Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

by Frans de Waal

At around the same time, Jakob von Uexküll, a German biologist, drew attention to the animal point of view, calling it its Umwelt.

His point was our limited ability to enter the inner lives of others, whether they are foreign humans or different organisms.

Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge. While the term cognition refers to the process of doing this, intelligence refers more to the ability to do it successfully.

The lesson is that before scientists test any animal, they need to know its typical behavior. The power of conditioning is not in doubt, but the early investigators had totally overlooked a crucial piece of information.

My own position is slightly different in that I prefer not to make any firm statements about something as poorly defined as consciousness. No one seems to know what it is. But for the same reason, I hasten to add, I’d never deny it to any species. For all I know, a frog may be conscious.

Needing a new term to make my point, I invented anthropodenial, which is the a priori rejection of humanlike traits in other animals or animallike traits in us.

The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals.

Griffin’s proposal to take animal cognition seriously led to a new label for this field: cognitive ethology.

Even the term nonhuman grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something. Poor things, they are nonhuman! When students embrace this jargon in their writing, I cannot resist sarcastic corrections in the margin saying that for completeness’s sake, they should add that the animals they are talking about are also nonpenguin, nonhyena, and a whole lot more.

It also takes respect. If we test animals under duress, what can we expect? Would anyone test the memory of human children by throwing them into a swimming pool to see if they remember where to get out?

a title to which I object, since I don’t believe in stupid animals—

British anthropologist Kenneth Oakley, in 1957, wrote Man the Toolmaker, which claimed that only humans make tools, he was well aware of Köhler’s observations of Sultan fitting sticks together. But Oakley refused to count this as tool manufacture, since it was done in reaction to a given situation rather than in anticipation of an imagined future.

“I feel that scientists holding to this definition are faced with three choices: They must accept chimpanzees as man, they must redefine man, or they must redefine tools.”

Now that I think of it, my distrust of language goes even deeper, because I am also unconvinced of its role in the thinking process. I am not sure that I think in words, and I never seem to hear any inner voices. This caused a bit of an embarrassment once at a meeting about the evolution of conscience, when fellow scholars kept referring to an inner voice that tells us what is right and wrong. I am sorry, I said, but I never hear such voices. Am I a man without a conscience, or do I—as the American animal expert Temple Grandin once famously said about herself—think in pictures?

Irene concluded that “for far too long, animals in general, and birds in particular, have been denigrated and treated merely as creatures of instinct rather than as sentient beings.”

You won’t often hear me say something like this, but I consider us the only linguistic species. We honestly have no evidence for symbolic communication, equally rich and multifunctional as ours, outside our species. It seems to be our own magic well, something we are exceptionally good at.

Countless theories have attempted to identify the benefits that language bestows upon our species and to explain why language may have arisen. In fact, an entire biennial international conference is devoted to exactly this topic, where speakers present more speculations and evolutionary scenarios than you can imagine.16 I myself take the rather simple view that the first and foremost advantage of language is to transmit information that transcends the here and now.

When a chimp holds out his hand to a friend who is eating, he is asking for a share, but when the same chimp is under attack and holds out his hand to a bystander, he is asking for protection. He may even point out his opponent by making angry slapping gestures in his direction. But although gestures are more context-dependent than other signals and greatly enrich communication, comparisons with human language remain a stretch.

Even if the connection with human language remains contentious, our appreciation of animal communication has greatly benefited from this flurry of research. As for the handful of language-trained animals, they have proven invaluable at showing what their minds are capable of. Since these animals respond to requests and prompts in a way that we find easy to interpret, the results speak to the human imagination and have been instrumental in breaking open the field of animal cognition.

But more likely, the ape was following the scientist’s body language more closely than we are used to. I regularly have this eerie impression that apes look right through me, perhaps because they are not distracted by language. By directing our attention to what others have to say, we neglect body language compared to animals, for whom it is all they have to go by.

Anyone who forbids the study of language origins must be scared of new ideas, as must anyone whose only answer to Mendelian genetics is state persecution.

As expressed by David Premack, “Humans command all cognitive abilities, and all of them are domain general, whereas animals, by contrast, command very few abilities, and all of them are adaptations restricted to a single goal or activity.”3 Humans, in other words, are a singular bright light in the dark intellectual firmament that is the rest of nature. Other species are conveniently swept together as “animals” or “the animal”—not to mention “the brute” or “the nonhuman”—as if there were no point differentiating among them. It is an us-versus-them world.

As the American primatologist Marc Hauser, inventor of the term humaniqueness, once said: “My guess is that we will eventually come to see that the gap between human and animal cognition, even a chimpanzee, is greater than the gap between a chimp and a beetle.”

Neo-Creationism is not to be confused with Intelligent Design, which is merely old creationism in a new bottle. Neo-Creationism is subtler in that it accepts evolution but only half of it. Its central tenet is that we descend from the apes in body but not in mind.

biology, the evolution-stops-at-the-head notion is known as Wallace’s Problem. Alfred Russel Wallace was a great English naturalist who lived at the same time as Charles Darwin and is considered the coconceiver of evolution by means of natural selection. In fact, this idea is also known as the Darwin-Wallace Theory. Whereas Wallace definitely had no trouble with the notion of evolution, he drew a line at the human mind. He was so impressed by what he called human dignity that he couldn’t stomach comparisons with apes.

He had mentioned massive interconnectivity in the brain, saying that consciousness arises from the number and complexity of neural connections. I have heard similar accounts from robot experts, who feel that if enough microchips connect within a computer, consciousness is bound to emerge. I am willing to believe it, even though no one seems to know how interconnectivity produces consciousness nor even what consciousness exactly is.

It was long thought that our brain contained more neurons than any other on the planet, regardless of its size, but we now know that the elephant brain has three times as many neurons—257 billion, to be exact. These neurons are differently distributed, though, with most of the elephant’s in its cerebellum.

The human brain has been called a “linearly scaled-up primate brain,” meaning that no areas are disproportionally large.8 All in all, the neural differences seem insufficient for human uniqueness to be a foregone conclusion. If we ever find a way of measuring it, consciousness could well turn out to be widespread. But until then some of Darwin’s ideas will remain just a tad too dangerous. This is not to deny that humans are special—in some ways we evidently are—but if this becomes the a priori assumption for every cognitive capacity under the sun, we are leaving the realm of science and entering that of belief.

When tested on physical tasks, such as memory, causality, and the use of tools, apes perform at about the same level as two-and-a-half-year-old children, but when it comes to social skills, such as learning from others or following others’ signals, they are left in the dust.

Still, even if the remaining differences hold up, there is little doubt that the blanket assertion that ToM is uniquely human must be downgraded to a more nuanced, gradualist view.39 Humans probably possess a fuller understanding of one another, but the contrast with other animals is not stark enough that extraterrestrials would automatically pick ToM as the chief marker that sets us apart.

Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives.

But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are still facing the mindset that animal cognition can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. It can’t be truly deep and amazing. Toward the end of a long career, many a scholar cannot resist shining a light on human talents by listing all the things we are capable of and animals not.

From the human perspective, these conjectures may make a satisfactory read, but for anyone interested, as I am, in the full spectrum of cognitions on our planet, they come across as a colossal waste of time. What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our pla...

There is also the issue of continued evolution. It is a widespread misconception that humans kept evolving while our closest relatives stopped. The only one who stopped, however, is the missing link: the last common ancestor of humans and apes, so named because it went extinct long ago. This link will forever remain missing unless we happen to dig up some fossil remains.

It is time for us to see them for what they are: talented team players who have no trouble suppressing conflicts within their group. A recent experiment at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago confirmed their cooperative skills. Scientists let a group of chimpanzees fish with dipsticks for ketchup that was stored in the holes of an artificial “termite” mound.

Sometimes animals coordinate as if they have agreed on a task division beforehand. We do not know how shared intentions and goals are communicated, but they do not seem to be orchestrated from above by leaders, as in humans. We develop a plan and put a hierarchy in place to manage its execution, which allows us to lay a railroad track across the country or build a huge cathedral that takes generations to complete.

Given how ill-defined consciousness is, it is not something we can affirm by majority vote or by people saying “Of course, they are conscious—I can see it in their eyes.” Subjective feelings won’t get us there. Science goes by hard evidence.

The ability to recognize oneself in the mirror is often viewed in absolute terms. According to Gallup, the pioneer of this field, a species either passes the mirror mark test and is self-aware, or it doesn’t and isn’t.9 Very few species do. For the longest time, only humans and the great apes passed, and not even all those. Gorillas used to flunk the mark test, leading to theories about why the poor things might have lost their self-awareness.

Self-awareness develops like an onion, building layer upon layer, rather than appearing out of the blue at a given age.16 For this reason, we should stop looking at the mark test as the litmus test of self-awareness. It is only one of many ways to find out about the conscious self.

I can’t count the number of times I have been called naïve, romantic, soft, unscientific, anthropomorphic, anecdotal, or just a sloppy thinker for proposing that primates follow political strategies, reconcile after fights, empathize with others, or understand the social world around them.

At times, the wall of skepticism seemed more ideological than scientific, a bit the way we biologists feel about creationists. However compelling the data we bring to the table, they never suffice. Things must be believed to be seen, as Willy Wonka sang, and entrenched disbelief is oddly immune to evidence. The “slayers” of the cognitive view were not open to it.

Neither possibility is a pleasant thought, because their deeper problem is evolutionary continuity. They can’t stand the notion of humans as modified apes. Like Alfred Russel Wallace, they feel that evolution must have skipped the human head. Although this view is currently on its way out in psychology, which under the sway of neuroscience is edging ever closer to the natural sciences, it is still prevalent in the humanities and most of the social sciences.

The cognitive view has won. But an assumption is still only an assumption. It doesn’t absolve us from working hard on the issues at hand, which is to determine at what cognitive level a given species operates and how this suits its ecology and lifestyle. What are its cognitive strengths, and how do these relate to survival?

And while the slayers of the cognitive view are a dying breed, we obviously still have the other two categories around—the skeptics and proponents—both of whom are essential. As a proponent myself, I do appreciate my more skeptical colleagues. They keep us on our toes and force us to design clever experiments to answer their questions. So long as progress is our shared goal, this is exactly how science ought to work.

We urgently need a bottom-up view that focuses on the building blocks of cognition.9 This approach will also need to include the emotions—a topic I have barely touched upon but that is close to my heart and is in equal need of attention. Breaking down mental capacities into all of these components may lead to less spectacular headlines, but our theories will be more realistic and informative as a result. It will also require a greater involvement of neuroscience.