Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Are we open-minded enough to assume that other species have a mental life? Are we creative enough to investigate it? Can we tease apart the roles of attention, motivation, and cognition? Those three are involved in everything animals do; hence poor performance can be explained by any one of them.

But those stories inspire observations and experiments that do help us sort out what’s going on. 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.

The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals. When we are considering species like the apes, which are aptly known as “anthropoids” (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. Dubbing an ape’s kiss “mouth-to-mouth contact” so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth’s gravity a different name than the moon’s, just because we think Earth is special.

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. So,

In other words, both macaques and rats volunteer for tests only when they feel confident, suggesting that they know their own knowledge.

One can train dolphins to jump synchronously because they do so in the wild, and one can teach horses to run together at the same pace because wild horses do the same.

In other words, what is salient to us—such as our own facial features—may not be salient to other species.

Having escaped the Dark Ages in which animals were mere stimulus-response machines, we are free to contemplate their mental lives. It is a great leap forward, the one that Griffin fought for. But now that animal cognition is an increasingly popular topic, we are still facing the mindset that animal cognition can be only a poor substitute of what we humans have. It can’t be truly deep and amazing. Toward the end of a long career, many a scholar cannot resist shining a light on human talents by listing all the things we are capable of and animals not. From the human perspective, these conjectures may make a satisfactory read, but for anyone interested, as I am, in the full spectrum of cognitions on our planet, they come across as a colossal waste of time. What a bizarre animal we are that the only question we can ask in relation to our place in nature is “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the smartest of them all?

Dog owners who stare into their pet’s eyes experience a rapid increase in oxytocin—a neuropeptide involved in attachment and bonding. Exchanging gazes full of empathy and trust, we enjoy a special relationship with the dog.42

While language is helpful to communicate memories, it is hardly what produces them. My preference would be to turn the burden of proof around, especially when it comes to species close to us. If other primates recall events with equal precision as humans do, the most economic assumption is that they do so in the same way. Those who insist that human memory rests on unique levels of awareness have their work cut out for them to substantiate such a claim. It may, literally, be all in our heads. The

Cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.

Harry Harlow, a well-known American primatologist, was an early critic of the hunger reduction model. He argued that intelligent animals learn mostly through curiosity and free exploration, both of which are likely killed by a narrow fixation on food. He poked fun at the Skinner box, seeing it as a splendid instrument to demonstrate the effectiveness of food rewards but not to study complex behavior.

There are so many ways to account for negative outcomes that it is safer to doubt one’s methods before doubting one’s subjects.

Ethology developed its own specialized language about instincts, fixed action patterns (a species’ stereotypical behavior, such as the dog’s tail wagging), innate releasers (stimuli that elicit specific behavior, such as the red dot on a gull’s bill that triggers pecking by hungry chicks), displacement activities (seemingly irrelevant actions resulting from conflicting tendencies, such as scratching oneself before a decision), and so on. Without going into the details of its classical framework,

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.

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.

status competition and the opportunistic making and breaking of alliances that marks political strife. For this, we have to go to the males, also in the elephant. For

Sultan would first jump or throw things at the banana or drag humans by the hand toward it in the hope that they’d help him out, or at least be willing to serve as a footstool.

Would anyone test the memory of human children by throwing them into a swimming pool to see if they remember where to get out? Yet

food-deprived chickens that were not particularly good at noticing the finer distinctions of a maze task.5

There are lots of wonderful cognitive adaptations out there that we don’t have or need. This is why ranking cognition on a single dimension is a pointless exercise. Cognitive evolution is marked by many peaks of specialization. The ecology of each species is key. The

Jolted by a twentyfold increase in testosterone, a bull changes into a sort of spinach-eating Popeye, a self-confident jerk ready to fight anyone in his path.

we are not the only ones who knew a Stone Age: our closest relatives still live in one. 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

While the matriarch operates on the basis of knowledge, the rest of the herd operates on the basis of trust.

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.

At the time, science had declared humans unique, since we were so much better at identifying faces than any other primate. No one seemed bothered by the fact that other primates had been tested mostly on human faces rather than those of their own kind.

The eyeless tick climbs onto a grass stem to await the smell of butyric acid emanating from mammalian skin. Since experiments have shown that this arachnid can go for eighteen years without food, the tick has ample time to meet a mammal, drop onto her victim, and gorge herself on warm blood. Afterward she is ready to lay her eggs and die.

Ernst Mayr characterized the Cartesian view of animals as dumb automatons.2

en route to such trees and get up before dawn, something they normally hate to do.