[tt] WP: Chrstinne Kenneally: Animals and Us, Not So Far Apart

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Chrstinne Kenneally: Animals and Us, Not So Far Apart
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/11/AR2008041103329_pf.html
Sunday, 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 at ckenneally.com

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