Bird Brain? : Cognitive Ethology Asks if Animals Can Think Consciously
Normally, the green-backed heron stands deathly still at the water’s edge and waits for fish to glide by. When one does, the long neck and beak strike and the fish slides down the gullet.
But once in a rare while, a heron, perhaps smarter or more impatient than his fellows, uses bait to attract fish, a twig, a leaf, a feather, an insect, an earthworm, pieces of bread left behind by humans, even a bit of plastic.
Now the question is, how did that bait-fishing heron figure all that out? Is the heron thinking consciously?
And the broader question is, are animals capable of simple conscious thought? Most ethologists, people who study animal behavior, doubt it strongly. But Dr. Donald R. Griffin, late of Cornell, Harvard and Rockefeller Universities and now semi-retired and an associate at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, is more assured that animals are capable of conscious thought.
“I don’t think anything is certain in this area,” he said. “We’re groping for suggestive evidence. But my favorite source of evidence, which has more long-term promise than anything else, is animal communication. I think they sometimes communicate what they are thinking or some approximation of it.
“Some of the behavior that’s been taught to apes and parrots is a good example. Only one parrot unfortunately. Alex Pepperberg as I call him. He seems to be using his imitations of human words to ask for things he wants.”
Griffin also cites the great apes who have been taught the sign language of the deaf, their voice mechanisms incapable of producing human sounds. “They seem to express a little more complicated thoughts.”
Griffin, who carries the sobriquet of “Batman” because of his work on the behavior of bats, has recently published his seventh book, “Animal Minds,” ($24.95, University of Chicago Press), a compendium of worldwide research into the question.
How about sea otters who routinely use stones as tools to break into shellfish such as clams and abalone? Sometimes they like a particular stone so much they tuck it under an armpit and carry it with them. Sometimes they find a discarded bottle and use that.
How about chimpanzees that use thin reeds to fish out termites through the narrow holes in their hills?
How about a Capuchin monkey mother who fabricated, modified and used simple tools to care for her infant’s head wound and used plant materials to treat it?
“Versatility,” Griffin said. “Doing things that are adapted to unpredictable circumstances or circumstances that are very hard to predict.”
A scientist, working with captive beaver, wanted to spare some trees from the bark-feeding animals in the enclosure. He put up fences around the trees to keep the beaver out. The beaver, used to piling up stuff for lodges and dams, simply adapted those talents to the new situation and piled up vegetation to scale the fence. “It isn’t something they ordinarily do to get food,” Griffin said.
Critics of conscious animal thought say the animal is not truly aware of what he is doing. Griffin said this puts the animal into a kind of “sleepwalker state.”
“That’s sort of a figure of speech,” Griffin said. “People sometimes get in states where they move around and don’t seem to be aware of what they are doing. Yet they don’t bump into things. . . . My only point is we sometimes do things that are reasonably sensible without being aware of what we are doing. It’s quite possible that animals are sometimes in a roughly comparable state, though I would emphasize the ‘roughly.’ But it seems to me sometimes they are not; they are aware of what they are doing.”
Consider Alex Pepperberg. Alex is an African gray parrot, the most proficient species in learning human words. University of Arizona researcher Irene Pepperberg is his teacher and trainer.
She used a procedure first reported in 1975 called the model-rival approach in which the bird is present while two human trainers ask each other questions. In his first 26 months of training, Alex learned nine names, three color adjectives and two phrases describing shapes. He also learned the word “no,” which he used freely when he was distressed or didn’t want to do what his trainers wanted him to do.
As he improved, he learned to recognize and describe color, shape and material such as paper, wood, cork or rawhide. He also learned to say “none” and “same” when they were appropriate.
His accuracy rate hovers in the 80% to 90% range which, Griffin says, is well above the level of chance. Pepperberg is now working with a second parrot.
The technique has worked so well among primates that one California school is using it on developmentally delayed children in hope of speeding their learning of spoken English.
If animals can learn, where do they store that learning? Is it memory? And if it is, does that suggest that animals have a library of alternative choices?
Griffin thinks so, despite arguments to the contrary. “It’s learning. But if something is learned there has to be some trace and you could call it memory. We can be conditioned. We can learn things and act on the basis of that learning without being conscious of the fact. It has not seemed to scientists to be very strong evidence (of conscious thought), but I think it probably is.
“Certainly animals, and a wide variety of animals, do learn and their behavior is changed by learning. I think scientists have tended to drop the word memory because it does have the implication of consciousness.”
There is a sort of taboo against thinking that animals can think consciously. “Most of my colleagues don’t want to get involved with it.”
The dolphin, so universally adored and respected, poses a problem for ethologists. With a brain more nearly the human size and a history that goes back to the Greek legends, the feats of the dolphin are mighty indeed, rescuing sailors with seemingly human care. Even the U.S. Navy thought of recruiting them to carry explosives to enemy ships.
But if human language is the common denominator to prove that an animal can consciously think, the dolphin is at a tremendous disadvantage.
In his book, Griffin says, “A more fundamental distinction between human language and what dolphins and sea lions have accomplished, at least so far, is the ability to switch back and forth between comprehension and production of communicative signals.”
They can’t tell us that they think and are aware of the thinking process.
But. . . .
Captive dolphins have been seen imitating human divers cleaning up their tanks with a sea gull feather and a piece of tile, and mimicking the sounds created by the diver’s Aqua-lung and air bubbles.
At sea, dolphins show that they have learned a lot about the fishing vessels that often catch them in their nets in their hunt for tuna. When they first encountered the tuna nets, many of them panicked and were drowned. Now they have learned to wait quietly until the fishermen lower the net to permit their escape.
They have also learned to stay on the right side of the vessels, having learned apparently that the fish-catching machinery and cranes are on the left side.
In a critical article in The New York Times Book Review, Helena Cronin, a researcher in evolutionary theory at the London School of Economics and Oxford University said animal behavior is more readily explained by natural selection, which wrote the script over the ages in the animal’s genes.
She rather scathingly refutes Griffin’s conclusions.
“The crux (which he) blithely ignores, is deciding when sophisticated information processing is accompanied by awareness and when it isn’t. Admittedly, he describes research that investigates such tough questions as whether vervet monkeys treat other vervet monkeys as if they have minds. But, given that even this is unlikely to satisfy hardheaded skeptics, where else might (he) have looked.
“Evolutionary considerations offer more hope. Consciousness bears all the hallmarks of a Darwinian adaptation. Unfortunately, its precise function is mysterious. Even in us, most information processing is unconscious. And we don’t need consciousness for some of the tasks where it normally obtrudes. . . .
“Nevertheless, a solution to the puzzle of human consciousness would surely throw light on where else in the animal realm natural selection has bestowed this unlikely gift.”
However, she is convinced that chimpanzees exhibit consciousness, and that conviction stems from the fact that “a mere 500,000 generations” separate humankind from ape kind.
Griffin also cites ape language as “one of the most exciting advances in cognitive ethology.” University of Nevada researchers taught a young female chimp named Washoe more than a hundred signs derived from American Sign Language for the deaf.
Earlier attempts to teach chimps spoken words failed because the chimpanzee’s larynx cannot produce the sounds.
But Washoe, beginning at age 1, was surrounded by people who used only sign language and much like a human baby learned a whole vocabulary. By age 3 she had learned to respond to at least 85 signs. Since then, other chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans have learned more than 100 signs.
“The implications of the discovery that chimpanzees and other Great Apes could communicate in even a rudimentary form of language were truly shattering to the deep-seated faith in language as a unique human attribute separating humanity from the beasts,” Griffin wrote.
Not only did Washoe and others sign to their trainers, but when they were alone they signed to each other.
Despite all this, the argument rolls on, involving the philosophical construction of human language, the rules of grammar, the ability to convey beliefs, what constitutes a word, a sentence, indeed language itself.
Some argue that it could be that apes have a language of their own and it is the stupid human who cannot understand.
Answering the question of whether behavior is willful and conscious or merely genetically programmed may take decades to answer. Griffin himself said we may never know for certain unless the animals learn to talk with us.
“Cognitive ethology,” he writes, “presents us with one of the supreme scientific challenges of our times, and it calls for our best efforts of critical and imaginative investigation.”
And if animals are ever admitted to the vast world of consciousness, it would signal the end to one of the last of human conceits.
