![]() And so how is it shaped? What can he do? What does he use it for? How does he survive through his cognitive solutions to certain problems like camouflage or putting coconut shells around yourself or those kind of things? So how does he solve the problems in his environment? And how it compares to humans is sort of a secondary issue in my mind. IRA FLATOW: What should we be asking? And how should we be testing them, then?įRANS DE WAAL: We should be asking– the octopus obviously has cognition going, because cognition is the processing of information. Are you smarter than an octopus? It’s not a good question. IRA FLATOW: So you said it’s sort of useless to ask whether humans are more intelligent than, say, an octopus, right? I talked about the octopus who knew how to get out.įRANS DE WAAL: It’s not a good question. She picked up her box, and she threw it at the banana, which was very smart, and it worked very well. And we had a female who did something that Kohler never described and no one has ever described. And we put a whole bunch of boxes out there and the bananas high up. And what the chimp did– he balanced himself on the end of the stick and reached up with his arm and grabbed the banana.įRANS DE WAAL: Yeah, we recently repeated the Kohler test at the Arnhem Zoo, where I used to work. Just like you say, they put a banana on a shelf, they would leave a stick around, and they would see if he could pick up the stick and knock off the banana. He worked in the chimp lab and they would measure intelligence. And I had a psychologist who told me that. IRA FLATOW: When I was in college, we had a psych lab. They really didn’t like to hear that, that animals could think. And the behaviorists and all the opponents of animal intelligence, they got crazy. So they were performing behavior that they never had been rewarded for, but which was the right behavior to get to the banana. And he would describe that his chimps would sit around for a long time and stare at the boxes, and then all of a sudden, they would jump up and stack a few boxes together. Animals either worked on the basis of instinct or on the basis of associative learning– you know, like reward and punishment.Īnd already in the previous century there were people who disagreed with that, like Wolfgang Kohler, the German scientist who would hang a banana high up in the ceiling and see– he would give his chimps a bunch of boxes and see if they used them to get there. Are we?įRANS DE WAAL: I hope we are, and I think we could be, but for the last 100 years, we haven’t really shown it because we have been downplaying animal intelligence for 100 years. Let me start with the name of your book, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are. And you can read an excerpt of the book on our site at /smartanimals. He joins us here in our New York studios. Franz de Waal is a primatologist at Emory University in Atlanta. After you read this book, you may never look at a wasp the same way again. And he documents our quest to measure animal intelligence and emotions in his new book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? And it’s not just about chimps and our next of kin. So how can we give animals a fair shake? Well, a good place to start, according to my next guest, would be, well, let’s test an an elephant. When they struggle, we pat ourselves on the backs, assured of our place at the top of the intelligence totem pole. But then we do dumb things like asking animals to solve human puzzles. We’re just too prejudiced by our own intelligence, our own way of solving problems, of looking at the world. How do you measure the IQ of a cat or an octopus? Well, until recently we humans haven’t done a great job at assessing the intelligence of animals. Quite impressive unless you’re a pet owner, because if you have a pet, I’m guessing you’ve had moments where you think, hey, this pet is really smart and clever and conniving. By now you’ve heard the story of Inky the octopus who, under the cover of darkness, squeezed through a crack in his tank top, stretched his long body through a drain hole in the floor, and slithered down a 50 meter pipe to make his escape into the sea from the National Aquarium of New Zealand. ![]()
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