Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (38 page)

In the same way, we are able to locate friends and relatives in a crowd even if we only see their backs. Having published our findings under the suggestive title “Faces and Behinds,” everyone thought it was funny that apes could do this, and we received an IgNobel prize for the study. This parody of the Nobel Prize honors research that “first makes people laugh, and then think.”
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I do hope it makes people think, because individual recognition is the cornerstone of any complex society.
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That animals have this capacity is often underestimated by humans, for whom all members of a given species look alike. Among themselves, however, animals generally have no trouble telling one another apart. Take dolphins, which for us are hard to identify because they all seem to have the same smiley face. Without equipment, we aren’t privy to their main channel of communication, which is underwater sound. Investigators typically follow them around on the surface in a boat, as I did with my former student Ann Weaver, who recognizes about three hundred bottlenose dolphins in the Boca Ciega Bay Intracoastal Waterway estuary, in Florida. Ann carries an enormous photo album with close-ups of every dorsal fin in the area, which she has patrolled for over fifteen years. She visits the bay nearly every day in a small motorboat while on the lookout for surfacing dolphins. The dorsal fin is the body part we see most easily, and each one is shaped slightly differently. Some are tall and sturdy, while others hang to one side or miss a chunk due to fights or shark attacks.

From these identifications, Ann knew that some males form alliances and travel together all the time. They swim synchronously and surface together. The few times that they are not near each other, they get into trouble with rivals, who sense an opportunity. Females and calves, up to the age of five or six, move together, too. Otherwise dolphin society is
fission-fusion
, meaning that individuals gather in temporary combinations that vary from hour to hour and from day to day. Knowing who is around by looking at a small body part that regularly sticks out of the water is a rather cumbersome technique, however, compared to how dolphins themselves recognize one another.

Dolphins know one another’s calls. This by itself is not so special, since we too recognize each other’s voices, as do many other animals. The morphology of the vocal apparatus (mouth, tongue, vocal cords, lung capacity) varies greatly, which allows us to recognize voices by their pitch, loudness, and timbre. We have no trouble hearing the gender and age of a speaker or singer, but we also recognize individual voices. When I sit in my office and hear colleagues talking around the corner, I don’t need to see them to know who they are.

Dolphins go much further, however. They produce
signature whistles
, which are high-pitched sounds with a modulation that is unique for each individual. Their structure varies the way ring-tone melodies vary. It is not so much the voice but the melody that marks them. Young dolphins develop personalized whistles in their first year. Females keep the same melody for the rest of their lives, whereas males adjust theirs to those of their closest buddies, so that the calls within a male alliance sound alike.
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Dolphins utter signature whistles especially when they are isolated (lonely ones in captivity do so all the time) but also before aggregating in large groups in the ocean. At such moments, identities are broadcast frequently and widely, which makes sense in a fission-fusion species that dwells in murky water. That whistles are used for individual identification was shown by playing them back through underwater speakers. Dolphins pay more attention to sounds associated with close kin than to those of others. That this is based not on mere voice recognition but on the call’s specific melody was demonstrated by playing back computer-generated sounds that mimicked the melodies: the voice was left out while the melody was preserved. These synthesized calls triggered the same responses as the originals.
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Dolphins have an incredible memory for their friends. The American animal behaviorist Jason Bruck took advantage of the fact that captive dolphins are regularly moved from one place to another for breeding purposes. He played back signature whistles of tank mates that had left long ago. In response to familiar calls, dolphins would become active, approach the speaker, and call in return. Bruck found that dolphins have no trouble recognizing former tank mates regardless of how much or little time they had spent together in the past or how long it had been since they had last seen them. The longest time interval in the study was when a female named Bailey recognized the whistles of Allie, a female she had lived with elsewhere twenty years before.
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Increasingly, experts view signature whistles as
names
. They are not just identifiers that individuals produce themselves but are sometimes mimicked. For dolphins, addressing specific companions by their own whistles is like calling them by name. While Roah used his own name to call Lorenz, dolphins sometimes mimic the characteristic call of someone else to draw his or her attention. That they do so is obviously hard to prove by observation alone; hence this issue was, again, addressed with playbacks. Working with bottlenose dolphins off the coast of Scotland, near the University of St. Andrews, Stephanie King and Vincent Janik recorded the signature whistles of free-ranging dolphins. They then played the calls back through a submerged speaker while the dolphins who had produced them still swam in the vicinity. The dolphins replied by calling back, sometimes multiple times, to their own characteristic whistles, as if confirming that they’d heard themselves being called.
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The deep irony of animals calling one another by name is, of course, that it was once taboo for scientists to name their animals. When Imanishi and his followers started doing so, they were ridiculed, as was Goodall when she gave her chimps names like David Greybeard and Flo. The complaint was that by using names we were humanizing our subjects. We were supposed to keep our distance and stay objective, and to never forget that only humans have names.

As it turns out, on this issue some animals may have been ahead of us.

9
EVOLUTIONARY COGNITION

G
iven how easily we string the words
animal
and
cognition
together as if there were nothing to it—as if these words might even
belong
together!—it is hard to imagine the struggle we went through to reach this point. Some animals were considered good learners or hard-wired for clever solutions, but
cognition
was way too big a word for what they did. Even though for many people animal intelligence is self-evident, science never takes anything at face value. We want proof, which with regard to animal cognition has now become overwhelming—so much so, in fact, that we risk forgetting the immense resistance that we had to overcome. This is why I have paid ample attention to the history of our field. There were early pioneers, such as Köhler, Kohts, Tolman, and Yerkes, and a second generation, such as Menzel, Gallup, Beck, Shettleworth, Kummer, and Griffin. The third generation, to which I myself belong, includes so many evolutionary cognitivists that I am not going to list them here, but we too faced an uphill battle.

I can’t count the number of times I have been called naïve, romantic, soft, unscientific, anthropomorphic, anecdotal, or just a sloppy thinker for proposing that primates follow political strategies, reconcile after fights, empathize with others, or understand the social world around them. Based on a lifetime of firsthand experience, none of these claims seemed particularly audacious to me. So one can imagine what happened to scientists suggesting awareness, linguistic capacities, or logical reasoning. Every claim was picked apart and held up against the light of alternative theories, which invariably sounded simpler given that they derived from the behavior of pigeons and rats in the confines of a Skinner box.

They were not always so simple, though—accounts based on associative learning can get quite convoluted compared to ones that merely postulate an extra mental faculty—but in those days, learning was thought to explain everything. Except, of course, when it didn’t. In the latter case, we clearly hadn’t thought long and hard enough about the issue at hand or we had failed to conduct the right experiments. At times, the wall of skepticism seemed more ideological than scientific, a bit the way we biologists feel about creationists. However compelling the data we bring to the table, they never suffice. Things must be believed to be seen, as Willy Wonka sang, and entrenched disbelief is oddly immune to evidence. The “slayers” of the cognitive view were not open to it.

This epithet comes from the American zoologist Marc Bekoff and the philosopher Colin Allen who early on picked up Griffin’s torch for cognitive ethology. They divided attitudes toward animal cognition into three types: the slayers, the skeptics, and the proponents. When first writing about this in 1997, slayers were still abundant:

Slayers deny any possibility of success in cognitive ethology. In our analyses of their published statements, we have found that they sometimes conflate the difficulty of doing rigorous cognitive ethological investigations with the impossibility of doing so. Slayers also often ignore specific details of work by cognitive ethologists and frequently mount philosophically motivated objections to the possibility of learning anything about animal cognition. Slayers do not believe that cognitive ethological approaches can lead, and have led, to new and testable hypotheses. They often pick out the most difficult and least accessible phenomena to study (e.g. consciousness) and then conclude that because we can gain little detailed knowledge about this subject, we cannot do better in other areas. Slayers also appeal to parsimony in explanations of animal behavior, but they dismiss the possibility that cognitive explanations can be more parsimonious than noncognitive alternatives, and they deny the utility of cognitive hypotheses for directing empirical research.
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When Emil Menzel told me about the prominent professor—clearly a slayer—who tried to ambush him but ended up with his foot in his mouth, he added an interesting side note. The same professor publicly challenged young Menzel to tell him what capacities he could possibly hope to find in apes that were not also present in pigeons. In other words, why waste your time on those willful, hard-to-control apes if animal intelligence is essentially the same across the board?

While this was the prevailing attitude at the time, the field has come around to a much more evolutionary approach, which recognizes that every species has a different cognitive story to tell. Each organism has its own ecology and lifestyle, its own
Umwelt
, which dictates what it needs to know in order to make a living. There is not a single species that can stand model for all the others, most certainly not one with a brain as tiny as a pigeon’s. Pigeons are plenty intelligent, but size does matter. Brains are the most “expensive” organs around. They are true energy hogs, using twenty times more calories per unit than muscle tissue. Menzel could simply have countered that since ape brains are several hundred times heavier than those of pigeons and hence burn vastly more energy, it stands to reason that apes face greater cognitive challenges. Otherwise mother nature indulged in a shocking extravagance, something she is not known for. In the utilitarian view of biology, animals have the brains they need—nothing more, nothing less. Even
within
a species, the brain may change depending on how it is being used, such as the way song-related areas seasonally expand and contract in the songbird brain.
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Brains adapt to ecological requirements, as does cognition.

We have also met a second type of slayer, though, and they have been even harder to deal with since they don’t share an interest in animal behavior. All they care about is humanity’s position in the cosmos, which science has been undercutting since the days of Copernicus. Their struggle has become rather hopeless, though, because if there is one overall trend in our field, it is that the wall between human and animal cognition has begun to resemble a Swiss Gruyère full of holes. Time after time we have demonstrated capacities in animals that were thought to set our species apart. Proponents of human uniqueness face the possibility that they have either grossly overestimated the complexity of what humans do or underestimated the capacities of other species.

Neither possibility is a pleasant thought, because their deeper problem is evolutionary continuity. They can’t stand the notion of humans as modified apes. Like Alfred Russel Wallace, they feel that evolution must have skipped the human head. Although this view is currently on its way out in psychology, which under the sway of neuroscience is edging ever closer to the natural sciences, it is still prevalent in the humanities and most of the social sciences. Typical is a recent reaction by the American anthropologist Jonathan Marks to the overwhelming evidence that animals pick up habits from one another, hence show cultural variability: “Labeling ape behavior as ‘culture’ simply means you have to find another word for what humans do.”
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