Cockroaches, pigeons, horses and humans: One sure bet is that it won’t be a photo finish

Writing on cockroaches in The Times’ Sunday magazine, entomologist William Jordan observed that these indestructible insects had survived 250 million years without being able to think.

Jordan knows that cockroaches can’t think. They operate entirely by instinct. But they act intelligent, and he wonders whether, deep down, human intelligence is only illusory, too.

It is easy to make another parallel and say that the human race is on the edge of extinction because it thinks too much. Any species that can think up the means of its own destruction may be overdeveloped, in a Darwinian sense.

Surely if we had remained brutes, without the imagination to penetrate the mysteries of the atom and loose its energies, we would still have dominated the Earth and would not now be in peril of blowing ourselves up.

Any layman who has ever tried to outwit a cockroach in a kitchen can believe they think.

As Jordan knows, you can’t hit one with a rolled-up newspaper. Either they are too smart, or, as he observes, their nervous systems are simply too sensitive.

When my wife and I lived in a grass shack by the Sans Souci lagoon on Oahu, we had dozens of cockroaches. They lived under the range and the refrigerator in the kitchen, and we would see them only when we came home at night and turned on the light. Caught out, they would instantly scurry for their hiding places. I gave up trying to kill them. They were too many and too fast. Not to say too smart.

Living with cockroaches may sound repugnant to anyone who lives in a well-made house in a temperate climate, but in subtropical Hawaii, in a loose-jointed shack, they were a fact of life. One almost began to feel protective of them.

Besides, we had worse things to deal with than cockroaches. Once I killed a scorpion in the kitchen when he scampered for cover under the electric toaster. I simply turned it on and roasted him.

Assigning a human intelligence to the lower species is a rather harmless fancy of mankind. Our myths and fables are full of talking horses and foxy foxes. Walt Disney even gave a human mentality and sentiment to mice. Charles Schulz brings forth philosophy from the mouth of a dog.

Our movies make heroes of horses; but the horse must surely be among the stupidest of quadrupeds. I doubt that any horse ever ran from a burning barn to kick at a door and alert a sleeping household. More likely he would run back into the barn. Nevertheless, we have all seen incidents that make us wonder.

H. (Rogie) Rogosin, a Hollywood psychologist, writes to describe a fascinating tableau he observed the other day at Rampart and Temple, near the Rampart Division police station.

“We stopped for a red light, and just at that moment a pigeon apparently stepped off the northwest curb, and with quick but regular steps walked between the white lines set up for pedestrians, all the way to the other curb, and got there in time for the signal change, without flying up into the air. I am not sure as to whether it was in any way due to the near presence of the police station.”

Rogosin says he is not an entirely unschooled observer of animal behavior; also, being a skeptic, he is not easily taken in by improbable phenomena.

“But I suspect,” he says, “the simplest explanation being the best solution, that the sense organs of the pigeon were aware, through sensory cues, that the automobiles surrounding it precluded flying at that particular moment, and although the pigeon was probably a female, intuition alone cannot be accepted as responsible for its observing the normal traffic rules for traveling within white lines at a pedestrian crossing.”

I don’t know how my women readers will take Rogosin’s implication that only females have intuition, or at least that females have more intuition than males, but it does seem that the pigeon may have been guided by some sense of the legality and safety of his conduct.

On the other hand, I doubt that any animal has a sense of legality, though he may learn what it is that his human contacts want him to do or not do.

I am reminded of Archy, the literary cockroach, who often wrote his daily column for newspaper columnist Don Marquis when Marquis was down drinking at the nearby saloon. Archy not only had intelligence, he had a soul, as he said in the first line he ever wrote:

“expression is the need of my soul”

You will remember that Archy wrote in free verse, because he had transmigrated from a poet into a cockroach. He struck the keys of Marquis’ typewriter by falling headfirst on them from the frame. He was not strong enough to work the shift lock, so he could not make capitals.

Archy said being a cockroach had given him a new lease on life:

“i see things from the underside now”

Once Archy decided he wanted to be a poet again, so he left his body and flew around in the cold, trying to find a live poet without a soul, but all were occupied, so he went back to his cockroach body, only to find that it had been squashed and swept aside.

“i wandered for weeks

the most lonely thing in new york

city at last in despair i

got into the carcass of another cockroach”

Remember poor Archy when you start to squash another cockroach.