Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

by Frans de Waal

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.’”

Wittgenstein’s reflections extended to people in strange cultures with whom we, even if we know their language, fail to “find our feet.”4 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.

“what we observe is not nature in itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.”

Operant conditioning tends to reinforce what is already there. Instead of being the omnipotent creator of behavior, it is its humble servant.

The impact of Japanese primatology is not always recognized in the West—which is why I have called it a “silent invasion”—but we routinely name individual animals and track their social careers across multiple generations. This allows us to understand the kinship ties and friendships at the core of group life. Begun by Imanishi right after World War II, this method has become standard in work on long-lived mammals, from dolphins to elephants and primates.

To stress this point, a “percussive stone technology” site (including stone assemblies and the remains of smashed nuts) was excavated in a tropical forest in Ivory Coast, where chimpanzees must have been opening nuts for at least four thousand years.31 These discoveries led to a human-ape lithic culture story that fit together nicely, tying us to our close relatives.

During the quiet hours in his pet store, my grandfather patiently trained goldfinches to pull a string. This particular finch is known in Dutch as a puttertje, a name that refers to the drawing of water from a well. Males that could both sing and draw would fetch a high price. For centuries, these little colorful birds were kept in homes with a chain around their leg, pulling a thimble up from a glass so as to fetch their own drinking water. One such finch is featured in the seventeenth-century Dutch painting central to Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch.

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. Other species are very capable of communicating inner processes, such as emotions and intentions, or coordinating actions and plans by means of nonverbal signals, but their communication is neither symbolized nor endlessly flexible like language. For one thing, it is almost entirely restricted to the here and now. A chimpanzee may detect another’s emotions in reaction to a particular ongoing situation, but cannot communicate even the simplest information about events displaced in space and time.

Animal calls do not necessarily mean what we think they mean: a critical part of how they function is how listeners interpret them.22 On top of this, it is good to keep in mind that most animals do not learn their calls the way humans learn words. They are simply born with them. However sophisticated natural animal communication may be, it lacks the symbolic quality and open-ended syntax that lends human language its infinite versatility.

“Would you say that you study language or intelligence, or is there no difference?” She replied: There is a difference because we have apes who have no linguistic abilities in the human sense, but who do quite well on cognitive tasks such as solving a maze problem. Language skills can help elaborate and refine cognitive skills, though, because you can tell an ape who is language-trained something that he does not know. This can put a cognitive task on a whole different plane.

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. It is a skill they employ every day and have refined to the point that they read us like a book.

It turned out that one of our student volunteers, who carefully followed the script during testing, had a distracting presence. This student was fidgety and nervous, always changing her body postures or adjusting her hair, which apparently made the monkeys nervous, too. Performance improved dramatically once we removed this young woman from the project.

Remember how Charlie Menzel felt that only people who hold apes in high esteem will fully appreciate what they are trying to communicate? His was a plea for raised expectations, which unfortunately is not the situation apes typically face. Children, in contrast, are treated in such a nurturing manner that they inevitably confirm the mental superiority ascribed to them.

The problem here is that captive apes have every reason to believe that we are omniscient! Suppose my assistant calls to tell me that Socko, the alpha male, has been wounded in a fight. I head over to the field station, walk up to him, and ask him to turn around, which he does—having known me since he was a baby—to show me his behind with the gash. Now try to look at this from Socko’s perspective. Chimps are smart animals, always trying to figure out what’s going on. Of course, he wonders how I know about his injury—I must be an all-knowing god. As such, human experimenters are about the last to be used to find out if apes understand the connection between seeing and knowing. All we are testing is the ape’s theory of the human mind.

Decades ago friends of mine were outraged by a newspaper article that ranked the smartest canine breeds. They happened to own the breed that was dead last on the list: the Afghan hound. Naturally, the top breed was the border collie. My insulted friends argued that the only reason Afghans were considered dim-witted is that they are independent-minded, stubborn, and unwilling to follow orders. The newspaper’s list was about obedience, they said, not intelligence. Afghans are perhaps more like cats, which are not beholden to anyone. This is no doubt why some people rate cats as less intelligent than dogs. We know, however, that a cat’s lack of response to humans is not due to ignorance. A recent study showed that felines have no trouble recognizing their owner’s voice. The deeper problem is that they don’t care, prompting the study’s authors to add: “the behavioral aspects of cats that cause their owners to become attached to them are still undetermined.”

Dogs were depicted as smarter than wolves, perhaps even apes, because they paid better attention to human pointing gestures. A human would point at one out of two buckets, and the dog would check that particular bucket out for a reward. Scientists concluded that domestication had given dogs extra intelligence compared to their ancestors. But what does it mean that wolves fail to follow human pointing? With a brain about one-third larger than a dog’s, I bet a wolf could outsmart its domesticated counterpart anytime—yet all we go by is how they react to us.

Cognition requires attention and motivation, yet it cannot be reduced to either.

Bonding- and Identification-based Observational Learning (BIOL). Accordingly, primate social learning stems from an urge to belong. BIOL refers to conformism born from the desire to act like others and to fit in.52 It explains why apes imitate their own kind far better than the average human, and why, among humans, they imitate only those whom they feel close to. It also explains why young chimps, especially females,53 learn so much from their mothers, and why high-status individuals are favorite models. This preference is also known in our own societies, in which advertisements feature celebrities showing off watches, perfumes, and cars. We love to emulate the Beckhams, Kardashians, Biebers, and Jolies. Might the same apply to apes? In one experiment, Vicky spread brightly colored plastic chips around in an enclosure, which the chimps could collect and carry to a container in exchange for rewards. Exposed to the sight of a top-ranking group member trained to drop tokens into one container and a bottom-ranking one trained to use a different container, the colony massively followed in the footsteps of the more prestigious member.54

The claim that only humans can mentally hop onto the time train, leaving all other species stranded on the platform, is tied to the fact that we consciously access past and future. Anything related to consciousness has been hard to accept in other species. But this reluctance is problematic: not because we know so much more about consciousness, but because we have growing evidence in other species for episodic memory, future planning, and delayed gratification. Either we abandon the idea that these capacities require consciousness, or we accept the possibility that animals may have it, too.

Octopuses have an odd life cycle. Most live only one or two years, which is unusual for an animal with their brainpower. They grow fast while trying to stay away from predators until they have a chance to mate and reproduce, after which they die. They stop eating, lose weight, and go into senescence.25 This is the stage about which Aristotle observed: “after giving birth … [they] become stupid, and are not aware of being tossed about in the water, but it is easy to dive and catch them by hand.”

This dichotomy is as false as the one that pits nature against nurture. The reason we rarely talk about instincts anymore is that nothing is purely genetic: the environment always plays a role.

We are returning to our hunting ways, albeit more in the way that a wildlife photographer relies on the hunting instinct: not to kill but to reveal.