We need to spend a lot more time thinking about and observing dogs and cats, as well as wild animals. Before we make these claims about the things that they can't do. As I'm doing this emotion work now I have had to invite a whole bunch of my colleagues to come out of the closet. I think science is full of closet holists. I was thinking about how the notion of holism is so daunting because scientists get paid to dissect things, whether they're animals or neutrons.
Science aims to break things down, level by level by level.
But then when scientists try to reassemble larger systems, they find they can't do it. I was really taken by your whole notion of the different levels of self-organization. You said that it was very difficult to really write about or demonstrate the evolution of these morphic fields, but I think that this is a very hot area. The way you bring this stuff home is by talking about animals such as cats and dogs and horses and cows, the animals with whom most people are familiar. And these are the animals people know very well, much better than most professional animal researchers, who may spend time in the field but certainly don't live with the animals they research.