Review of Are We Smart Enough.doc

Species solipsism has long been the default position of our philosophical tradition. Until very recently in our intellectual history, philosophical and (to a large extent) scientific inquiry into the nature of mind has proceeded as if we humans were the only minded species on the planet. We have sought to uncover the nature of our own minds and left as an afterthought the question of what other kinds of mind there might be. It is true that ethical concerns about our treatment of other animals have seemed to offer an acknowledgement of the reality of other minded animals. But such accounts tend to stress lowest common denominators, such the capacity to feel pain and suffer, and thus have tended to underplay the diversity of mindedness.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1990

Abstract Plant and animal species are information-processing entities of such complexity, integration, and adaptive competence that it may be scientifically fruitful to consider them intelligent. The possibility arises from the analogy between learning (in organisms) and evolution (in species), and from recent developments in evolutionary science, psychology and cognitive science. Species are now described as spatiotemporally localized individuals in an expanded hierarchy of biological entities. Intentional and cognitive abilities are now ...

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 1987

Recent decades have seen a number of influential attacks on the comparative psychology of learning and intelligence. Two specific charges have been that the use of distantly related species has prevented us from making valid evolutionary inferences and that learning mechanisms are species-specific adaptations to ecological niches and hence not properly comparable between species. It is argued here that work using distantly related species may yield valuable insights into the structure of intelligence and that the question of whether or not learning mechanisms are niche-specific is one which can only be answered by comparative work in "nonnatural" situations. The problems involved in defining and assessing intelligence are discussed. Experimental work has not succeeded in demonstrating differences in intellect among nonhuman vertebrates. Hence the null hypothesis-that there are no differences in intellect among nonhuman vertebrates-should be adopted; the superiority of human intelligence stems from our possessing a species-specific language-acquisition device. One implication of the null hypothesis is that general problem-solving capacity is independent of niche-specific adaptations. A second implication is that problem-solving may involve relatively simple mechanisms; association formation in particular may play a central role in nonhuman intelligence, allowing the successful detection of causal links between events. Causality is a constraint common to all ecological niches.

2015

Cognitive scientists frequently (and implicitly) seem to assume that the more evolutionary proximity there is between an animal and Homo sapiens, the more its (brain/)mind and behaviour will be similar to ours. For example, while it is very common to read scientific papers that compare non-human primate behaviours, in particular chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus), to human behaviours, it is very rare, in contrast, to read a scientific paper on human mind that refers to insect cognition data. In this paper we try to challenge this unnoticed anthropocentric (and primatecentric) bias, which prevent us to see deep similarities across the cognitive abilities of living beings. The basic idea of this paper is that a «core» cognitive system exists which is widespread among animals, including humans. What differentiates human mind from other minds is language.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2021

In a series of papers in the 80s, Macphail (1982, 1985, 1987) put forth evidence in support of the Null Hypothesis for differences in intelligence across non-human species, stating in his 1985 paper that there are "no differences, either qualitative or quantitative, among vertebrates" (p. 46). He further claimed that association formation dominates intelligent behavior, that any differences in intelligence between species could be accounted for by the differential effects of contextual variables, that learning mechanisms are of general applicability and did not evolve as speciesspecific specializations, and that human intelligence differs from that of other animals in that only humans possess a species-specific language device. The peer commentaries on Macphail's (1987) Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper were generally negative. The most scathing comment was from Goldman-Rakic and Preuss (1987) who suggested that "Macphail's 'null hypothesis' is merely the epitaph on the head stone of comparative cognition" (p. 667). Surprisingly, despite the negative tone, Macphail (1987) ended his response to the commentaries on an uplifting note, stating that "For my part, I remain an optimist, and prefer to see the failure to demonstrate differences as evidence not that our scientific procedures are weak but that the animal mind is not what we expected it to be. And after all, did we really expect that it would be?" (p. 688). Based on the growth of comparative cognition in the more than three decades since Macphail's (1987) paper, and the papers included in this Research Topic, it is clear Macphail was right to be optimistic. As Pepperberg notes, Macphail (1987) should be given credit for ".. . instigating a variety of controversies, stimulating the wide-ranging discussions, and generating the types of challenges that have led to many new avenues of research" (p. 10). At the time, many of the remarkable abilities of non-human animals were unknown to Macphail. Abilities such as episodic memory, theory of mind, orthographic processing, planning for the future, fast mapping, and numerical competence, to name but a few, were yet to have their time in the limelight. With the wealth of comparative data collected over the past 30 years, we thought it was timely to review the status of Macphail's Null Hypothesis, and gauge how the current generation of comparative psychologists approach the inherent challenge that Macphail put forward. The manuscripts we received ranged from empirical to theoretical, and covered research on a variety of different animals such as pigeons, fish, rats, humans, parrots, eels, crows, monkeys, marine mammals, and spiders. All the papers addressed Macphail's main claim that there are no qualitative or quantitative differences in intelligence across species. A subset of papers addressed Macphail's other claims that (1) contextual variables can explain all of the observed differences between species, (2) associative processes account for all non-human intelligence, and (3) the uniqueness of human intelligence is due to a species-specific language acquisition device.

The Wire Science, 2020

Some time ago, I read a remarkable book with a provocative title: Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are? Probably not, the author-Frans de Waal, a well-known Dutch-American primatologistargued. I agree, but I think we should keep trying. After all, human smartness is largely due to trial and error.

2006

Educational Research Review, 2007

The notion of general cognitive ability (or ‘intelligence’) is explored and why the time might now be ripe for educators to re-consider the power offered by a general intellectual capacity which is itself amenable to educational influence. We review existing knowledge concerning general intelligence, including the cohabitation of general and special abilities, cognitive modules, development, and evidence for plasticity of

Animal Sentience, 2019

Chapman & Huffman review and evaluate various aspects of the notion of human superiority. In this commentary we focus on intelligence and suggest a biologically based view of intelligence applicable to humans and non-human species alike. "Mental manipulation" (e.g., mental transformations, rotations, perspective-taking), an extension of object manipulation, provides a continuous, biologically based concept for studying intelligent behavior in humans and other species and challenges the notion of human superiority.

We are often asked whether some apes are smarter than others. Here we used two individual-based datasets on cognitive abilities to answer this question and to elucidate the structure of individual differences. We identified some individuals who consistently scored well across multiple tasks, and even one individual who could be classified as exceptional when compared with her conspecifics. However, we found no general intelligence factor. Instead, we detected some clusters of certain abilities, including inferences, learning and perhaps a tool-use and quantities cluster. Thus, apes in general and chimpanzees in particular present a pattern characterized by the existence of some smart animals but no evidence of a general intelligence factor. This conclusion contrasts with previous studies that have found evidence of a g factor in primates. However, those studies have used group-based as opposed to the individual-based data used here, which means that the two sets of analyses are not directly comparable. We advocate an approach based on testing multiple individuals (of multiple species) on multiple tasks that capture cognitive, motivational and temperament factors affecting performance. One of the advantages of this approach is that it may contribute to reconcile the general and domain-specific views on primate intelligence.