Debunking favorite myths about 'lower' animals

How good are chimpanzees at facial recognition? Pretty poor, went the conventional wisdom. Unlike humans, who can recognize and distinguish between many, many different people, chimps tested on this scored pretty low.

The testing involved human faces, since humans look so different from each other, as compared to chimps, who all look pretty similar. Then one researcher, Lisa Parr, decided to try chimp faces instead and it turned out the chimpanzees excelled at facial recognition. Well, whaddaya know.

This is one anecdote shared by Parr's colleague at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Frans de Waal, in his provocative new book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (W.W. Norton) and as this anecdote illustrates, the answer to his titular question is evidently "not always."

More significantly, the book - which de Waal will discuss Thursday night at the Free Library - traces the development of animal-behavior science and shows how earlier human-chauvinist assumptions interfered with our understanding of animal cognition.

Those assumptions, by and large, were passed off as scientific fact as recently as the mid- to late 20th century, but over the past three decades, de Waal shows, humans have gotten smarter about designing experiments that accurately assess what's going on in nonhuman animals' heads, and as that picture becomes clearer, so does that of our place in the world.

Think about it: If you're 35 or older, the world you were born into pushed a human-centric narrative about animals' capacities and intellect that was on par with saying the sun went around the earth. And that narrative has been shown to be fundamentally flawed as favorite "that's what separates us from the animals" behaviors and abilities were discovered in other animals too.

"Every cognitive capacity that we discover," de Waal asserts in discussing Betty the Crow, "is going to be older and more widespread than initially thought." So when this individual crow that needed a bent wire to get at food surprised researchers by taking a straight wire and bending it into a hook, it doesn't mean that suddenly crows have evolved a "tool-making" ability - it means they always had it and we missed it.

At other points in the book de Waal looks at the unprompted use of arithmetic by Alex the Parrot, which calls into question how "unique" our human grasp of mathematics is, and at Ayumu the chimpanzee, who is not just pretty good at a number-recognition memory test, but better at it than almost any human on earth, including you (go ahead and try to beat Ayumu's score with this gamified version). The disturbing (to some) conclusion from the latter is that some animals are better than humans not just at living within their own ecosystem but at tasks and activities we've specifically created within our own culture - so what else might they be better at that we haven't yet come up with a way to test?

Only now, de Waal explained in a phone interview, are we allowing ourselves to ask these apple-cart-upsetting questions. "For hundreds of years," he said, "we had a simplified version of animals. We were not ready to recognize the complexity of their cognition." Ascribing human-level intelligence to a nonhuman was "anthropomorphizing," the dreaded "unscientific" error, a charge that "was a way of killing that kind of thinking," that is, thinking of animals as complex individuals with interior lives.

Flipping the script, de Waal has now coined "ahthropodenial" to describe humans' efforts to separate ourselves from the animal kingdom - placing our species at the top of some imaginary linear scale, instead of within a pool of differences and similarities along different spectra.

"Are you smarter than an octopus?" he asked me rhetorically. "Maybe - but that octopus will experience things you never will." De Waal noted that we should grow out of "trying to judge animals on our terms and not on their terms," echoing the title, and much of the point, of the recently rereleased Lee Hall classic On Their Own Terms.

The new, more accurate paradigm of human-nonhuman relations would seem to call into question our moral authority in deciding to treat other sentient beings as objects and property. But when it comes to the question of altering our own behavior, e.g. going vegan, de Waal demurs, focusing instead on quality of life issues for captive animals.

"For me the moral issue is how you treat animals," he explained, bemoaning how "very intensive animal facilities exploit" pigs, "one of the most intelligent animals," and how farmers "force cows to stand on concrete," causing untold suffering within the meat and dairy industry.

I observed that the farmers in question may rationalize the practice with that same "simplified" myth of animals as machines that has only recently been definitively debunked. He replied that "they can rationalize it financially. But it's my position that everything that is economically profitable is not necessarily morally acceptable."

There's plenty more to be said on this topic, and de Waal covers a great deal of it in Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? For anyone who's interested in facts about animals and how we nail them down (especially in the face of persistent, convenient untruths), be sure to get over to the Free Library on Thursday night.

Frans de Waal, "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?" Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St. 215-686-5322. Tickets are $15. More info here.