the need to return an insult when insulted first, to make a joke at another’s expense, to tell a lie, gossip a little, or to engage in some private glee when a disliked other has experienced a setback?’ (3). Of course there are times when aggression may indicate that a child is not coping. ‘Children who characteristically respond to a variety of emotions by acting aggressively probably have a narrow repertoire and limited set of problem-solving skills’, they write (4). But equally, a child who never shows aggression may struggle in later life. Bukowski and Abecassis found that ‘The overuse as well as the complete absence of aggression may be maladaptive’. Would it really help the child who overused aggression if they were to be labelled a ‘bully’? Giving them such a label could create a more permanent wedge between them and the children at the receiving end of their aggression. Children - especially young children - can be embarrassingly thoughtless. For instance, my daughter, at three years of age, blurted out ‘Look at that fat lady’ as a woman passed us in a supermarket doorway. Our natural instinct is to tell children ‘you shouldn’t say that’. And, of course, as parents and teachers we should try to ensure children learn to accept and abide by the morals and mores of our society. But we also need to accept that children are emotionally and socially unsophisticated. They will make many mistakes along the way. They do not have the same capacity to empathise and understand other people’s perspectives as adults do. They will often get frustrated when they don’t get their way and will use physical and verbal aggression to try to get what they want. Their social, emotional and moral development is a long and bumpy road – with much anger, frustration and anxiety, but also excitement, pride and sheer joy – along the way. Children need to learn how to handle both positive and negative emotions. We cannot – and should not – insulate them from negative emotions such as anger, sadness, loneliness, fear or embarrassment. Nor should we give them the impression that if they feel any of these emotions they may be ‘scarred for life’. If the behaviour of one or more children evokes negative emotions in another child – be it embarrassment, unhappiness, frustration or fear – it does not mean that these children should be labelled as ‘bullies’ and ‘victims’. Children’s relationships are a lot more complicated than the anti-bullying industry implies. We are told schools must adopt a ‘zero tolerance’ approach to bullying. But such an approach is deeply problematic. It suggests that whenever a child feels picked on or victimised, their troubles - whatever they may be - can be resolved in an instant by a third party. It teaches nothing about the complexity of friendships, enemies and relationships in general. It says nothing of the fact there will be some people in life you will struggle to get along with. It implies that a person has the right to expect everyone they meet to be unfailingly pleasant and kind. And when, inevitably, that doesn’t happen it suggests we have the right to have our differences ‘stamped out’ by a figure of authority. A ‘zero tolerance’ approach to bullying also cultivates a culture of victimhood: if a child feels upset by other children’s actions or comments, they are encouraged to see themselves as the victim of bullying and go straight to a teacher at the first sign of trouble. In fact, the ABA’s advice for children and young people includes the statements: ‘Bullying is not your fault. It is always wrong and you do not have to put up with it’ and ‘Be confident – you have done nothing to deserve this’. The ‘zero tolerance’ approach to bullying is not only problematic, it is also dishonest. There is nothing straightforward about minimising, never mind wiping out, behaviours that are having a negative effect on a child. Firstly, it is very difficult to determine when aggression constitutes ‘bullying’ and when it is a perfectly healthy response to a particular situation. Secondly, when a child is clearly suffering, it is not at all straightforward to work out how to make the situation better for that child. Some children have a horrible time at school: they may dread going to school on a daily basis, be deeply unhappy and socially isolated. But how do we help make that situation better for that child? Not through the blunt instrument of anti-bullying policies, that’s for sure. There is no magic bullet. In fact, the large-scale review of bullying research carried out by Clayton Cook and colleagues showed that the success of anti-bullying programmes has been limited. ‘Even when programs have an impact, the improvement appears to be changing children’s knowledge and perceptions, not bullying behaviour’ they write. Similarly, a large-scale study in Sheffield in the 1990s found that of the four schools that had implemented whole-school anti-bullying interventions, two of the schools had experienced a decline in bullying and two schools had seen a significant rise (5). I am not arguing teachers and parents should turn their backs on the young and let them sink or swim. But we should be more honest in acknowledging that what goes on in the playground is a lot more complicated than the caricatured idea that there are ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ or ‘bullies’ and ‘victims’. Seeing a child shunned by their peers, looking lost and lonely in the playground, is heartbreaking. But labelling that child a ‘victim’ of bullying may make the situation worse. It is possible that by intervening adults make the situation worse. It is also possible adults could help sort the situation out. But how to do so is far from straightforward. The people who will know best whether and how to intervene are teachers – who in most cases will know their pupils fairly well and have some sense of the playground dynamics. The anti-bullying industry’s tick-box approach to what is and is not acceptable behaviour will not be at all helpful. Neither will their trite message ‘Say NO to bullying’. All I can conclude is that we need to do away with anti-bullying awareness campaigns and anti-bullying policies. They are blunt instruments that often label children as ‘bullies’ and ‘victims’. And the obsession with bullying is putting obstacles in the way of children learning – through unsupervised play – to deal with rejection, ‘roll with the punches’, resolve conflicts, learn to negotiate, and develop into more resilient, capable adults. We have a duty to guide the young on their path to adulthood, but let’s give them the opportunities they need to learn how to make and maintain friendships, deal with people they like as well as those they don’t like, and handle difficult situations and difficult emotions. And let’s not go in with the great big sledgehammer of ‘zero tolerance on bullying’. Some children in some circumstances do need protection. But most benefit from a little exposure to the knocks that life will inevitably deliver. —————————————————————————————————————————- Peer-reviewed research on bullying Over the last decade there has been more than a six-fold increase in published peer-reviewed research on bullying. It should be pointed out that although the peer-reviewed research does tend to be a lot more systematic than advocacy research, it also has a number of limitations, the most obvious being the myriad different definitions and measures of bullying used. Also, many - if not most – of the studies are based on self-report questionnaires, which are widely recognised among researchers as having a number of shortcomings, including ‘social desirability bias’, where participants answer in a way that will portray them in a good light. Many of the peer-reviewed studies make claims about the long-term effects of bullying when the methodology used is not longitudinal. That is, they have not investigated long-term effects by following up the participants over several years. Their claims about future effects are merely inferred from associations their studies have found between bullying and concomitant factors, such as sleeplessness, anxiety, depression or academic achievement. Bearing in mind these limitations, what has the research on bullying purportedly found? In a 2010 meta-analysis – that is, a statistical technique for reviewing a large number of existing research studies – assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, Clayton Cook, found the ‘risk of adversity’ was found to be greater for ‘bully/victims’ (that is, those who both bully and have been bullied) than for either ‘bullies’ or ‘victims’. Those involved in bullying – as ‘victim’, ‘bullies’ or ‘bully/victims’ - tended to have ‘poorer problem-solving skills’ than children not involved in bullying. They also found differences between the groups: ‘bullies’ were more at risk of having ‘poor academic performance’ and ‘holding negative attitudes and beliefs about others’; ‘victims’ were more at risk of ‘possessing negative attitudes and beliefs about themselves’; and being a ‘bully/victim’ ‘was associated with having the most severe challenges in social competence of all the groups’.  But it is far from clear from these studies whether there is a causal relationship between being a ‘bully’, ‘victim’ or ‘bully/victim’ and having ‘adverse behavioural and psychological outcomes’. There may well be a causal relationship, but we don’t know from the data the direction of the causal relationship (if there is one). It could be that children with particular problems are more likely to become ‘bullies’, ‘victims’ or ‘bully/victims’. Or it could it be that by being involved in bullying children are more likely to experience a number of other difficulties. One also has to bear in mind the difficulty in eliminating subjective influence on research about human beings and human relationships. When looking into the effect on children of bullying it is easy to come up with harmful consequences – if that is what is being looked for. The possibility that there may be positive outcomes is often not considered by researchers, and thereby the results are distorted. Helene Guldberg is author of Reclaiming Childhood: Freedom and Play in an Age of Fear, published by Routledge. (Buy this book from Amazon(UK)). play, children and risk 2011-11-24T13:49:17+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/helenes_srob_review/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/helenes_srob_review/#When:08:05:07Z In his attempt to prove that beasts have morals, Dale Peterson airbrushes away all the things that make humans unique in the animal kingdom.On the dust jacket of Dale Peterson’s new book, The Moral Lives of Animals, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs, is effusive in her praise: ‘There’s a special place in the hearts of many of us for books that express the “oneness” of life on Earth’, she says, ‘and this book tops them all’. Yet reading The Moral Lives of Animals I was often left, like fellow reviewer Stephen Budiansky, ‘with the feeling of being stuck on a bar stool next to a bore’ – one intent on relaying to the reader, ‘utterly unremarkable facts about his two large mutts, Spike and Smoke’. Peterson’s aim is to downplay what is unique about human morality. As Budiansky rightly points out: ‘Rather than a sophisticated system of language-based laws, philosophical arguments and abstract values that sets mankind apart, morality is, in [Peterson’s] view, a set of largely primitive psychological instincts.’ This is a definition broad enough to encompass much of the animal world. Peterson argues that animals’ moral systems are not merely ‘analogous to our own’ – that is, superficially similar due to coincidental factors - but ‘homologous to our own’ – that is, similar due to a ‘common origin’. He asks us to view morality as a ‘moral organ’, ‘equivalent to the elephant’s nose: enormous, powerful, multifaceted’. Our ‘moral organ’ may have features that differ from that of other animals, Peterson tells us, but ultimately human morality is, like animal morality, an organ residing in the limbic system of the brain. Petersen accuses of ‘Darwinian narcissism’ those who fail to recognise the existence of animal morality. If one defines morality as, for instance, ‘collectively shared norms’ one is guilty of ‘argument by definition’, he claims. But if anyone is guilty of ‘argument by definition’ it is Peterson himself: ‘The function of morality, or the moral organ, is to negotiate the inherent serious conflict between self and others.’ And, hey presto, there is ample evidence of other species - particularly group-dwelling species – managing potential conflicts between their members, so ‘animals have morality’. This is wrong. Humans and animals negotiate ‘conflict’ by fundamentally different means. Peterson is presenting us with examples not of animal morality, but of Darwinian evolution selecting behaviours that minimise conflict and strengthen social ties among group-dwelling animals. Take his examples of ‘you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’ in the animal kingdom. Chimpanzees, for instance, spend an inordinate amount of time grooming each other because grooming serves an important social function in maintaining group ties, and strong chimpanzee communities increase the chance of individual members surviving. Human beings, however, negotiate conflict through socially created values and codes of conduct. We are able to behave morally because we are uniquely able to exert some self-control, reflect on our own behaviour, put ourselves in the shoes of other people and make judgements. If one reduces everything to its simplest form then one can find parallels between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. But this kind of philistinism does not deepen our understanding of human beings and human society or indeed of animal behaviour. For instance, Peterson’s approach strips a concept like empathy of any deeper meaning. ‘I would prefer to consider empathy as appearing in two different but related forms, contagious and cognitive’, he writes. Contagious empathy is ‘the process in which a single bird, startled by some sudden movement, takes off in alarm and is instantly joined by the entire flock’. Cognitive empathy ‘is contagious empathy pressed through a cognitive filter: a brain or mind’. In other words, these two types of empathy are just different forms of the same thing. But there is a world of difference between an instinctual connection between organisms – including some of our instinctual responses, such as yawning when others yawn – and human empathy involving a Theory of Mind, that is, the ability to recognise that one’s own perspectives and beliefs can be different from someone else’s. Once children are able to think about thoughts in this way, their thinking is lifted to a different level. Peterson, however, dismisses the ability to think about thoughts as a veneer covering basic primal urges: ‘It is extremely easy to define morality by identifying this or that manifestation of human morality that might indeed be uniquely ours – written codes, cultural elements, intellectual analysis, an elaborate conscience, a fine-tuned sense of guilt – and thereby fail to recognise morality as it appears elsewhere, in other species.’ The search for homologies - characteristics shared between species that were present in a common ancestor – is an entirely legitimate enterprise. It can shed some light on the evolutionary origins of particular physiological or behavioural traits. But Peterson takes the giant leap from stating the blatantly obvious – that many of our organs are homologous with those of other animals - to absurdly asking us to imagine morality as merely an instinctive emotional response. He writes: ‘We tend to believe in the uniqueness of our own human organs… but the vast majority of such organs appear in similar form among many other species.’ It is true that other animals have eyes, ears, noses, hearts, brains and many other organs in common with us. It is neither novel nor contentious to point out that we are physiologically very similar to many other animals. We are the product of evolution after all. But acknowledging our physiological similarity to many other animals does not necessarily lead to the acceptance of behavioural, cognitive, emotional or, indeed, moral continuities.  Human beings, unlike other animals, are not determined by instinctual drives. We are able to reflect on and make judgements about our own and others’ actions, and as a result we are able to make considered moral choices. We are not born with this ability. As the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget showed, children progress from a very limited understanding of morality to a more sophisticated understanding – involving, for instance, the consideration of the motives and intentions behind particular acts. So, for pre-school children, a child who accidentally breaks several cups, when doing what he’d been asked to do by an adult, is ‘naughtier’ than one who breaks one cup while trying to steal some sweets. Young children judge actions by their outcomes or consequences rather than by their intentions. Claiming that our morality is merely based on ‘gut instincts’ ignores the transformations children go through in their moral understanding from infancy to adolescence. While Peterson downplays human abilities, he exaggerates animal abilities. So he says monkeys and apes ‘can appreciate the connection between seeing and knowing, and thus possess an awareness of the awareness of others’. He uses an anecdote from primatologist Frans de Waal’s 1982 book Chimpanzee Politics to show that chimps are capable of deception: ‘Orr, an adolescent female [...] would scream while she was having sex. During surreptitious copulation with younger males, however, her screams sometimes caught the attention of the alpha, who would do his mighty best to interrupt the couple. Eventually, Orr learned to suppress her vocalisations when mating with lower-ranking males, while she continued screaming whenever she mated with the alpha.’ But, as I argue in my book Just Another Ape?, anecdotal evidence can be highly deceptive. Even if there was consistent evidence that apes deceive their fellows, the question still remains whether they are aware of what they are doing. Deception itself does not necessarily imply intentionality. To be able to deceive intentionally, an animal would need to be able to think about the intentions, knowledge and beliefs of those they are deceiving. In other words, they would need to have a Theory of Mind. There are many examples of deception in the wild that clearly do not involve a Theory of Mind. For instance, if threatened, the Eyed Hawk-moth flaps open its wings to reveal large eyespots. But as evolutionary psychologist Richard Byrne points out: ‘Moths [expose their “eyes”] to looming cardboard squares and to looming animals that could eat them, alike… So we have real reason to doubt that they understand about mental states of predators.’ (1) Daniel Povinelli, who ran the Cognitive Evolution Group at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, is adamant that no test to date has reliably demonstrated that even chimpanzees – the masters of deceit, according to Peterson – have an understanding of the mental life of others (2). For example, Povinelli tested whether chimps understood that their begging gestures would only be effective if the person they were begging from could actually see them. So in one experiment, one caretaker had a blindfold covering her mouth and the other had a blindfold covering her eyes. Povinelli found that the chimpanzees did not differentiate between the caretaker who could clearly see them (the one with the blindfold over her mouth) and the caretaker who could not see them (the one with the blindfold over her eyes) when making begging gestures (3). So even if animals are found to deceive, that does not necessarily imply that they know that they are deceiving. The animal may just be very good at picking up useful routines that bring them food, sex or safety, without necessarily having any understanding or insight into what they are doing. No doubt Peterson would accuse me of what he terms ‘false anthropo-exemptionalism’ – that is, ‘an exaggerated insistence on discontinuity’ between human beings and other species. His biological determinism prevents him from recognising that something new - something quite exceptional - emerged in the course of the evolution of humans. Human beings have something that no other animal has: an ability to participate in a collective cognition. Because we, as individuals, are able to draw on the collective knowledge of humanity, in a way no animal can, our individual abilities go way beyond what evolution has endowed us with. Our species is no longer constrained by our biology. Many scientists reject any notion that human beings have abilities that are profoundly different from other animals. To do so, they fear, will give ammunition to creationists and spiritualists. But we do not need spiritual or ‘magical’ explanations to grasp that the difference between human beings and other animals is fundamental rather than one of degrees. There are some fascinating theories put forward in the last decade that go quite far in explaining the emergence, through evolution, of uniquely powerful human abilities. We don’t know how or when, but there must have been some gene mutation or set of mutations tens of thousands of years ago that endowed us with the unique ability to participate in a collective cognition. Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, persuasively argues in The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition that at some point after the ape and human line diverged – and possibly only a few hundred thousand years ago - the human lineage evolved a motivation to share emotional states with each other, leading to a unique ability to engage in ‘shared intentionality’. This motivation to engage with other humans emotionally is manifest in early infancy. Tomasello writes: ‘Human understanding of others as intentional beings makes its initial appearance at around nine months of age, but its real power becomes apparent only gradually as children actively employ the cultural tools that this understanding enables them to master, most importantly language.’ A small difference in our innate abilities led to a unique connection between human minds - allowing us to learn through imitation and collaboration – leading to cumulative cultural evolution and the transformation of the human mind.  As I argue in Just Another Ape?: ‘It is this unique ability to copy complex actions and strategies (even those that the individual doing the copying would never have been able to come up with on their own), along with unique forms of cooperation and an ability to teach, that creates the uniquely powerful “ratchet effect” in human culture, whereby gains are consolidated and built on rather than having to be rediscovered.’ There are very many unanswered questions regarding how and why our human genetic make-up evolved. But even if we did have all the answers, we would not – as a result of these insights – be able to explain why we behave the way we do today, or the ethical codes by which we currently live. The evolution of the human genetic make-up is merely the precondition for the emergence of distinctly human cultural abilities. We need to look to cultural evolution, rather than genetic evolution, to explain the vast gulf that exists between the capabilities and achievements of humans and those of other animals. Human beings are capable of making judgements about our own and other people’s behaviour, and have the capacity consciously to change the way we behave and society as whole. We are not perfect and never will be, but we are special and unique among the animal kingdom. As sociologist Frank Furedi argues in Debating Humanism: ‘Most important of all we need to understand that whatever the mistakes that we have made we can extract from them lessons that can guide us to move forward’. (4) animals, genetics, book reviews 2011-06-17T08:05:07+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/The_chasm_that_separates_great_apes_from_humans/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/The_chasm_that_separates_great_apes_from_humans/#When:13:26:18Z Jon Cohen’s new book reminds us that, for all the claims that apes and human beings are ‘98.5 per cent the same’ in terms of genetics, there is still an unfathomable gap between us.Today we are often told that us ‘arrogant’ human beings need to get off our anthropocentric pedestal. We are not as special as we think; we are ‘just another ape’. Peter Singer, the so-called father of the animal rights movement, claims that the great apes - that is, orang-utans, gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos - are not only our closest living relatives; they also possess many of the characteristics that were once considered to be unique to humans. When I met one of the world’s foremost primatologists, Frans de Waal, in 2005, to discuss his book Our Inner Ape: The Past and Future of Human Nature, he told me: ‘Genetically, we are 98.5 per cent identical to chimps and bonobos, and mentally, socially and emotionally we are probably also 98.5 per cent identical. We love to emphasise that little difference that exists and cling to it and make a big deal out of it, but the similarities vastly outnumber the differences.’ Similarly, Deborah Fouts, co-director of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute based in Central Washington University, although conceding that ‘[chimpanzees] haven’t built a rocket ship to the moon’, asserts that ‘we’re not that different’. In his new book Searching for What Makes Us Human, in Rainforests, Labs, Sanctuaries, and Zoos, American science journalist Jon Cohen suggests that it might now be time to emphasise the differences between us and our evolutionary cousins. He writes: ‘There is something fundamentally backward about the “almost human” rubric for chimps. From everything I can tell, no chimpanzee looks at a human and wonders: is this where I came from? Nor do chimps ponder the possibility that we represent where they are heading. Yet humans from every culture look at chimpanzees and see hints of their primitive selves.’ Cohen recounts a number of tales from his travels around the world, when he met both with chimps and their researchers. His journey includes world-renowned genetics labs, rainforests in Uganda, sanctuaries in Iowa, and experimental enclaves in Japan. At times, the book frustratingly reads like a collection of tangentially related articles, where Cohen’s argument is often hidden or lost; but nonetheless there are many interesting insights into the world of ape research. For instance, cutting-edge genetics research has shed some light on the conundrum of the one per cent difference between the genes of chimps and humans. ‘The nearly-identical molecular makeup does not lead to nearly identical organisms’, Cohen points out. The differences between humans and chimps are vast. ‘We have bigger and more complex brains, fully-fledged language and writing, sophisticated tools, the control of fire, cultures that become increasingly complex, permanent structures in which to live and work, and the ability to walk upright and travel far and wide’, Cohen writes. And we differ not only in terms of our behaviour and how we live, but also in terms of our anatomy and susceptibility and resistance to different diseases. Chimps miscarry much less frequently than humans, and males ejaculate far more sperm. ‘A one per cent genetic difference accounts for all this?’, Cohen asks. The publication of the draft of the chimpanzee genome in September 2005 may have provided us with some of the answers. ‘Just as the research team provided the best validation yet of a one per cent difference, it also revealed the most dramatic evidence of the figure’s limitations’, says Cohen, explaining: ‘To begin with, the number does not factor in the many stretches of DNA that have been inserted in or deleted from the genomes… But more striking still, the chimpanzee genome project highlighted the importance of the biological knobs that control gene expression.’ In Not a Chimp, Jeremy Taylor similarly argues that the genetic gap between humans and chimpanzees is far larger than molecular biology first indicated. Some of the important differences between the genomes of chimps and humans are in the regulation of gene expression. So a small change can make an immense difference. Having investigated the ape-language field for my book Just Another Ape?, I was especially interested in what Cohen had to say about apes’ purported ability to acquire human-like language. During one of his journeys, Cohen met two of the stars of the ape-language world: the bonobo Kanzi and his half-sister, Panbanisha. He writes: ‘If they have language, I did not witness it. If a three-year-old human showed as little response to what I said, I would think the child had a hearing problem or was psychologically impaired.’ The 1960s and 70s were the heyday of ape-language research, but the field imploded in the 1980s after Columbia University researcher, Herbert Terrace, published the findings of his attempts to teach the chimp Nim Chimpsky American Sign Language (ASL). Not only did Terrace conclude that Nim was incapable of creating sentences; his team also analysed films of other high-profile ASL-using apes, including Washoe the chimp and Koko the gorilla, and decided that apes had a ‘severely restricted’ ability to learn more than ‘isolated symbols.’ There was no evidence of them being able to create sentences. The field became the butt of jokes, Cohen points out, quoting the linguist Noam Chomsky: ‘It’s as likely that an ape will prove to have a language ability as there is an island somewhere with a species of flightless birds waiting for humans to teach them to fly.’ Cohen rightly concedes that apes do communicate with each other in the wild, but their communications by no means reach the status of language. He writes: ‘Chimpanzees, as far as scientists can tell, only vocalise about the here and now. They do not talk about yesterday or tomorrow, their dreams or fears, loves lost or sought – all of which would require using words as symbols.’ At the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Centre in Leipzig, Germany, Cohen was given a tour by its director, Josep Call. Call and his team have carried out comparative research on two-year-old human children and adult chimps and orang-utans, and have found that human children significantly outperform apes on social cognition tasks even at this young age. This shows that humans are not just social, Call says, but ‘ultra social’. It is our unique ability to connect with other minds that has allowed us to advance through cumulative cultural transmission. Michael Tomasello, director of the Leipzig centre’s department of developmental and comparative psychology, told Cohen: ‘If you raise a human baby on a desert island outside of any kind of culture, that child’s cognitive abilities as an adult would be very similar to other apes. What’s really different is something in the direction of culture. All of the things we consider our highest achievements, including language, symbolic mathematics and social institutions like governments and universities… these are cultural products. This isn’t one person’s brainpower. These are collective efforts.’ Because chimpanzees cannot teach or truly imitate, their cultural learning is severely limited. As Call told Cohen, it would be possible for a single chimpanzee to invent all the achievements of other chimpanzees within its lifetime. ‘A smart human could not invent a car or even the thing you are writing with’, Call told Cohen. ‘Or imagine if you had to invent algebra in a lifetime and invent Arabic numerals. Without that given to you by your culture, you’re not going to get there.’ Back in the US, Cohen spoke to David Premack, the man who came up with the concept of ‘Theory of Mind’. He has carried out extensive comparative research on chimps and humans, concluding that only humans can teach and correct themselves. Premack writes: ‘It is no coincidence that humans both practise and teach, whereas other species do neither. A species that practises but does not teach – that corrects itself but does not correct others – will probably never be found. Nor will a species of the opposite kind, one that teaches but does not practise, [one that] corrects others but not itself.’ Although the field of primate research is littered with anthropomorphism – as Premack told Cohen, too many of his former colleagues were ‘chimp huggers’ who ‘confused chimps with humans’ – there has been some fascinating research in recent decades, and key theoretical breakthroughs have been made. Cohen is lucky to have had the opportunity to meet so many of those who have been at the forefront of these innovations, and to discuss their findings and insights with them. animals, genetics, book reviews 2011-01-28T13:26:18+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/are_we_just_another_ape/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/are_we_just_another_ape/#When:13:49:53Z Today human beings are constantly denigrated. Prominent philosophers, scientists, social scientists, novelists and aristocrats have gone so far as to call for the mass culling – or even elimination – of humans. Orange-prize winning author Lionel Shriver recently wrote ‘if we [were to] disappear, another form of life will take our place – creatures beautiful, not so self-destructive, or simply weird. That’s cheerful news, really’. Sadly, this notion of the human race as a problem is increasingly mainstream. Today’s misanthropic cultural outlook – one that continually denigrates humans and blurs the differences between humans and other animals – needs to be challenged. The main challenge we face today is to uphold a human-centred morality – one that always considers the interest of humans over and above those of animals. Since life began several billion years ago, 99.999 percent of all species that have ever existed on Earth have become extinct. Species come and species go. Nature is amazing: it has created all kinds of weird and wonderful species. But it is also brutal: ‘red in tooth and claw’ as the English poet Alfred Tennyson aptly described it. In the largest mass extinction on Earth 250 million years ago – the Permian-Triassic extinction – it is estimated that 90 percent of all species disappeared. If a species goes extinct it is not a loss in and of itself – other than that it may be a loss to human beings – because no other species would be aware of what has been lost. If humans were to be wiped out, however, we would lose something quite exceptional: culture and, with that, civilisation. We are the product of evolution like all other animals, but something amazing emerged – possibly around 60,000 years ago – that transformed us. That is, a capacity for cultural transmission. Some chance mutation or chance mutations must have allowed us to at some point in our past to start learning from each other in a qualitatively new way and, as a result, build upon the achievements of our fellows and previous generations. It is this unique ability to copy complex actions and strategies (even those that the individual doing the copying would never have been able to come up with on their own), along with unique forms of co-operation and the ability to teach, that allows us to consolidate and build on the achievements of our fellows, rather than continually having to re-invent the wheel in the way other animals have to. Even our closest living relatives – the great apes – cannot ape, but can only copy actions that they themselves may have been able to invent on their own. They try to reproduce the result of an action without understanding how it was achieved. The fact that it takes chimps up to four years to acquire the necessary skills to select and adequately use tools to crack nuts raises serious questions about their ability to reflect on what their fellow apes are doing and copy the steps involved in cracking nuts. Instead they get there by trial and error. Human children, on the other hand, even as young as one year of age show great flexibility in how they imitate – being able to focus on the sequence of bodily actions used to achieve an outcome, or on the outcome itself, or, indeed, on the goal or intention of the person they are copying. It is this ability to learn from others and connect with each other in a uniquely powerful way that sets us apart from all other species. Our accomplishments are the outcome of us being able to put our heads together and achieve so much more than we could ever achieve on our own. Of course, humans are not perfect – and never will be. But at least we can reflect on our actions, consider how to improve on our successes and learn from our mistakes, make moral choices and do our best to improve not just ourselves but the society in which we live. 2010-11-18T13:49:53+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/animals_are_useless_unless_humans_make_use_of_them/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/animals_are_useless_unless_humans_make_use_of_them/#When:14:11:05Z We have built cities, cured diseases and created art, yet some people think humans are worth no more than apes.Over the next two weeks, spiked will be publishing a series of articles based on talks given at the Battle of Ideas festival, which took place on 30 and 31 October at the Royal College of Art in London. Here, Helene Guldberg explains why animals should not have rights and what makes humans unique. Should apes have rights? Absolutely not. Rights are a human concept, premised on the idea of autonomous individuals, who should be treated equally before the law. Animals are not autonomous. They cannot take responsibility for their own actions, and they cannot – like us humans – subordinate their individual natural drives to the interest of society as a whole. In fact, they do not have society. It is therefore nonsensical to grant animals rights. But what about the question of whether animals should have any special protection, such as protection from deliberate harm? My argument is that we should always consider the interest of humans over and above those of animals, which is why animal research – which can further medical advance and human knowledge – is a morally good thing to do. This is not to say I’d advocate wanton cruelty to animals. Destructiveness for the sake of being destructive - such as taking pleasure from hammering nails into the eyes of cats - is degrading to humans. It is inhumane and uncivilized. But it is only so because of what it tells us about the person who is carrying out the act and the effect it has on other humans. That’s because animals only have value in relations to humans. They have no value in and of themselves. Likewise, if a species goes extinct, it is not a loss in and of itself – other than that it may be a loss to human beings – because no other species would be aware of what has been lost. Since life began several billion years ago, 99.999 per cent of all species that have ever existed on Earth have become extinct. Species come and species go. Nature is amazing: it has created all kinds of weird and wonderful species. But it is also brutal: ‘red in tooth and claw’, as the English poet Alfred Tennyson aptly described it. In the largest mass extinction on Earth 250million years ago - the Permian-Triassic extinction - an estimated 90 per cent of all species disappeared. If humans were to be wiped out, however, we would lose something quite exceptional: that is, culture – and with that civilisation. We are the product of evolution like all other animals, but something amazing emerged – possibly around 60,000 years ago – that transformed us. That is, a capacity for cultural transmission. Some chance mutation or chance mutations must have allowed us, at some point in our past, to start learning from each other in a qualitatively new way and, as a result, to build upon the achievements of our fellows and previous generations. For most of the six million years since our lineage diverged from that of our common ape ancestors, we remained little more than glorified chimpanzees in how we lived and the tools we used. But around 60,000 years ago human history took off. That’s when we see far more sophisticated tool-making emerging, more developed hunting techniques, even travel across oceans, cave drawings and more. Being able to learn from and build upon the clever inventions of our fellows meant that we were able to start exerting some control over nature. We have been able to make life-changing inventions. We’ve built cities, nation states, governments. We have invented the alphabet and other forms of written symbols, and we have produced art and literature. We can now diagnose illnesses and cure them. We have a sense of right and wrong, and we can debate and discuss where we want to take society. Animals live in the here and now: hand to mouth. They may be social, in terms of operating in packs, but they do not connect with each other in the way human beings do. They cannot truly imitate – not even great apes. In other words, apes cannot ape. Our uniqueness rests on our ability to connect with each other in a uniquely powerful way. Human beings can imitate with a high degree of flexibility from their second year of life. Infants can look at what somebody else is doing and make inferences about their goals and intentions. They can observe the various steps someone takes to achieve an outcome, or to produce an end product. Apes seem to be able only to look at the outcome of what some other being has done, and then they have to invent their own way of achieving that outcome through trial and error. In the end, they might achieve the same result, or get the same result in a different way. This is why, I would argue, in the right conditions, a clever ape could invent all the ape behaviour that we see today. But it’s absolutely not the case that any human being, however clever they are, could invent from scratch anything from bicycles and combustion engines to X-rays and the harnessing of electricity. This is because our learning is cumulative. We build on the achievements of previous generations. Human beings are unique in that we have created culture – and with that civilisation – and in the process we have made ourselves. If we lose sight of our unique capacities we will lose the power to improve our condition and further develop humanity. The main challenge we face today is therefore to uphold a human-centred morality – one that puts human beings first - restoring confidence in the capacity of humans to change society for the better. animals, animal research, genetics 2010-11-03T14:11:05+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/orang-utans_are_not_remotely_like_humans/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/orang-utans_are_not_remotely_like_humans/#When:09:15:40Z Experts should know better than to claim that great apes can communicate in a similar way to human beings.Time and again, we are told that humans are not that special after all: abilities previously thought to be uniquely human are now purportedly evident amongst the great apes. The most recent claim, published in the current issue of the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, is that orang-utans use mime to make themselves understood. ‘Given pantomime’s sophisticated attributes, some consider it to be uniquely human’, the article’s authors, Anne Russon and Kristin Andrews, write. ‘Pantomime is gesture in which meaning is acted out; in humans, it can be as simple as twirling a finger to indicate a vortex or as complex as telling the Ramayana.’ The researchers analysed 20 years of data on previously captive orang-utans now living in the forest in Indonesian Borneo. They identified 18 cases of pantomime, 14 of which were addressed to humans and four to other orang-utans. One example, we are told, involved an orang-utan reminiscing through miming a past event. A female orang-utan named Kikan had injured her foot the previous week and a member of staff had used a fig leaf to seal the wound. This first-aid was apparently re-enacted by Kikan. Russon said: ‘She’s not asking for anything, which is the most common aim observed of great ape communication, but appears simply to be sharing a memory with the person who helped her when she hurt her foot.’ There is no doubt that apes and other animals are able to communicate with each other in the wild – whether through courtship rituals, dominance and territorial displays, or food and alarm calls. For instance, dogs bare their teeth and growl to signal to other animals to leave their territory. Cats try to look bigger and more menacing by puffing out the hair on their tails to signal to other animals not to oppose them. Subordinate chimpanzees use grunts directed to dominant chimpanzees to signal appeasement or submission. However, these are instinctive communications. The evidence for any animal being able to communicate intentionally – let alone ‘be able to make sense of their world by telling stories, and to relay their thoughts about the world to others’ as Andrews claims - is still non-existent. Michael Tomasello, author of a number of fascinating books, including Origins of Human Communication, who has spent many years studying the abilities of great apes at the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Leipzig, tells me: ‘Without some kind of control observations we cannot be sure what [the orang-utans] are doing.’ For instance, ‘How often do the orang-utans make those hand movements in other, irrelevant contexts?’, he asks. The fact is that we do not know whether Kikan was trying to communicate her gratitude - or any other meaning - or whether she was merely making some random hand movements. As I argue in my new book, Just Another Ape?, one needs to go beyond first impressions and anecdotal evidence in order to establish the differences, and the alleged similarities, between human beings and the great apes. The researchers’ identification and description of a set of behaviours could be interpreted in a number of different ways. And even if there was evidence that some of the behaviours served a communicative function, we do not know whether this communication was intentional or not. Daniel Povinelli, former director of the Cognitive Evolution Group at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who has carried out some groundbreaking research to compare and contrast how humans and chimpanzees understand the world around them, tells me that the apes may merely have been emitting random behaviours. ‘[Emit] a random behaviour. If you are reinforced, stop. If more of what you want is still available, repeat the behaviour that was reinforced. If it’s all gone, stop. If you do not get what you want, [emit] a different random behaviour. If nothing you want is present, do nothing.’ It is sloppy simply to identify and describe a particular behaviour - or set of behaviours - and conclude that this is evidence of animals being able intentionally to convey meanings to other beings. Even if the set of behaviours was shown to serve a communicative function, it does not mean that the ape was communicating intentionally: it may be the result of random behaviours or instinctive communications. Take the example of vervet monkeys. Groundbreaking research by Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney in the 1980s on vervet monkeys in the wild showed a seemingly sophisticated method of communicating about the proximity of predators. Living on the edge of the savannah, vervet monkeys have many predators. Their chance of survival would therefore be greatly increased if they were able to respond appropriately to different vocal warnings. Indeed, it was found that the vervets have specific alarm calls for specific predators: the alarm call for an eagle is different from that for a leopard, which in turn is different from that for a python. From the outset of their study, Seyfarth and Cheney stressed that it could not be established from these initial findings whether the callers vocalised with the explicit intent of referring to the proximity of a predator. They were careful to point out that there was no evidence that the monkeys had ‘thoughts’ that they intentionally conveyed to others – such as ‘Oh no! I see a dangerous leopard. I had better warn the others quickly and make sure that they know it is a predator that may get us unless we seek safety in a tree.’ In fact, further research shows that the caller’s vocalisations are not ‘intended’ for other animals. In Origins of Human Communications, Tomasello demonstrates that the alarm calls primarily benefits the caller – by, for instance, distracting the predator – and that the other vervets are merely informed by ‘eavesdropping’. This was demonstrated by Cheney and Seyfarth in follow-up experiments where vervet mothers would see ‘predators’ approaching their offspring. The mothers would not give the alarm calls unless they themselves were at risk. In The Language Instinct, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker persuasively takes apart many of the ‘preposterous’ claims made about apes’ and other animals’ language abilities. He stresses that we all have a tendency to anthropomorphise – thinking that animals are capable of a lot more than they are in reality. ‘People who spend a lot of time with animals are prone to developing indulgent attitudes about their powers of communication’, he writes, giving the example of his great-aunt Bella who ‘insisted in all sincerity that her Siamese cat Rusty understood English’. But we should expect more of those involved in ape language studies. They should be prepared to evaluate critically the data from their studies. Instead, many of the claims of those involved in ape language studies are not much more scientific than those of his great-aunt, Pinker argues. I would extend that criticism to Russon and Andrews. For instance, in the research paper they claim that one female orang-utan acted out events in order to help her make sense of her experience. She ‘re-enacted her activities with her partner after deliberately turning her back on him, probably to understand them’, they write. How on earth can we know that this is what the ape was doing? Another example is the so-called evidence of an adolescent male ‘pantomiming a request’. He picked a leaf and a stem in front of a human staff member and ‘with eye to eye contact, wiped dirt off his forehead with the leaf then gave the leaf to [the human] to request that she do the same.’ (1) But we cannot know that this is what he was ‘requesting’. He may merely have been randomly passing the leaf to the human. Ape communications are incomparable with human language. We debate and discuss ideas, construct arguments – drawing on past experiences and imagining future possibilities – in order to change the opinions of others. We pantomime. We create everything from great literature to nursery rhymes that help us make sense of the human condition, and we can pass this on down the generations: some nursery rhymes have survived centuries. We can communicate an infinite number of meanings and develop an infinite number of arguments. We can debate and discuss everything from international politics and economics to the most mundane issues. I cannot see even the remotest comparison between the beauty, power and complexity of human language and an ape wiping its forehead with a leaf and passing it to another being. animals 2010-08-19T09:15:40+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/set_children_free_by_trusting_adults/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/set_children_free_by_trusting_adults/#When:09:18:35Z We can only give kids the independence they need if we have faith in other people to look out for them.Oliver and Gillian Schonrock have inspired a heated debate this week about how much independence children should have. The couple from south London have been allowing their eight-year-old daughter and five-year-old son to cycle one mile unsupervised from their home to school. Alleyn’s Junior School raised concerns about the parents allowing their children to travel unsupervised. The headmaster, Mark O’Donnell, told a Sunday newspaper that the school was under obligation to consider the children’s safety. ‘If a school feels a child in their care is at risk, they have a legal responsibility to notify the local authority’, he said. In a follow-up statement, the school said that they had not actually reported the parents to the local authority, but added: ‘Both children are below the nine-years-of-age threshold currently recommended by the local authority (Southwark Council) for crossing the road independently. Moreover, Bikeability, the government-approved, cycle-training organisation, itself does not recognise a child’s ability to cycle unsupervised and independently until they are over 11 years of age.’ Earlier this week, I was invited by BBC Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine Show to defend Oliver and Gillian Schonrock. I was debating Rebecca Andrews, a former police officer and author of Policing Innocence: Is Your Child Really Safe? Andrews’ concern was that by allowing the children to carry out a daily ‘routine’ without supervision, the Schonrocks were putting them at risk of being targeted by paedophiles. Apparently, this is what the McCanns - whose daughter Madeleine disappeared after being left alone at a Portuguese holiday resort in 2007 - were guilty of. Andrews argued that just as you shouldn’t leave your handbag on the seat of your car – increasing the risk of the car being broken into – you shouldn’t allow your children to come under the radar of potential paedophiles. To me, Andrews’ position is absurd and alarmist. If anyone is irresponsible here, it is not the Schonrocks for giving their children more freedom and responsibility, but the likes of Andrews for promoting such a negative message about other adults. As I argue in my recent book Reclaiming Childhood, today’s ‘stranger danger’ panic could create a hostile – and, as a result, a more dangerous - world for children. Of course, children shouldn’t grow up naive to the dangers of the world, but neither should we encourage the current generation to grow up fearing other adults. Strangers can play an important role in looking out for other people’s children. As a child, I remember being given specific instructions about never getting into strangers’ cars, and being particularly wary of strange men offering sweets in return for following them somewhere. We didn’t know anybody who this had happened to, but we took the stern and specific warning to heart. Other than that, we would expect adults – whether we knew them or not – to be there for us, and to help out if we ever got into trouble. Today we seem to expect the worst of people. As a consequence there is an assumption that adults will not look out for children. On one discussion board, a mother asked: ‘What if the child fell off her bike? Who would pick her up out of the road? What if there was a more serious accident?’ I am far more worried about the presumption that strangers would not step in to help than any possible small risk posed to the Schonrock children as they cycle to school (almost entirely on the pavement rather than the road, as it happens). It is precisely because of the paedophile panic that many would think twice about helping out. I would not hesitate to check whether a child who had fallen off his or her bike needed help, but a lone male would be less likely to do so. This is not because he wouldn’t care, but because of the fear of being suspected of having sinister motives. Andrews, if a little eccentric, is far from a lone voice warning about the risk from strangers. But, in relation to the Schonrock case, most people have raised concern about traffic rather than the danger of abduction. In a particularly odious piece in the Daily Telegraph (a paper that has on the whole published pieces in defence of the Schonrocks) one author wrote: ‘Waving off your babies to play in the traffic, and hoping they’ll survive on their wits is lazy, negligent and naive.’ Apparently, allowing children to travel to school unsupervised is tantamount to ‘chucking them into the sea with no life jacket’. The author asked what the mother of these children could be doing that was more important than ensuring the safety of her kids: ‘Who would she blame if her son was run over?’ Herself, no doubt. Just like any parent who tragically loses a child is likely to blame themselves. But that doesn’t mean it is a good idea to wrap children in cotton wool. It is understandable that parents worry about traffic, as roads are dangerous places, and children need to appreciate that cars can kill. But we cannot completely insulate our children from traffic. The car is the main form of transport for the majority of people, and there is a lot more traffic on the roads today than there was three decades ago. So children need to learn to cross the road. The age at which they should be allowed to negotiate traffic on their own will vary from child to child, and it is for parents to decide when their children are ready to do so. It is not necessarily an easy decision to make. But parents also need to weigh up the danger of insulating children from traffic and not allowing them to become sufficiently ‘streetwise’ when it comes to crossing the road on their own. Only two or three decades ago, nobody batted an eyelid on seeing five-year-olds cycling with older siblings unaccompanied by adults. Nor indeed were people taken aback by eight-year-olds being left in charge of their younger siblings. My sisters and I regularly looked after our younger brothers at that age. Things have changed, particularly in the UK. The much-quoted study One False Move shows a dramatic decrease in children’s independent mobility over the period of two decades. In 1971, 80 per cent of seven- and eight-year-old children in England were allowed to travel to school on their own; in 1990 the figure was only nine per cent. Figures from the UK Department for Transport (DfT) show that the proportion of primary-school children who walked or cycled to school unaccompanied was as low as five per cent in 2006. It was because they wanted to ‘recreate the simple freedom of our childhood’ that the Schonrocks decided to let their children make their own way to school. ‘We are trying to let them enjoy their lives and teach them a little bit about the risks of life’, said Oliver Schonrock. Good on them! We need more parents like the Schonrocks, who are prepared to go against the grain and give their children more freedom and responsibility. But more than anything, we need people to speak out against all the doom-mongers who would have the Schonrocks believe that they are feckless and irresponsible and that the world is full of dangerous people with sinister motives. Ultimately, parents will give children the independence they need only if they have sufficient trust in other adults – trust in them not harming but looking out for other people’s children. children and risk, parents and kids 2010-07-08T09:18:35+00:00 http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/why_we_are_different_from_apes/ http://www.heleneguldberg.co.uk/index.php/site/why_we_are_different_from_apes/#When:09:12:48Z Guest blog post, Eureka Zone, The TimesToday human beings are constantly denigrated. Prominent philosophers, scientists, social scientists, novelists and aristocrats have gone so far as to call for the destruction of humans. On becoming a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, David Attenborough warned that the recent increase in human population was having a devastating effect on ecology and pollution. ‘I’ve never seen a problem that would be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more’, he said. Prince Philip suggests he could help reduce the human footprint: ‘If I were reincarnated, I would wish to be returned to Earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels’. Sadly, this notion of the human race as a problem - or even a pest - is increasingly mainstream. Today’s misanthropic cultural outlook - one that continually denigrates humans and blurs the differences between humans and other animals, sorely needs to be challenged. The argument for human and animal equivalence is at its strongest in relation to our closest living relatives - the great apes. In my forthcoming book, Just Another Ape?, I therefore focus on the differences between human beings and apes - to show just how exceptional humans really are. It is an argument that needs to be put across - not only because it is historically and scientifically correct (even if ‘politically incorrect’), but because unless we have faith in our own abilities, society will stagnate. Whatever first impressions might tell us, apes are really not ‘just like us’. They do not have anything resembling human consciousness - the ability to think about a problem before approaching it, reflect on what they are doing while they are doing it and refine their actions accordingly. And the evidence for apes having human-like mental capacities is getting weaker and weaker as researchers develop more sophisticated ways of investigating what apes can and cannot do. Equally importantly, we humans are the only truly cultural animal - in the sense of being able to learn from each other’s clever feats through imitation, reflection and teaching. Because apes do not have this capacity they have not moved beyond their hand-to-mouth existence, and their lives have changed very little in the six million years since we ‘split’ from our common ancestor. While apes are still struggling to crack open nuts, humans have made life-changing inventions - from the cultivation of crops to the harnessing of electricity and life-saving vaccines and x-rays and much more. While apes are still struggling to communicate in the here-and-now, humans have invented alphabets and other forms of written symbols and ever more impressive means to disseminate the written word - from the invention of paper and ink to the typewriter and the internet. While apes are living in similar-sized groups as they did several million years ago, human beings have created cities, nation states, governments and global economic institutions. The differences in language, tool-use, self-awareness and insight between apes and humans are vast. A human child, even as young as two years of age, is intellectually head and shoulders above any ape. However, the question of whether apes have the rudiments of our unique human abilities - abilities that have allowed us to develop language, build cities, create great art and literature and much more - is an interesting one. An exploration of the extent to which apes resemble us may give us some insight into the evolutionary origins of human capabilities, but it will also show us how great the differences are between apes and humans. animals 2010-06-21T09:12:48+00:00