Having just beat up on the Post for a hideous op-ed, I fell compelled to point out a good one. This one is very, very good.
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.
Ever since I was a small child, I've never been able to understand why we humans think we are so unique and superior. Clearly we are able to create complex technologies and cultures where other species are not, and that no doubt makes us different. But to take the absence of such things in other species as proof that they lead meaningless social and mental lives just never made any sense to me. On the one hand, we know that we evolved from common ancestry. On the other, we still believe that our mental processes are utterly unique and infinitely more complex than even our closest biological relatives? Where else does evolution work like that?
The place where this really first hit home for me was the Ape House at the National Zoo. Judging from what I've overheard the few times I've been there, most people hate the place for the way it smells. And although I certainly don't disagree with them there, that's not what bothers me most. Looking at the apes behind the glass is depressing. Making eye contact with one of them and then holding it? Looking into their eyes and having them look back at me? I can see the pain and frustration and anger and sadness - and it is the sadness that really gets me - that comes from spending your life locked in a cage. And this is the thing: it doesn't look or feel all that different than looking into the eyes of human child.
But most people don't ever have this experience, nor do they need to. If you have ever owned a dog, you surely already know that they have thoughts and feelings and experiences that cannot simply be explained away as unthinking "instincts." And if you have ever watched the way dogs interact with one another, and paid attention to the way those behaviors change as they get to know one another, you cannot simply say that it is all "instinct." They are far, far more complex than that.
And if that's true of apes and dogs, how is it not obvious that it must be true for all other animals? We know some animals can count. We know some can create and use tools. We know some can learn new behaviors and then teach them to others. Wit dolphins, we even know that they are capable of giving one another names and then talking about them when they are not around. And yet somehow we're supposed to be so thoroughly unique that we are nothing like any of them?
And last but not least, if as we are now beginning to admit we have much more in common with other species than we previously thought, does that not mean that we must also begin to admit that some of our more complex behaviors are ruled not by reason and intellect but perhaps also by instinct? What if some of our social behaviors aren't wholly learned but are at least in part innate? What if the human tendency to fight wars isn't simply based on ignorance, but is instead partly motivated by deep, instinctual impulses? What if our dating and mating behaviors are also in part instinctual? What would that tell us about ourselves, and how would it change our understandings of the societies we have built?
I obviously don't have any of the answers to these questions, but I'm thrilled that it appears they are finally beginning to be asked.
UPDATE: And as if on cue, check out this great story from Boing Boing on the intelligence of fruit flies.
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