Animal studies show humans are not so smart
WASHINGTON—The more we study animals, the less special we seem.
Baboons can distinguish between written words and gibberish. Monkeys seem to be able to do multiplication. Apes can delay instant gratification longer than a human child can. They plan ahead. They make war and peace. They show empathy. They share.
“It’s not a question of whether they think—it’s how they think,” says Brian Hare, a scientist at Duke University.
Now scientists are wondering if apes are capable of thinking about what other apes are thinking.
The evidence that animals are more intelligent and more social than we thought seems to grow each year, especially when it comes to primates.
It’s an increasingly hot scientific field with the number of ape and monkey cognition studies doubling in recent years, often with better technology and neuroscience paving the way to unusual discoveries.
This month, scientists mapping the DNA of the bonobo ape found that, like the chimpanzees, bonobos were only 1.3 percent different from humans.
Says Josep Call, director of the primate research center at Max Planck Institute in Germany: “Every year we discover things that we thought they could not do.”
Setting goals
Call says one of his recent more surprising studies showed that apes could set goals and follow through with them.
Orangutans and bonobos in a zoo were offered eight possible tools—two of which would help them get at some food.
At times when the orangutans and bonobos chose the proper tool, researchers moved the apes to a different area before they could get the food, and then kept them waiting as much as 14 hours.
In nearly every case, when the apes realized they were being moved, they took their tool with them so they could use it to get food the next day, remembering that even after sleeping.
The goal and series of tasks didn’t leave the apes’ minds.
Call says this is similar to a person packing luggage a day before a trip: “For humans it’s such a central ability, it’s so important.”
Capable of deception
For a few years, scientists have watched chimpanzees in zoos collect and store rocks as weapons for later use. In May, a study found the chimps even added deception to the mix.
The chimps created haystacks to conceal their stash of stones from opponents, just like nations do with bombs.
Hare also points to studies in which competing chimpanzees enter an arena where one bit of food is hidden from view for only one chimp.
The chimp that can see the hidden food, quickly learns that his foe can’t see it and uses that to his advantage, displaying the ability to perceive another ape’s situation.
That’s a trait humans develop as toddlers, but something we thought other animals never got, according to Hare.
Amazing memory
And then there is the amazing monkey memory.
At the National Zoo in Washington, humans who tried to match their recall skills with an orangutan’s were humbled.
Says Don Moore, the zoo’s associate director: “I’ve got a Ph.D., for God’s sake, you would think I could outthink an orang and I can’t.”
In a French research, at least two baboons kept memorizing so many pictures—several thousand—that after three years researchers ran out of time before the baboons reached their limit.
Researcher Joel Fagot at the French National Center for Scientific Research figures the baboons can memorize at least 10,000 and probably more.
And a chimp in Japan named Ayumu who sees strings of numbers flash on a screen for a splitsecond regularly beats humans at accurately duplicating the lineup.
Ayumu is a YouTube sensation, along with orangutans in a Miami zoo that use iPads.
Dolphins
It’s not just primates that demonstrate surprising abilities.
Dolphins, whose brains are 25 percent heavier than humans, recognize themselves in a mirror. So do elephants.
A recent study showed black bears could do primitive counting, something even pigeons had done, by putting two dots before five, or 10 before 20 in one experiment.
The trend in research is to identify some new thinking skill that chimps can do, revealing that certain abilities are “not uniquely human,” says Frans de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University.
Then the scientists found that
Not as special
same ability in other primates further removed from humans genetically. Then they saw it in dogs and elephants.
“Capacities that we think in humans are very special and complex are probably not so special and not so complex,” De Waal says.
“This research in animals elevates the animals, but it also brings down the humans … If monkeys can do it and maybe dogs and other animals, maybe it’s not as complex as you think.”
At Duke, professor Elizabeth Brannon showed videos of monkeys that appeared to be doing a “fuzzy representation” of multiplication by following the number of dots that go into a box on a computer screen and choosing the right answer to come out of the box.
This was after they had already done addition and subtraction.
This spring in France, researchers showed that six baboons could distinguish between fake and real four-letter words—BRRU vs KITE, for example.
The baboons also chose to do these computer-based exercises of their own free will, either for fun or a snack.
Control of emotions
It was once thought the control of emotions and the ability to empathize and socialize separated us from our primate cousins.
But chimps console—and fight—each other. They also try to soothe an upset companion, grooming and putting their arms around him.
“I see plenty of empathy in my chimpanzees,” De Waal says.
But studies have shown chimps also go to war against neighboring colonies, killing the males and taking the females.
That’s something that also is very human and leads people to believe that war-making must go back in our lineage 6 million years, De Waal says.
When scientists look at our other closest relative, the bonobo, they see a difference. Bonobos don’t kill.
Hare says his experiments show bonobos give food to newcomer bonobos, even when they can choose to keep all the food themselves.
Choice to perform
One reason scientists are learning more about animal intellect is computers, including touch screens. In some cases, scientists are setting up banks of computers available to primates 24/7.
In the French word recognition experiment, Fagot found he got more and better data when it was the baboons’ choice to work.
Steve Ross, an animal cognition researcher at Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, agrees. “The apes in our case seem to be working better when they have that control, that choice to perform,” he said.
Brain scans on monkeys and apes also have helped correct mistaken views about ape brain power.
It was once thought the prefrontal cortex, the area in charge of higher reasoning, was disproportionately larger than the rest of the brain only in humans, giving us a cognitive advantage, Hare says.
But imaging shows that the prefrontal cortexes of monkeys and apes have that same larger scale, he says.
What’s different is that the human communication system in the prefrontal cortex is more complex, Hare says.
So there are limits to what non-
human primates can do.
Complexity of language
Animals don’t have the ability to communicate with the complexity of human language.
In the French study, the baboons can recognize that the letters KITE make a word because through trial and error they learn which letters tend to go together in what order.
But the baboons don’t have a clue of what KITE means. It’s that gap that’s key.
“The boundaries are not as sharp as people think, but there are certain things you can’t overcome and language is one of them,” says Herbert Terrace, an animal cognition researcher at Columbia University.
And that leads to another difference, Ross says.
Because apes lack language skills, they learn by watching and mimicking. Humans teach with language and explanation, which is faster and better, according to Ross.
Some of the shifts in scientific understanding of animals are leading to ethical debates.
When Emory University researcher Lori Marino in 2001 cowrote a groundbreaking study on dolphins recognizing themselves in mirrors, proving they have a sense of self similar to humans, she had a revelation.
“The more you learn about them, the more you realize that they do have the capacity and characteristics that we think of as a person,” Marino says. “I think it’s impossible to ignore the ethical implications of these kinds of findings.”
After the two dolphins she studied died when they were transferred to another aquarium, she decided never to work on captive dolphins again.
She then became a science adviser to the Nonhuman Rights Project, which seeks legal rights or status for animals.
The idea, Marino says, is to get animals such as dolphins “to be deemed a person, not property.”
Research restrictions
The intelligence of primates was one of the factors behind a report last year by the Institute of Medicine that said the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should reduce dramatically the number of chimpanzees it uses in biomedical research.
The NIH is working on new guidelines that would further limit federal medical chimpanzee use down from its current few dozen chimps at any given time, says James Anderson, the NIH program planning chief.
Chimps are a special case, with their use “very, very limited,” Anderson says.
But he raises the question: “What happens if your child is sick or your mother is dying” and animal research may lead to a cure?
Right not to be killed
The issue is more about animal welfare and giving them the right “not to be killed, not to be tortured, not to be confined unnecessarily” than giving them legal standing, says David DeGrazia, a philosophy and ethics professor at George Washington University.
Hare says that focusing on animal rights ignores the problem of treatment of chimps in research settings.
He contends that for behavioral studies and even for many medical research tests they could be kept in zoos or sanctuaries rather than labs.
Animals performing tasks in near-natural habitats “is like an Ivy League college” for the apes, Hare says. “We’re going to see them do stunning and sophisticated things.”