Reviews for Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are
Nonfiction
'Are We Smart Plenty to Know How Smart Animals Are?' and 'The Genius of Birds'
It used to happen every twenty-four hours at the London Zoo: Out came the dainty table and chairs, the china cups and saucers — afternoon tea, set out for the inhabitants of the ape enclosure to throw and smash. It was supposed to exist amusing — a comic, reckless collision of beasts and high culture. But, equally Frans de Waal explains in "Are Nosotros Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?," apes are actually innovative, agile tool-users. For example — one of many examples — wild chimps in Gabon have been observed employing five different tools, in a methodical sequence, to break open beehives, pry the chambers autonomously, scoop out the honey and convey it to their mouths. Not surprisingly — to de Waal, at least — the apes in London quickly mastered the teacups and teapot as well. They sat there civilly, having tea.
"When the public tea parties began to threaten the human ego, something had to be washed," de Waal writes. "The apes were retrained to spill the tea, throw nutrient effectually, beverage from the teapot's spout," and and then on. The animals had to exist taught to be as stupid every bit nosotros assumed they were. Merely, of grade, the fact that they could be taught to exist stupid is simply more perverse evidence of their intelligence.
For centuries, our understanding of animal intelligence has been obscured in only this kind of cloud of fake assumptions and human being egotism. De Waal, a primatologist and ethologist who has been examining the fuzzy boundary between our species and others for 30 years, painstakingly untangles the confusion, then walks us through inquiry revealing what a wide range of animal species are actually capable of. Tool apply, cooperation, awareness of individual identity, theory of listen, planning, metacognition and perceptions of time — we now know that all these archetypically human, cognitive feats are performed by some animals as well. And non simply primates: Past the middle of Chapter 6, we're reading well-nigh cooperation among leopard coral trout. (The book's main weakness is that de Waal has too much evidence, from also many corners of the animal kingdom, to convince usa with; eventually, information technology feels a trivial repetitive — we're not at all surprised that the bonobo knows to expect in the stupid tube for the slice of food.)
Bluntly, it all deals a pretty violent wallop to our sense of specialness. And it can provoke some drastic resistance. De Waal quotes one American psychologist, insistently holding the line of our humanness at our ability, fifty-fifty as children, to work together toward a shared goal: "It is inconceivable that you would ever see two chimpanzees carrying a log together," the psychologist says. But so, 25 apes at a Dutch zoo prop a tree body against the wall of their enclosure, climb out and raid the eating house. What is true, it becomes clear, is that y'all'll never run into animals doing such intelligent things if you smugly refuse to look for them, or — and this is de Waal's real point — if you don't know how to look.
De Waal argues that nosotros should endeavour to empathise a species' intelligence merely within its own context, or umwelt: the animal'due south "self-centered subjective world, which represents simply a modest tranche of all available worlds." At that place are many different forms of intelligence; each should be valuated only relative to its surround. "It seems highly unfair to enquire if a squirrel can count to 10 if counting is non really what a squirrel'southward life is nigh," de Waal writes. (A squirrel's life is about remembering where it stored its basics; its intelligence is geospatial intelligence.) And nevertheless, in that location's apparently a long history of scientists ignoring this truth. For case, they've investigated chimpanzees' ability to recognize faces by testing whether the chimps can recognize human faces, instead of faces of other chimps. (They do the former poorly and the latter quite well.) They've performed the famous mirror test — to gauge whether an fauna recognizes the figure in a mirror equally itself — on elephants using a also-small, human-size mirror. Such blind spots are, ultimately, a failure of empathy — a failure to imagine the experiment, or the course of intelligence it's testing for, through the animal'southward eyes. De Waal compares it to "throwing both fish and cats into a swimming puddle" and seeing who can swim.
Nosotros sometimes fall into what de Waal calls "neo-creationist" thinking: We take evolution but presume "evolution stopped at the homo head" — believing our bodies may have evolved from monkeys, but that our brains are their ain miraculous and discrete inventions. Just cognition must be understood as an evolutionary product, like any other biological phenomenon; information technology exists on a spectrum, de Waal argues, with familiar forms shading into admittedly conflicting-looking ones. He introduces what he calls the rule of "cognitive ripples": Nosotros tend to discover intelligence in primates because information technology'due south nearly conspicuous. It looks the most similar our intelligence. Merely "subsequently the apes break downwards the dam between the humans and the residual of the animal kingdom, the floodgates frequently open to include species after species."
And that brings us to bird smarts, and the science journalist Jennifer Ackerman's lovely, celebratory survey, "The Genius of Birds."
Somehow, it's difficult to imagine these cognitive ripples rippling anywhere weirder than a bird. Look closely at one: how it chirps and twitches and flies. It'south chastening to imagine a comprehensible intelligence operating within a body so different from ours. And then at that place'due south the outcome of scale: At that place are equally many as 400 billion birds flitting around the planet; pondering their individual, perspicacious consciousnesses tin can be jaw-dropping, near sublime. Merely, Ackerman writes, "1 by one, the bellwether differences between birds and our closest primate relatives seem to be falling away."
Ackerman writes about birds' genius for wayfinding; their memories; the neuro-scientific overlap of bird song and human language; avian architecture (a bird called the long-tailed tit builds a nest out of "roughly 6,000 pieces"); their canny, sophisticated social intelligence, their social learning and the evidence of their empathy. She goes to New Caledonia, an isle between Australia and Republic of the fiji islands, where "gratis from the brunt of vigilance" — confronting predators — a race of crows can futz and experiment with the materials around them until they've fashioned all kinds of hooklike, food-procuring tools. They're similar Silicon Valley start-up founders, aimlessly tinkering and disrupting on a cushion of privilege.
Like de Waal, Ackerman wants the states to "appreciate the complex cognitive abilities of birds in their own right and not because they wait similar some aspect of our own." Scientists see innovation every bit a primal measure of intelligence in the avian world: the sparrow that builds its nest in the tailpipe of an abandoned Toyota; the bullfinches in Barbados, which Ackerman discovers have learned to snatch the carbohydrate packets from outdoor cafes as though snagging worms from dirt — these are small exertions of "genius," Ackerman writes, a talent for "catching on" to your surroundings and exploiting them. And for all the analytical of "bird brains," she shows them to be uniquely impressive machines inside their own evolutionary contexts — unrecognizably so to science, at kickoff, because, though they have equally high concentrations of neurons, they're quite differently designed from our primate brains. (And, Ackerman explains, that's because bird brains are dinosaur brains! Really!) Here's one scientist's Zen-like distillation: "There's the mammal way. And there's the bird way" — 2 distinct cognitive operating systems, honed through convergent evolution.
The science gets heed-bending. If you desire sentences similar "Not only could the pigeons pick out a new Monet or Picasso, they could also tell other Impressionists (Renoir, for instance) from other Cubists (such as Braque)," then this is the book for you. And it's elevated by Ackerman's prose — the joy she takes in thinking and noticing. She homes in on "the taut, quick vitality that seems most besides much for their tiny bodies to incorporate" and describes a flock of 400 birds changing direction midflight as "almost instantaneous ripples of movement in what appears to exist one living curtain of bird."
Often, you feel her wonderment, faintly recognizing some other, foreign intelligence covertly operating in a earth we presume to be ours: the one pecking at our muffin crumbs, the quick specks in the heaven.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/01/books/review/are-we-smart-enough-to-know-how-smart-animals-are-and-the-genius-of-birds.html
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