Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(39)

Even more egregious than human chest beating—another primate pattern—is the tendency to disparage other species. Well, not just other species, because there is a long history of the Caucasian male declaring himself genetically superior to everyone else. Ethnic triumphalism is extended outside our species when we make fun of Neanderthals as brutes devoid of sophistication. We now know, however, that Neanderthal brains were slightly larger than ours, that some of their genes were absorbed into our own genome, and that they knew fire, burials, hand-axes, musical instruments, and so on. Perhaps our brothers will finally get some respect. When it comes to the apes, however, contempt persists. When in 2013 the BBC website asked Are You as Stupid as a Chimpanzee? I was curious to learn how they had pinpointed the level of chimpanzee intelligence. But the website (since removed) merely offered a test of human knowledge about world affairs, which had nothing to do with apes. The apes merely served to draw a contrast with our species. But why focus on apes in this regard rather than, say, grasshoppers or goldfish? The reason is, of course, that everyone is ready to believe that we are smarter than these animals, yet we are not entirely sure about species closer to us. It is out of insecurity that we love the contrast with other Hominoids, as is also reflected in angry book titles such as Not a Chimp or Just Another Ape?10

The same insecurity marked the reaction to Ayumu. People watching his videotaped performance on the Internet either did not believe it, saying it must be a hoax, or had comments such as “I can’t believe I am dumber than a chimp!” The whole experiment was taken as so offensive that American scientists felt they had to go into special training to beat the chimp. When Tetsuro Matsuzawa, the Japanese scientist who led the Ayumu project, first heard of this reaction, he put his head in his hands. In her charming behind-the-scenes look at the field of evolutionary cognition, Virginia Morrell recounts Matsuzawa’s reaction:

Really, I cannot believe this. With Ayumu, as you saw, we discovered that chimpanzees are better than humans at one type of memory test. It is something a chimpanzee can do immediately, and it is one thing—one thing—that they are better at than humans. I know this has upset people. And now there are researchers who have practiced to become as good as a chimpanzee. I really don’t understand this need for us to always be superior in all domains.11

Even though the iceberg’s tip has been melting for decades, attitudes barely seem to budge. Instead of discussing them any further here or going over the latest uniqueness claims, I will explore a few claims that are now close to retirement. They illustrate the methodology behind intelligence testing, which is crucial to what we find. How do you give a chimp—or an elephant or an octopus or a horse—an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science. Human IQ may be controversial, especially while we are comparing cultural or ethnic groups, but when it comes to distinct species, the problems are a magnitude greater.

I am willing to believe a recent study that found cat lovers to be more intelligent than dog lovers, but this comparison is a piece of cake relative to one drawing a contrast between actual cats and dogs. Both species are so different that it would be hard to design an intelligence test that both of them perceive and approach similarly. At issue, however, is not just how two animal species compare but—the big gorilla in the room—how they compare to us. And in this regard, we often abandon all scrutiny. Just as science is critical of any new finding in animal cognition, it is often equally uncritical with regard to claims about our own intelligence. It swallows them hook, line, and sinker, especially if they—unlike Ayumu’s feat—are in the expected direction. In the meantime, the general public gets confused, because inevitably any such claims provoke studies that challenge them. Variation in outcome is often a matter of methodology, which may sound boring but goes to the heart of the question of whether we are smart enough to know how smart animals are.

Methodology is all we have as scientists, so we pay close attention to it. When our capuchin monkeys underperformed on a face-recognition task on a touchscreen, we kept staring at the data until we discovered that it was always on a particular day of the week that the monkeys fared so poorly. It turned out that one of our student volunteers, who carefully followed the script during testing, had a distracting presence. This student was fidgety and nervous, always changing her body postures or adjusting her hair, which apparently made the monkeys nervous, too. Performance improved dramatically once we removed this young woman from the project. Or take the recent finding that male but not female experimenters induce so much stress in mice that it affects their responses. Placing a T-shirt worn by a man in the room has the same effect, suggesting that olfaction is key.12 This means, of course, that mouse studies conducted by men may have different outcomes than those conducted by women. Methodological details matter much more than we tend to admit, which is particularly relevant when we compare species.


Knowing What Others Know

Imagine that aliens from a distant galaxy landed on earth wondering if there was one species unlike the rest. I am not convinced they would settle on us, but let’s assume they did. Do you think they’d do so based on the fact that we know what others know? Of all the skills that we possess and all the technology that we have invented, would they zoom in on the way we perceive one another? What an odd and capricious choice this would be! But it is precisely the trait that the scientific community has considered most worthy of attention for the last two decades. Known as theory of mind, abbreviated ToM, it is the capacity to grasp the mental states of others. And the profound irony is that our fascination with ToM did not even start with our species. Emil Menzel was the first to ponder what one individual knows about what others know, but he did so for juvenile chimpanzees.