Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?(9)

For these reasons, Lorenz once joked that there was nothing comparative about comparative psychology. He knew what he was talking about, having just published a seminal study on the courtship patterns of twenty different duck species.27 His sensitivity to the minutest differences between species was quite the opposite of the way comparative psychologists lump animals together as “nonhuman models of human behavior.” Think for a second about this terminology, which remains so entrenched in psychology that no one takes notice anymore. Its first implication, of course, is that the only reason to study animals is to learn about ourselves. Second, it ignores that every species is uniquely adapted to its own ecology, because otherwise how could one serve as a model for another? Even the term nonhuman grates on me, since it lumps millions of species together by an absence, as if they were missing something. Poor things, they are nonhuman! When students embrace this jargon in their writing, I cannot resist sarcastic corrections in the margin saying that for completeness’s sake, they should add that the animals they are talking about are also nonpenguin, nonhyena, and a whole lot more.

Even though comparative psychology is changing for the better, I’d rather avoid its leaden baggage and propose to call the new field evolutionary cognition, which is the study of all cognition (human and animal) from an evolutionary standpoint. Which species we study obviously matters a great deal, and humans are not necessarily central to every comparison. The field includes phylogeny, when we trace traits across the evolutionary tree to determine whether similarities are due to common descent, the way Lorenz had done so beautifully for waterfowl. We also ask how cognition has been shaped to serve survival. The agenda of this field is precisely what Griffin and Uexküll had in mind, in that it seeks to place the study of cognition on a less anthropocentric footing. Uexküll urged us to look at the world from the animal’s standpoint, saying that this is the only way to fully appreciate animal intelligence.

A century later we are ready to listen.





2 A TALE OF TWO SCHOOLS


Do Dogs Desire?

Given the prominent role that jackdaws and little silvery fish known as three-spined sticklebacks—my favorite childhood animals—played in the early years of ethology, the discipline was an easy sell to me. I learned about it when, as a biology student, I heard a professor explain the zigzag dance of the stickleback. I was floored: not by what these little fish did but by how seriously science took what they did. It was the first time I realized that what I liked doing best—watching animals behave—could be a profession. As a boy, I had spent hours observing self-caught aquatic life that I kept in buckets and tanks in our backyard. The high point had been breeding sticklebacks and releasing the young back into the ditch from which their parents had come.

Ethology is the biological study of animal behavior that arose in continental Europe right before and after World War II. It reached the English-speaking world when one of its founders, Niko Tinbergen, moved across the Channel. A Dutch zoologist, Tinbergen started out in Leiden and accepted a position in Oxford in 1949. He described the male stickleback’s zigzag dance in great detail, explaining how it draws the female to the nest where the male fertilizes her eggs. The male then chases her off and protects the eggs, fanning and aerating them, until they hatch. I had seen it all with my own eyes in an abandoned aquarium—its luxurious algae growth was exactly what the fish needed—including the stunning transformation of silvery males into brightly red and blue show-offs. Tinbergen had noticed that males in tanks in the windowsill of his lab in Leiden would get agitated every time a red mail truck drove by in the street below. Using fish models to trigger courtship and aggression, he confirmed the critical role of a red signal.

Clearly, ethology was the direction I wanted to go in, but before pursuing this goal, I was briefly diverted by its rival discipline. I worked in the lab of a psychology professor trained in the behaviorist tradition that dominated comparative psychology for most of the last century. This school was chiefly American but evidently had reached my university in the Netherlands. I still remember this professor’s classes, in which he made fun of anyone who believed to know what animals “want,” “like,” or “feel,” carefully neutralizing such terminology with quotation marks. If your dog drops a tennis ball in front of you and looks up at you with wagging tail, do you think she wants to play? How na?ve! Who says dogs have desires and intentions? Her behavior is the product of the law of effect: she must have been rewarded for it in the past. The dog’s mind, if such a thing even exists, remains a black box.

Its focus on nothing but behavior is what gave behaviorism its name, but I had trouble with the idea that animal behavior could be reduced to a history of incentives. It presented animals as passive, whereas I view them as seeking, wanting, and striving. True, their behavior changes based on its consequences, but they never act randomly or accidentally to begin with. Let’s take the dog and her ball. Throw a ball at a puppy, and she will go after it like an eager predator. The more she learns about prey and their escape tactics—or about you and your fake throws—the better a hunter or fetcher she will become. But still, at the root of everything is her immense enthusiasm for the pursuit, which takes her through shrubs, into water, and sometimes through glass doors. This enthusiasm manifests itself before any skill development.

Now, compare this behavior with that of your pet rabbit. It doesn’t matter how many balls you throw at him, none of the same learning will take place. Absent a hunting instinct, what is there to acquire? Even if you were to offer your rabbit a juicy carrot for every retrieved ball, you’d be in for a long, tedious training program that would never generate the excitement for small moving objects known of cats and dogs. Behaviorists totally overlooked these natural proclivities, forgetting that by flapping their wings, digging holes, manipulating sticks, gnawing wood, climbing trees, and so on, every species sets up its own learning opportunities. Many animals are driven to learn the things they need to know or do, the way kid goats practice head butts or human toddlers have an insuppressible urge to stand up and walk. This holds even for animals in a sterile box. It is no accident that rats are trained to press bars with their paws, pigeons to peck keys with their beaks, and cats to rub their flanks against a latch. Operant conditioning tends to reinforce what is already there. Instead of being the omnipotent creator of behavior, it is its humble servant.