Animals and Us, Not So Far Apart

[Guest guest]

[this might be the final thing i'd say to researchers that torture

animals for profit, because afterall, it's coming from scientests.

thus, they should look into the eyes of the very animal they are

experimenting on and know that THEY DO KNOW]

Animals and Us, Not So Far Apart

washingtonpost.com

 

By Christine KenneallySunday, April 13, 2008; B03

Ever

since Galileo argued that the sun was the center of the solar system,

the idea of Earth as the universal hub has been the classic example of

scientific arrogance. It's certainly a foolproof example of the way

humans consider themselves the rule by which everything else should be

measured, but when we use it, there's a sense that we don't make that

kind of mistake anymore. Yet even today scientists are swayed by the

notion that humans stand at the center of the biological universe,

especially when it comes to what we care about most: our minds.

For

years, scientists believed that the parts of the human brain that

supported complex thought and language had only recently evolved. The

mental life of animals was treated as primitive and utterly distinct

from ours. But an explosion in animal research is showing that many

components of human thought are shared with other species. Evidence

shows that parrots can understand numbers, crows make tools, elephants

and hyenas live in complex, rule-governed societies, and chimpanzees

make sense of the world in many of the same ways we do. The implication

is indisputable: Humans are not unique.

The irony of the

cognitive comeuppance for our species is that it also holds the key to

a groundbreaking understanding of ourselves. When we examine the mental

overlap between us and many other species, we can more cleanly pick

apart what elements of thought are special to us, what elements are

shared with a few other animals and what is common to many. This also

means that we can begin to map the trajectory of the mind's evolution

through millions of years. Not only does this deepen our understanding

of our own species, it puts evolution in its rightful place -- as the

Big Idea that is the foundation for all other research.

In recent

years, the intersect between humans and other animals has become most

obvious with respect to language. We've long thought that the one

unbreakable wall between us and them was our linguistic ability -- we

have it and they don't. It took an army of linguists, neuroscientists,

paleoanthropologists and geneticists to prove that this is not the

case. We now know that chimpanzees and bonobos are capable of

understanding and even creating simple sentences, and that they make

rudimentary references to objects with their natural cries. A border

collie in Germany

named Rico is able to correctly select many objects when they are

named, and will even apply new words to novel objects. Even in the

wild, monkeys use a rudimentary form of structure in their calls,

combining two calls to create a new meaning.

Animals' ability with numbers has also attracted more scientific attention. In 1999, researchers at Columbia University

announced that they'd taught two rhesus monkeys to count to four using

images of shapes on a computer screen. More recently, researchers at

the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard

have shown that monkeys, like children, grasp small numbers precisely

and approximate large numbers. Alex, an African gray parrot studied by

Irene Pepperberg at Brandeis,

was not only able to identify by word 50 different objects, seven

colors and five shapes, he also comprehended numbers under 10 (though,

interestingly, he did not count sequentially).

It's old news by

now that humans aren't the only animals that use tools, but each year

brings more strange, wonderful stories of how good the other guys are

at it. It was long assumed that gorillas were the only great apes that

didn't use tools, but two years ago in Africa, gorillas were observed using sticks to test the depth of water before they stepped into it.

And how about Betty, a New Caledonian crow housed in the aviary at Oxford University?

In 2001, a lab researcher filmed Betty to see whether she or her aviary

mate, Abel, would choose a hooked tool over a straight one to get a

tiny toy bucket with meat inside it out of a glass cylinder. In one of

the first trials, Abel accidentally knocked the hook away. Betty

quickly hopped up and in a completely businesslike fashion took the

remaining straight piece of wire -- a material she'd never seen before

-- found a suitable place to wedge it, bent it into a fine-looking hook

and used it to retrieve the bucket of food.

The tool question is

even more interesting when some animal families within a species do

things one way and others do it another. Such behavioral differences

between groups of the same species amount to a kind of basic culture.

Only 10 years ago, the idea that nonhuman animals have culture would

have been laughed out of science, but the evidence has piled up.

Certain

Japanese macaques have invented effective potato-washing techniques

that other macaques do not employ, and different chimpanzee groups

favor different tools -- some prefer rock hammers, others wood -- as

well as different hammering techniques. Some groups use a fishing

technique to get termites with sticks, while chimpanzees in Guinea

are the only ones that stand atop palm trees and repeatedly beat the

center of the tree crown with a branch to make a pulpy soup. Science

has been clear for a long time that humans are merely a twig on the ape

branch of the great tree of life, but now research that puts humans'

mental life in context is starting to catch up.

Of course, these

are early days, and researchers expect the road to be as rocky as it is

exciting. Just last year a group of scientists in Leipzig,

Germany, announced a tantalizing study that compared the learning

abilities of human children with those of chimpanzees and orangutans.

Three apes were presented with an array of tests that tapped their

understanding of the physical world and how it works; for example, they

had to use sticks to get out-of-reach objects, they had to follow the

gaze of a person to find a reward, and they were asked to tell the

difference between various amounts of an item. Remarkably, chimpanzees

and humans were typically either the best or equally good. But when the

researchers measured social rather than physical intelligence, the

field changed completely: Humans were significantly better at

understanding other minds.

The study didn't show that learning

from other individuals, as well as understanding their intentions, is

uniquely human, but it strongly suggested that it was at least a more

specifically human skill than a general ape one. The findings made

pleasing intuitive sense -- scientists regard the bustling, layered,

intensely interactive human social world to be pretty distinct within

the entire animal kingdom. But don't get too comfortable with that yet.

Another team of scientists has pointed out that the study was biased

toward humans: During the social learning experiment, both children and

chimpanzees had to engage with human adults -- so the apes were

essentially being asked to learn from another species.

In a recent letter to Science magazine, Victoria Horner of the Living Links Center in Atlanta

suggested an experiment in which the situation is reversed and trained

apes administer the test to human children. "We doubt," she observed,

"this would do the children's performance any good!" Horner's excellent

point speaks not only to this experiment but to all of cognitive

science. We will learn more about ourselves if we examine our

weaknesses as well our strengths -- and in this, animals have much to

teach us.

ckenneally

Christine Kenneally is a freelance journalist and the author of "The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language."