Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(47)

One can see here the interplay between the redefinition of a phenomenon and the quest to know what sets us apart, but also a deeper methodological problem, because whether apes imitate us or not is wholly beside the point. For culture to arise in a species, all that matters is that its members pick up habits from one another. There are only two ways to make a fair comparison in this regard (if we disregard the third option of having white-coated apes administer tests to both apes and children). One is to follow the wolf example: raise apes in a human home so that they are as comfortable as children around a human experimenter. The second is the so-called conspecific approach, which is to test a species with models of its own kind.

The first solution yielded results right away, because several human-raised apes turned out to be as good at imitating members of our species as were young children.45 In other words, apes, like children, are born imitators and prefer to copy the species that raised them. Under most circumstances, this will be their own kind, but if reared by another species, they are prepared to imitate that one as well. Using us as models, these apes spontaneously learn to brush their teeth, ride bicycles, light fires, drive golf carts, eat with a knife and fork, peel potatoes, and mop the floor. It reminds me of suggestive stories on the Internet about dogs raised by cats, which show feline behavior such as sitting in boxes, crawling under tight spaces, licking their paws to clean their face, or sitting with their front legs tucked in.

Another critical study was conducted by Victoria Horner, a Scottish primatologist, who later became my team’s lead expert on cultural learning. Together with Andrew Whiten of St. Andrews University, Vicky worked with a dozen orphan chimps at Ngamba Island, a sanctuary in Uganda. She acted like a mix between a mother and caretaker for the juvenile apes. Sitting next to her during tests, the juvenile apes were attached to Vicky and eager to follow her example. Her experiment created waves because as in Ayumu’s case, the apes proved to be smarter than the children. Vicky would poke a stick into holes in a large plastic box, going through a series of holes until a candy would roll out. Only one hole mattered. If the box was made of black plastic, it was impossible to tell that some of the holes were just for show. A transparent box, on the other hand, made it obvious where the candies came from. Handed the stick and the box, young chimps mimicked only the necessary moves, at least with the transparent box. The children, on the other hand, mimicked everything that Vicky had demonstrated, including useless moves. They did so even with the transparent box, approaching the problem more like a magic ritual than as a goal-directed task.46

With this outcome, the whole strategy of redefining imitation backfired! After all, it was the apes who best fit the new definition of true imitation. The apes were showing selective imitation, the sort that pays close attention to goals and methods. If imitation requires understanding, we have to give it to the apes, not to the children, who for lack of a better term, showed only dumb copying.

What to do now? Premack complained that it was way too easy to make children look “foolish”—as if that were the goal of the experiment!—whereas in reality, he felt, there must be something wrong with the interpretation.47 His distress was genuine, showing to what degree the human ego gets in the way of dispassionate science. Promptly, psychologists settled on a narrative in which overimitation—a new term for children’s indiscriminate copying—is actually a brilliant achievement. It fits our species’ purported reliance on culture, because it makes us imitate behavior regardless of what it is good for; we transmit habits in full, without every individual making his or her own ill-informed decisions. Given the superior knowledge of adults, the best strategy for a child is to copy them without question. Blind faith is the only truly rational strategy, it was concluded with some relief.

Even more striking were Vicky’s studies at our field station in Atlanta, where we started a decade-long research program in collaboration with Whiten, focusing entirely on the conspecific approach. When chimps were given a chance to watch one another, incredible talents for imitation manifested themselves. Apes truly do ape, allowing behavior to be faithfully transmitted within the group.48 A video of Katie imitating her mother, Georgia, offers a nice example. Georgia had learned to flip open a little door in a box, then stick a rod deep into the opening to retrieve a reward. Katie had watched her mother do this five times, following her every move and smelling Georgia’s mouth every time she got a reward. After her mother was moved to another room, Katie could finally access the box herself. Even before we had added any rewards, she flipped open the door with one hand and inserted the rod with the other. Sitting like this, she looked up at us on the other side of the window and impatiently rapped it, while grunting, as if telling us to hurry up. As soon as we pushed the reward into the box, she retrieved it. Before ever being rewarded for these actions, Katie perfectly duplicated the sequence she had watch Georgia perform.

Rewards are often secondary. Imitation without reward is of course common in human culture, such as when we mimic hairstyles, accents, dance steps, and hand gestures, but it is also common in the rest of the primate order. The macaques on the Arashiyama mountaintop in Japan customarily rub pebbles together. The young learn to do it without any reward other than perhaps the noise associated with it. If one case refutes the common notion that imitation requires reward, it is this weird behavior, about which Michael Huffman, an American primatologist who has studied it for decades, notes, “It is likely that the infant is first exposed in utero to the click-clacking sounds of stones as its mother plays, and then exposed visually as one of the first activities it sees after birth, when its eyes begin to focus on objects around it.”49