Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

323 Pages·2016·4.33 MB·English

For Catherine,
whom I was smart enough to marry
CONTENTS
Prologue
1 MAGIC WELLS
2 A TALE OF TWO SCHOOLS
3 COGNITIVE RIPPLES
4 TALK TO ME
5 THE MEASURE OF ALL THINGS
6 SOCIAL SKILLS
7 TIME WILL TELL
8 OF MIRRORS AND JARS
9 EVOLUTIONARY COGNITION
Notes
Bibliography
Glossary
Acknowledgments
Index

PROLOGUE
The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great
as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.
—Charles Darwin (1871)1
O
ne early November morning, while the days were getting colder, I noticed
that Franje, a female chimpanzee, was gathering all the straw from her bedroom.
She took it under her arm out onto the large island at the Burgers’ Zoo, in the
Dutch city of Arnhem. Her behavior took me by surprise. First of all, Franje had
never done this before, nor had we ever seen other chimps drag straw outside.
Second, if her goal was to stay warm during the day, as we suspected, it was
notable that she collected the straw while at a cozy temperature inside a heated
building. Instead of reacting to the cold, she was bracing for a temperature she
could not actually feel. The most reasonable explanation would be that she
extrapolated from the previous shivering day to the weather expected today. In
any case, later on she stayed nice and warm with little Fons, her son, in the straw
nest she’d built.
I never cease wondering about the mental level at which animals operate, even
as I know full well that a single story is not enough to draw conclusions. But
those stories inspire observations and experiments that do help us sort out what’s
going on. The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov reportedly once said, “The
most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is
not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’” I know this thought all too well. We go
through a long process of watching our animals, being intrigued and surprised by
their actions, systematically testing our ideas about them, and arguing with
colleagues over what the data actually mean. As a result, we are rather slow to
accept conclusions, and disagreement lurks around every corner. Even if the
initial observation is simple (an ape collects a pile of straw), the repercussions
can be enormous. The question as to whether animals make plans for the future,
as Franje seemed to be doing, is one that science is currently quite preoccupied
with. Specialists speak of mental time travel, chronesthesia, and autonoesis, but
I will avoid such arcane terminology and try to translate the progress into
ordinary language. I will relate stories of the everyday use of animal intelligence
as well as offer actual evidence from controlled experiments. The first tells us
what purpose cognitive capacities serve, while the second helps us rule out
alternative explanations. I value both equally, even though I realize that stories
make easier reading than experiments.
Consider the related question as to whether animals say goodbye as well as
hello. The latter is not hard to fathom. Greeting is a response to the appearance
of a familiar individual after an absence, such as your dog jumping up at you as
soon as you walk through the door. Internet videos of soldiers being saluted by
pets upon return from abroad suggest a connection between the length of
separation and the intensity of the greeting. We can relate to this connection
since it applies to us as well. No grand cognitive theories are necessary to
account for it. But what about saying goodbye?
We dread to say farewell to someone we love. My mother cried when I moved
across the Atlantic, even though we both realized that my absence would not last
forever. Saying goodbye presupposes the realization of future separation, which
is why it is rare in animals. But here, too, I have a story. I once trained a female
chimpanzee named Kuif to bottle-feed an adopted infant of her species. Kuif
acted in every way as the infant’s mother but lacked sufficient milk of her own
to nurse her. We would hand her a bottle of warm milk, which she would
carefully give to the baby ape. Kuif got so good at this that she’d even briefly
withdraw the bottle if the baby needed to burp. This project required that Kuif
and the baby, which she kept on her body day and night, be called inside for a
feeding during the daytime while the rest of the colony remained outside. After a
while we noticed that instead of coming in right away, Kuif would make a long
detour. She’d do the rounds on the island, visiting the alpha male, the alpha
female, and several good friends, giving each one a kiss, before she’d walk
toward the building. If the others were asleep, she’d wake them up for her
goodbyes. Again, the behavior itself was simple, yet the precise circumstances
made us wonder about the underlying cognition. Like Franje, Kuif seemed to be
thinking ahead.
But what about skeptics who believe that animals are by definition trapped in
the present, and only humans contemplate the future? Are they making a
reasonable assumption, or are they blinkered as to what animals are capable of?
And why is humanity so prone to downplay animal intelligence? We routinely
deny them capacities that we take for granted in ourselves. What is behind this?
In trying to find out at what mental level other species operate, the real challenge
comes not just from the animals themselves but also from within us. Human
attitudes, creativity, and imagination are very much part of the story. Before we
ask if animals possess a certain kind of intelligence, especially one that we
cherish in ourselves, we need to overcome internal resistance to even consider
the possibility. Hence this book’s central question: “Are we smart enough to
know how smart animals are?”
The short answer is “Yes, but you’d never have guessed.” For most of the last
century, science was overly cautious and skeptical about the intelligence of
animals. Attributing intentions and emotions to animals was seen as naïve “folk”
nonsense. We, the scientists, knew better! We never went in for any of this “my
dog is jealous” stuff, or “my cat knows what she wants,” let alone anything more
complicated, such as that animals might reflect on the past or feel one another’s
pain. Students of animal behavior either didn’t care about cognition or actively
opposed the whole notion. Most didn’t want to touch the topic with a ten-foot
pole. Fortunately, there were exceptions—and I will make sure to dwell on
those, since I love the history of my field—but the two dominant schools of
thought viewed animals as either stimulus-response machines out to obtain
rewards and avoid punishment or as robots genetically endowed with useful
instincts. While each school fought the other and deemed it too narrow, they
shared a fundamentally mechanistic outlook: there was no need to worry about
the internal lives of animals, and anyone who did was anthropomorphic,
romantic, or unscientific.
Did we have to go through this bleak period? In earlier days, the thinking was
noticeably more liberal. Charles Darwin wrote extensively about human and
animal emotions, and many a scientist in the nineteenth century was eager to
find higher intelligence in animals. It remains a mystery why these efforts were
temporarily suspended, and why we voluntarily hung a millstone around the
neck of biology—which is how the great evolutionist Ernst Mayr characterized
the Cartesian view of animals as dumb automatons.2 But times are changing.
Everyone must have noticed the avalanche of knowledge emerging over the last