Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(63)
Elephant coalitions are subtle, and everything these animals do seems a slow-motion movie to the human eye. Sometimes two bulls will deliberately stand right next to each other with ears out, so as to indicate to an opponent that it is time to leave the waterhole. These coalitions dominate the scene, usually arranged around a clear leader. Other bulls come to pay their respect to him, approaching him with outstretched trunk, quivering in trepidation, dipping the tip into his mouth in an act of trust. After performing this tense ritual, the lower-ranking bulls relax as if a burden has been taken off their shoulders. These scenes are reminiscent of how dominant male chimpanzees expect subordinates to crawl in the dust while uttering submissive grunts, not to mention human status rituals, such as kissing the ring of the don, or Saddam Hussein’s insistence that his underlings stick their nose under his armpit. Our species is quite creative when it comes to reinforcement of the hierarchy.
We are familiar enough with these processes to recognize them in other animals. As soon as power is based on alliances rather than individual size or force, the door opens to calculated strategies. Given elephant intelligence in other domains, there is every reason to expect pachyderm society to be as complex as that of other political animals.
7 TIME WILL TELL
What is time? Leave now for dogs and apes! Man has forever!
—Robert Browning (1896)1
Judging the gap between two trees, a monkey relies on its memory of past jumps to calculate the next one. Is there a landing spot on the other side? Is it within jumping distance? Can the branch handle its impact? These life-and-death decisions take a great deal of experience to make and show how past and future intertwine in a species’s behavior. The past provides the required practice, whereas the future is where the next move will take place. Long-range future orientation is also common, such as when during a drought the matriarch of an elephant herd remembers a drinking hole miles away that no one else knows about. The herd sets out on a long trek, taking days to reach precious water. While the matriarch operates on the basis of knowledge, the rest of the herd operates on the basis of trust. Whether it is a matter of seconds or days, animal behavior is not only goal-but also future-oriented.
So it is curious to me that animals are often thought to be stuck in the present. The present is ephemeral. One moment it is here, the next it is gone. Whether you are a thrush picking up a worm for your chicks in a distant nest or a dog setting out in the morning to patrol your territory and dribble urine at strategic locations, animals have jobs to do, which imply the future. True, most of the time it is the near future, and it remains unclear how aware they are of it. Yet their behavior would make no sense if they lived entirely in the present.
We ourselves consciously reflect on the past and the future, so it was perhaps unavoidable that whether animals do or don’t would become a battleground. Isn’t consciousness what sets humans apart? Some claim that we are the only ones to actively recall the past and imagine the future, but others have been busy gathering evidence to the contrary. Since no one can prove conscious reflection without verbal reports, the debate skirts subjective experience as something that—at least for now—we can’t put our finger on. There has been genuine progress, though, in the exploration of how animals relate to the time dimension. Of all areas of evolutionary cognition, this one is perhaps the most esoteric and the hardest to get a handle on. The terminology shifts regularly, and debates are fierce. For this reason, I have visited two experts to ask them where we currently stand, which opinions will be presented at the end of this chapter.
In Search of Lost Time
Perhaps the controversy started earlier than we think, because in the 1920s an American psychologist, Edward Tolman, bravely and controversially asserted that animals are capable of more than the mindless linking between stimulus and response. He rejected the idea of them as purely incentive-driven. He dared use the term cognitive (he was famous for his studies of cognitive maps in maze-learning rats) and called animals “purposive,” guided by goals and expectations, both of which reference the future.
While Tolman—in a bow to the suffocating grip of the era’s classical behaviorism—shied away from the stronger term purposeful, his student Otto Tinklepaugh designed an experiment in which a macaque watched either a lettuce leaf or a banana being placed under a cup. As soon as the monkey was given access, she ran to the baited cup. If she found the food that she had seen being hidden, everything proceeded smoothly. But if the experimenter had replaced the banana with lettuce, the monkey only stared at the reward. She’d frantically look around, inspecting the location over and over, while angrily shrieking at the sneaky experimenter. Only after a long delay would she settle for the disappointing vegetable. From a behaviorist perspective, her attitude was bizarre since animals are supposed to merely connect behavior with rewards, any rewards. The nature of the reward shouldn’t matter. Tinklepaugh, however, demonstrated that there is more going on. Guided by a mental representation of what she had seen being hidden, the monkey had developed an expectation, the violation of which deeply upset her.2
Instead of merely preferring one behavior over another, or one cup over another, the monkey recalled a specific event. It was as if she were saying “Hey, I swear I saw them put a banana under that cup!” Such precise recall of events is known as episodic memory, which was long thought to require language, hence to be uniquely human. Animals were thought to be good at learning the general consequences of behavior without retaining any specifics. This position has become shaky, though. Let me give an example that is a bit more striking since it involves a much longer time frame than the monkey experiment.