The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (13 page)

Alex’s talents demonstrate that not only is the ability to understand and act on general conceptual categories like color and shape and number not human-specific, it’s not specific to apes, or even to mammals. Alex can use those categories in the comprehension of complicated labels, and in the larger meaning created by stringing some of these labels together, like “What color five?” We may have words for these concepts, but it’s clear that you don’t have to have language to understand them and to be able to act on that understanding.

Other sophisticated forms of cognition include awareness of oneself and the ability to generalize. Gordon G. Gallup started exploring self-awareness in animals in the late 1960s, when he began to look at the way animals make use of reflection. Different animals interact in different ways with mirrors. Some ignore them entirely. Others use mirrors to locate things in space; parrots, for example, can find hidden objects that are visible only by their reflection. Other animals, like monkeys, engage with their reflections as if the reflection were another individual entirely. Gallup was the first to show that chimpanzees recognize that the image they are looking at in a mirror is themselves, an ability that was previously thought to be human-specific.
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When Gallup announced his findings, many researchers were shocked and unsuccessfully tried to disprove them.

In 2000 Diana Reiss, at Osborn Laboratories of Marine Sciences at the New York Aquarium in Coney Island, and Lori Marino, a senior lecturer in the Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology Program at Emory University, applied the test to dolphins. Like all other whales, dolphins have traveled a radically different evolutionary trajectory from ours. Their closest land relatives are the ungulates, like the hippo. The researchers marked the dolphins with a nontoxic black marker on parts of their bodies that couldn’t be seen without the use of a mirror, and then watched and recorded their behavior at a mirror attached to the outside glass wall of their pool. Once the dolphins had been marked, they swam to the reflective surface and used it to examine the ink marks, showing clear awareness of themselves. In fact, Reiss pointed out, the test didn’t just expose the capacity for self-awareness: it also demonstrated that the dolphins were motivated to view themselves.

In 2006 it was announced that elephants are able to recognize themselves in mirrors. This work was also conducted by Diana Reiss, with Frans de Waal and Joshua Plotnik. In a similar fashion to the dolphin experiments, the researchers marked three Asian elephants and gave them access to mirrors. They noted that, compared to dolphins, elephants have the advantage of being able to touch most of their body with their trunks. Accordingly, after being marked the elephants spent a significant amount of time in front of the test mirror, repeatedly touching the experimental marks (but, crucially, not touching invisible marks that had also been made).

Reiss’s work with dolphins has also provided evidence for the ability of nonlinguistic animals to generalize. Dolphins instinctively eat only live fish, so in captivity they must be taught to consume prey that is already dead. Reiss had to cut each fish she fed them into three parts. A dolphin would happily eat the head and the middle, but it would eat the tail only if the fins were cut off. If the dolphin misbehaved during feedings, Reiss gave it a time-out. This involved getting up from where she knelt at the side of the pool, walking back about twenty feet, and looking at the dolphin but not interacting with it in any way for a minute or so. “It let her know something was not right,” explained Reiss. One day Reiss accidentally let an untrimmed tail slip into the dolphin’s food. The dolphin responded by swimming to the opposite side of the pool and then rising out of the water in a vertical position, just looking at Reiss for a minute or so.
This feels a lot like a time-out!
thought Reiss.

She decided to test the dolphin, and a few days later she let an uncut fish tail slip through on purpose. The dolphin did the same thing, giving her another time-out. Reiss repeated the experiment three additional times, each with the same result. Dolphins are natural imitators, said Reiss, and imitation is an important part of the ability to learn. They are what Reiss calls “contingency testers,” forever probing and exploring objects, and extremely adept at recognizing and generating patterns. The intentions behind their actions can be as obvious as our own.

Chimpanzees are also known to be good at generalizing and applying the patterns of one task to another. It is this ability that makes them such exceptional subjects in cognitive experiments. Monkeys, in contrast, can’t generalize. They may be close relations, but if they learn how to use a joystick in one experiment, they have to relearn how to use it for the next.

The ability to grasp the concept of number, like most other mental talents, was believed to belong only to speaking humans, until researchers began to explore it in babies and other animals. Since these investigations began, the evidence for a shared, fundamental comprehension of numbers has mounted. Babies are able to identify numbers below four exactly, and they can represent large numbers approximately. In 1992, in one of the first experiments of this kind, the researcher Karen Wynn showed infants a Mickey Mouse doll and then hid it behind a screen. Wynn then showed the children another doll and placed it behind the screen as well. When the screen was removed, children were startled if they saw only one doll, and they looked longer at the object. Further experiments demonstrated that children were able to understand the addition and subtraction of up to three objects.
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As research on the natural abilities of infants has accumulated, so it has for animals. In 1999 two researchers at Columbia University announced that they’d taught two rhesus monkeys to count to four using images of shapes on a computer screen. The monkeys were also able to understand the difference between smaller and larger numbers with greater sets of images.
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Marc Hauser, who is head of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard, and his colleagues have shown that monkeys can, like children, grasp small numbers precisely and approximate large numbers. They can also perform the same kind of addition that babies can. Hauser replicated Wynn’s experiment, but instead of human babies he used rhesus monkeys as subjects. Like the children, the monkeys were startled when the numbers didn’t correctly add up. In later experiments the researchers further investigated the ability of the monkeys to understand addition and subtraction of amounts up to three. These findings also held true for domesticated dogs.

In 2006 French scientists announced that children and adults from the Munduruku, an isolated group of indigenous Amazonians, had demonstrated that they understood and were able to use concepts from geometry even though their language has no words for those concepts. When investigators showed them drawings of parallel lines and right-angled triangles, they were able to use the geometric relationships to locate hidden objects. The Munduruku did as well as American children on the same test.
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In another experiment, two researchers from Duke University determined that infants only seven months old grasped certain numerical concepts. The experimenters showed the infants videos of adults and at the same time played them recordings of adults speaking. The infants displayed a clear preference for watching the group of adults that matched the number of people they could hear speaking. This doesn’t mean that babies can count, but at this preverbal level they grasp number sufficiently to be able to match it in the visual and the auditory domains.
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The choice of adults and voices, experimenters point out, was not arbitrary. Not even children who are much older can perform in the same way if they are asked to match objects that matter less to them or that are less obviously related, like drumbeats and black dots. The infants’ natural mental abilities are shaped by their environment. They are much smarter than we imagined, but their intelligence doesn’t get expressed as abstract, computational efficiency; it’s all about being human.

Many of the animals that demonstrate complicated thinking turn out to have a fair bit in common with one another and with us. Even though many of them are not that closely related to humans, they share many traits that seem as important as DNA. Hyenas, whales, elephants, humans, baboons, crows, and parrots all have long lives, extended periods of childhood, complicated systems of communication, and their societies are made up of individuals with distinct roles and relationships.

Accounting for the connection between phenomena like individuality and cognition is a fairly recent development. “In most studies of long-lived animals with elaborate social systems, the individual is extremely important because they have extremely varied experiences,” said Betty’s researcher Alex Kacelnik.

This is a familiar enough idea when we apply it to humans, who are pleased to take the performance of our best and brightest as evidence of our species’ abilities. If you went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at the Picassos, you wouldn’t treat the art as just the work of one individual in highly special circumstances, but would likely examine it as an expression of what it means to be human. “We have different standards,” Kacelnik said. “If a chess master says that he uses some unconscious process to learn what the next set of possible moves is, we call that inspiration and cognition. But say that you were to train an animal to play chess and you reward it for making appropriate moves in particular configurations of the board, you would not call that cognition. You would say that the animal has used trial and error. But you would be observing the same thing.” Exploring the social complexity of an animal’s life involves treating individual acts as part of the genius of the species rather than as exceptions to it.

Katy Payne and her assistant Melissa Groo at Cornell’s Bioacoustics Research Program investigated elephant social complexity. Groo screened a video of a young female elephant calf they call Elodie, taken at the Dzanga-Sangha National Park in the Central African Republic. Elodie’s antics took place in a
bai,
a muddy clearing in the middle of a forest, the elephant equivalent of a village square. Different families, each led by a matriarch, visit the
bai
over the course of a day, and at any one time up to eighty elephants might be scattered about. The young elephants play while the adults flap ears and rumble and thunder at one another. The elephants spend a lot of time using their feet and trunks to construct mud wells, holes that are a few feet in diameter. They stand in them and eat mineral-rich mud from the bottom. Generally, the dominant individuals (typically large adult males) occupy the best wells, while less dominant individuals stand around nearby waiting for a chance to slip in.

In the video Elodie enters the frame from the left. She is a tiny thing, trotting on huge feet, and she heads for a hole ruled by an enormous male. Given her size and sex, Elodie should be last in line for access to the well, but she walks in and plunges her trunk straight down next to the male’s trunk; she is almost standing on her head—fat, round rump thrust up into the air and the rest of her not visible over the rim. Lamar, the male, is momentarily baffled by the interloper, so he lets her in. But quickly he recovers himself and pokes her in the butt with his tusks. Elodie screams and scoots out, and her mother, as always hovering by, jolts forward in response. “She is a nervous wreck,” says Groo. But Elodie is not. Within a minute she sidles back up to Lamar and squirms into the hole again.

“You never see Elodie’s behavior in other juveniles,” Groo said. “It is a unique strategy.” The ability to accommodate individualistic behavior like Elodie’s within a group is an indicator of intelligence. It means that for elephants, as for humans, society operates according to a layered set of rules—on one level there are expected modes of behavior, yet on another level rules can be broken. This kind of flexibility requires a mental agility that would not be necessary in a social system based on a rigid behavioral pattern.

Lamar eventually tires of Elodie’s intrusion and walks away, leaving the pit to her. But another male decides it is now his turn. Elodie’s mother tries to stand in the way of her daughter’s competitor and ward him off, but she is subordinate to him and quickly backs down. The male moves in on Elodie. He is not as big as Lamar, but he still towers over the baby elephant. Elodie will not budge, however, and shortly he yields and walks away.

Like crows, elephants are biologically distant from humans, yet like us they live long lives in structured societies where “childhood” is an extended period of learning out of which individualistic behavior emerges. The social demands of elephant society are intense. They include, Payne explained, growing up in a crowded community with members that change and develop over the years. For males, it means living in a very vocal, collaborative female society for their first twelve to fifteen years and then moving into a more silent, solitary, competitive existence. In their new world they make temporary associations and coalitions with other males, and they rise and fall in dominance as they go in and out of musth (heat). Like humans, female elephants live years past their reproductive stage. This means, Payne said, that elephant society is more sophisticated than societies in which the members do not live long, because the elders can impart their wisdom. Older females pass on social learning, like how to interact with hundreds of other familiar elephants, and also practical information, like where the best water hole or fruit tree can be found. This requires memory, knowledge, and the ability to learn that knowledge.
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Other researchers have commented on the sophisticated ways that members of animal groups such as these relate to one another. Frans de Waal calls the set of rules and relationships found in such complicated groups social syntax. Ray Jackendoff agrees there is a parallel to be drawn between the role of syntax in language and in social situations: “If you look at what the other primates are doing, you have to attribute some concepts to them. Not all of them by any means, but tracing who’s related to whom and therefore who one is entitled to commit aggression against, these kinds of things require combinatorial structure, and they suggest that the meaning was around before the language.” (See chapter 9 for more on the mental platform for syntax.)