Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

By Frans De Waal (2016)

Well... are we? This book doesn't exactly answer; instead, Frans De Waal explains why it's so damn hard to know how smart animals actually are. And what a loaded question that even is.

I'll start with one of my favorite concepts De Waal hammers home. A classic experiment of those interested in ape intelligence is to compare them to children. The idea is simple - give apes and children the same test, and see who does better, and then gauge at about what "age" of human smartness the apes are. Seems fair, right? In fact not. Any good scientific experiment or comparison relies on the quality of its controls. That is, the factors not being tested need to remain the same across tests. In these ape vs child tests, the children are often in a nice comfy room, with their mothers right by likely giving nonverbal cues. The apes, on the other hand, are confined in cages and underfed to promote interest in the reward, without their mothers or friends. Clearly these are not fair comparisons. 

This concept of fair testing is built upon further, in the idea that an animal must be tested in a way fair to its natural abilities. You wouldn't test a colorblind man on his ability to differentiate colors on a screen, and then call him dumb when he is unable to do so! One example in this book is investigating the facial recognition ability of apes. They show different human faces on a screen, and see if the ape can differentiate or remember ones they saw previously. They perform fairly poorly, and then are labeled as an animal with poor facial-recognition. Dogs, on the other hand, are pretty good facial recognizers. But then the test was performed with ape faces, and they did much better, showing that apes are great at facial recognition amongst their own communities, they just don't care too much about human faces! 

Examples of bad and good animal intelligence experiments comprise the meat of this book. Luckily, we've come a long way since the early days of animal testing, and most experiments lean toward the "good" side nowadays. But still, there are always unrecognized differences in animals' perceptions of the world and clever experiments must be devised to truly test how animals think. At this point, I don't think there is any doubt that animals do think - but how they think is still a largely unanswered question. Many skeptics are unwilling to take proofs of intelligence for fact, and err on the side of something else at play - clever conditioning, or simple "learning", not intelligence. I think to this, De Waal would say, if it walks, talks, and smells like a horse ... then it's probably a horse.

(04/05/22)