Bones to Pick - The Fossil Chronicles - page 192

Gallup is famous for having invented the mirror (or mark) test for
determining if animals have a sense of “me,” or self. He, thus, painted red
dye above the eyebrows and ears of a variety of anesthetized animals,
who were then placed in rooms that contained mirrors. Upon waking
and gazing into the mirrors, most animals reacted to their reflections as
if they were other animals (sometimes by threatening them). However,
when some animals, such as great apes (as opposed to monkeys), gazed
at their reflections, they touched the parts of their bodies that were
dyed and often tried to remove the paint. Gallup's interpretation was
that these animals possessed a sense of self. Although the list of self-
aware mammals has grown since Gallup did his pioneering work, only
a handful have yet passed the mirror test, including elephants, dolphins,
people, and, most recently (to some extent), pigs. 29
Maser and Gallup argue that a sense of self is an evolutionarily
advanced trait that must have developed in our ancestors before they
evolved an ability to reflect on their own thoughts and emotions: to be
aware that they were aware. This ability to reflect, in turn, would have
been a prerequisite for inferring the emotional states, motivations, and
intentions of others (an aptitude for “mind reading,” at which humans
excel, known as theory of mind, or ToM). 30 What, you may wonder, does
this have to do with religion? As Maser and Gallup put it, “God, as the
ultimate attribution, is a natural extension of our ability to reflect on our
own mental states. We typically use these reflections as a model for pre-
suming the mental life of others, but a logical extension of that capacity
is to use these reflections to infer the mentality of a theistic entity.” 31
As far as we know, only humans conceive of a god (or gods), and
Maser and Gallup believe that an evolved sense of self is a necessary
but not sufficient condition for this to happen. Their second condition
for the emergence of a belief in God is that our ancestors must have
had an understanding of death. Once hominins became self-aware and
also grasped that death occurs in others, their own inevitable deaths
became a concern. Thus, the concept of personal mortality became “a
major motivational component forcing into use our cognitive capac-