VII. Knowledge is power but not for all: species-specific intelligence

All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.

Animal Farm

By George Orwell

As this was already mentioned in Preface for this book, lives of many creatures, from large to very small ones, are full of vital situations that demand minute-to-minute decisions from them: to fight or to flee, to court or to ignore, to dominate or to obey, to take off or to share with, to eat or to spit out. We can hardly presume that living things can be provided with inherited “receipts” for all cases. One of the most interesting problems in studying animal intelligence is how inherited traits interact with individual and social learning during the development of complex behaviour, and, more concretely, how “wired” stereotypes together with possible innate predisposition for selecting stimuli in environment and responding to them in specific ways influence the development of cognitive abilities.

Lorenz and Tinbergen elaborated the paradigm of classical ethology that was aimed at understanding the ultimate evolutionary reasons for behaviour. The basis of the general research program for ethologists is frequently referred to as “Tinbergen’s four questions”:

1) How does the behaviour develop during the animal's life time, or what is the ontogeny of the behaviour?

2) How does the animal's immediate environment activate the physiological mechanisms that generate the behaviour, or what are the proximal mechanisms of the behaviour?

3) How does the behaviour contribute to survival and reproductive success, or what is the adaptive significance of the behaviour?

4) What is the evolutionary history or phylogeny of the behaviour?

Now students of animal behaviour agree that many displays of behaviour have both genetically pre-programmed and learned aspects. So, at first sight, it seems trivial to discuss combinations of innate and acquired components of behaviour. However, concrete knowledge fills empty honeycombs of the logic schema with the honey of sense, and can provide new ideas.

In this part we will consider specific forms of inter-relations between learning and instinct in animals, starting with the problem of individual diversity of members of species in relation to their intellectual potentials.

When considering relations between innate and learned behaviour, a key question arises about what is instinct. In this part I only touch on the aspects of the concept of instinct which deal with intellectual abilities of animals. I would like to refer the reader who is interested in classical concepts of instinct and its modern development to special books and reviews in this field (see, for example, Alcock, 2005; Bateson, 1991 (ed.): Bateson, 2001, 2003, 2005; Heyes and Huber (eds.), 2000; Becoff, 2002).

Recent development of comparative cognitive studies in close relation with ethology has led researchers to a concept of guided learning in animals, that is, learning which is controlled by instincts. Different aspects of this phenomenon concern predisposition of organisms to forming some associations more readily than others and this includes displays of guided learning of different complexity, from relatively simple, such as “innate” fear for enemies and preference for certain kinds of food, to very complex such as tool manufacture and food storing. Starting with a classic problem of “misbehaviour of organisms” in Chapter 20, we then will analyse different aspects of guided learning in Chapters 22 and 23.

In Chapter 23 seemingly paradoxical questions will be discussed about how an instinct is learned, how intelligence is wired, and whether “innate learning” is possible, as a form of imprinting. Analysis of these intricate details of the whole picture of animal behaviour is based mainly on developmental studies. Recent data lay foundation of the concept of ecological intelligence, that is, development of amazing cognitive skills in some species, within frames of specific domains, aimed to solving some vital but restricted problems.

20. IS FINDING A COMMON METRIC OF INTELLIGENCE POSSIBLE IN REAL ANIMAL LIFE?

In this chapter we will discuss the question of possible possession of equal intelligence in members of species. In this book we have already met many examples of limited possibilities of animals to learn. Students of animal intelligence no more share the belief of early behaviourists that animals could learn all information with equal ease. We know now that animals represent the World in species-specific ways. Species differ in their abilities to perceive stimuli and establish connections between them, and it is possible that sometimes species-specific behavioural patterns govern education in animals. The questions we will discuss in this Chapter are the following: Can we consider members of species equal? Can we rank species within a universal intelligence scale? Why “clever” animals do “bad mistakes”?