The three case-studies making up this chapter deal with unwitting anthropomorphism in forms not already discussed.

Hierarchy

In 3.4, unintended anthropomorphism was held to be partly responsible for the eventual disappointment of early hopes of bridging the great gap in knowledge between “what nerve cells do and how animals behave”. But anthropomorphism has served indirectly to frustrate those bridge-building hopes in another way, by compromising the important principle of a hierarchy among the causal mechanisms of behaviour. It was probably Tinbergen (1950, 1911) who brought this idea of hierarchical organization into the ethological mainstream, when he proposed it as one of the principles of the Grand Theory of instinct (see 3.1). This was unfortunate because “it came to grief in the general, deserved destruction of simplistic energy models”, although it was “a much more powerful principle in its own right” (R. Dawkins 1976a). The principle is now almost universally accepted in general biological theory and in behavioural theory specifically (Bullock 1957, 1965; Dethier & Stellar 1961; Medawar 1969b; Tavolga 1969; Tinbergen 1969; Hinde 1970, 1982, 1990; Anderson 1972; Ayala & Dobzhansky 1974; Fentress & Stilwell 1974; Baerends 1976; R. Dawkins 1976a; Bunge 1977; Granit 1977; Allen 1978, 1983; Gallistel 1980; Huntingford 1980; McFarland 1981; M. S. Dawkins 1983; Halliday & Slater 1983; Buss 1987; Szentágothai 1987; Weiskrantz 1987; Greenberg & Tobach 1989).