Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(29)
As a case in point, we now have evidence of tool use outside mammals and birds. Primates and corvids may well show the most sophisticated use of technology, but what to think of partially submerged crocodiles and alligators balancing large sticks on their snouts? Crocodilians do so especially in pools and swamps near rookeries during the nesting season, when herons and other wading birds are in desperate need of sticks and twigs. You can imagine the scene: a heron lands on a log in the water from which it wants to pick up an attractive branch, but suddenly the log comes to life and grabs the bird. Perhaps crocs initially learn that birds land on them when branches float nearby and then extend this association by making sure to be near branches when herons are nesting. From there, it may be a small step to cover oneself with objects that attract birds. The problem with this idea, however, is that there are actually very few free-floating branches and twigs around. There is too much demand for them. Is it possible that the crocs—which the scientists lament are historically taken to be “lethargic, stupid, and boring”—bring their stick-lures with them from far away? This would be another spectacular cognitive ripple, one that extends deliberate tool use to the reptiles.47
The final example, which may again stretch the definition of a tool, concerns the veined octopus in the seas around Indonesia. Here we are dealing with an invertebrate: a mollusk! It has been seen collecting coconut shells. Since octopuses are a favorite food of many predators, camouflage is one of their main goals in life. Initially, the coconut shells yield no benefit, however, because they have to be transported, which only draws unwanted attention. Stretching its arms into rigid limbs, the octopus tiptoes over the sea floor while holding its prize in some of its other arms. Awkwardly walking to a safe lair, it can then use the shells to hide underneath.48 A mollusk collecting tools for future protection, however simple, goes to show how far we have come since the days when technology was thought to be the defining characteristic of our species.
4 TALK TO ME
Speak and I shall baptize thee!
—French Bishop to a chimpanzee, early 1700s1
We associate research in the natural habitat with sacrifice and bravery, since fieldworkers must tackle the unpleasant and dangerous creatures of the tropical rainforest, from bloodsucking leeches to predators and snakes. By contrast, students of captive animals are thought to have it easy. But we sometimes forget how much courage it takes to defend one’s ideas in the face of staunch opposition. Most of the time this occurs just among academics, which is disagreeable rather than hazardous, but Nadia Kohts faced lethal risks. Her full name was Nadezhda Nikolaevna Ladygina-Kohts, and she lived and worked early last century in the shadow of the Kremlin. Under the sinister influence of the would-be geneticist Trofim Lysenko, Joseph Stalin had many a brilliant Russian biologist either shot or sent to the Gulag for thinking the wrong thoughts. Lysenko believed that plants and animals pass on traits gained during their lifetime. The names of those who disagreed with him became unmentionable, and entire research institutes were closed down.
It was in this oppressive climate that Kohts, with her husband Alexander Fiodorovich Kohts—founding director of Moscow’s State Darwin Museum—set out to study ape facial expressions, inspired by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by that bourgeois Englishman, Charles Darwin. Lysenko was distinctly ambivalent about Darwin’s theory, some of which he labeled “reactionary.” Staying out of trouble became a major preoccupation of the Kohtses, who hid documents and data among their taxidermy collection in the museum basement. They wisely put a large statue of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck—famous proponent of the inheritance of acquired characteristics—at the museum entrance.
Kohts published in French, German, and most of all her native Russian. She wrote seven books, of which only one was translated into English, long after its appearance in 1935. The English version of Infant Chimpanzee and Human Child, edited by me, appeared in 2002. The book compares the emotional life and intelligence of a young chimpanzee, Joni, with that of Kohts’s little son, Roody. Kohts studied Joni’s reactions to pictures of chimpanzees and other animals, and to his own mirror image. Even though Joni was probably too young to recognize himself, Kohts describes how he would entertain himself in front of his reflection by pulling weird faces and sticking out his tongue.2
Kohts is little known compared to Wolfgang K?hler, who conducted his groundbreaking ape research from 1912 through 1920. I wonder what she knew about it while working in Moscow from 1913 until Joni’s premature death in 1916. While K?hler is widely recognized as a pioneer of evolutionary cognition, pictures of Kohts’s work leave little doubt that she was on exactly the same track. One of the museum’s glass cases features Joni’s mounted body surrounded by ladders and tools, including sticks that fit into each other. Was Kohts overlooked by science due to her gender? Or was it her language?
I learned about her from the writings of Robert Yerkes, who came to Moscow to discuss her projects through an interpreter. In his books, Yerkes described Kohts’s work with the greatest admiration. There is a good chance, for example, that Kohts invented the matching-to-sample (MTS) paradigm, a staple of modern cognitive neuroscience. MTS is nowadays being applied to both humans and animals in countless laboratories. Kohts would hold up an object for Joni, then hide it among other objects in a sack and let him feel around to find the first one. The test involved two modalities—vision and touch—demanding that Joni make a choice based on his memory of the previously seen model.