Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

by Frans de Waal

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.’”

since behavior is, as the Austrian ethologist Konrad Lorenz put it, the liveliest aspect of all that lives.

What we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. —Werner Heisenberg (1958)

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

We laugh hysterically at apes in movies and sitcoms, not because they are inherently funny—there are much funnier-looking animals, such as giraffes and ostriches—but because we like to keep our fellow primates at arm’s length. It is similar to how people in neighboring countries, who resemble each other most, joke about each other. The Dutch find nothing to laugh at in the Chinese or the Brazilians, but they relish a good joke about the Belgians.

It seems highly unfair to ask if a squirrel can count to ten if counting is not really what a squirrel’s life is about.

The credo of experimental science remains that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

The gibbon’s hand lacks a fully opposable thumb. It is suited for grasping branches rather than for picking up items from a flat surface. Only when their hand morphology was taken into account did gibbons pass certain intelligence tests.

Their earlier poor performance had had more to do with the way they were tested than with their mental powers.

An elephant, it turns out, can use tools—if they are the right ones.

No one seemed bothered by the fact that other primates had been tested mostly on human faces rather than those of their own kind.

The lesson is that before scientists test any animal, they need to know its typical behavior.

the assumption that animals are “dumb,” in the sense that they lack conscious minds, is only that: an assumption.

the word anthropomorphism came about when Xenophanes, in 570 B.C., objected to Homer’s poetry because it described the gods as if they looked like people. Xenophanes ridiculed the arrogance behind this assumption—why couldn’t they look like horses?

Bonobos go even further: when a zookeeper familiar with chimpanzees once naïvely accepted a bonobo kiss, not knowing this species, he was taken aback by the amount of tongue that went into it!

Saying that ants have “queens,” “soldiers,” and “slaves” is mere anthropomorphic shorthand.

Dubbing an ape’s kiss “mouth-to-mouth contact” so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth’s gravity a different name than the moon’s, just because we think Earth is special.

Even the term nonhuman grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something.

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.

One thing I learned in this lab was that superior intelligence doesn’t imply better test outcomes.

Needless to say, the apes’ performance on the task was well below that of the monkeys, not due to an intellectual deficit but because they were bored out of their minds. The task was just not up to their intellectual level.

Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.

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?

No one has ever proposed permanent food deprivation for university students.

There is even a joke about its complete reliance on external cues, in which one behaviorist asks another after lovemaking: “That was great for you. How was it for me?”

Anecdotes hint at what is possible and challenge our thinking.

“The plural of anecdote is not data,”

Evolutionarily speaking, it would be a true miracle if we had the fancy cognition that we believe we have while our fellow animals had none of it.

In fact, following the report by Pfungst, the owner was so disappointed that he accused the horse of treachery and wanted him to spend the rest of his life pulling hearses as punishment. Instead of being mad at himself, he blamed his horse!

Apes really don’t need anesthesia to show how well they understand mirrors. They spontaneously use them to look inside their mouth, and females always turn around to check out their behinds—something males don’t care about.

A good experiment doesn’t create new and unusual behavior but taps into natural tendencies,

Any monkey that holds food while high-ranking males are empty-handed risks getting into trouble.

By attributing all behavior under the sun to a single learning mechanism, behaviorism set up its own downfall. Its dogmatic overreach made it more like a religion than a scientific approach.

Unbelievably, there was a time when Western professors warned their students away from the Japanese school because naming animals was considered too humanizing.

Tinbergen put objects around the nest, such as a circle of pinecones, to see what information they used to find it back. He was able to trick the wasps, making them search at the wrong location, by moving his pinecones around.

Dandy, a young adult male, hardly slowed down when he ran over the place. Later in the afternoon, however, when all the apes were dozing off in the sun, he made a beeline for the spot. Without hesitation, he dug up the fruits and devoured them at his leisure, which he would never have been able to do had he stopped right when he saw them. He would have lost them to dominant group mates.50

What struck me most is that Dandy at his first passing didn’t linger for a second. He must have made an instant calculation that deception was going to be his best bet.

not unlike the story of Archimedes, who jumped out of his bath in which he had discovered how to measure the volume of submerged objects, after which he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse, shouting “Eureka!”

Lol… wait. This happened?😂

After his lecture, the professor jumped up to accuse Menzel of being unscientific and anthropomorphic, of attributing plans and intentions to animals that obviously had neither. To a roar of approval, Menzel countered that he had not attributed anything. If this professor had seen plans and intentions, he must have seen them with his own eyes, because Menzel himself had refrained from suggesting any such things.

He protested against labeling a single observation an “anecdote,”

It is not unusual for a juvenile quarrel to escalate into an adult fight.

This historical progression is not to be confused with a scale with Hominoids on top. I rather view it as an ever-expanding pool of possibilities in which the cognition of, say, the octopus may be no less astonishing than that of any given mammal or bird.

Every year when I visit Burgers’ Zoo, in Arnhem, a few chimps still remember me from more than three decades before.

Face recognition, science concluded, is a specialized cognitive skill of primates. But no sooner had it done so than the first cognitive ripples arrived. Face recognition has been found in crows, sheep, even wasps.

Wildlife biologist John Marzluff at the University of Washington, in Seattle, has captured so many crows that these birds take his name in vain whenever he walks around, scolding and dive-bombing him, doing justice to the “murder” label used for a whole bunch of them.

Evolutionary science distinguishes between homology (the traits of two species derive from a common ancestor) and analogy (similar traits evolved independently in two species).

When it comes to tool use, chimps always catch the limelight, but there are three other great apes—bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans—that, together with chimps, us, and the gibbons, make up the Hominoid family.

Since Roberta acted as if the trap were still there, she clearly had not paid much attention to how it worked. Visalberghi concluded that monkeys are able to solve the trap-tube task without actually understanding it.32

The documentary shows Stoffel leaning a rake against the wall and claims that he once piled up large stones against it to escape. After all the stones were removed from his enclosure, he apparently constructed a heap of mud balls for the same purpose.

Taylor is trying out tasks with even more steps, and the crows are keeping up with the challenge. This is most impressive, and considerably better than monkeys, which have trouble with stepwise tasks.