Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

by Frans de Waal

Their earlier poor performance had had more to do with the way they were tested than with their mental powers. Elephants are another good example.

Its dogmatic overreach made it more like a religion than a scientific approach. Ethologists loved to slam it, saying that instead of domesticating white rats in order to make them suitable to a particular testing paradigm, behaviorists should have done the opposite. They should have invented paradigms that fit “real” animals. The counterpunch came in 1953, when Daniel Lehrman, an American comparative psychologist, sharply attacked ethology.39 Lehrman objected to simplistic definitions of innate, saying that even species-typical behavior develops from a history of interaction with the environment. Since nothing is purely inborn, the term instinct is in fact misleading and should be avoided. Ethologists were stung and dismayed by his unexpected critique, but once they got over their “adrenaline attack” (Tinbergen’s words), they discovered that Lehrman hardly fit the behaviorist bogeyman stereotype. He was an enthusiastic bird-watcher, for example, who knew his animals. This impressed the ethologists, and Baerends recalled that while meeting the “enemy” in person, they managed to resolve most misunderstandings, found common ground, and became “very good friends.”40 Once Tinbergen became acquainted with Danny, as they now knew Lehrman, he went so far as to call him more of a zoologist than a psychologist, which the latter took as a compliment.41 Their

Apparently, they had needed a big spat to start a rapprochement, which was hastened by ongoing criticism within each camp of its own tenets. Within ethology, the younger generation grumbled about the rigid Lorenzian drive and instinct concepts, whereas comparative psychology had an even longer tradition of challenges to its own dominant paradigm.42 Cognitive approaches had been tried off and on, even as early as the 1930s.43 But ironically, the biggest blow to behaviorism came from within. It all started with a simple learning experiment conducted on rats. Anyone who has tried to punish a dog or cat for problematic behavior knows that it is best to do so quickly, while the offense is still visible or at least fresh in the animal’s mind. If you wait too

There

Clark’s nutcrackers remember where they have stored thousands of nuts, beewolves make an orientation flight before leaving their burrow, and chimpanzees nonchalantly learn the

Nature abounds with illustrations to the contrary. One that I know firsthand is a pair-bonding Amazonian cichlid, the discus fish, that has achieved the equivalent of mammalian nursing.

That they still learn the skill is a great testament to the irrelevance of reinforcement, because none of these activities is ever rewarded

age, the juvenile starts to coordinate to the point that a nut is occasionally cracked. It is only by the age of six or seven that their skill reaches adult level.24

my cognitive ripple rule: Every cognitive capacity that we discover is going to be older and more

widespread than initially thought. This

What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our place in nature is “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?”

Books and articles commonly state that one of the central issues of evolutionary cognition is to find out what sets us apart. Entire conferences have been organized around the human essence, asking “What makes us human?” But is this truly the most fundamental question of our field? I beg to differ. In and of itself, it seems an intellectual dead end.

I recommend placing a moratorium on human uniqueness claims. Given their miserable track record, it is time to rein them in for a few decades. This will allow us to develop a more comprehensive framework.

To find out how bodies interact with cognition, we have incredibly rich material to work with. Adding animals to the mix is bound to stimulate the up-and-coming field of “embodied cognition,” which postulates that cognition reflects the body’s interactions with the world.

A Dutch educational program recently brought out an advertisement in which human children face the floating peanut task (see Chapter 3). Even though the members of our species have a bottle of water standing not too far away, they fail to think of the solution until they see a video of apes solving the same problem. Some apes do so spontaneously, even when there is no bottle around to suggest what to do. They walk to the faucet

where they know water can be collected. The point of the ad is that schools should teach kids to think outside the box, using apes as an inspiration.66

We have no good reason to focus solely on chimpanzees, though. They often serve as a starting point, but “chimpocentrism” is a mere extension of anthropocentrism.

The deep irony of animals calling one another by name is, of course, that it was once taboo for scientists to name their animals. When Imanishi and his followers started doing so, they were ridiculed, as was Goodall when she gave her chimps names like David Greybeard and Flo. The complaint was that by using names we were humanizing our subjects. We were supposed to keep our distance and stay objective, and to never forget that only humans have names. As it turns out, on this issue some animals may have been ahead of us.

They divided attitudes toward animal cognition into three types: the slayers, the skeptics, and the proponents.

tell him what capacities he could possibly hope to find in apes that were not also present in pigeons. In other words, why waste your time on those willful, hard-to-control apes if animal intelligence is essentially the same across the board?

mother nature indulged in a shocking extravagance, something she is not known for. In the utilitarian view of biology, animals have the brains they need—nothing more, nothing less. Even within a species, the brain may change depending on how it is being used, such as the way song-related areas seasonally expand and contract in the songbird brain.2 Brains adapt to ecological requirements, as does cognition.

the wall between human and animal cognition has begun to resemble a Swiss Gruyère full of holes.

Proponents of human uniqueness face the possibility that they have either grossly overestimated the complexity of what humans do or underestimated the capacities of other species.

How much more refreshing was David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who held animals in such high esteem that he wrote that “no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men.”

This is why evolutionary cognition is such a perfect label for our field, because only evolutionary theory can make sense of survival, ecology, anatomy, and cognition all at once.

Instead of searching for a general theory that covers all cognition on the planet, it treats every species as a case study.

The reason we rarely talk about instincts anymore is that nothing is purely genetic: the environment always plays a role. In the same way, pure cognition is a figment of the imagination. Where would cognition be without learning? Some sort of information gathering is always part of it.

we wish to pinpoint proposed mental processes by measuring observable outcomes.

Animals should be given a chance to express their natural behavior. We are developing a greater interest in their variable lifestyles. Our challenge is to think more like them, so that we open our minds to their specific circumstances and goals and observe and understand them on their own terms.

Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are. In doing so, I am sure we will discover many magic wells, including some as yet beyond our imagination.