Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

by Frans de Waal

Apes are special in that they seek logical connections based on how they believe the world works.

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.

Moreover, wild chimps not only use and make tools, but they learn from one another, which allows them to refine their tools over generations.

More elaborate toolkits are known for chimpanzees in Gabon hunting for honey. In yet another dangerous activity, these chimps raid bee nests using a five-piece toolkit, which includes a pounder (a heavy stick to break open the hive’s entrance), a perforator (a stick to perforate the ground to get to the honey chamber), an enlarger (to enlarge an opening through sideways action), a collector (a stick with a frayed end to dip into honey and slurp it off), and swabs (strips of bark to scoop up honey).21

Given the evolutionary gulf between primates and corvids, and the many ancestral species of mammals and birds in between that don’t use tools, we are dealing with a typical example of convergent evolution. Independently, both taxonomic groups must have faced a need for complex manipulations of items in their environment, or other challenges that stimulated brain growth, which led them to evolve strikingly similar cognitive skills.

What are linguists afraid of? They had better pull their heads out of the sand, because no trait, not even our beloved linguistic ability, ever comes about de novo. Nothing evolves all of a sudden, without antecedents. Every new trait taps into existing structures and processes. Thus, Wernicke’s area, a part of the brain central to human speech, is recognizable in the great apes, in which it is enlarged on the left side, as it is in us.27 This obviously raises the question of what this particular brain region was doing in our ancestors before it was recruited for language.

Given a chance, the jays quickly re-cached their worms at a new location—but only if they had been watched. They seemed to understand that the food was safe if no other birds had any information.

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.”40

Moreover, not unlike presidential candidates who hold babies up in the air as soon as the cameras are rolling, male chimps vying for power develop a sudden interest in infants, which they hold and tickle in order to curry favor with the females.68

In those days, university students were firmly antiestablishment, and I had the shoulder-long hair to prove it. We considered ambition ridiculous and power evil. My observations of the chimps, however, made me question the idea that hierarchies were merely cultural institutions, a product of socialization, something we could wipe out at any moment. They seemed more ingrained. I had no trouble detecting the same tendencies in even the most hippielike organizations. They were generally run by young men who mocked authority and preached egalitarianism yet had no qualms about ordering everyone else around and stealing their comrades’ girlfriends. It wasn’t the chimps who were odd, but the humans who seemed dishonest.

In a set of studies in the Red Sea, Bshary observed coordinated hunting between the leopard coral trout—a beautiful reddish-brown grouper that can grow to three feet in length—and the giant moray eel. These two species make a perfect match. The moray eel can enter crevices in the coral reef, whereas the trout hunts in the open waters around it. Prey can escape from the trout by hiding in a crevice and from the eel by entering open water, but it cannot get away from the two of them together.

There is no single form of cognition, and there is no point in ranking cognitions from simple to complex. A species’s cognition is generally as good as what it needs for its survival.