Tool-use in animals is often equated with intelligence. But Maja Choma wonders that if even pigeons can learn to use them, what does it say about our high opinion of ourselves?
“Tool use is the external employment of an unattached environmental object to alter more efficiently the form, position or condition of another object, organism or the user itself when the user holds or carries the tool during or just prior to use and is responsible for the proper and effective orientation of the tool”
(p10 Animal tool behavior by B. Beck. (1980)
Imagine getting up in the morning and not using a single tool all day long. No spoon or even a bowl for your cereal. No coffee from a machine on the way to lectures, no pen and paper for your notes. No phone calls, no iPod, no internet. Just nothing.
It’s not until you imagine a world without tools that you realise how dependent we’ve become on them in every aspect of our lives. The influence of technology can be seen everywhere in modern society, but throughout evolution, tool-use has been our characteristic skill. We like using tools; a baby will play with them from a very early age, even if it just means banging one thing against another to make a fun noise.
It’s something we take pride in, imagining it requires a lot of intelligence and understanding, as something that sets us apart from other animals, something that helped us survive and become such a dominant species. Being an extremely self-centred species, therefore, we find animals using tools fascinating. We’ve always thought that being able to use tools is a sign of some special ability, a human-like intelligence or logic. But is it?
A crow can make a hook out of a twig and use it to extract snacks from holes. A chimpanzee can use a box to stand on or a stick to reach a banana. Even a snail can use small stones to shift its own balance in order to turn the right way up (yes, someone made an experiment to see what happens when you put a snail up side down on its shell.) Are these instances demonstrating special cognitive abilities? Why should tool manufacture and use be a good indicator of having them? Just because humans are smart (we tell ourselves) and use tools doesn’t mean that animals who use tools are smart. In fact to say so would be very naïve – if not plain stupid.
In 1917, Wolfgang Köhler reported some interesting instances of impressive problem-solving behaviour in a number of chimpanzees; a bunch of bananas was placed in a room, high enough to be out of easy reach of the 7 chimps present, and a small wooden box was placed in a far corner. All the chimps tried to obtain the food by jumping, but when it failed, they paced for some time when suddenly one individual ran to the box, pushed it under the bunch, climbed and reached the bananas. Köhler called this behaviour insightful, causing a great controversy. The problem-solving didn’t require trial-error learning or special training, yet the chimp did it; no-one taught the animal to push objects or to get on top of them in order to reach others, yet it did so in one smooth, error free way, straight to the success of eating the banana.
Other experiments include chimps using a series of gradually longer sticks to reach for other sticks, the final one being of the correct length to reach a reward. Again, no trial or error learning was present: the chimp simply sat for a while, contemplated, and then solved the problem smoothly and with minimal error. Insightful indeed. But surely such flashes are only present in primates? Not true. Almost 70 years latter, a group of psychologists from Harvard University decided to have a closer look at this “special ability” – with pigeons.
Epstein and colleagues trained 11 adult pigeons; some were trained to just push a small box around their cages towards a green spot, others were trained to climb a fixed box and peck on a picture of a banana (and not fly or jump towards it), still others were taught separately both of the actions. In their experiment, they placed a picture of a bout of reach, and a box away from it, than put a bird into the cage and observed and filmed its actions.
First three birds, all of which has been trained in both actions separately, behaved very similarly: each subject was at first “confused” –looked around, gazed back and forth at banana and box, but after a while and rather suddenly each one would go to the box and start pushing it towards the banana, then on reaching the right spot, climb the box and peck the picture. The birds that were taught only one part of the solution never volunteered the whole sequence, nor did the birds that were taught both actions but weren’t trained in pushing box in one direction – they pushed the box aimlessly for 14 minutes at a time without stopping. They seemed quite happy with their lot.
Nevertheless, viewers of the resulting video were impressed and astounded by the pigeons’ apparent problem-solving abilities. What can we conclude then? Epstein thought his study showed how easy it was to read too much into simple algorithms of behaviour. Humans are prone to project our own emotions and thoughts onto other creatures which show a similar behaviour pattern to our own, ascribing insight, logic, and reasoning to simple actions which may be nothing of the sort. The idea of ‘insight’ and any other special abilities could no longer be reliably derived from tool-related behaviour.
But what does that say about ourselves and our infinitely complex tools? Do we really have flashes of insight, or are we just enacting aspects of conditioned behaviour in what appears to be a complicated and sophisticated way?
Or maybe, just maybe, we aren’t as clever as we think….
