If I specify the criteria that lead me to such an inference, I can apply them to other animals. People do that intuitively. But sometimes it is rational to treat animals as though they had some human properties. I know you've been concerned with how animals and humans become what they are and how their behavior develops, and that's been the basis of a lot of your research. You seem to be able to describe in understandable language processes which many people find very complicated.
Some people see the process of growth and development as very simple.
They seem to think it is read out of the genes, and that when the human genome project is completed we shall have the Book of Life, which will give us a complete an understanding of all human nature. Others take the view that the developmental process is so immensely complicated that we shall never understand it properly. I take the view that, although on the surface developmental processes may look complicated, the underlying rules are analogous to those that underlie a game like chess. The rules of chess are simple, but the games that can be generated by those rules are enormously complex. What we have to do as scientists is try to understand rules that produce a design for a life.