Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(17)

Years later the Spanish primatologist Josep Call presented apes with two covered cups. They had learned that only one would be baited with grapes. If Call removed the tops and let them look inside the cups, the apes chose the one with grapes. Next, he kept the cups covered and shook first one, then the other. Only the cup with grapes made noise, which was the one they preferred. This was not too surprising. But making things harder, Call would sometimes shake only the empty cup, which made no noise. In this case, the apes would still pick the other one, thus operating on the basis of exclusion. From the absence of sound, they guessed where the grapes must be. Perhaps we are not impressed by this either, as we take such inferences for granted, but it is not all that obvious. Dogs, for example, flunk this task. Apes are special in that they seek logical connections based on how they believe the world works.37

Here it gets interesting, because aren’t we supposed to go for the simplest possible explanation? If large-brained animals, such as apes, try to get at the logic behind events, could this be the simplest level at which they operate?38 It reminds me of Morgan’s provision to his canon, according to which we are allowed more complex premises in the case of more intelligent species. We most certainly apply this rule to ourselves. We always try to figure things out, applying our reasoning powers to everything around us. We go so far as to invent causes if we can’t find any, leading to weird superstitions and supernatural beliefs, such as sports fans wearing the same T-shirt over and over for luck, and disasters being blamed on the hand of God. We are so logic-driven that we can’t stand the absence of it.

Evidently, the word simple is not as simple as it sounds. It means different things in relation to different species, which complicates the eternal battle between skeptics and cognitivists. In addition, we often get tangled up in semantics that aren’t worth the heat they generate. One scientist will argue that monkeys understand the danger posed by leopards, whereas another will say that monkeys have merely learned from experience that leopards sometimes kill members of their species. Both statements are really not that different, even though the first uses the language of understanding, and the second of learning. With the decline of behaviorism, debates on these issues have fortunately grown less fiery. By attributing all behavior under the sun to a single learning mechanism, behaviorism set up its own downfall. Its dogmatic overreach made it more like a religion than a scientific approach. Ethologists loved to slam it, saying that instead of domesticating white rats in order to make them suitable to a particular testing paradigm, behaviorists should have done the opposite. They should have invented paradigms that fit “real” animals.

The counterpunch came in 1953, when Daniel Lehrman, an American comparative psychologist, sharply attacked ethology.39 Lehrman objected to simplistic definitions of innate, saying that even species-typical behavior develops from a history of interaction with the environment. Since nothing is purely inborn, the term instinct is in fact misleading and should be avoided. Ethologists were stung and dismayed by his unexpected critique, but once they got over their “adrenaline attack” (Tinbergen’s words), they discovered that Lehrman hardly fit the behaviorist bogeyman stereotype. He was an enthusiastic bird-watcher, for example, who knew his animals. This impressed the ethologists, and Baerends recalled that while meeting the “enemy” in person, they managed to resolve most misunderstandings, found common ground, and became “very good friends.”40 Once Tinbergen became acquainted with Danny, as they now knew Lehrman, he went so far as to call him more of a zoologist than a psychologist, which the latter took as a compliment.41

Their bonding over birds went way beyond the way John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev bonded over Pushinka, a little dog that the Soviet leader sent to the White House. Despite this gesture, the Cold War continued unabated. In contrast, Lehrman’s harsh critique and the subsequent meeting of minds between comparative psychologists and ethologists set in motion a process of mutual respect and understanding. Tinbergen, in particular, acknowledged Lehrman’s influence on his later thinking. Apparently, they had needed a big spat to start a rapprochement, which was hastened by ongoing criticism within each camp of its own tenets. Within ethology, the younger generation grumbled about the rigid Lorenzian drive and instinct concepts, whereas comparative psychology had an even longer tradition of challenges to its own dominant paradigm.42 Cognitive approaches had been tried off and on, even as early as the 1930s.43 But ironically, the biggest blow to behaviorism came from within. It all started with a simple learning experiment conducted on rats.

Anyone who has tried to punish a dog or cat for problematic behavior knows that it is best to do so quickly, while the offense is still visible or at least fresh in the animal’s mind. If you wait too long, your pet doesn’t connect your scolding with the stolen meat or the droppings behind the couch. Since short intervals between behavior and consequence have always been regarded as essential, no one was prepared when, in 1955, the American psychologist John Garcia claimed he had found a case that broke all the rules: rats learn to refuse poisoned foods after just a single bad experience even if the resulting nausea takes hours to set in.44 Moreover, the negative outcome had to be nausea—electric shock didn’t have the same effect. Since toxic nutrition works slowly and makes you sick, none of this was particularly surprising from a biological standpoint. Avoiding bad food seems a highly adaptive mechanism. For standard learning theory, however, these findings came like a bolt out of the blue, due to the assumption that time intervals should be short while the kind of punishment is irrelevant. The findings were in fact devastating, and Garcia’s conclusions were so unwelcome that he had trouble getting them published. One imaginative reviewer contended that his data were less likely than finding bird shit in a cuckoo clock! The Garcia Effect is now well established, though. In our own lives, we remember food that has poisoned us so well that we gag at the mere thought of it or never set foot in a certain restaurant again.