This is what I know…
Random Observations: May 7, 2008
“Animal Intelligence”
Continuing my science kick, I have been following the latest stories released in the journals Nature and Science.
One story reports on a group of researchers at MIT who wondered how young birds move from babbling to mature bird song.
See: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/320/5876/630 and: http://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/05/audio_special_babbling_bird_br.html and: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/science/06obsong.html?ref=science# and: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/05/080501-bird-brains.html and: http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/05/01/bird-song-babble.html
Now, I think this is an interesting question. Do chicks learn adult bird languages the way human children learn language? Is it a matter of imitation and repetition? What would be the best way to structure an experiment to find out? Could you set up brain scans… would a bird have to hold still and sing for an MRI?
Could you take the young birds out of the company of adult birds and drill them with recorded sounds? Could you compare the evolving juvenile songs of different families, and analyse their complexity? Could you deprive them of their native songs and see if they develop new patterns?
Nope, the good people at MIT decided the most efficient way to understand how the bird brain learns language would be… you guessed it… to remove parts of the young birds’ brains, and keep records on which amputations hobbled them the most.
Result: We now know that birds use different parts of their brains when they develop the complex songs of adulthood.
Don’t get me wrong, I may be against animal cruelty in general, but I am not a zealot on the matter: I understand that many people think invasive vivisection is sometimes a necessary tool in pursuit of valuable scientific knowledge, but… I am sorry… nothing I have read in any of the reports of this much lauded study suggest why this particularly brutal approach was needed, in order to find out the tid bit that we learned.
And not a single science journalist seemed to think questions about whether the ends justified the means, in this particular case, were either necessary or appropriate.
(Disclosure: I used to have four pet Zebra Finches)
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A much more interesting study discussed this week focuses on the cost of animal intelligence, itself.
It would seem that evolved intelligence comes with a list of significant evolutionary disadvantages. Observations, experiments, and studies conducted over a number of years, by different groups of scientists, conclude that higher intelligence taxes an animal’s energy reserves, and results in a prolonged period of infantalization. It often comes at the cost of longevity, and is particularly hard on juvenile mortality.
Their conclusion: In many cases, and for most species, working by instinct is just more efficient than complex cognitive adaptation.
So, how did these scientists structure their experiments?
Well, first there was statistical modelling based on all the information we already know about more intelligent versus less intelligent species; and, when the time came to work with live creatures, the primary controlled experiments seem to have involved breeding-and-training programs for fruit flies and small worms, some of which extended over 30 generations in order to mimic the process of evolution.
One experiment is described in the New York Times’ weekly science section, yesterday:
See: “Cost of Smarts” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/opinion/07wed4.html?th&emc=th
First, fruit flies were trained to avoid or like certain foods through a combination of Pavlovian techniques and cognitive association, and then the ones who had learned how to approach new foods cognitively, i.e. through learned associations rather than instinctively, were bred together over and over again.
Artificially selecting for cognitive learning, the scientists could eventually study the consequences of intelligence as a heritable trait.
Result: As predicted, the newly evolved, smarter flies died sooner and fared poorly in early stages of development, when compared to their stupider cousins.
I like this study—and not just because it speaks to a latent misanthropic streak that might be hiding inside me.
I like the way the scientists challenged preconceived notions about the value of intelligence, and chose to investigate the costs, instead.
I like the way they designed their live experiments, and the way they ran past data through new filters.
I like the questions they asked, and the way the journalists who reported on the studies covered the speculation about what their findings might mean: to us, to other animals, to our understanding of the world, to the science of knowing.
And I particularly like Verlyn Klinkenborg’s response to this kind of science in an editorial for today’s New York Times:
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/opinion/07wed4.html?th&emc=th
Klinkenborg wonders what animals might think about our intelligence, and the good it has done us:
Every chicken that looks at you sideways — which is how they all look at you — is really saying what Thoreau said less succinctly: you are endeavoring to solve the problem of a livelihood by a formula more complicated than the problem itself.
Living in a rural area, on what appears to be a hobby farm, Klinkenborg provides the uber-urban, pseudo-intellectual readership of the NYTimes (myself included) with a regular blast of fresh air.
Harbouring the insticts of an old-school “natural philosopher,’ and equipped with a fantastic gift for analogy, Klinkenborg’s editorial musing isn’t published according to a set schedule as far as I can tell; but, when they do appear, his articles are among my favourite stops on the Net.
This little gem of an editorial response is short and wry. The author is no misanthropist, and his conclusion takes the edge off my frustration, even as he makes me laugh:
Research on animal intelligence also makes me wonder what experiments animals would perform on humans if they had the chance. Every cat with an owner, for instance, is running a small-scale study in operant conditioning. I believe that if animals ran the labs, they would test us to determine the limits of our patience, our faithfulness, our memory for terrain. They would try to decide what intelligence in humans is really for, not merely how much of it there is. Above all, they would hope to study a fundamental question: Are humans actually aware of the world they live in? So far the results are inconclusive.
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So, with regard to animal intelligence: I say, to each her own.
Here we are: the human species (top of the food chain), with our complex brains designing complex solutions to what we think are the world’s most important intellectual and scientific puzzles, when …I mean… given the state of the planet after 400+ years of our big-brained, uniquely human experiments… (shrug) well, perhaps it is time to re-frame our analysis of what intelligence is for, don’t you think?
