The question is, how much smarter?
My answer is that there are some animals who, like some people, have a form of genius. These animals have talents that are so extraordinary they’re way past anything any normal human being could do even with a lot of hard work and practice.
Who are these animals?
Birds, for one. The more I learn about birds, the more I’m beginning to think we have no idea what the limits to some bird species’ intelligence are. Bird migration is probably the most extraordinary talent we know about right now. Birds have brains no bigger than a walnut, but they can learn and remember migratory routes thousands of miles in distance. The Arctic tern has the longest migratory route we know about: 18,000 miles, round-trip. Some of these birds travel from the North Pole to the South Pole and back again every year.
EXTREME MEMORY
What makes this a genius-level ability instead of just some miraculous ability that’s built into the species, like having wings and being able to fly, is the fact that birds have to learn these routes. They aren’t born knowing their species’ migratory route; it isn’t hardwired. Moreover, they learn the routes with almost no effort at all. Many migratory birds have genius-level learning abilities when it comes to migration.
There’s a good movie about these birds called Fly Away Home, based on the story of Bill Lishman, the man who, along with his partner, Joseph Duff, taught a bunch of Canada geese to follow him in his ultralight airplane. They created the project because they wanted to try to save the whooping cranes, which are on the verge of extinction. Operation Migration, the charity Bill Lishman founded, says there are only 188 whooping cranes left in the world. They’re all in one big flock, which makes them even more vulnerable to extinction.
Up until Bill Lishman came along people were trying to save the species by raising baby whooping cranes in captivity. But it wasn’t working because when the babies were brought up without any migrating adults to teach them the routes, there was no way to reintroduce them to the wild. They didn’t know how to migrate, so when winter came they would just stay put and die in the cold.
Bill Lishman had the idea of teaching the whooping cranes to migrate by leading them along a migration path in his ultralight plane, a small one-person airplane that can fly as slowly as 28 to 58 miles per hour. He started out working with Canada geese, because geese aren’t in danger of going extinct. Any golfer on the East Coast can tell you there’s no goose shortage. As a matter of fact the goose poop problem has gotten so out of hand that some Border collies are getting a brand-new job working goose patrol at golf courses. That’s good, because Border collies need a job. They get antsy living a life of leisure.
Pretty quickly Mr. Lishman managed to show that you could teach geese to follow a human in an ultralight airplane, and you could teach them a four-hundred-mile one-way migration route flying it just once. No human being could memorize a four-hundred-mile route across unmarked open terrain after traveling it just one time. Bird migration is an extreme talent.
After he knew he could do it with geese, he switched to sandhill cranes, which are related to whooping cranes but aren’t endangered. In 1997 he led seven sandhill cranes from southern Ontario down to Virginia, a four-hundred-mile trip one way. The cranes spent the winter in Virginia and then, one day at the end of March, they went out for their daily foraging and didn’t come back. Two days later Mr. Lishman got a call from a school principal up in Ontario who said he had six big birds in his schoolyard entertaining the students! Six of the seven birds had made it the whole four hundred miles back to Canada, after having flown the route only once in their lives, and in the opposite direction. They ended up thirty miles away from where they’d been fledged.
Lots of animals have extreme memory and learning abilities in one realm or another. Gray squirrels bury hundreds of nuts every winter, one nut in each burial spot, and they remember them all. They remember where they hid each nut, what kind of nut it was, and even when they hid it. They’re not just marking the spots some way, or finding the nuts by smell, which is what a lot of people probably assume. I read a gardening column the other day where a woman wrote in asking whether there was any way to keep squirrels from digging up her garden. The columnist answered that squirrels forget where they’ve buried their nuts, so they dig everything up. That is not true. Squirrels remember exactly where they buried hundreds and hundreds of nuts. Dr. Pierre Lavenex at the University of California, Berkeley, a researcher who studies memory in gray squirrels, says, “They use information from the environment, such as the relative position of trees and buildings, and they triangulate, relying on the angles and distances between these distant landmarks and their caches.”1
No human can do that. A normal human can’t even remember where he put the car keys half the time, let alone where he buried five hundred individual nuts. How long would a person last if he had to eat buried nuts for food? He wouldn’t get through the winter, that’s for sure. “People can do this [i.e. triangulate landmarks to find the precise spot where they’ve buried something] for a few sites,” Dr. Lavenex says, “maybe six or seven, but not for nearly as many as squirrels do.”
Most animals have “superhuman” skills like this: animals have animal genius. Birds are navigation geniuses, dogs are smell geniuses, eagles are visual geniuses—it can be anything.
EXTREME PERCEPTION AND ANIMAL INTELLIGENCE
Many animals also have extreme perception. Forensic dogs are three times as good as any X-ray machine at sniffing out contraband, drugs, or explosives, and their overall success rate on tests is 90 percent.
The fact that a dog can smell things a person can’t doesn’t make him a genius; it just makes him a dog. Humans can see things dogs can’t, but that doesn’t make us smarter.
But when you look at the jobs some dogs have invented for themselves using their advanced perceptual abilities, you’re moving into the realm of true cognition, which is solving a problem under novel conditions. The seizure alert dogs are an example of an animal using advanced perceptual abilities to solve a problem no dog was born knowing how to solve. Seizure alert dogs are dogs who, their owners say, can predict a seizure before it starts. There’s still controversy over whether you can train a dog to predict seizures, and so far people haven’t had a lot of luck trying. But there are a number of dogs who have figured it out on their own. These dogs were trained as seizure-response dogs, meaning they can help a person once a seizure has begun. The dog might be trained to lie on top of the person so he doesn’t hurt himself, or bring the person his medicine or the telephone. Those are all standard helpful behaviors any dog can be trained to perform.
But some of these dogs have gone from responding to seizures to perceiving signs of a seizure ahead of time. No one knows how they do this, because the signs are invisible to people. No human being can look at someone who’s about to have a seizure and see (or hear, smell, or feel) what’s coming. Yet one study found that 10 percent of owners said their seizure response dogs had turned into seizure alert dogs.
The New York Times published a terrific article about a woman named Connie Standley, in Florida, who has two huge Bouvier des Flandres dogs who predict her seizures about thirty minutes ahead of time.2 When they sense Ms. Standley is heading into a seizure they’ll do things like pull on her clothes, bark at her, or drag on her hand to get her to someplace safe so she won’t get hurt when the seizure begins. Ms. Standley says they predict about 80 percent of her seizures. Ms. Standley’s dogs apparently were trained as seizure alert dogs before they came to her, but there aren’t many dogs in that category. Most of the seizure alert dogs were trained to respond to seizures, not predict seizures.
The seizure alert dogs remind me of Clever Hans. Hans was the world-famous German horse in the early 1900s whose owner, Wilhelm von Osten, thought he could count. Herr von Osten could ask the horse questions like, “What’s seven and five?” and Hans would tap out the number 12 with his hoof. Hans could even tap out answers to
questions like, “If the eighth day of the month comes on Tuesday, what is the date for the following Friday?” He could answer mathematical questions posed to him by complete strangers, too.
Eventually a psychologist named Oskar Pfungst managed to show that Hans wasn’t really counting. Instead, Hans was observing subtle, unconscious cues the humans had no idea they were giving off. He’d start tapping his foot when he could see it was time to start tapping; then he’d stop tapping his foot when he saw it was time to stop tapping. His questioners were making tiny, unconscious movements only Hans could see. The movements were so tiny the humans making them couldn’t even feel them.
Dr. Pfungst couldn’t see the movements, either, and he was looking for them. He finally solved the case by putting Hans’s questioners out of view and having them ask Hans questions they didn’t know the answers to themselves. It turned out Hans could answer questions only when the person asking the question was in plain view and already knew the answer. If either condition was missing, his performance fell apart.
Psychologists often use the Clever Hans story to show that humans who believe animals are intelligent are deluding themselves. But that’s not the obvious conclusion as far as I’m concerned. No one has ever been able to train a horse to do what Hans did. Hans trained himself. Is the ability to read a member of a different species as well as Hans was reading human beings really a sign that he was just a “dumb animal” who’d been classically conditioned to stamp his hoof? I think there’s more to it than that.
What makes Hans similar to the seizure alert dogs is that both Hans and the dogs acquired their skills without human help. As I mentioned, to my knowledge, so far no one’s figured out how to take a “raw” dog and teach it how to predict seizures. About the best a trainer can do is reward the dogs for helping when a person is having a seizure and then leave it up to the dog to start identifying signs that predict the onset of a seizure on his own. That approach hasn’t been hugely successful, but some dogs do it. I think those dogs are showing superior intelligence the same way a human who can do something few other people can do shows superior intelligence.
What makes the actions of the seizure alert dogs, and probably of Hans, too, a sign of high intelligence—or high talent—is the fact that they didn’t have to do what they did. It’s one thing for a dog to start recognizing the signs that a seizure is coming; you might chalk that up to unique aspects of canine hearing, smell, or vision, like the fact that a dog can hear a dog whistle while a human can’t. But it’s another thing for a dog to start to recognize the signs of an impending seizure and then decide to do something about it. That’s what intelligence is in humans; intelligence is people using their built-in perceptual and cognitive skills to achieve useful and sometimes remarkable goals.
INVISIBLE TO THE NAKED EYE
By now you’re probably thinking, if animals are so smart, why hasn’t anyone noticed?
First of all, we have no idea what most animals are doing in the wild. Even when people like Jane Goodall have been able to spend years doing close observation of a group of animals in their native habitat, we still don’t learn what the animals think they’re doing, or what they’re communicating to one another about what they’re doing. That’s why it’s always a surprise when a crow like Betty spontaneously bends a wire to make a food hook, or a gray parrot like Alex suddenly spells the word “nut.” Just the other day I met a lady at a conference who told me about another super-smart bird living in a Florida hotel. This bird is a macaw who invented a new word—crackey—to signify either cookie or cracker. Those are the two foods his owner gives him as treats, so apparently the macaw decided that cookie-cracker is a food category unto itself, requiring its own word, which he created by putting “cookie” and “cracker” together. He’s right about cookies and crackers; they are a separate category. Cookies and crackers are both treats, not “real” food. I’m guessing that’s what the bird means when he asks for a crackey; he’s probably asking for junk food.
Another gray parrot, N’Kisi, owned by Aimee Morgana in New York City, has a vocabulary of over five hundred English words. She uses the present, past, and future tenses and once used the word “flied” to mean “flew.” She called the aromatherapy oils Aimee uses “pretty smell medicine.”
The point is, we don’t know what animals can and can’t do. The fact that we’re constantly being dumbfounded by brand-new abilities no one had a clue animals possessed ought to be a lesson to us about how much we don’t know.
IF ANIMALS ARE SO SMART, WHY AREN’T THEY IN CHARGE?
I think the reason researchers don’t take this lesson more to heart is that most people just naturally assume, without stopping to think about it, that if animals were as smart as humans or smarter, they’d have more to show for it. Where are all the animal inventions? That’s the big question.
This is the if-animals-were-smart-they-wouldn’t-still-be-pooping-in-the-woods theory of animal cognition. If animals were really smart, they would have invented flush toilets!
What the indoor plumbing theory of animal IQ forgets is the fact that plenty of indigenous peoples never invented indoor plumbing, either, and they’re no less intelligent than anyone else. Our thinking about animals is a lot like the Europeans’ thinking about primitive cultures in the nineteenth century when European explorers first began to have a lot of contact with the people of Africa. That was a time when botanists and zoologists were creating classifications for every plant and animal on earth, so naturally Europeans created classifications for humans, too. They thought the Europeans were the most intelligent, the Asians were next most intelligent, and the Africans were on the bottom.
The Europeans were wrong about that, probably for some of the same reasons people will turn out to be wrong about animals, too. One big mistake the Europeans made was to equate IQ with cultural evolution. Cumulative cultural evolution means that each generation can build on the knowledge of the generation before it rather than having to start all over again from scratch. For a culture to evolve, you have to have cultural ratcheting, which means that a group of people or animals has to have a way to hold on to the things the previous generations have learned so the next generation can add on new things.3 Cultural ratcheting means a culture can maintain and pass along an expanding body of knowledge that no one generation would be able to invent for itself.
Researchers don’t know how and why one culture evolves faster than another, but they do know it’s not because of IQ. You probably have to have things like direct, one-on-one teaching along with very widespread paying attention and learning so you don’t keep losing knowledge as fast as you gain it.
All human cultures, including indigenous peoples, have cumulative cultural evolution to some degree. But so far researchers think only birds and maybe chimpanzees also have it. However, there is so much of animal life we just can’t perceive at this point, that the time hasn’t come to conclude that animals do or do not have cultural evolution. Take dolphins, for instance. Dolphins talk back and forth to each other for hours on end. It’s completely possible dolphins could have a rich “mental” culture they’ve developed over many generations that’s invisible to us. How would we know one way or the other?
I thought about dolphins when I read A Man Without Words. In deaf culture people sign the same information to each other over and over again to make sure every person understands it and has the same information. The author, Susan Schaller, talks about a picnic she attended where “even though everyone saw my name and where I was from in my [signed] introduction, the spelling of my English name, my namesign, and California’s namesign passed from person to person until everyone was completely satisfied that they had all seen the exact same information.”
I wonder whether dolphins are doing something like that, passing precious cultural information from dolphin to dolphin over and over again to make sure none of it gets lost. Dolphins don’t have books or hands, so they can’t record the things they know in writing or
in objects they’ve built. I say this because early humans didn’t have written language, either, but they made simple tools, clothing, and shelters that could probably serve both as objects and as the instructions on how to make the object. (When an object is really simple, you can tell a lot about how to make it just by looking at it.)
But if you have only oral communication, and you’ve built a complex culture, then passing your culture along would be like playing the game Telephone. You’d be constantly in danger of having distortions come into the transmission process, ruining the knowledge you’re trying to pass along. The only way to keep this from happening would be to develop a strict habit of repeating each piece of knowledge over and over again, back and forth, to make sure the person or dolphin you’re transmitting to has received an exact copy of your message, not an approximation.
SMART, BUT DIFFERENT
I think animals are smarter than we know. I also think a lot of animals probably have a different kind of intelligence than g, the general fluid intelligence normal people have.
In the last chapter I said that animals are cognitive specialists. They’re smart in some things, not smart in others. People are generalists, meaning that a person who’s smart in one area will be smart in others, too. That’s what IQ tests show.
Autistic people are smart the way animals are smart. We’re specialists. Autistic people can have IQ scores all over the map. Donna Williams, an autistic woman from Australia who wrote a memoir called Nobody Nowhere, has written that her own scores on the different subscales range all the way from mentally retarded to genius. I believe it.4
After many years observing animals and living with autism, I have come to the conclusion that animals with extreme talents are similar to autistic savants.
If you’ve never met an autistic savant, you might want to watch the movie Rain Man, which is about an autistic savant, Raymond, and his brother. Raymond couldn’t fix himself a piece of toast without setting the kitchen on fire, but he could count cards in a game of blackjack and win thousands of dollars. That kind of disparity is typical with autistic savants. When you get outside their specialty they’re almost never as smart or capable as normal people. That’s why they used to be called idiot savants. Just like animals with extreme talent, autistic savants can naturally do things no normal human being can even be taught to do, no matter how hard he tries to learn or how much time he spends practicing. Yet they usually have IQs in the mentally retarded range.
Animals in Translation Page 34