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.Like many of the other first year Liberal Arts university students I knew at the time, I took a lot of Intro courses (Intro to Psychology, Intro to Philosophy, Intro to Sociology), and these were for the most part fascinating enough to me that I broadened my sampling of the fields into my second year. I remember specifically taking both Comparative Psychology and a course called Ethology, and what I couldn't have known (twenty-some years ago) was that these two fields were about to go to war with each other: with the Psychologists insisting that all nonhuman behaviour is conditioned/preprogrammed and that the anthropromorphising of animals (and especially granting them intelligence or emotions) betrays a weak and sentimental mind, and the Ethologists rebutting that if researchers aren't finding evidence of human-like intelligence in nonhuman animals, the problem is with their methodology. Working and researching throughout these past few decades, Primatologist Frans de Waal has assembled much evidence to back up Darwin's initial claim that the difference between animals and humans is one of degree, not of kind, and with Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, he traces the confrontation between the two sides of this debate; smugly trumpeting the victory of his own beliefs. Now, I still enjoy reading pop science and sampling what's new in the fields that have long intrigued me, but I didn't find this book to be terribly engaging: my mind kept wandering, I was rarely wowed by the illustrative anecdotes, and I didn't find the writing style to be very interesting; since I didn't know there had been this decades-long war between the two sides, de Waal's conclusion that accepted theory has shifted from the Psychologists' viewpoint to that of the Ethologists isn't paradigm-shattering to me. This was just an okay read.
It would be great if everyone were open-minded and purely interested in the evidence, but science is not immune to preconceived notions and fanatically held beliefs. Anyone who forbids the study of language origins must be scared of new ideas, as must anyone whose only answer to Mendelian genetics is state persecution. Like Galileo's colleagues, who refused to peek trough 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.De Waal's main point is that for the last century, Behaviourists have been testing animals as though true intelligence can only be proven if nonhumans behave exactly like humans – they decided gibbons are non-tool-using because they won't grasp sticks (yet, they don't have opposable thumbs and will use tools if they are like the tree branches they find in nature [ie, horizontal strings]); they decided elephants are non-tool-using because they won't manipulate sticks with their trunks in the way that the researchers expected (yet, they will stack boxes to reach dangling food) – and they relied far too heavily on rats and pigeons, etc., in unnatural situations to explain human behaviour. De Waal makes the valid point that testing a chimp in a cage, directed by a nonmember of their own species in a white lab coat, against a human child who is sitting on her mother's lap and encouraged to identify with the researcher, is not exactly apples to apples: no wonder the chimps routinely test poorly against the children. By contrast, De Waal's research has taken him to nature preserve-type settings around the world where the complex (and intelligent) behaviour of chimpanzees can be tested and proven within their own Umwelt. These results are so unsurprising that it seems incredible that the Ethologists have had to fight so hard to have their findings accepted.
However good our relations with apes, the idea that we can test them in exactly the same way we test children is an illusion of the same order as someone throwing both fish and cats into a swimming pool and believe he is treating them in the same way.De Waal shares research that proves various animals have the intelligence to display behaviours we previously attributed only to humans – tool use, planning for the future, complex speech, counting, recognising themselves in a mirror, etc – and beyond our near relatives the primates, he cites the intelligent behaviour of birds (and especially parrots and corvids; jays and crows, etc), dogs, dolphins and whales, octopuses, even some insects. De Waal traces the history of the confrontation between the two sides in the debate; often mocking the inflexibility of the Behaviourists and how they continually moved the goalposts in the face of new evidence in order to preserve the “uniqueness” of human intelligence. This mocking seems to be a hallmark of De Waal's style:
The term 'nonhuman' grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something. Poor things, they are nonhuman! When students embrace this jargon in their writing, I cannot resist sarcastic corrections in the margin saying that for completeness's sake, they should add that the animals they are talking about are also nonpenguin, nonhyena, and a whole lot more.Note the exclamation point there, too – De Waal is a not infrequent devotee of their use. So, this wasn't quite the book I was expecting, and as for what it was, I didn't really engage with it. For the most part, it read like the victory speech of an ungracious winner. It is incredible to me that there has even been this debate about the need to test animals within their own environments (and not expect them to be able to replicate our own specific demonstrations of intelligent behaviours), so I understand why there was a need for this overview; I just wanted a better narrative, I guess.
As I said, I studied both Comparative Psychology and Ethology at university, and in both courses, it was the stories of surprising animal behaviours that I really enjoyed; and not that much surprised me in this book. But this story gave me a jolt:
When whaling still occurred around Twofold Bay, in Australia, orcas would approach the whaling station to perform conspicuous breaching and lobtailing that served to announce the arrival of a humpback whale. They would herd the large whale into shallow waters close to a whaling vessel, allowing the whalers to harpoon the harassed leviathan. Once the whale was killed, the orcas would be given one day to consume their preferred delicacy—its tongue and lips—after which the whalers would collect their prize. Here too humans gave names to their preferred orca partners and recognized the tit-for-tat that is the foundation of all cooperation, human as well as animal.
