Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(46)

With this elegant motion, Lolita demonstrated that she realized I would find the front of her newborn more interesting than its back. To take someone else’s perspective represents a huge leap in social evolution.


Spreading Habits

Decades ago friends of mine were outraged by a newspaper article that ranked the smartest canine breeds. They happened to own the breed that was dead last on the list: the Afghan hound. Naturally, the top breed was the border collie. My insulted friends argued that the only reason Afghans were considered dim-witted is that they are independent-minded, stubborn, and unwilling to follow orders. The newspaper’s list was about obedience, they said, not intelligence. Afghans are perhaps more like cats, which are not beholden to anyone. This is no doubt why some people rate cats as less intelligent than dogs. We know, however, that a cat’s lack of response to humans is not due to ignorance. A recent study showed that felines have no trouble recognizing their owner’s voice. The deeper problem is that they don’t care, prompting the study’s authors to add: “the behavioral aspects of cats that cause their owners to become attached to them are still undetermined.”40

I had to think of this story when dog cognition emerged as a hot topic. Dogs were depicted as smarter than wolves, perhaps even apes, because they paid better attention to human pointing gestures. A human would point at one out of two buckets, and the dog would check that particular bucket out for a reward. Scientists concluded that domestication had given dogs extra intelligence compared to their ancestors. But what does it mean that wolves fail to follow human pointing? With a brain about one-third larger than a dog’s, I bet a wolf could outsmart its domesticated counterpart anytime—yet all we go by is how they react to us. And who says that the difference in reaction is inborn, a consequence of domestication, and not based on familiarity with the species doing the pointing? It is the old nature-nurture dilemma. The only way to determine how much of a trait is produced by genes and how much by the environment is to hold one of these two constant to see what difference the other one makes. It is a complex problem that is never fully resolved. In the dog-wolf comparison, this would mean raising wolves like dogs in a human household. If they still differ, genetics might be at play.

Raising wolf puppies in the home is a hellish job, though, since they are exceptionally energetic and less rule-bound than dog puppies, chewing up everything in sight. When dedicated scientists raised wolves this way, the nurture hypothesis came out the winner. Human-raised wolves followed hand points as well as dogs. A few differences persisted, though, such as that wolves looked less at human faces than dogs and were more self-reliant. When dogs tackle a problem they cannot solve, they look back at their human companion to get encouragement or assistance—something that wolves never do. Wolves keep trying and trying on their own. Domestication may be responsible for this particular difference. Instead of intelligence, though, it seems more a question of temperament and relations with us—those weird bipedal apes that the wolf evolved to fear and the dog was bred to please.41 Dogs, for example, engage in lots of eye contact with us. They have hijacked the human parental pathways in the brain, making us care about them in almost the same way that we care about our children. Dog owners who stare into their pet’s eyes experience a rapid increase in oxytocin—a neuropeptide involved in attachment and bonding. Exchanging gazes full of empathy and trust, we enjoy a special relationship with the dog.42

Cognition requires attention and motivation, yet it cannot be reduced to either. As we have seen, the same problem troubles the comparison between apes and children, an issue that popped up again in the controversy around animal culture. Whereas in the nineteenth century, anthropologists were still open to the possibility of culture outside our own species, in the twentieth they began to write culture with a capital C while claiming that the trait is what makes us human. Sigmund Freud considered culture and civilization a victory over nature, while the American anthropologist Leslie White, in a book ironically entitled The Evolution of Culture, declared: “Man and culture originated simultaneously—this by definition.”43 Naturally, when the first reports of animal culture came along, defined as habits learned from others—from potato-washing macaques and nut-cracking chimpanzees to bubble-net-hunting humpback whales—they faced a wall of hostility. One line of defense against this offensive notion was to focus on the learning mechanism. If it could be shown that human culture relies on distinct mechanisms, so the thinking went, we might be able to claim culture for ourselves. Imitation became the holy grail of this battle.

To this end, the age-old definition of imitating as “doing an act from seeing it done” had to be changed to something narrower, something more advanced. The category true imitation was born, which requires one individual to intentionally copy another’s specific technique to achieve a specific goal.44 Merely duplicating behavior, such as one songbird learning another’s song, was not enough anymore: it had to be done with insight and comprehension. While imitation is common in lots of animals according to the old definition, true imitation is rare. We learned this fact from experiments in which apes and children were prompted to imitate an experimenter. They’d watch a human model open a puzzle box or rake in food with a tool. While the children copied the demonstrated action, the apes failed, hence the conclusion that other species lack imitative capacities and cannot possibly have culture. The comfort this finding brought to some circles greatly puzzled me, because it did not answer any fundamental questions either about animal culture or about human culture. All it did was draw a flimsy line in the sand.