Free Inside Animal Minds: The New Science of Animal Intelligence by and Peter Miller Mary Roach Virgina Morell Page B

him. “He knows all this, and he gets bored, so he interrupts the others, or he gives the wrong answer just to be obstinate. At this stage, he’s like a teenage son; he’s moody, and I’m never sure what he’ll do.”
    “Wanna go tree,” Alex said in a tiny voice.
    Alex had lived his entire life in captivity, but he knew that beyond the lab’s door, there was a hallway and a tall window framing a leafy elm tree. He liked to see the tree, so Pepperberg put her hand out for him to climb aboard. She walked him down the hall into the tree’s green light.
    “Good boy! Good birdie,” Alex said, bobbing on her hand.
    “Yes, you’re a good boy. You’re a good birdie.” And she kissed his feathered head.
    He was a good birdie until the end, and Pepperberg was happy toreport that he had finally mastered the word
seven
before he died.
    Many of Alex’s cognitive skills, such as his ability to understand the concepts of same and different, are generally ascribed only to higher mammals, particularly primates. But parrots, like great apes (and humans), live a long time in complex societies. And like primates, these birds must keep track of the dynamics of changing relationships and environments.
    “They need to be able to distinguish colors to know when a fruit is ripe or unripe,” Pepperberg noted. “They need to categorize things—what’s edible, what isn’t—and to know the shapes of predators. And it helps to have a concept of numbers if you need to keep track of your flock, and to know who’s single and who’s paired up. For a long-lived bird, you can’t do all of this with instinct; cognition must be involved.”
    Being able mentally to divide the world into simple abstract categories would seem a valuable skill for many organisms. Is that ability, then, part of the evolutionary drive that led to human intelligence?
    Charles Darwin, who attempted to explain how human intelligence developed, extended his theory of evolution to the human brain: Like the rest of our physiology, intelligence must have evolved from simpler organisms, because all animals face the same general challenges of life. They need to find mates, food, and a path through the woods, sea, or sky—tasks that Darwin argued require problem-solving and categorizing abilities. Indeed, Darwin went so far as to suggest that earthworms are cognitive beings because, based on his close observations, they have to make judgments about the kinds of leafy matter they use to block their tunnels. He hadn’t expected to find thinking invertebrates, and remarked that the hint of earthworm intelligence “has surprised me more than anything else in regard to worms.”
    To Darwin, the earthworm discovery demonstrated that degreesof intelligence could be found throughout the animal kingdom. But the Darwinian approach to animal intelligence was cast aside in the early 20th century, when researchers decided that field observations were simply “anecdotes” usually tainted by anthropomorphism. In an effort to be more rigorous, many embraced behaviorism, which regarded animals as little more than machines, and focused their studies on the laboratory white rat—because one “machine” would behave like any other.
    But if animals are simply machines, how can the appearance of human intelligence be explained? Without Darwin’s evolutionary perspective, the greater cognitive skills of people did not make sense biologically. Slowly, the pendulum has swung away from the animal-as-machine model and back toward Darwin. A whole range of animal studies now suggests that the roots of cognition are deep, widespread, and highly malleable.
    Just how easily new mental skills can evolve is perhaps best illustrated by dogs. Most owners talk to their dogs and expect them to understand. But this canine talent wasn’t fully appreciated until a border collie named Rico appeared on a German TV game show in 2001. Rico knew the names of some 200 toys, and acquired the names of new