I's not. I don't think any of the involved scientists reject the idea right away. But that is besides the point. The point is to try and prove it in a scientific process so that we can know it, not merely believe.
A scientist may struggle to rigorously define nebulous concepts like 'love' in an empirical manner, and will particularly resist applying such terms to the behavior of non-human animals. They call doing so anthropomorphism, and rail against it. It's not scientific to assume dogs have human emotions, so they need to be careful about incorporating such assumptions into their scientific work. But then you get laymen picking up on this and saying things like "love is a human emotion and dogs aren't human. what seems to be love to you is merely food-seeking behavior." But this is not the appropriate way for dog owners to think about their dogs. In everyday contexts, people should be making these sort of intuitive assumptions about the way other people and animals feel, even though they aren't necessarily scientific beliefs.
And the argument that goes like 'a scientist cannot use emotions (or whatever) because it cannot be scientifically explained' makes no sense. Could be that one key part you're missing is: when a scientist cannot easily prove something that doesn't make it non-existing nor unusable, but a scientist doesn't have to turn to belief for that: a scientist can simply admit to not knowing and not caring how something works yet use it, likewise scientists are allowed to make assumptions. It's just that they'll always realize it's an assumption.
I'm for instance very well aware that my pets seem to love me and I know that me providing them food plays a big role in that and that it's likely (likeley, because assuming certain animals have no emotions would be equally wrong plus by now proven false already IIRC) very different kind of love than the one between humans. I fail to see how that is in any way not appropriate though. Despite realizing that the enjoyment of interaction between me and my pets is based on certain hormones being released in my body when I'm around them, my pets give me great joy, I do a lot for them, and I'm grieving for days if not weeks if one of them passes away.
Avoiding the anthropomorphism of animals is important when you're actively researching animals. But otherwise, leave that attitude in the lab.
Not sure why you bring that up, because that is not really an assumption, it's almost the definition of a species. And otherwise: yes. But again: realizing that it would be an assumption is healthy, imo.
But otherwise, leave that attitude in the lab.
Sorry, but hard no. It's not even an attitude, it's realism. Can you please try to understand that it's perfectly possible to realize what anthropomorphism is at all times, yet at the same time take great care of pets and have a typical pet-human relationship?
> It was unclear how their remains got deep into the cave system, however. There were no signs that predatorsbrought them into the chamber or that underground streams swept them there. So Berger’s team concluded that the bones had been deliberately placed
Interestingly enough, even in the 60's people thought humans were the only animals with intelligence and emotions. Here's an excerpt from Jane Goodall's PIMA interview[0]
> GOODALL: Yes. And when these Cambridge professors told me that only humans had personalities, minds, and emotions, I knew they were totally wrong because I had this great teacher when I was a child. That was my dog, Rusty. You can’t share your life in a meaningful way with a dog, a cat, a rabbit, a horse, a bird, and not know that we are not the only beings on this planet who are sentient and sapient.
Later...
> GOODALL: When I started in 1960, nobody had studied chimps in the wild. No scientist, that is. If, at that time you had gone into some of the indigenous people living deep in the rainforest, they would’ve told you chimpanzees used to make tools. They knew it. But, of course, now we are back on the scientific bandwagon. ... But there’s a wonderful book written by a psychologist, called The Mentality of Apes, Wolfgang Köhler, and he studied this colony of captive apes, and he described so many innovative uses of objects. But at that time, the scientific community said, “Oh, well, these were chimpanzees in captivity. Therefore, our human characteristics had rubbed off onto them. It’s nothing to do with what they, as wild individuals, would be capable of.” ...
Even now there are a lot of people who believe that there is a certain magic when discussing brains. Quite a lot of people think it would be impossible to build one, theoretically. I'll say it loud and clear, unless there's magic, there's no reason we can't -- theoretically -- build a brain. It must follow the same principles of physics that the rest of the universe does. I'll also say that a fuck ton of life is intelligent, even my idiot cat. Just look at how they dream, you can tell that tiny dumb brain can simulate its environment (or else they wouldn't try to eat, run in their sleep, or wake up to nightmares). I know AI can do a lot of things right now, but boy is it not close to this incredible thing that the smallest and stupidest mammal is doing with magnitudes lower computational budget. It really is quite impressive. But this is also why AI research should be so interesting, because there's still so much left that we haven't even scratched the surface of. It is possible to be highly critical in one hand and hold curiosity in the other. The details are important though and we must not be tricked by statistics. But the area we're moving into now is going to get murky really fast and I'd warn anyone from trusting metrics as a way to measure performance more than a guide, because there's a lot we don't know. But that's the fun of it all, the puzzle, the draw to research in the first place.
[0] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/jane-goodall-changed-the-wa...
I don't believe there is magic, but I do believe that the amount we do not know about the brain dwarfs by a magnificent margin that which we think we know. I'd be surprised if our understanding of the brain is even at 0.0001% of what it is actually doing.
How do you prove that something that lived 300.000 years ago could communicate?
However I think it seems likely that our cognitive ability to reason about linguistic structures is an adaptation of our ability to reason about making and using tools. Tools leave physical evidence, so if we can figure out an evolutionary relationship with language development we might make traction that way.