Books
Are Animals Smarter Than We Think?
Two intelligent humans assess the mental feats of wild creatures and come to opposite conclusions
By Sy Montgomery
Courtesy of www.greatapetrust.org |
What’s going on here? Are these animals thinking or using language? Or are we projecting human abilities onto nonhuman animals? Two new books that grapple with the nature of intelligence in the nonhuman world offer vastly different conclusions. In Do Animals Think? University of Florida psychologist Clive Wynne argues that the mental feats of nonhuman animals are all in our heads—not theirs. He claims that language is ours alone and that animals’ seemingly complex responses to problems are achieved by automatic mechanisms, not by thought. But how did humans acquire the ability to use language and practice culture? Not through some “mutational miracle,” writes journalist Tim Friend. In Animal Talk, he argues that culture, language, and mathematical skills emerged thanks to a process common to all living creatures: evolution. We think because thinking is adaptive. Therefore we should expect to see similar cognitive abilities in both human and nonhuman animals.
Friend’s book is filled with examples of such sophisticated animal behaviors. Male humpback whales compose and seasonally alter lengthy, complex songs. Vervet monkeys distinguish between snakes and eagles by different alarm calls. A tree frog partially submerges itself in the water of a tree hole and then adjusts its call to the size of the hole to play the tree like a musical instrument. Friend makes the case for an “animal Esperanto” that even humans can learn to understand. “Humans and animals alike, regardless of race or species, talk about the same things every day—that is, sex, real estate, who’s boss, and what’s for dinner,” he writes.
It might look that way, counters Wynne, but animals simply don’t think the way we do. Sheba the mathematical chimp, for example, may not have been adding, but merely memorizing by rote. Some animals might be capable of elementary problem solving, he concedes. But “the psychological abilities that make human culture possible,” he argues, “are almost entirely lacking in any other species.” Where Friend sees continuity between humans and everyone else, Wynne sees a sharp divide.
From a biological standpoint, such a division makes no sense. We share about 99 percent of our genetic material with chimps (and over 30 percent with daisies). To divide the animate world into two categories, one consisting of a single animal species (us) and another made up of the remaining 5 million to 50 million, is as scientifically useless as saying the universe is composed only of Gouda cheese and substances that are not Gouda cheese.
Even if Wynne’s dogma can be frustrating, his book, like Friend’s, is a fun read. Both are packed with clever experiments, intriguing anecdotes, and a delight in the diversity of animal behavior. Wynne, for example, regales the reader with tales of bees trapped in flowers by their tongues, or with the fact that most animals can’t count beyond seven—but neither can most people, if objects are flashed in front of them faster than they can count in words. So dazzled is Wynne by such wonders that even he sometimes seems deflected from his debunking mission. He is particularly charmed by insect-eating bats, who measure distance by timing echoes bouncing back from sounds they generate as they fly. “Let’s not worry about what they might be conscious of,” he writes of the bats. “Let’s just enjoy our opportunity to be conscious of them.” Indeed.
Animal Talk: Breaking the Codes of Animal Language
By Tim Friend, Free Press, $25
By Clive D. Wynne, Princeton University Press, $26.95
