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.’”

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

The credo of experimental science remains that an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. If we fail to find a capacity in a given species, our first thought ought to be “Did we overlook something?” And the second should be “Did our test fit the species?”

We always try to figure things out, applying our reasoning powers to everything around us. We go so far as to invent causes if we can’t find any, leading to weird superstitions and supernatural beliefs, such as sports fans wearing the same T-shirt over and over for luck, and disasters being blamed on the hand of God. We are so logic-driven that we can’t stand the absence of it.

Biologists never tire of stressing the distinction between mechanism and function: it is very common for animals to achieve the same end (function) by different means (mechanism).

Like Galileo’s colleagues, who refused to peek through his telescope, humans are a strange lot. We have the power to analyze and explore the world around us, yet panic as soon as the evidence threatens to violate our expectations.

Just as science is critical of any new finding in animal cognition, it is often equally uncritical with regard to claims about our own intelligence. It swallows them hook, line, and sinker, especially if they—unlike Ayumu’s feat—are in the expected direction. In the meantime, the general public gets confused, because inevitably any such claims provoke studies that challenge them. Variation in outcome is often a matter of methodology, which may sound boring but goes to the heart of the question of whether we are smart enough to know how smart animals are.

The fundamental problem with all these denials is that it is impossible to prove a negative. This is no minor issue. When anyone claims the absence of a given capacity in other species, and speculates that it must therefore have arisen recently in our lineage, we hardly need to inspect the data to appreciate the shakiness of such a claim. All we can ever conclude with some certainty is that we have failed to find a given skill in the species that we have examined. We cannot go much further than this, and we certainly may not turn it into an affirmation of absence. Scientists do so all the time, though, whenever the human-animal comparison is at stake. The zeal to find out what sets us apart overrides all reasonable caution.

To take someone else’s perspective represents a huge leap in social evolution.