May 2004

Do Animals Think? by Clive D.L. Wynne Princeton University Press, 2004; $26.95 Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings by Duane M. Rumbaugh and David A. Washburn Yale University Press, 2003; $35.00

IF YOUR DOG DROPS A TENNIS BALL in front of you and looks up at you with tail wagging, do you figure she wants to play? How naive! Who says dogs have desires and intentions? Her behavior is merely the product of reinforcement: she has been rewarded for it in the past.

Many scientists have grown up with the so-called law of effect, the idea that all behavior is conditioned by reward and punishment. This principle of learning was advocated by a dominant school of twentieth-century psychological thought known as American behaviorism. The school’s founders, John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner, were happy to explain all conceivable behavior within the narrow confines of what Skinner called “operant conditioning.” The mind, if such a thing even existed, remained a black box. In the early days, the behaviorists applied their doctrine in equal measure to people and other animals. Watson, for instance, to demonstrate the power of his methods, intentionally created a phobia for furry objects in a human baby. Initially “little Albert” was unafraid of a tame white rat. But after Watson paired each appearance of the rat with sharp noises right behind poor Albert’s head, fear of rats was the inevitable outcome. Even human speech was thought to be the product of simple reinforcement learning.

The behaviorists’ goal of unifying the science of behavior was a noble one—but alas, outside academia the masses resisted. They stubbornly refused to accept that their own behavior could be explained without considering thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Don’t we all have mental lives, don’t we look into the future, aren’t we rational beings? Eventually, the behaviorists caved in and exempted the bipedal ape from their theory of everything.

That was the beginning of the problem for other animals. Once cognitive complexity was admitted in people, the rest of the animal kingdom became the sole standard-bearer of behaviorism. Animals were expected to follow the law of effect to the letter, and anyone who thought differently was just being anthropomorphic. From a unified science, behaviorism had become a dichotomous one, with two separate languages: one for human behavior, another for animal behavior. Human rationality and superiority are not really the issue, however—one only needs to read the latest Darwin Awards to notice that our species can be less rational than advertised. The issue is the dividing line between us and the rest of nature.

Radical behaviorists adamantly insist on this line, and look across it with entirely different eyes than the ones they reserve for their fellow human beings. They speak about animals as “them” and compare “them” with “us,” as Clive D. L. Wynne does at the beginning of Do Animals Think? (“What are animals—really? What should we make of them?”). Other behaviorists, however, intentionally blur the line. They apply the same well-tested behaviorist methodology to reconnect human and animal behavior, daring to mention the words “animal” and “cognition” in the same breath. They write books such as Duane M. Rumbaugh and David A. Washburn’s Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings.

Of the two, Wynne’s book is by far the more readable. Wynne has a pleasant writing style and a knack for engaging the reader. He begins with the story of a mad animal-rights activist who threatened the lives of people on the Isle of Wight, where Wynne grew up. The man was convinced that animals are sentient beings, a certainty Wynne says he wishes he could share.

This story sets the tone of doubt and reserve that permeates the book. Wynne includes numerous insightful accounts of remarkable animal behavior, but he invariably concludes on a note of caution: one should not infer too much from these accounts. He is not so radical a behaviorist that he excludes all forms of reasoning by animals, but he takes greater pleasure in explaining what animals cannot do—monkeys fail to understand relations between cause and effect, apes can sign but lack the syntax that defines human language—than in describing what they can do. Capacities unique to a particular species, such as echolocation in bats, get Wynne’s full admiration. But anything that seems to elevate other animals close to the lofty cognitive level of humankind he regards with utmost skepticism. He seems to take delight in animals, and possesses great knowledge about them, yet he prefers them at arm’s length. The constant message is that animals are not people.

That much is obvious. But it is equally true that people are animals. The dichotomy Wynne advocates is outdated, lending his book a pre-Darwinian flavor. Take the case of animal culture, currently one of the hottest areas in the study of animal behavior. The idea goes back to the pioneering work of Kinji Imanishi, who proposed in 1952 that if individuals learn from one another, their behavior may grow so different from behavior in other groups of the same species that they seem to have their own culture. Imanishi thus reduced the idea of culture to its most basic feature: the social rather than the genetic transmission of behavior.

Many examples of animal culture have been documented. The classic case emerged among wild macaques on Japan’s Koshima Island. During their fieldwork with the monkeys there, investigators provisioned them with sweet potatoes, which a juvenile female named Imo soon began washing; she would bring her potatoes to a small river and clean them off before eating them. Imo’s washing behavior spread first to her mother and then to her age peers, before affecting the rest of the group. Later Imo moved her operation to the shoreline, washing the potatoes in the ocean, and, again, the other monkeys followed.

Some psychologists have objected to this example, pointing out that it is uncertain whether the monkeys learned their skill by copying others or by discovering the behavior individually, without anyone’s help. Wynne supports the second view. But instead of basing his opinion on the actual data published by a team of Japanese primatologists, who have worked on the problem for fifty years, he relies on the word of a skeptical Westerner who has never set foot on the island. This scientist, a specialist in rat behavior, suggested that potato washing spread because performers were selectively rewarded by the people who handed out the potatoes.

A few years ago I went to Koshima Island to verify the idea of selective rewarding. I talked with some of the people who had actually witnessed Imo cleaning her first spud. They told me that initially the monkeys were fed far away from any water, so there was no question of rewarding any washing behavior. Imo herself came up with the idea of transporting the potatoes to the river for cleaning. They also pointed out that one cannot feed a group of monkeys any way one wishes. The dominant males have to be fed first, the females second, and the little ones last; changing the order sparks bloodshed. Thus, except for Imo’s mother, the monkeys that learned the behavior first, the juveniles, were the last to be rewarded. In fact, the only monkeys on the island that never learned potato washing were the adult males: precisely the best-rewarded group.

Wynne invariably favors interpretations that widen the assumed cognitive gap between human and animal. For example, he uncritically accepts the uniqueness claim du jour: that only human beings possess a theory of mind (ToM), or the cognitive ability to understand that others, too, have mental states such as thoughts and knowledge. Ironically—given Wynne’s dismissal of an ape ToM—the concept got its start with a 1970s study of chimpanzees. A female showed she had grasped the intentions of others by, for example, selecting a key from among several tools if she saw a person struggling to open a locked door.

Evidence for a theory of mind in apes has gone through its ups and downs ever since. Some experiments have failed spectacularly, leading the proponents of one school of thought to contend that apes simply lack the capacity. Negative results are inconclusive, though: as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Furthermore, the performance of apes is often assessed by comparing it with that of children. Because the experimenter is invariably human, however, only the apes face a species barrier. When an ingenious experiment conducted at Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta got around that problem, the evidence for an ape ToM was more positive: chimpanzees seemed to realize that if a member of their species had seen hidden food, this individual knew where the food was, as opposed to one who had not seen it. That finding threw the question of a ToM in nonhuman animals wide open again.

In an unexpected twist (because the debate has focused on humans versus apes), a capuchin monkey in a laboratory at Kyoto University in Japan recently passed a series of seeing-knowing tasks with flying colors. The least one can conclude is that it is premature to settle on ToM capabilities as the ultimate Rubicon.

In spite of Wynne’s dismissal of an ape ToM, his book offers many insightful descriptions of animal behavior. A wonderful chapter on the role of messenger pigeons during the First World War includes a picture of the stuffed body of Cher Ami, a genuine war hero. The pigeon kept flying after its leg had been shot off, delivering its message and thus rescuing an entire battalion.

Rumbaugh and Washburn are considerably more open-minded about the mental accomplishments of animals than Wynne is. Their book celebrates Rumbaugh’s lifetime of research on monkeys and apes. In fact, what fascinates me the most about Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings is its historical overview of experimental work with primates, first with the Wisconsin General Testing Apparatus (WGTA) and later with joysticks and computers.

The WGTA was developed at the University of Wisconsin in the 1940s, and is still being used today. In this set-up, a primate subject in a cage faces an experimenter across a platform, on which differently shaped or colored stimuli are arrayed. Both experimenter and primate can reach the stimuli; the experimenter baits them with rewards, and the primate selects among them. I remember working with such an apparatus as a student, testing chimpanzees to see if they could discriminate shapes by touch alone. The task was so incredibly simple and repetitive that the apes invariably got tired of the whole thing five minutes into the testing. In fact, they got so bored that they performed worse than macaques tested on the same stimuli.

I mention this episode because test performance is often taken as a measure of intelligence, even though attention and motivation are equally important to the outcome. As a result, failure is open to interpretation. Rumbaugh and Washburn understand these points better than most scientists, and they are at pains to remind the reader how the questions one asks tend to constrain the answers one gets.

Indeed, some testing paradigms positively suppress the phenomena being tested. When Rumbaugh replaced the WGTA with an innovative testing setup in which the monkeys move a joystick to select stimuli on a computer screen, their performance improved dramatically. Rumbaugh’s work on the connection between method and outcome should be required reading for anyone who attaches significance to negative evidence.

One learning paradigm discussed by Rumbaugh and Washburn has special interest. Some animals learn how to learn—that is, once they have mastered a particular task, they can more quickly learn future tasks that have the same design but rely on different stimuli. Trial-and-error learning cannot explain improved performance in reaction to new stimuli, hence the level of learning must be higher. But generalization across tasks is precisely what the founders of behaviorism thought animals could not do.

Rumbaugh and Washburn discuss many forms of advanced problem-solving, which they classify as “emergents.” The term is slightly awkward, but the authors apply it to cases in which animals flexibly apply accumulated knowledge to new situations, resulting in an “emergent” solution. The classic example is the chimpanzee in a room with a few sticks and boxes in one corner and, for the first time in the chimp’s experience, a banana hanging from the ceiling. The solution emerges as the old bits of previous knowledge combine until, as if a lightbulb suddenly goes on in the chimpanzee’s head, he climbs on top of the boxes and reaches for the banana with a stick.

The two authors rightly speak of reasoning and rationality, and so adopt a terminology that is anathema to radical behaviorism. They discuss the behaviorist view at length but choose to deviate from it, stressing continuity between animal and human. For the reader, though, it is frustrating that they focus almost entirely on apes and other primates, without examining how the concept of emergents could apply equally well to other animals. Crows, dolphins, elephants, and parrots have been credited with creative problem-solving as well.

There will always be tension between those who view animals as only slightly more flexible than machines and those who see them as only slightly less rational than human beings. The views discussed in these two books are by no means as far apart as they could be; both, after all, come out of the same tradition of experimental psychology. Throw in a few naturalists and neuroscientists, and the debate gets even more complex. That said, however, the two books range widely enough across the spectrum of views to make a powerful case that there is still plenty to be discovered, and that human uniqueness is largely in the eye of the beholder.

Frans B.M. de Waal is C. H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior at Emory University in Atlanta and the director of the Living Links Center at the university’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

By Laurence A. Marschall

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Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan Bloomsbury, 2004; $23.95

IN HIS MEMORABLE 1998 BOOK The Meadowlands, about the New Jersey wetlands just west of the Lincoln Tunnel, Robert Sullivan emerged as the Thoreau of blighted ecosystems. Traveling by canoe along oil-slicked bayous, Sullivan uncovered treasures of both natural and industrial history no passing commuter would have suspected.

Now Sullivan has crossed the Hudson River and relocated his eclectic wanderings to the back alleys of lower Manhattan, where the dumpsters of Chinese noodle joints, Irish pubs, and Salvadoran chicken takeouts are the real happening places for urban wildlife. Happening, that is, if you’re a rat.

“Four seasons spent among vermin” is how Sullivan describes his sojourn. His Walden Pond was Edens Alley, a narrow defile a few blocks from Wall Street. Equipped with both binoculars and a night-vision monocular, he arrived in the evenings after dark to watch the rats as they emerged to feed and, in the notebook he’d brought along, to wax lyrical about nature, civilization, and the meaning of life. A typical entry from his winter journal:

5:44—The rats retreat suddenly. The reason: three men enter the alley, though when I see the men I wonder which creature left the alley for which creature—sometimes it seems as if the rats’ departure is a courtesy extended by the rats. . . . I think of all the rats that have crawled through this alley before, the history of this alley’s previous inhabitants. Oh, to know—to really know—this pellicle of rat-infested ground.

Such deadpan effusiveness over creatures commonly regarded as loathsome may border on sick humor, but elegies to Rattus norvegicus make up only a small part of Sullivan’s book. There are many stories about the ethology, natural history, and social importance of rats, and, overall, plenty of evidence that people and rats have a lot more in common than most people would like to admit.

Sullivan cites Martin W. Schein, for instance, the co-author of a 1953 paper on the eating habits of rats captured on Baltimore backstreets. Schein conducted laboratory studies using authentic garbage from the alleys where the rats were trapped. He learned that rats hate raw beets (I sympathize) and that scrambled eggs and macaroni and cheese are popular rat comfort foods, just as they are for human Baltimoreans. In Edens Alley, according to Sullivan, the rats also seem to like chicken pot pie.

In spite of some strong dislikes, though, rats are not picky eaters. By and large, they are omnivorous and highly adaptable—the same traits that make people so successful—and they show uncanny cleverness in finding food and avoiding peril. Ann Li, an epidemiologist with the New York City Department of Health, takes Sullivan on a rat-trapping expedition to Brooklyn, and tells him she thinks rats are “so underappreciated.” Even the exterminators who show Sullivan how to outsmart the rodents express a grudging admiration for their prey.

As much as he shares the rodentophilia of his informants, Sullivan is unsparing when he recounts the misery rats cause. Sometimes they attack directly: in 1979 a large pack surrounded a woman on a street in downtown Manhattan. And of course they carry infectious diseases such as plague. Yet unless people find a way to steam-clean each crevice of the city every day, rats will continue to cohabit with us in uneasy harmony. “If you killed every rat in New York City,” Ann Li remarks, “you would have created new housing for 60 million rats.”

Running with Reindeer: Encounters in Russian Lapland by Roger Took Westview Press, 2004; $27.50

FEW PLACES IN EUROPE are as far off the beaten track as the Kola Peninsula, a potato-shaped carbuncle of land at the top of the Scandinavian Peninsula, east of Finland. Russian Lapland, as the Kola is also known, has one large city (Murmansk), a few subsidiary industrial centers and mining towns, and a scattering of isolated villages in the hinterlands. One passable highway runs through the province. But beyond that right-of-way, for hundreds of kilometers in every direction, the hardy traveler encounters nothing but tundra, taiga (boreal forest), and vacant shoreline.

Roger Took is just such a hardy traveler—perhaps even a foolhardy one. When he arrived in the Russian northland in the early 1990s, the entire country was teetering on the edge of anarchy, and it was not clear which disaffected group a lone Englishman should be more afraid of: suspicious Sami tribesmen, the military attached to the remnants of the Russian Northern Fleet, or the legendary Russian Mafia. Just in case, Took offhandedly notes, he learned how to fire, strip, and reassemble a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol before he left London.

We never learn whether Took ever fired the pistol, but readers can be grateful that he survived, met many fascinating characters, and kept coming back, year after year, for more than a decade. The Kola, he discovered, is a land of contrasts and contradictions, shaped by history and politics as much as by geography. Its first inhabitants were nomadic Sami, who roamed freely through northern Scandinavia. In the Middle Ages, settlers called Pomors arrived from the more populated regions of Russia, to the south. A brisk fur trade with Europe developed because the Kola Peninsula’s best harbors, warmed by the northernmost hook of the Gulf Stream, are more or less ice-free throughout the year.

Only after the Russian Revolution did the area begin to take on its current look of emptiness. In a procrustean attempt to collectivize the Sami economy, Stalin had villagers herded into hastily built urban areas and industrial farms. Much of the coastline was declared off-limits. The discovery of rich mineral resources in the Khibiny mountain range, near the center of the peninsula, only made matters worse; soon “special settlers” were being shipped from various parts of the Soviet Union to provide forced labor.

For the most part, today’s inhabitants huddle in charmless concrete apartment blocks, largely ignorant of the region’s rich history and remarkable resources. Took, however, has grown to love the place. Armed with little more than a backpack and a fishing rod, he boldly wandered through military reservations, floated down rivers with salmon poachers, sledged to hunting and herding excursions with descendants of the Sami, and accompanied wildlife biologists and archaeologists on expeditions to the interior. In one memorable episode he hitched a ride through the backcountry on a clanking, tanklike all-terrain vehicle (minus the gun turret), accompanying a human-rights activist who was documenting a gulag of prison barracks.

Took reports signs of a new life for Russian Lapland. Environmentalists in Russia and Scandinavia have begun to throw their weight behind efforts to clean up the damage caused by the nuclear fleet. Shops in Murmansk now display the latest fashions. And foreign sportsmen have begun to discover that some of the world’s greatest salmon streams run through the Kola’s remote countryside. Russian Lapland may not come off as a vacation paradise, but Took’s book is a marvelous introduction to a region of rich but almost forgotten heritage.

Sequoia: The Heralded Tree in American Art and Culture by Lori Vermaas Smithsonian Books, 2003; $39.95

JUST AS LEBANON is famous for its cedars, so North America is known for its redwoods. Not only are they among the largest and most stately trees on earth, but they thrive in settings of surpassing scenic beauty. Strolling beneath a towering canopy of Sequoia sempervirens, the most common redwood along the northern coast of California, one experiences a world of subtle twilight just a few steps from the glare of a sunlit, rocky shoreline. The rarer Sequoiadendron giganteum, whose ponderous trunks make their coastal cousins seem almost willowy, grow farther inland, in sheltered groves in Yosemite and other isolated valleys.

It is no wonder, then, that the giant sequoias have assumed symbolic importance far out of proportion to their restricted habitat. Lori Vermaas, a cultural historian, has written an insightful new survey of American art and literature on redwoods from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The most widespread early depictions of the giant trees, in the years during and just after the Civil War, were made by enterprising commercial artists who used twin lenses on their cameras to create so-called stereo-view cards. Many of the pictures focused on the immense scale of the trees; a favorite subject was the Grizzly Giant, a tree in Yosemite National Park whose trunk soared straight skyward but whose upper branches seemed painfully gnarled, like the rheumatic joints of an old man.

To a nation still smarting from the horrible conflict between the states, the redwoods, far removed from the scene of battle, seemed serene, impassive, and impervious to harm. They epitomized the part of the nation that had remained intact and functional despite the fires of war and social turmoil. Huge paintings of sequoias by such landscape artists as Albert Bierstadt were all the rage (oversize landscape paintings being the functional equivalents of IMAX films).

Yet few envisioned the giant trees as symbols of an endangered environment. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, logging them was even seen as an example of humankind’s ability to bend nature to its will. Woodsmen were “no puny impersonations of men,” but men who swung “heavy, keen-edged axes as though they were mere trifles.” Logging teams were typically photographed in the yawning notches of trees they were about to topple. In one particularly striking print, an entire troop of U.S. cavalrymen, mounted on horseback, stand like conquering gladiators atop and along the length of the trunk of a fallen giant.

Exuberantly expansive, the American imagination invoked sequoias as a natural treasure, but a treasure to be expropriated and spent. Even John Muir, one of the nation’s first conservationists, waxed enthusiastic over the use of redwood lumber in construction. Redwood housing was “almost absolutely unperishable.”

The onslaught of logging operations, among other abuses of the era, sparked the modern environmental movement, and redwoods came to be seen as treasures to preserve. Although groves of redwoods are continually threatened, the trees still stand, and pictorialists in the tradition of Ansel Adams have continued to use the image of the redwood as an emblem of strength and endurance. Vermaas helps us understand the symbolism of sequoias, but even she must admit that the best way to appreciate them is on foot and close-up. “No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree,” wrote John Steinbeck in 1962. “The feeling they produce is not transferable.”

Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is the W.K.T. Sahm professor of physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.

A summary of the processes that make mountains rise can be found at www.physicalgeography.net, a Web site created by Michael J. Pidwirny, a geographer at Okanagan University College in Kelowna, British Columbia. (On the home page click on “Fundamentals: Online Textbook” from the menu bar at the top; in “Chapter 10: Introduction to the Lithosphere,” click on “Mountain Building.”) For an overall view of how colliding tectonic plates transform the planet, go to “Dynamic Earth” (earth.leeds.ac.uk/dynamicearth), developed by Robert Butler, a geologist at the University of Leeds.

Illustrations of the way tectonics has changed the distribution of land and sea can also be found at a Web site run by Christopher R. Scotese, a geologist at the University of Texas at Arlington. For thirty years, Scotese and his collaborators have been working on a series of paleogeographic atlases. The latest of them, the Global Plate Tectonic Model, is available at “PALEOMAP Project” (www.scotese.com). From the home page you can choose 3-D movable paleoglobes and paleogeographic animations that show the positions of the continents and the shapes of the ocean basins for various periods of geological time. Select “Earth History” from the menu at the left on the home page. There you’ll find full-color maps depicting details such as mountain ranges, shorelines, and active plate boundaries during those same periods—beginning with the breakup of the first supercontinent, Rodinia, and extending through the present and into the future for 250 million years, when the supercontinent Pangea Ultima will trap what is now the Atlantic Ocean in a small, inland basin.

Antonio Schettino, a geologist in Milan, Italy, worked with Scotese to re-create plate motions in the Mediterranean region (www.itis-molinari.mi.it/Intro-Med.html). The accompanying QuickTime animation provides an excellent graphic explanation of how the Alps arose. A similar presentation of tectonic processes shows the ancient mountain chains in greater regional detail (www4.nau.edu/geology). Click on “Popular Departmental Links” and look at the three items created by Ronald C. Blakey, a geologist at Northern Arizona University. The site www.jamestown-ri.info/northern_appalachians.htm provides a rundown of the northern Appalachian chain’s geological history, which stretches back a billion years.

Geologists can now watch mountains grow, thanks to new satellite and radar technologies that measure minute movements of the Earth’s crust and slight changes in the stresses that cause earthquakes. Go to the “Active Tectonics” site, run by a group from the University of California, Berkeley (www.seismo.berkeley.edu/~burgmann/EDUCATION/InSAR.html), for more information.

Robert Anderson is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.

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Copyright © Natural History Magazine, Inc., 2004