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Page 100. Reading 2.

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How Smart Are Animals?

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By Gita Simonson

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We think that crows are smart, but what do we really know?

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Intelligence takes on diverse meanings for different species,

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and researchers think we are too prone to use human standards.

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We've all heard talk of animal intelligence.

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We speak of crafty crows, clever foxes, discerning dolphins, and brilliant squids,

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but can we really use the word intelligence with regard to animals?

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Researchers are concerned with learning mechanisms and other cognitive abilities.

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Thinking, acquiring knowledge, sensory perception, memory, and language.

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These are the thought processes which form the basis for what we experience and comprehend of the world around us.

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The problem is that we often look for human traits when we study animal behavior.

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But what may be clever for us needn't be a viable attribute in other members of the animal kingdom.

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Animals are often given tasks based on human behavior, such as the use of tools,

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says Peter Bachman, a zoologist at the Natural History Museum in Oslo.

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If you turn it around and visualize a flock of screaming chimpanzees hauling you up into a treetop,

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and confronting you with a complicated problem involving nuts,

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how intelligently do you think you would perform, he asks.

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Indeed, we can easily fail to notice animal intelligence if we only look for human qualities,

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says Bjarn Brastad, an animal behaviorist at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.

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It can be limiting if your point of departure is human traits.

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Animals have other abilities, and can have elements of intelligence that humans lack.

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He says.

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IQ by the Kilo

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We often measure intelligence, particularly in mammals,

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in accordance with how much the brain weighs in relation to total body weight.

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Humans lead by a long shot on this list, and the animal right behind us is not one of the apes.

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It's the dolphin.

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Dolphins can thus be said to have the potential for very high intelligence,

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but we can't measure this optimally.

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Dolphins come from a completely different world, in a way,

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and have a language we can't fathom.

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Communication is definitely a great barrier in the understanding of animal behavior.

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Human intelligence is strongly linked to the language we use to communicate with one another, says Bachman.

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As long as we can't communicate with animals, it's really hard to decide how smart they are.

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Language is such an integral part of being human,

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and that makes it hard to avoid using humans,

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as a framework for considering the intelligence of animals.

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Bees smarter than babies?

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A group of scientists from Queen Mary University in London

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examined studies of animal intelligence

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to find out what scientists currently think about comparable cognition in different species.

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They found that concepts and terms used to calculate the intelligence of animals

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are often borrowed from studies of human psychology.

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One reads,

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A recent study charting the learning speed of bees, human infants, birds, and fish ended with the bees on top and our offspring at bottom.

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So the researchers behind the experiment concluded that learning speed couldn't be used to measure intelligence because humans weren't first across the finish line.

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The British scientists point out that the bees beat the babies in a learning test because the lab tested characteristics that bees have been perfecting during eons of evolutionary development.

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In comparisons of intelligence among species, it's hard to avoid dealing trump cards to one species or another.

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It's difficult to discern between reasoning, learned reflexes, and pure instincts.

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This makes it challenging for humans to create tests.

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But don't remind animals of their natural behavior, says Bachman.

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Bottom-up

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The British scientists suggest what they term a bottom-up method.

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This differs from what they regard as top-bottom studies in animal behavior research.

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In these, researchers pick out a cognitive trait and investigate how the animal's nerve system guides this trait.

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With more emphasis on a bottom-up method,

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they would study the species' behavior and the behavior of the animal.

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They would also study the species' neural networks in attempts to perceive what uses these networks can have.

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The advantage of the bottom-up methods is that we can find traits that we didn't know existed in animals, says Brostad.

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Bachman comments that one of the challenges of this method is the extreme difficulty of investigating tiny neural circuitry in minuscule brains, such as in small insects.

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Better Tools Required

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There are now numerous studies that compare the cognitive capabilities of various species through investigations of their brains' neural circuitry.

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This has contributed toward answering questions about whether some of our human qualities can also exist in other species

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and help lay the groundwork for better comparisons.

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For instance, multiple studies have been conducted with regard to facial recognition, imitation, social behavior, and empathy,

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and these can be found among many of our animal cousins.

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If the neural paths that are active in animals are the same ones acting in humans, we could have kindred abilities, says Bachman.

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Gro Amdam conducts research on bees and what happens to their brains as they age.

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She is a professor at Arizona State University and a researcher at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences.

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Scientists need to develop better intelligence.

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There are tools, methods, and theories for comparing the brain skills in different species, but we are well on our way, she says.