Even though I recognize the need for rules in order for a society to function (regardless of species) I also recognize that, like all behavior their meaning depends on their context. In spite of what we may like to believe, nothing is written in stone.
This doesn’t mean that I’m one of those people who believes that rules were meant to be broken simply because they’re rules. Hardly. But I do believe that when new information makes it clear that rules that once held no longer do, then it’s time to let them go.
This podcast was triggered by a change in a once inviolate rule—that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light—that shocked the physics world in 2011. As it turns out, apparently a subatomic particle called a neutrino can. (You can read about the experiment in this article from the New York Times.) While few scientists want to publicly say that Einstein got it wrong, some already begin to speculate on what this might mean…
Which naturally got me thinking about what some consider those equally inviolate rules regarding animal cognition and emotion.
Under circumstances when long-established rules exist, how much proof is enough for a society to think the once unthinkable? How much would it take you to accept that something can travel faster than the speed of light? How about that animals are capable of cognition and emotion?
The answer to those questions results in an intellectual paradox in that sometimes the more we know about a subject, the more proof we need that existing rules no longer hold true. For those of us who can’t comprehend the complex rules of theoretical physics, the idea that a particle could move faster than the speed of light doesn’t seem that alien at all. Similarly when we’re not constrained by rules that limit cognition and emotion to Home sapiens, we more readily accept evidence of that those same capacities exist in animals.
What we don’t know is how much evidence it takes from either “side” of these debates to trigger a society to either reassert or scrap a rule, to reaffirm the old view of reality or to adopt a new one.
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