Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(10)

One of the first illustrations came from the work on kittiwakes by Esther Cullen, a postdoctoral student of Tinbergen. Kittiwakes are seabirds of the gull family; they differ from other gulls in that to deter predators, they nest on narrow cliffs. These birds rarely give alarm calls and do not vigorously defend their nests—they don’t need to. But what is most intriguing is that kittiwakes fail to recognize their young. Ground-nesting gulls, in which the young move around after hatching, recognize their offspring within days and do not hesitate to kick out strange ones that scientists place in their nests. Kittiwakes, on the other hand, can’t tell the difference between their own and strange young, treating the latter like their own. Not that they need to worry about this situation: fledglings normally stay put at the parental nest. This is, of course, precisely why biologists think kittiwakes lack individual recognition.1

For the behaviorist, though, such findings are thoroughly puzzling. Two similar birds differing so starkly in what they learn makes no sense, because learning is supposedly universal. Behaviorism ignores ecology and has little room for learning that is adapted to the specific needs of each organism. It has even less room for an absence of learning, as in the kittiwake, or other biological variation, such as differences between the sexes. In some species, for example, males roam a large area in search of mates, whereas females occupy smaller home ranges. Under such conditions, males are expected to have superior spatial abilities. They need to remember when and where they ran into a member of the opposite sex. Giant panda males travel far and wide through the wet bamboo forest, which is uniformly green in all directions. It is crucial for them to be at the right place at the right time given that females ovulate only once per year and are receptive for just a couple of days—which is why zoos have such trouble breeding this magnificent bear. That males have better spatial abilities than females was confirmed when Bonnie Perdue, an American psychologist, tested pandas at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in China. She did so by spreading out food boxes over an outdoor area. Panda males were much better than females at remembering which boxes had recently been baited. In contrast, when the Asian small-clawed otter, a member of the same arctoidea (bear-like) family of carnivores, was tested on a similar task, both sexes performed the same. This otter being monogamous, males and females occupy the same territory. Similarly, males of sexually promiscuous rodent species navigate mazes more easily than females, whereas monogamous rodents show no sex difference.2

If learning talents are a product of natural history and mating strategies, the whole notion of universality begins to fall apart. We can expect huge variation. Evidence for inborn learning specializations has been steadily mounting.3 There are many different types, from the way ducklings imprint on the first moving object they see—whether it is their mother or a bearded zoologist—to the song learning of birds and whales and the way primates copy one another’s tool use. The more variation we discover, the shakier gets the claim that all learning is essentially the same.4

Yet during my student days, behaviorism still ruled supreme, at least in psychology. Luckily for me, the professor’s pipe-smoking associate, Paul Timmermans, regularly took me aside to induce some much-needed reflection on the indoctrination I was being subjected to. We worked with two young chimpanzees who offered me my first contact with primates apart from my own species. It was love at first sight. I had never met animals that so clearly possessed a mind of their own. Between puffs of smoke, Paul would ask rhetorically, with a twinkle in his eyes, “Do you really think chimps lack emotions?” He would do so just after the apes had thrown a shrieking temper tantrum for not getting their way, or laughed their hoarse chuckles during roughhousing. Paul would also mischievously ask my opinion about other taboo topics, without necessarily saying that the professor was wrong. One night the chimps escaped and ran through the building, only to return to their cage, carefully closing its door behind them before going to sleep. In the morning, we found them curled up in their straw nests and would not have suspected a thing had it not been for the smelly droppings discovered in the hallway by a secretary. “Is it possible that apes think ahead?” Paul asked when I wondered why the apes had closed their own door. How to deal with such crafty, volatile characters without assuming intentions and emotions?

To drive this point home more bluntly, imagine that you wish to enter a testing room with chimpanzees, as I did every day. I would suggest that rather than rely on some behavioral coding scheme that denies intentionality, you pay close attention to their moods and emotions, reading them the way you would any person’s, and beware of their tricks. Otherwise, you might end up like one of my fellow students. Despite the advice we gave him of how to dress for the occasion, he came to his first encounter in a suit and tie. He was sure he could handle such relatively small animals, while mentioning how good he was with dogs. The two chimps were mere juveniles, only four and five years old at the time. But of course, they were already stronger than any grown man, and ten times more cunning than a dog. I still remember the student staggering out of the testing room, having trouble shedding both apes clinging to his legs. His jacket was in tatters, with both sleeves torn off. He was fortunate that the apes never discovered the choking function of his tie.

One thing I learned in this lab was that superior intelligence doesn’t imply better test outcomes. We presented both rhesus monkeys and chimpanzees with a simple task, known as haptic (touch) discrimination. They were to stick their hand through a hole to feel the difference between two shapes and pick the correct one. Our goal was to do hundreds of trials per session, but whereas this worked well with the monkeys, the chimps had other ideas. They would do fine on the first dozen trials, showing that the discrimination posed no problem, but then their attention would wander. They’d thrust their hands farther so as to reach me, pulling at my clothes, making laughing faces, banging on the window that separated us, and trying to engage me in play. Jumping up and down, they’d even gesture to the door, as if I didn’t know how to get to their side. Sometimes, unprofessionally, I would give in and have fun with them. Needless to say, the apes’ performance on the task was well below that of the monkeys, not due to an intellectual deficit but because they were bored out of their minds.