Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

by Frans de Waal

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