If a Lion could Talk

How many of us have caught ourselves gazing into the eyes of a pet, wondering what thoughts lie behind those eyes? Or fallen into an argument over which is smarter, the dog or the cat? Scientists have conducted elaborate experiments trying to ascertain whether animals from chimps to pigeons can communicate, count, reason, or even lie. So does science tell us what we assume -- that animals are pretty much like us, only not as smart? Simply, no. Now, in this superb book, Stephen Budiansky poses the fundamental question: "What is intelligence?" His answer takes us on the ultimate wildlife adventure to animal consciousness.

Budiansky begins by exposing our tendency to see ourselves in animals. Our anthropomorphism allows us to perceive intelligence only in behavior that mimics our own. This prejudice, he argues, betrays a lack of imagination. Each species is so specialized that most of their abilities are simply not comparable. At the mercy of our anthropomorphic tendencies, we continue to puzzle over pointless issues like whether a wing or an arm is better, or whether night vision is better than day vision, rather than discovering the real world of a winged nighthawk, a thoroughbred horse, or an African lion. Budiansky investigates the sometimes bizarre research behind animal intelligence experiments: from horses who can count or ace history quizzes, and primates who seem fluent in sign language, to rats who seem to have become self-aware, he reveals that often these animals are responding to our tiny unconscious cues. And, while critically discussing scientists' interpretations of animal intelligence, he is able to lay out their discoveries in terms of what we know about ourselves. For instance, by putting you in the minds of dogs or bees who travel by dead reckoning, he demonstrates that this is also how you find your way down a familiar street with almost no conscious awareness of your navigation system.

Modern cognitive science and the new science of evolutionary ecology are beginning to show that thinking in animals is tremendously complex and wonderful in its variety. A pigeon's ability to find its way home from almost anywhere has little to do with comparative intelligence; rather it is due to the pigeon's very different perception of the world. That's why, as Wittgenstein said, "If a lion could talk, we would not understand him." In this fascinating book, Budiansky frees us from the shackles of our ideas about the natural world, and opens a window to the astounding worlds of the animals that surround us.

If you're not a rigorous scientific thinker, or can't stand to risk having a sacred cow gored (if I may use a term redolent of speciest violence against animals, or some such claptrap), don't bother reading this book. You'll only wind up giving it a one-star review and shrieking tediously about your violated sense of oneness with the Earth.

This does not represent the findings of the largest bird migration study ever conducted, that by Dutch biologist A.C. Perdeck. Over the course of several years, Perdeck captured 11,000 migrating starlings at their autumn stopover sites in Britain and France. He ringed them and transported them by aircraft to Switzerland, 375 miles to the SE, where they were released. Perdeck found that juvenile birds that had never migrated before continued to fly on their original directional heading and ended up in southern France or Spain. Adults who had migrated before, however, reoriented themselves and flew via different headings to their normal wintering grounds in England and northern France.

Perdeck repeated the experiments with migrating chaffinches captured in Holland and released in Switzerland. Again, juvenile birds continued on with their original directional heading, SW, but adults reoriented and flew NW to their traditional wintering grounds in Britain. (In nature, the birds fly in mixed flocks of adults and juveniles.)

Budiansky doesn't footnote his statement and in the chapter notes only cites the general popular reference work, "The Oxford Companion to Animal Behavior," not even pointing to a specific article in this work. In other words, the source of the information for his statement is effectively obscured.

I am sympathetic to Budiansky's point of view, but I am very, very disappointed in the way he has presented his arguments. In short, his book is not a reliable report of research findings on animal "intelligence."

Some examples of anthropomorphism, of course, are clearly erroneous - the famous example of the counting horse, and the way evolution seems almost spooky in its apparent "intelligence." Certainly he's right in saying that it's hubris on our part to compare animals intelligence solely in terms of ours. And it's not very accurate either; at a wolf refuge in Washington state, called Wolf Haven, they tell you that researchers have determined that a German Shepherd dog is as intelligent as a 4-year old child, but a wolf is as intelligent as a 12-year old. There are very few four-year-olds, or 12-year olds, for that matter, who could survive and thrive in the wild, hunting their food successfully and finding safe places to sleep, avoiding predators and hunters along the way.

But then he jumps from those errors, with a few bashes at Decartes along the way, to the conclusion that only people think. There is little difference, he says, between the behavior of a simple computerized model of a cricket and a real cricket.

And, by extension, there's little difference between that computer toy and a chimpanzee, at least in terms of its behavior. Bernd Heinrich, in his fascinating book Mind of the Raven, discusses his frustration at being unable to publish articles with results that appear to demonstrate raven's abilities to figure out problems. It didn't matter how carefully he was able to construct the studies, and how accurate the results appeared, the scientific community doesn't want to hear it.

Certainly it's accurate (apparently) that only humans use language in any real sense, and much of what separates human behavior from the behavior or "lower" animals is that language and what it enables us to do. But that's not enough for him, he wants to have people be the only animals that think at all, and he goes through study after study to demonstrate this fact, whether the studies show that or not.

One example: a study had chimpanzees, pigeons, and college students look at a series of pictures of birds, to learn to pick out the kingfisher. Once they could do it, they got a second set of different bird pictures, from which they were supposed to identify the kingfisher. All three groups did very well on the test (80-90% right) but on interviewing the human participants, the researchers learned that they had simply been picking out the most colorful bird, rather than correctly identifying the kingfisher. So they reran the second part of the test, using brightly colored birds with the kingfisher pictures, and the scores of the apes, the pigeons, and the college students all dropped by about 10%. This proves, apparently, that animals can't think the way people do.

It's unfortunate, because he does make some very good points. For instance, the things which set apart human brain function from other animals: language, planning, playing chess, the ability to do mathematics, are precisely those things which computers can do well - in fact, far better than we -- while the things that "even animals" can do, such as recognizing a face, or navigating across a room without bumping into anything, computers have so far been almost perfect failures at. Although he doesn't say it, it seems pretty clear to me that this is an indication that we understand things like mathematics and language much better than we do our own ability to recognize faces. What you don't understand, you can't program.

So, if you want to be reassured that the "Tenko the Robotic Puppy" your child wants for Christmas this year is just the same as a real puppy, but without the walks and the droppings, this book is for you.

Budiansky has an axe to grind, and no amount of evidence is going to get in his way. His idea is neither original nor very convincing: humans are in some magical way unique from other animals. Again and again, evidence of non-humans thinking and behaving in ways that are obviously intelligent is either ignored or seriously misrepresented. It is true that it is possible to over-interpret behavioural experiments; however, what is needed is a more scientific approach, not a less scientific one. Moreover, the first step for anyone writing a book like this is to read the literature properly: this is something which Budiansky has clearly not done.