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.’”

There are many ways to process, organize, and spread information, and it is only recently that science has become open-minded enough to treat all these different methods with wonder and amazement rather than dismissal and denial.

Dualisms between body and mind, human and animal, or reason and emotion may sound useful, but they seriously distract from the larger picture. Trained as a biologist and ethologist, I have little patience with the paralyzing skepticism of the past.

My most memorable experience with an alien world, however, came from raising jackdaws, small members of the crow family. Two of them flew in and out of my window on the fourth floor of a student dorm, so I could watch their exploits from above. When they were young and inexperienced, I observed them, like any good parent, with great apprehension. We think of flight as something birds do naturally, but it is actually a skill that they have to learn. Landing is the hardest part, and I was always afraid they would crash into a moving car. I began to think like a bird, mapping the environment as if looking for the perfect landing spot, judging a distant object (a branch, a balcony) with this goal in mind. Upon achieving a safe landing, my birds would give happy “caw-caw” calls, after which I would call them to come back, and the whole process would start anew. Once they became expert flyers, I enjoyed their playful tumbling in the wind as if I were flying among them. I entered my birds’ Umwelt, even though imperfectly.

When Thomas Nagel, in 1974, asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” he concluded that we would never know.3 We have no way of entering the subjective life of another species, he said. Nagel did not seek to know how a human would feel as a bat: he wanted to understand how a bat feels like a bat. This is indeed beyond our comprehension. The same wall between them and us was noted by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, when he famously declared, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.”

what else is cognition but information processing? 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.

Von Frisch once said, “The life of the bee is like a magic well, the more you draw from it, the more there is to draw.”5 Griffin felt the same about echolocation, seeing this capacity as yet another inexhaustible source of mystery and wonder. He called it, too, a magic well.6

At the same time, we feel threatened by primates. We laugh hysterically at apes in movies and sitcoms, not because they are inherently funny—there are much funnier-looking animals, such as giraffes and ostriches—but because we like to keep our fellow primates at arm’s length. It is similar to how people in neighboring countries, who resemble each other most, joke about each other. The Dutch find nothing to laugh at in the Chinese or the Brazilians, but they relish a good joke about the Belgians.

. It seems highly unfair to ask if a squirrel can count to ten if counting is not really what a squirrel’s life is about.

Following in the footsteps of Kafka and Uexküll, we are trying to get under the skin of other species, trying to understand them on their terms. And the more we succeed, the more we discover a natural landscape dotted with magic wells.