AS THE TUNA boats move in, the porpoises grow still. Rather than blowing out conspicuously, as porpoises ordinarily do, they lie quietly at the surface with only their blow holes above water, breathing in such a way that they can barely be made out by a lookout on the boat.
Fishermen watch for the porpoises because, for unknown reasons, tuna and porpoises tend to swim together. If the porpoises sense they`ve been spotted, they dash for the right side of the fishing boat, seemingly having learned that the cranes used to lower the giant net are usually mounted on the left.
If caught, they wait near the surface for the fishermen to begin hauling the net in, and then escape through a momentary gap. Tuna do not learn the trick, do not swim to the surface where the net is less effective and do not escape.
Do those observations provide evidence that porpoises are intelligent, versatile animals able to devise a response to new conditions? Or are such reports only cute anecdotes, irrelevant to resolving the scientific question of whether animals can think?
”It`s no good taking this anecdotal approach, talking about one bird doing something bizarre at a picnic table or whales blowing bubbles (to catch fish),” snorts McMaster University psychologist Bennett Galef.
”The whole problem is that they keep locking on the exceptional instance,” Galef adds. ”They look at one dog who finds his way from Brooklyn to Manhattan and forget 99,000 dogs who get lost walking around the block.”
But that ”show me” attitude is only one pole in an increasingly controversial debate. At the other extreme, scientists impressed by the evidence for animal intelligence accuse their rivals of wearing ideological blinders that prevent their seeing what even a casual observer knows to be true.
There is no consensus at all among researchers studying animal awareness, and none is imminent, but two trends have emerged. First, claims that gorillas and dolphins can use language have been considerably tempered in recent years. Second, a different approach to animal intelligence has gained prominence. Rather than look solely at language as the mark of intelligence, many researchers are looking hard at a variety of other animal behaviors that seem to show planning and insight.
Both sides want to resolve several related questions: Do animals think?
Do they have mental lives at all like ours, or are they more like robots programmed to do a few tricks? How big is the gap between humans and other animals?
The dispute is not over whether animals can learn. No one denies that Fido can be taught to fetch the paper or that Flipper can be trained to jump through a hoop. Instead, the controversy is whether animals are aware in the way that we are: Are they capable of picturing the future, planning, improvising, communicating, using symbols? Do they have a sense of self?
As far apart as the two sides are, the momentum may be shifting toward those scientists who believe animals do think. Last year, for example, Rutgers University held a two-day symposium on ”The Question of Animal Cognition,”
and the New England Aquarium presented a series of scientific lectures on animal intelligence, language and communication.
And in an issue of the journal Nature, a Japanese psychologist reported that a chimpanzee has learned the abstract skill of counting as many as six objects presented to her.
The most prominent advocate of the new view, Rockefeller University biologist Donald Griffin, has compiled myriad old and new examples of seemingly intelligent animal behavior.
The examples, from Griffin`s book ”Animal Thinking,” include:
— Chimpanzees who seem to show a sense of self-awareness. The chimps were given mirrors to play with, and then anesthetized while researchers drew a large dot on their foreheads. When the chimps awoke, they looked in the mirror, saw the dot and immediately reached to touch their own foreheads.
— Dolphins who appear to have a rudimentary grasp of grammar. University of Hawaii researcher Louis Herman claims he has, in effect, taught dolphins to recognize the distinction between ”man bites dog” and ”dog bites man.”
Herman`s dolphins can correctly carry out such commands as, ”Bring the ball to the surfboard” and ”Bring the surfboard to the ball.”
— Chimpanzees who ”fish” for termites by choosing a suitable branch, stripping it, carrying it as far as several minutes walk to a termite mound and then probing with it. Scientists who try to mimic the technique rarely can match the chimps` success.
— Egyptian vultures who break open ostrich eggs, which are too thick to peck through, by picking up a stone in their bill and hammering at the shell until it breaks, or by flinging the rock at it.
— Weaver ants, who construct nests by gluing together leaves with a sticky silk. Worker ants form living chains to pull together edges of leaves, then fetch ant larvae and squeeze silk from them to join the two edges.
— Sea otters, who often eat while floating on their backs, holding a shellfish against their chests with one paw while cracking it open with a rock or even a beer bottle. The otters may keep a particularly good rock tucked under an armpit while swimming or diving. (Beer bottles float, so otters don`t stow them under their arms.)
— Chimpanzees, studied by psychologists Duane Rumbaugh and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh at Emory University`s Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, who have learned to use a special computer keyboard to ”talk” with each other.
Sherman, a chimp, watches his trainer lock two cookies in a box, while another chimp, Austin, is kept out of sight. Then Sherman uses the keyboard to tell Austin which of six particular tools he needs, Austin brings it, Sherman unlocks the box and the chimps share the cookies.
— The ”assassin” bug, which captures termites in tropical rain forests with an elaborate flim-flam. The bug sticks pieces of termite nest to itself and then stations itself near the opening to a termite colony. Perhaps confused by the familiar smell, the termite ”soldiers” fail to recognize the camouflaged bug as an intruder, enabling the assassin to reach into the nest and drag out a victim.
The bug eats the termite, leaving only its hard outer skeleton. Then, to cap off its performance, the assassin shoves the skeleton back into the nest, where a termite ”gravedigger” grabs it. This termite, whose role is to dispose of corpses, is then dragged out of the nest itself, becoming a new victim that then serves as bait for yet another ”gravedigger,” and so on.
No one argues that an assassin bug is as bright as a chimp, but in all these cases and many more that Griffin has gathered, researchers disagree vehemently on what the observations do prove. Do they demonstrate that animals are intelligent, or is the braininess in the eyes of the beholder?
Are the weaver ants really co-operating, for example, or are ants simply hard-wired little robots for whom words like ”co-operate” are inappropriate? Is cracking eggs with a rock as smart as it seems, or are the Egyptian vultures only genetically programmed birdbrains?
Griffin confronts such questions head-on. ”When a chimp fishes for termites with a stick, we say that`s tool use and convincing evidence of intelligence,” he said. ”But when an assassin bug does something almost as elaborate, why do we assume they`re just robots who don`t understand what they`re doing?”
Griffin`s suggestion that even insects may be conscious is distinctly a minority view. But claims about the abilities of higher animals are also deeply controversial.
The debate may be at its angriest, in fact, where it touches on our closest relatives, in particular on the question of whether apes can learn language.
A decade ago, there was heady talk that researchers would someday be able to ask, ”What is it like to be an ape?” Columbia University psychologist Herbert Terrace recalls, for example, that in the mid-`70s when he began teaching sign language to a chimp named Nim Chimpsky, he believed the
”fantasy” that he ”would literally be able to have a conversation with another species.”
But in a 1979 paper that dealt a body blow to the credibility of research on ape language, Terrace recanted. Analysis of his own videotapes revealed, Terrace claimed, that his chimp was not composing sentences in sign language as had been thought, but was instead merely ”aping” his trainers to get rewards.
According to Ronald Cohn, a biologist who works with the gorilla Koko, the most famous ”talking” ape of all, ”Terrace is absolutely wrong, but what he`s done is totally kill all funding for this research.”
Cohn and psychologist Penny Patterson, the lead investigator in Project Koko, say that Koko has a vocabulary of between 500 and 1,000 words and insist she uses signs to rhyme, lie, joke and describe her world. But many observers maintain that such claims are exaggerations or wishful thinking, impossible to evaluate because the two researchers do not publish their findings in scientific journals.
In the ape debate in particular and the animal intelligence controversy in general, there may be only one point of agreement: The dispute, which dates back at least as far as Aristotle, is not about to be resolved.
Ronald Gandelman, a Rutgers psychologist who organized a recent symposium on animal awareness, noted almost wistfully, ”If we could just be another animal for 30 seconds, the whole problem would be solved. But it`s quite possible the questions will never be answered.”
