ARE WE SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW HOW SMART ANIMALS ARE?

Its focus on nothing but behavior is what gave behaviorism its name, but I had trouble with the idea that animal behavior could be reduced to a history of incentives. It presented animals as passive, whereas I knew them as seeking, wanting, and striving. True, their behavior changes based on its consequences, but they never act randomly or accidentally to begin with. Let's take the dog and her ball. Throw a ball at a puppy and she will go after it like an eager predator. The more she learns about prey and their escape tactics—or about you and your fake throws—the better a hunter or fetcher she will become. But still, at the root of everything is her immense enthusiasm for the pursuit, which takes her through shrubs, into water, and sometimes through glass doors. This enthusiasm manifests itself before any skill development.

Now, compare this behavior with that of your pet rabbit. It doesn't matter how many balls you throw at him, none of the same learning will take place. Absent a hunting instinct, what is there to acquire? Even if you were to offer your rabbit a juicy carrot for every retrieved ball, you'd be in for a long, tedious training program that would never generate the excitement for small moving objects known of cats and dogs. Behaviorists totally overlooked these natural proclivities, forgetting that by flapping their wings, digging holes, manipulating sticks, gnawing wood, climbing trees, and so on, every species sets up its own learning opportunities. Many animals are driven to learn the things they need to know or do, the way kid goats practice head butts or human toddlers have an insuppressible urge to stand up and walk.

– Pages 30-31

We obviously attach immense importance to abstract thought and language (a penchant I am not about to mock while writing a book!), but in the larger scheme of things this is only one way to face the problem of survival. In sheer numbers and biomass, ants and termites may have done a better job than we have, focusing on tight coordination among colony members rather than individual thought. Each society operates like a self-organized mind, albeit one pitter-pattering around on thousands of little feet. There are many ways to process, organize, and spread information, and it is only recently that science has become open-minded enough to treat all these different methods with wonder and amazement rather than dismissal and denial.

So, yes, we are smart enough to appreciate other species, but it has required the steady hammering of our thick skulls with hundreds of facts that were initially poo-pooed by science. How and why we became less anthropocentric and prejudiced is worth reflecting on while considering all we have learned in the meantime. In going over these developments, I will inevitably inject my own view, which emphasizes evolutionary continuity at the expense of traditional dualisms. Dualisms between body and mind, human and animal, or reason and emotion may sound useful, but they seriously distract from the larger picture. Trained as a biologist and ethologist, I have little patience with the paralyzing skepticism of the past. I doubt that it was worth the oceans of ink that we, myself included, have spent on it.

– Pages 5-6

The difference between behaviorism and ethology has always been one of human-controlled versus natural behavior. Behaviorists sought to dictate behavior by placing animals in barren environments in which they could do little else than what the experimenter wanted. If they didn't, their behavior was classified as "misbehavior." Raccoons, for example, are almost impossible to train to drop coins into a box, because they prefer to hold on to them and frantically rub them together—a perfectly normal foraging behavior for this species. Skinner had no eye for such natural proclivities, however, and preferred a language of control and domination. He spoke of behavioral engineering and manipulation, and not just in relation to animals. Later in life he sought to turn humans into happy, productive, and "maximally effective" citizens. While there is no doubt that operant conditioning is a solid and valuable idea and a powerful modifier of behavior, behaviorism's big mistake was to declare it the only game in town.

– Pages 36-37

Our experiment was inspired by a floating peanut task conducted on a large number of orangutans and chimpanzees, a subset of which cracked the puzzle at first sight. This is especially remarkable since—unlike the crows—the apes had no pretraining; nor did they find any tools nearby. Rather, they must have conjured the effectiveness of water in their heads before going out of their way to collect it. Water doesn't even look like a tool. How hard this task is became clear from tests on children, many of which never found the solution. Only 58 percent of eight-year-olds came up with it, and only 8 percent of four-year-olds. Most children frantically try to reach the prize with their fingers, then give up.

– Page 92

I can't count the number of times I have been called naive, romantic, soft, unscientific, anthropomorphic, anecdotal, or just a sloppy thinker for proposing that primates follow political strategies, reconcile after fights, empathize with others, or understand the social world around them. Based on a lifetime of firsthand experience, none of these claims seemed particularly audacious to me. So one can imagine what happened to scientists suggesting awareness, linguistic capacities, or logical reasoning. Every claim was picked apart and held up against the light of alternative theories. which invariably sounded simpler given that they derived from the behavior of pigeons and rats in the confines of a Skinner box.

At times, the wall of skepticism seemed more idological than scientific, a bit the way we biologists feel about creationists. However compelling the data we bring to the table, they never suffice. Things must be bel;ieved to be seen, as Willy Wonka sang, and entrenched disbelief is oddly immune to evidence.

– Pages 265-266