Chap1

Chapter 1
The Intelligent Animal

Man is an animal who thinks.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Many is the child that has looked deep into the eyes of his pet dog or cat and wondered, if for only a moment, about the nature of the barrier that separates humans from other animals. Throughout human history many adults have also thought a great deal about this difference between man and the beast. Today we may smile to ourselves at the naivety of the above statement by the Roman statesman Seneca. But for all our great advances in knowledge in recent centuries, we are still woefully ignorant of the nature of our own intelligence and exactly how our intelligence differs from that of other animals.
It is obvious, not only to the scientists and philosophers, but also to the common man that humans are in some way smarter or more intelligent than any other animal. The contrast between humans and non-humans is quite apparent, but the exact nature of the difference in mental ability and the ramifications of this difference are still to this day very much a matter of speculation and dispute. We agree that humans are more intelligent than other animals, but there is no agreement as to the specific nature of this intelligence.
Perhaps one of the reasons why we have had such difficulties in analyzing our own intellectual abilities is the impossibility of getting outside ourselves. We are trapped in our own bodies. We always see things only through human eyes and can think only with our human brains. One often hears from world travellers that they were never able to fully understand their own country and its values until they had travelled abroad and visited other countries with somewhat different values. By getting outside their own country and by experiencing different cultures, these people are able not only to learn about these foreign countries, but also, by comparison, to understand their own culture much better. Mankind then, must be somewhat like the person who would dearly like to visit foreign countries, but is never able to do so. We are never able to experience what other animals are experiencing. We can never really know what is going on inside their heads.
However, even the person who is unable to leave his own country has some information about foreign cultures available to him. He is able to read books about other countries or even talk directly with foreigners (assuming they speak a common language) or nowadays see films from abroad. But as humans, we are never able to leave our human bodies and experience how other animals are experiencing this same world. And what is more, unlike the foreigners, animals do not talk to us and tell us about it.
Perhaps our task would be a great deal easier if somehow one of us could become another animal for a few days and then return to tell us what it was like, or if another animal could acquire the gift of speech and tell us about its former life. But these methods are all but impossible. We must, it seems, seek the answers elsewhere.
Science has often sought to explore mysteries of nature that were beyond the direct observation of human eyes. In problems of the infamous "black box" type, science has often excelled in providing useful proposals for the understanding of these mysteries. Scientists have often proposed the existence of objects that could not be directly observed at that time. Some examples of these proposals are molecules, bacteria and genes. By carefully observing what goes in and what comes out of one of these "black boxes", scientists can sometimes hypothesize a good approximation of what may very well be happening inside the box, even though they are not actually able to observe what is happening on the inside.
Perhaps science can even yet do the same for the problem of human and animal intelligence. The animals cannot tell us what is happening inside their heads, and we cannot experience directly what they are experiencing, but by carefully observing the differences between human behaviour and animal behaviour, perhaps a scientific theory can be formulated to account for some of the differences.

DEGREE VERSUS KIND
Starting with Aristotle, many philosophers and scientists have pondered the question of the nature of this difference between man and the other animals. The controversy over the centuries has tended to center around two main points. The first of these points concerns the amount of the difference of intelligence between man and the other animals. That is, whether this difference is a matter of degree or rather, a matter of kind. Even to this day it is possible to find equally qualified scientists arguing over whether man is more intelligent only by degrees from the other animals or whether man's mental activity is of a different kind from the rest of the animal kingdom.
Aristotle in his Historia Animalium was one of the first to defend the "degree" side of the argument. He contended that the dog, the elephant and other animals approached the mental level of the human child. Charles Darwin (1871) in more modern times tended to agree with the view of Aristotle when he stated that "there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties", that this difference consists solely of man's "almost infinitely larger power of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas. . .the mental powers of higher animals do not differ in kind, though greatly in degree from the corresponding powers of man".
In this century, Edward L. Thorndike, the first man to study animal intelligence in the laboratory, was also of this "degree" opinion. He denied not only any unique intellectual difference between man and the other animals, but also any uniqueness anywhere in the hierarchy of the animal kingdom. He believed that intellectual differences between animal species were only differences of degree. "All the vertebrates apparently have the ability to learn. The general pattern and features of the learning are extraordinarily alike over almost the entire range. Molluscs and arthropods, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals manifest fundamentally the same process of learning" (1931, p. 163).
Defending the other side of the dispute, Descartes (1637) argued in favour of the differences-of-kind position. It is "not only that the brutes have less reason than man, but that they have none at all". John Locke (1706) also saw that "the power of abstracting is not at all in them [other animals] and that the having of general ideas is that which puts a perfect distinction between man and brutes".
The experimental methods of modern science have by no means settled the issue. Contradicting Thorndike's hypothesis of difference of only degree in the hierarchy of animals, Bitterman (1965) has found in his experiments that there is a discontinuity in animal learning along the evolutionary scale. For example, in his habit-reversal experiments, Bitterman found that the higher animals were able to improve their performance on this type of problem, whereas the lower animals were not. In these experiments, animals were rewarded for choosing the alternative A rather than B until a preference for A had been established, then B was rewarded instead of A. After the preference for B had been established, the reward was switched back to A and so forth. After the habit was established, the reward was reversed. Animals such as the rat and monkey were able to show a steady improvement in switching back and forth. However, the fish in contrast, were never able to show any improvement whatsoever, later reversals being accomplished no sooner than the earlier ones.
The most conspicuous modern defender of the idea that man is different in kind from all other animals is Leslie White. He believes that human language is different in kind from other types of animal communication. "Man differs from the apes, and indeed all other living creatures so far as we know, in that he is capable of symbolic behaviour. With words man creates a new world, a world of ideas and philosophies" (1949. p. 46).

PROPOSED UNIQUE ABILITIES
In addition to this dispute of the "degree versus kind" of human intelligence over animal intelligence, there has also been superimposed throughout the years the question of what, if any, specific abilities man possesses that other animals do not. For example, it has been proposed at one time or another that man is the only animal able to use tools, or to use abstract thought or to use language and so forth. The same people who believed that humans are different in kind in intelligence have raised these proposed specific differences to support their claim of human uniqueness, and the people on the degree side have done their best to show that these specific differences are not actually a difference of kind but rather only a difference of degree.
The people on the "kind" side have proposed specific abilities which, although humans are easily able to perform, other animals, it has been claimed, are never capable of doing. Their opponents have attempted to show that other animals are at least occasionally capable of these activities. Once it had been clearly demonstrated that some of the other animals were capable of performing one of these proposed unique activities even on a simple or primitive level, it has generally been agreed that this proposed difference of kind was disproven and was actually only a difference of degree. It is important to remember how these terms "kind" and "degree" have been used in this area in the past as this distinction will be discussed again in Chapter 4.
The following is a brief summary of some of the various abilities that have been put forward at one time or another to mark man apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Even though some of these supposedly distinctive abilities have now been discounted, each, in its day, had its defenders and its detractors.
I have only listed those proposed abilities that science has been able to examine at least to some extent. Saying that man is the only "rational" animal may sound promising at first, but no one has ever been able to define exactly what rational behaviour is (as opposed to non-rational behaviour). Even if we assume that humans are indeed "rational", how is it possible to show that other animals are not rational? Much the same is true for the idea that man is the only animal that has "self-transcendence". Even assuming that man does have this ability, how can we test other animals to see whether they do or do not have this "self-transcendence"? For all I know, the cat sitting on the fence outside my window as I write this may be transcending himself at this moment, but I have no way of knowing one way or the other, and until someone is able to define self-transcendence in such a way that we are able to test animals and ourselves for the possession of this presently ethereal ability, we should leave the question open and admit our ignorance.

PHYSIOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES Before considering the various proposed mental abilities between man and the other animals, however, it might be useful to first examine the physiological differences between humans and the other animals. When examining these physiological differences--as well as the various proposed mental abilities--it will be of particular interest to took closely at the differences between man and his nearest relatives--the great apes. Various studies have convinced most scientists that next to man, the most intelligent animals are the apes. In studying the mental differences between humans and the other animals therefore it is essential that particular attention be paid to the differences between man and the apes.
At one time it was argued that the physiological differences between humans and apes were relatively small, so that in fact the apes (gibbon, orangutan, gorilla and chimpanzee) differed more from each other than they did from Homo Sapiens. However this contention is no longer accepted. Today it is generally agreed that man differs more from the apes than they differ from each other.
Schultz (1936) has listed thirty differences peculiar to man from all the apes. Some of the better known of these differences are: the greatest weight at birth in relation to adult body weight, the largest relative brain size, complete bipedal walk and erect posture, the greatest reduction in density of hair--except on the scalp, the occurrence of wavy and curly hair, the complete lack of a penis bone, the highest total number of vertebrae, the unique structure of the kidney, by far the lowest shoulders and the lowest placed nipples, by far the longest thumb in proportion to the length of the hand, the equality of the sexes in regard to the size of the canine teeth and so on.
For our purposes however, the second difference listed above-the largest relative brain size--is by far the most interesting and bears looking at more closely. The human's brain case is by far the largest in capacity, having roughly three times the capacity of that of the largest brained ape. Our skull averages about 1,450 cubic centimeters which compares to about 500cc for the gorilla, 404cc for the chimp, 395cc for the orangutan and 128cc for the gibbon.
Not only do we have a large brain, but when compared to the brains of other animals, we find that most of the growth of our brain has been in one portion of it--the cerebrum. The massive cerebrum dominates the appearance of the human brain. It is formed in two hemispheres perched on top of the rest of the brain. In the lower mammals, the cerebrum is small and is mostly devoted to the sense of smell. In the higher mammals, the cerebrum becomes larger and larger until in man in constitutes over 90% of our brain volume.
The surface of the cerebrum is known as the cortex. The cortex is three to four millimeters thick and wrapped in wrinkled folds around the two cerebral hemispheres. In humans the cerebrum still controls sensory perception, and certain areas of the cortex can be assigned to the various senses. In the lower animals, these sensory and motor areas are bunched together with little room between them. However the primates have developed association areas of the cortex surrounding the sensory areas. These association areas do not have any direct projections outside the cortex. They relate to the outside world only after other portions of the brain have a already processed the information.

These association areas are by far the most extensive in man. In the diagram, note the increases in both the absolute and the relative size of the association cortex in four mammals. In humans, these areas include the prefrontal lobe and regions of the occipital, temporal and parietal lobes. The precise function of these association areas is difficult to determine, but they are clearly acting upon information which has already received sophisticated processing.
Since these association areas are largest in humans and since we have the most highly developed intelligence, there is reason for assuming that there must be some sort of relationship between our intelligence and these association areas. If man does have some unique intellectual ability, it may very well be the association areas of the cortex that provide the seat for it.

TOOL USING AND MAKING For many years it was generally believed that man was the only animal able to use tools. We now know however, that there are many other animals that have this ability.
There are several birds that are able to use a tool to help them acquire their food. The Galapagos woodpecker finch can use a cactus spine or twig to pry out insects from crevices in bark. This finch even holds the twig under one foot while eating and will change ends of the stick when one end becomes blunted. In addition, the Egyptian vulture uses a rock to help it break open ostrich eggs. And it has recently been shown that blue jays are able to crumple up a piece of newspaper and use it as an extension of their beak to rake distant food pellets into the cage.
But birds are not the only lower animals able to use tools. Californian sea otters regularly use stones to smash shellfish. And of course, non-human tool use becomes most advanced in the baboons and especially in the chimpanzees. Chimps appear to be unique in their ability to use different tools for different purposes.
Kohler (1927) showed in his extensive experiments with captive chimpanzees that they are able to use a wide range of tools quite spontaneously. They are able to use sticks to draw in food beyond arm's reach into the cage. Some chimps are even able to use a short stick to draw a longer stick into the cage and then use the longer stick to draw in the distant food. Exceptionally clever chimps are able to stack as many as five boxes under a banana hung from the ceiling and climb the boxes to obtain the food. They can use sticks to pry open box lids and to dig roots from the ground. They use straws to draw in columns of ants to eat the insects and so on.
It is quite clear then that many other animals are capable of using tools. It is thought that Benjamin Franklin first suggested that man is the only tool-making animal. This assertion of man's unique tool making ability also has fallen recently after careful observation of chimps in the wild by Jane Goodall (1971). These chimps were able not only to use objects as tools, but also to make modifications to some objects demonstrating the crude beginnings of tool making. They used grass stems to draw out termites from mounds. The chimps would strip the leaves off a stem to make a suitable tool. As the stems became bent, they would bite off the ends or use the other ends or discard them in favour of new ones. They would sometimes travel up to 15 meters from the mound to find firm stems and also collect three or four stems at once, return to the termite nest and lay the spares on the ground until they needed them. These wild chimps were also able to make another tool--a home made sponge. They chewed leaves, making them more absorbent and used them to draw water up from tree hollows.
So man is not the only tool user nor the only tool maker. Although several other animals use tools, it seems that only the chimp among the lower animals is able not only to use a variety of tools for different purposes, but also to show the crude beginnings of tool-making. However, in this area, it seems that man still can claim to be the only animal that uses one tool to make another tool. For example, even the chimp has been unable to use a stone hand ax to split a piece of wood into splinters which it needed to obtain food from a narrow pipe. Khroustov (1964) found that a chimp could split off pieces of soft wood with its teeth for this purpose. But even though shown many times how to use the hand ax on tougher wood, it was never able to use this ax to produce splinters.
Before moving on to the next proposed unique ability of man, it might be of interest to ask what we know of man's tool using and making past. When did our ancestors first start to use tools? Unfortunately, we are unlikely ever to learn when this happened. Our ancestors' first tools were most certainly common stones, shells, sticks, antler and bone. Since tool use seldom leaves any archaeologically identifiable remains, the date of our first tool use is likely to remain a matter of dispute. Even if an archaeologist were lucky enough to see a stone that had actually been used as a tool countless centuries ago by early man, this stone would most likely look like any other stone, and the archaeologist would not be able to realize the importance of it.
However, we do have some indirect evidence of man's tool using past. In a cave along with early man-ape fossils, Dart (1959) found numerous baboon skulls which showed signs of having been fractured open. The nature of these fractures leads Dart to conclude that these baboons had been killed by blows from a club. Also found in the cave were large fore-limb bones of animals that match the size and shape of the baboon fractures. In other words, early tool using man may well have used these bones as clubs to kill baboons. Not all archaeologists are convinced, however, that there is enough evidence in this collection of bones to draw this conclusion.
Our first attempts at tool-making are unlikely to have been preserved. Like today's chimps, we probably started our tool-making activities with sticks and stems and other easily manipulated materials. This type of material usually decays within a short time. It is only when tool-making man turned his attention towards stone that we are provided with a certain archaeological record of his activities. The first stone tools we have so far found are the crude "chipped pebbles" made at least a million years ago and perhaps as much as two million years ago in the lower Pleistocene epoch.
These stone pebble tools must have been made by using another stone to chip off the desired bits, that is using one tool to produce another tool. This is the feat that modern chimps can still not accomplish. Our first solid evidence of early man's tool activities is not of his first tool use or even his first tool-making, but rather of the more advanced stage of using one tool to make another tool.

ABSTRACTION Since the time of the ancient Greeks, men have been asserting that humans have the unique ability to "think abstractly", or to form general concepts. Although clearly not as vague as the term "rational", the problem of defining it and of demonstrating experimentally that only humans have this ability has so far been difficult and inconclusive. The fullest account of the research in this area has been prepared by Pikas (1966).
Aristotle in De Anima defined abstraction as disregarding the particulars in order to extract what is in common. Wundt (1894) made a distinction between two types of abstraction. He defined "isolating abstraction" as merely discriminating activity and "generalizing abstraction" as "neglecting the attributes . . . of a number of objects or facts . . . in order to retain certain of them that are common to the whole group and raise them to the status of characteristics constituting a general concept."
In more recent times, Goldstein and his colleague (1941) in their work with brain-injured patients proposed that normal humans are capable of two modes of behaviour--abstract and concrete. These two modes are "capacity levels of the total personality". The abstract and concrete attitudes are not just mental sets or habits of the person, rather each one provides the basis for all performances relating to a specific plane of activity. Although normal humans are capable of both levels, Goldstein found that brain-injured patients were often deficient in the abstract attitude.
Concrete behaviour, according to Goldstein, consists of reacting to a stimulus in an automatic or direct manner. The behaviour is confined to the immediate apprehension of the given situation in its particular uniqueness. Most of our daily activities are run on the concrete basis, that is acquired performances which do not need conscious, volitional activity.
In the abstract attitude however, man can transcend the immediately given situation, the specific aspect or sense impression. He can detach himself from the given impression. The abstract behaviour is brought into play "whenever the situation cannot be mastered without the individual's detaching his ego from the situation".
Goldstein maintains that these are two separate levels of ability, and that there is a pronounced difference between the abstract and the concrete behaviour. The abstract level does not represent a gradual ascent from the concrete level. Abstract behaviour is not simply a combination of existing lower functions. There is a decisive difference between the abstract attitude of active shifting, active synthesis and the concrete attitude of passive global reactions to stimulus.
The abstract level is, according to Goldstein, characterized by the appearance of conscious will. This is an essential part of the new level. According to Goldstein, any other kind of seeming abstraction which does not involve conscious will is not abstraction at all. Goldstein then defines abstraction as the ability to carry out a conceptualization by conscious volition.
The normal individual functions on both the abstract and the concrete levels, and in his everyday activities they are intertwined in a fluid relationship, the person switching back and forth from one mode to another as needed. However, Goldstein found that brain injured patients have great difficulty in assuming the abstract attitude. The patient is reduced to a level of concreteness of situational thinking and acting, and can perform only those tasks which can be fulfilled in a concrete manner.
Some aspects of this impairment of the abstract attitude produced by injury to the frontal lobes in humans are demonstrated by some individual examples given by Goldstein and his associates (1942 & 1944). The patients varied in the nature and degree of their brain injuries and as a result, not all were affected in exactly the same way. One patient was asked to repeat the sentence: "The snow is black". The patient stated that he could not say it, that it was not so. The examiner explained to him that such senseless phrases can be repeated even though they are not true, and then asked the patient to repeat the sentence again. This time the patient repeated the sentence, but mumbled immediately afterwards: "No, the snow is white". Another patient was able to use eating utensils while eating, however when given these same utensils outside the eating situation, was only able to produce a jumble of senseless movements with them.
Another patient who had just been successful in reciting the days of the week was then asked to recite the alphabet. He was unable to shift to this task, and only after the examiner had commenced to call out the alphabet was the patient able to follow in his recitation. One patient complained, "I tried working out jigsaw puzzles but I was very bad at them. I could see the bits but I could not see any relation between them. I could not get the general idea." Some patients were able to read words correctly, but if the letters of the same word were presented separately with a space between each letter, they were unable to recognize the word.
Many patients could easily find their way when walking from the ward into a room, but if asked to draw a map of their route, they could not. One patient was able to recognize the testing room because, unlike the other rooms it has three windows in it. However, it was necessary for him to open a number of doors before he found the correct room because he had no spatial orientation which would enable him to locate the room with three windows. He was able to get to the shop or dining room only by following the other patients. If he got separated from them he became lost. He was able to recognize his own bedroom only because he had tied a string to the bed post.
This same patient was once shown a picture of an animal and was asked to identify it. When he could not decide whether it was a dog or a horse, he addressed the picture directly saying "Are you a dog?" When the picture did not reply, he became very angry. When given a mirror he would took behind it for the person he saw in the mirror and became excited when he did not find a person there.
Goldstein's work in this area has been most valuable in several fields of psychology and physiology, including that of understanding and helping persons with brain injuries. However, he was mainly concerned with differences between brain-injured individuals and normal individuals. He did no comparative work between normal humans and other animals, but he takes the position that while normal humans are capable of both the abstract and the concrete modes, other animals are only capable of the concrete attitude.
Although most valuable in other areas, Goldstein's extensive work on brain-injured patients did not enable him to formulate a new definition of abstraction that would enable scientists to test other animals for the possession of this mental ability. He stresses the importance of conscious will in his definition of abstraction, but this is of no help in testing other animals. Scientists have no way of knowing if a particular behaviour of an animal was carried out consciously or otherwise. Indeed, we do not even know whether they have what we call conscious behaviour or not.
Gradually over the years, the difficulties in defining the term abstraction caused most researchers to abandon the term in favour of "concept" or "concept formation" which has generally been given the definition of "common response to dissimilar stimuli". There have been several experimental studies designed to show that only man is capable of abstraction or concept formation. However, because of different definitions of "abstraction", the interpretation of the results of these studies is a matter of dispute.
Chimps as well as rats have been successfully conditioned to respond positively to triangles and negatively to circles. These reactions although learned for certain triangles, proved to have also been learned for other triangles as well. Munn (1955) asserted that the animals "were responding to the different triangles in terms of some property common to all, such as three-sidedness or triangularity". Thus, the animals apparently formed the concept of triangularity. However, Goldstein disputes this assertion. He says that the animals learned "to react to common aspects on an entirely concrete basis" (1941).
Animals were shown, however, to have difficulties in learning to discriminate the middle of three serial stimuli. Experiments with the white rat and the dove, showed that it is much more difficult for the animal to learn to distinguish the middle of three stimuli of varying magnitude than to discriminate between two extreme stimuli (i.e. triangle and a circle). Apparently the middle stimuli is "less likely to stand in perceptual contrast with others (i. e. to be concretely impressive) than the two extreme stimuli" (Goldstein, 1941, p. 25).
Although some of those studies may seem to suggest that animals are limited to concrete responses, using the only accepted operational definition of concept formation as "common response to dissimilar stimuli", it is clear that animals are able to do just that. As yet, there are no studies that are universally accepted as demonstrating a difference of kind between man and other animals as far as abstraction or concept formation is concerned.

ART Every human culture has some form of art. And what is more, no art from even the so called simple or primitive cultures can be called immature. If we know enough about a culture to be able to understand and appreciate its art forms, we inevitably find a high level of maturity and sophistication. Although not all societies have all of the art forms we are accustomed to, and sometimes their art forms are less well executed than ours--especially when their tools and techniques are inferior to ours--no art can be considered childlike or immature.
It has long been widely believed that humans are the only animals capable of producing these forms of behaviour. However, in the 1950's there was a great deal of publicity about chimp "art". Experiments were conducted by several scientists that produced ape and monkey drawings and paintings. These works could best be described as scribbles and some of their paintings looked a great deal like "abstract" art. Chimps are also known to have what might be called a crude sense of music or perhaps a more accurate term would be a sense of rhythm. Chimps can readily learn to beat a bass drum in time to simple jazz music.
Is this another case of one of our proposed unique abilities falling under the hands of a chimpanzee? In order to answer this question, we must first examine the nature and components of human art.

HUMAN ART Undoubtedly it is the aesthetic component which forms the nucleus of any art form. An object or performance cannot property be called art unless there is included an element which is over and above any possible utility or efficiency. This aesthetic element exists solely for the enjoyment and satisfaction of either the artist or also for those who may see it.
Of course the more commonly accepted forms of art such as paintings or sculptures have no functional utility--that is, you cannot store water in them or hoe the garden with them. However, other objects, which we do not normally consider to be forms of art, such as dresses or pottery can also become works of art if decorations or ornamentations are included in their production. Few people normally consider a rug to be an art object. However, the Navajo Indians have developed the intricate designs and craftsmanship of their hand-made rugs to the point where they are regarded as valuable art objects the world over.
There is also an additional component of almost all, if not all human art. An artist is usually trying to communicate something to others who will be viewing his production. This communication may be specific and conscious as when ideas are communicated in literature and drama, or the communication may be more general and only semiconscious or even unconscious in art forms such as music or paintings. It appears that some forms of art lend themselves better to the communication of ideas, whereas other forms are much better mediums for the communication of feelings, emotions and moods. There are many people who believe that all (human) art contains this element of communication. Certainly the vast majority of our art can be shown to be expressive of some type of communication rather than to be purely aesthetic.
To the extent that the artist is able to succeed in communicating, he must use the accepted conventions of the culture in which he is working. These conventions are always present in every society, even though they are often not explicitly stated as such. These conventions are often very largely unconscious and we may have difficulty in recognizing them as cultural conventions until we study other societies in which the conventions differ from our own.
Probably the conventions used by the literary artist or author are most clearly recognized. He is bound by the language in use by the society of which he is a member. He cannot hope to communicate anything to his audience unless he adheres rather closely to the linguistic conventions or symbols in use in that society. Unlike most cultural conventions, linguistic conventions, at least in modern societies, are usually formalized and recorded in the form of dictionaries, rules of grammar and so forth. Also, unlike other forms of artistic conventions, most people are easily aware that the reason they cannot understand the language of a person from a different culture is because of the differences in learned conventions. Unfortunately, many people tend to react to culturally foreign forms of art and music with the belief that these are in some way inferior or primitive or meaningless, instead of by recognizing that these works are using different conventions, which the viewer must learn before he can appreciate them.
The more common use of unconscious conventions can be shown in the art forms of drawings and paintings. For example, in our culture from a very early age we learn to accept the convention of using a two-dimensional representation to communicate a three-dimensional space. Many people are not even aware that this is a learned convention. However the conventional nature of two-dimensional representations is shown by the fact that the people of some cultures such as in Oceania and Africa have no two-dimensional art and are at first not able to recognize or correctly interpret photographs and drawings.
When first shown pictures, these people often tended to react in one of two ways. Either they were completely unable to recognize the pictorial representation or else they reacted as if the picture was the real object itself. The first reaction was recorded by Robert Laws at the end of the last century in what is now Malawi, Africa.

Take a picture in black and white and the natives cannot see it. You may tell the natives: "This is a picture of an ox and a dog," and the people will look at it and look at you and that look says that they consider you a liar. Perhaps you say again, "Yes, this is a picture of an ox and a dog". Well, perhaps they will tell you what they think this time. If there are few boys about, you say: "This is really a picture of an ox and a dog. Look at the horn of the ox, and there is his tail." And the boy will say: "Oh! yes and there is the dog's nose and eyes and ears!" Then the old people will took again and clap their hands and say, "Oh! yes, it is a dog." When a man has seen a picture for the first time, his book education has begun. (Quoted in Beach, 1901, p. 468)

The second reaction is shown from another report when photographs were projected on a large screen for an African tribe.

When all the people were quickly seated, the first picture flashed on the sheet was that of an elephant. The wildest excitement immediately prevailed, many of the people jumping up and shouting, fearing the beast must be alive, while those nearest to the sheet sprang up and fled. The chief himself crept stealthily forward and peeped behind the sheet to see if the animal had a body, and when he discovered that the animal's body was only the thickness of the sheet, a great roar broke the stillness of the night. (Lloyd, 1904)

Perhaps the best example of unconscious conventions in art can be indicated in music. The person of a Western cultural background finds music from another culture such as China to be meaningless, unpleasant and often is unable to understand how the Chinese are able to enjoy listening to it. Chinese not accustomed to Western music often make similar remarks about our music.
Chinese music, as most non-Western music, uses a different scale from our music. Any musical scale arbitrarily sets fixed intervals between notes. The Chinese music simply employs a different system of intervals between notes. It is not the pitch of the individual notes in Chinese music which Western listeners find inharmonious, but rather it is the interval between the notes that we are unaccustomed to.
In any culture when an individual artist or small group of artists first breaks with established conventions and substitutes new conventions, there is an inevitable period of misunderstanding and even rejection by the society. This pattern can be shown in our own culture for example in painting when the abstract school first began early in the century and also for music with the early development of jazz.
We see then that a very important component of human art is the element of communication. In this respect, art and music are similar to language and writing. Language and writing will be discussed more fully in the next chapter. However, it is already evident that art, music, language and writing are all forms of communication which rest their ability to communicate on the learned cultural conventions or symbols present in each culture. When trying to understand a different culture, it is not only necessary to learn their linguistic conventions in order to understand their speech, but it is also necessary to learn their artistic conventions in order to appreciate their art and music.

APE AND MONKEY ART It is now possible to examine in more detail the "art" of apes and monkeys and see how it compares with human art. Morris (1962) has compiled the fullest account of the research done in this area with apes and monkeys. Most of the study has been conducted with chimps, but a few gorillas, orangutans and capuchin monkeys have also been observed. As far as is known, apes and monkeys never make any type of drawings in the wild. In the laboratory, it was necessary to first demonstrate the use of a pencil or paints and paper to the animals. However once shown what to do, the animals carried on quite spontaneously and required no further assistance or guidance from the experimenters. In many cases this type of behaviour was carried out enthusiastically by the chimps. No reward was given to the apes for their picture making, apparently this behaviour is self-rewarding, that is the apes apparently enjoy doing it for its own sake. In some cases, if the

Fan pattern drawing by female chimpanzee

experimenter tried to take the drawing away from the animal before it was "finished", the ape became extremely upset and violent.
The scribbles of these animals develop and change over time as they acquire experience. An individual ape usually starts with relatively simple lines, but with experience changes more and more to multiple scribbles. There appears to be a distinct patterning and sense of design employed in these scribbles. Each animal appears to have an individual drawing style which seems to be fairly constant over time. Any attempts by the experimenter to influence the kind of picture being produced were always unsuccessful.
From these results we can fairly confidently assume that the apes are capable of at least some primitive degree of aesthetic enjoyment of their artistic work. However, the most important fact in this area is that none of these apes or monkeys were ever able to reach the imitative or representational stage of art. That is, none of these animals, no matter how old or experienced, were ever able to draw even a crude picture or outline of some object. A human child's scribbles quickly become imitative, but a chimp's never do. In other words, they were never able to formulate the conventions or symbols that were necessary before art can become a form of communication.
There have been some studies done with chimps indicating that they are able to obtain some information from black and white photographs. The Gardner's chimp has been able to correctly identify photographs of many objects (see Chapter 2). However at least at first, chimps are apparently reacting to the photographs as if they were the real thing, rather than by realizing that they are only representations of the real thing. When Kohler (1927) showed his chimps photographs of other chimps they always reacted as if they were seeing another chimp. Most of the chimps tried over and over to see what was behind the print. The most intelligent of this group of chimps repeatedly raised his arm to the photograph in the typical chimp gesture of friendly greeting. How long chimps continue to regard photographs as the real object, rather than as a representation of the real object is not known. The evidence on chimp interpretation of two-dimensional representations is not clear at this time. However, it is clear that chimps have not been able to produce two-dimensional reproductions of their own.
As mentioned previously, imitative two-dimensional drawing is a learned convention which most, but not all human cultures use. The natives of some cultures in the South Pacific and Africa had not formulated the convention of using two-dimensional art. It must be made clear that there is no similarity between the lack of two-dimensional art in these people and the inability of the chimps to produce this type of art. Although the natives were at first unable to recognize two-dimensional art, when property instructed, within a very short time these people were able not only to recognize work using this convention, but also to make use of the convention themselves. The chimps, on the other hand, although given ample opportunity to develop this convention in the laboratory were never able to do so. Also, as far as is known, they have never been able to produce this in the wild either.

CONCLUSION In conclusion, when we ask if humans are the only animals able to produce art, we must first define exactly what we mean by "art". If we mean only the aesthetic element when we speak of art, then it is apparent that apes are indeed capable of some simple form of art. However, if we include in our definition the component of representation or communication, it seems clear that here we have a genuine demarcation line between human ability and non-human ability. Humans are capable of producing representational art, other animals are not.
It is most unlikely that man's first attempts at art were representational. The earliest evidence we now have of human art are the "doodles" drawn with fingers on damp clay in a cave in Spain dated about 30,000 BC. Like today's chimp scribbles, these early human doodles were almost certainly not representational--in spite of some people's attempts to find pictures in them.
As far as the beginning of human representational art is concerned, it is of great surprise and mystery to anthropologists that the present evidence indicates a sudden outburst of mature and sophisticated representational art around 20,000 years ago in the upper Paleolithic period. The excellence of these drawings in the caves of France and Spain is remarkable because of the lack of accompanying primitive or immature art. One might expect to find large quantities of "beginners" art in this area also, but one does not.
After some reflection on the previous discussion of the nature of human art, the sudden appearance of high quality art may seem somewhat less mysterious. It may well be that once mankind formulated the necessary conventions for producing representational art, implementation of this activity reached a mature level in a very short time. As the evidence from the ape scribbles and the lack of two-dimensional art in some cultures seems to indicate, apparently the truly difficult part in developing art was the formation of the conventions or symbols that are necessary before the production of imitative art can begin.
Humans must first have acquired the ability to make such formulations through evolution (apparently chimps still do not have this ability), and then some time later to first formulate the actual conventions which enabled representational two-dimensional art to begin (which some cultures still have not done). Apparently once these conventions were formulated, the implementation of art, was relatively easy and reached a high level of sophistication in a short time.

CULTURE With the growth of the new science of anthropology, it has become popular to remark that only mankind has culture. However, the serious student of anthropology realizes that anthropologists can not even agree upon a definition of culture. Although most anthropologists accept that humans are the only animal with culture, a few are not so certain.
It is not necessary to burden the reader with all the competing definitions of culture put forth by the various schools in anthropology. It is sufficient to list the characteristics which all anthropologists would agree are necessary for a minimum definition of culture. Culture is dependent upon the ability of one animal to acquire or learn from another animal information previously learned by the first animal. This ability to pass on knowledge and skills from one individual to another individual and therefore from one society to another, or from one generation to the next must be at the core of the meaning of culture.
The tremendous advantage given to a species that has culture is that it eliminates the necessity of each animal learning every problem by "trial and error". Once one animal has learned a skill or useful behaviour, this information can be passed on to other members of the group. It is no longer necessary for each individual to learn everything first hand or by trial and error. Learning is acquired by the group rather than by only the individual.
Also it is necessary to emphasize that cultural behaviour must be learned, it cannot be genetically transmitted. Culture must be non-biological. Behaviour in other animals which might at first appear to be similar to our own cultural activity, can often be shown to be rather the result of biology. For example, greylag geese pair off permanently for mating. Since this is similar to the practice in many human cultures (ideally), it might be tempting to call this behaviour cultural. However, it can be shown that this behaviour in the geese is not learned, that it is controlled by genetics. One consequence of this is that all flocks of geese are identical in this respect. Each flock has the same behaviour in this activity as do all the other groups. Since the behaviour is controlled biologically, there is no room for group variation. In contrast, the behaviour of humans in different societies in regard to mating differs markedly. Indeed, Homo Sapiens behaviour shows a truly remarkable variation in many activities from one society to the next. For any behaviour to be considered cultural, it must be shown that this behaviour differs from one group to the next. A shorthand definition of culture then, might be stated as pooled learning or non-physical inheritance which is different for each society.
Obviously, humans are cultural animals par excellence. We communicate knowledge to each other on every conceivable subject and skill. Evidence indicates that our culture traditions started very slowly, with new discoveries or inventions sometimes taking hundreds of years to spread across a continent. But slowly, this process of acquiring information from other humans speeded up. Also the rate of learning has increased dramatically. Humans have at least to some extent, learned how to learn--we have slowly acquired a "learning set" about how to learn at least certain types of knowledge. So that today, not only is our rate of discovery much faster, but also once a discovery is made, this knowledge can be transmitted around the world in as little as a few hours.
It is evident that nearly all our cultural activity is possible because of our symbolic language. By word of mouth or writing or even by pictures, humans pass learning on to other humans. If it were not for the use of symbolic language, much of this transfer would not be possible. As will be discussed in the next chapter, no other animal is able to communicate to another learned information or skills by the use of symbolic language.
However, it must be pointed out, saying that other animals are not able to pass information on by the use of symbolic language, and saying that no other animal has the ability to transfer learning are not quite the same thing. It is possible that other animals could transfer learning to others without the use of language. And in fact, this is just what some animals are able to do on a very limited scale.
Without language, the capacity to transmit previous learning is dependent upon imitative learning. That is, seeing another individual performing a new action and then copying that action. Humans of course can do this, but apes, monkeys and possibly cats are also capable of imitative learning.
When Yerkes (1943) first set up his laboratory in Florida, the pioneer chimpanzees were shown how to work the drinking fountains. Through the years, it was never necessary to instruct the new generations of chimps on the operation of the fountains. Each new chimp learned how to perform this task from watching another chimp. Because of this and other examples, Yerkes did not consider chimps incapable of culture. Chimps are the best among non-human animals at this type of imitative learning. There are numerous examples showing how readily they do this; for instance, they can learn to operate a simple set of latches merely by seeing another do this act. Many other examples of imitation can be found in Kohler (1927).
Monkeys are also able to learn from one another by imitation. A particularly interesting example was found by Kawamura (1959) among the wild Japanese Macaques. The practice of washing sweet-potatoes with water before eating them was started by a three year old female. The practice was first transmitted to her playmates and then to the mother. New habits such as this usually start among the infants and then spread to the older members by what Kawamura calls "acculturation".
There is definitely variation among the wild Japanese macaque troops as to the types of food consumed. One troop knows how to remove a certain type of root from the earth, while another troop entirely lacks this knowledge. Another troop frequently invades rice paddies, yet another troop never damages them in spite of their living many years near rice paddies.
It seems clear then that at least apes and monkeys are capable of transferring information by imitation. Does this mean they have a primitive form of culture? It is a matter of opinion. In order to give man the exclusive claim to culture, it is necessary to include language somewhere in the definition. This author is of the opinion that language should be considered in its own right. The ability to use symbolic language and the possession of culture are not the same thing. Each should be considered separately. True, most of our culture depends on the use of symbolic language, but not all of it. Even if we are the only animal able to use symbolic language, that does not automatically mean we are the only animal with culture.
The amount and type of learning that can be transferred by imitation is very limited and simple. Ape and monkey "culture" is so primitive that it is tempting to dismiss it altogether. However, ape tool-making compared to our tool-making ability is almost ludicrously simple. Sticks and home-made sponges are hardly comparable to computers and lasers. Nevertheless, sticks and home-made sponges are tools. And however simple, these tools mean that we can no longer call ourselves the only tool-making animal.
Likewise, even though ape and monkey transfer of learning by imitation is almost absurdly primitive compared to our cultural activities, we cannot deny that some transfer of knowledge is taking place. And painful as it may be for us to admit it, we can no longer claim to be the only animal capable of cultural activity.

HUMOUR In the middle ages it was often said that man is a rational animal who laughs. Perhaps outright laughter is unique to humans. Kohler (1927) reported that he had never observed apes laugh or weep. However they sometimes produce a rhythmic gasping or grunting, somewhat resembling our laughter when they are being tickled. Also, when doing something that gives them particular pleasure, they form an expression that that resembles our "smile". Although Kohler believed that, with experience, chimps are able to correctly interpret human facial expressions, he states that they were never able to understand merry human laughter.
It seems that chimps do appear to have a crude sense of humour. Humour is usually dependent upon recognizing the incongruities or peculiarities in a given situation. In order to recognize these incongruities an animal must in some sense be detached or removed in his thinking from the immediate situation.
Chimps in zoos sometimes lure visitors near their cages and then shower them with saliva or handfuls of mud. The chimps then run around their cages in noisy glee. Kohler tells how chimps would sometimes tease hens by holding slices of bread through the wire fence, waiting until a hen would approach the bread and then pulling the bread back at the last moment. At one meal, this "joke" was repeated around fifty times.
These examples are enough to show once again that chimps have dethroned another supposed unique human ability. Although most interesting, there has been little if any comparative experimental work on humour in various apes or monkeys. Humour because of its fluid and fleeting nature has always been difficult to study scientifically even in humans.

SELF CONCEPT Psychologists have long considered humans the only animal able to form a "self concept". This term is usually defined in such a way however, as to make it impossible to test other animals for the possession of this ability.
Recently it has been suggested by Gallup (1971) that the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror might be one aspect of the ability to form a self concept. Even though most psychologists would consider this to be a very limited definition of self concept at best, it has the advantage of allowing us to examine other animals for the possession of this ability. This definition is so far removed from the usual one however, that perhaps it would be best if the term "self concept" were not even used.
Human babies usually show that they are able to recognize themselves in mirrors when they are about 10 months old. Retarded persons may never acquire this ability. It will be recalled that one of Goldstein's brain injured patients was unable to recognize himself in a mirror and tried to look behind it to find the person he saw.
Most animals when first confronted with a mirror will at first react as if another member of their species stood before them. They soon lose interest in the mirror however and never show signs that they recognize themselves.
Chimps (but not monkeys) react differently however. At first they react as other animals, that is responding as if another chimp were in front of them. Kohler's chimps would often grasp behind the mirror apparently trying to catch the chimp they saw before them. Gallup found however, that on the third day after first being exposed to a mirror, they began to show they were able to recognize themselves by inspecting parts of their bodies they could not see otherwise and by making grotesque faces at themselves. Kohler found that unlike other animals, a chimp's interest in mirror images did not decrease with time.
In some ways this ability to recognize oneself in a mirror seems more similar to recognizing two-dimensional photographs than it does to "self concept". As will be remembered, Kohler's chimps also reacted to black and white photographs of chimps as if they were observing another animal. A mirror image is in colour and makes identical moves simultaneously with the observing chimp, whereas of course a photograph is always stationary. A chimp is able to recognize itself in a mirror after two days, but Kohler did not mention if his chimps were ever able to react to photographs except as if they were other chimps.
At any rate, it seems that only chimps and perhaps other apes among non-human animals can recognize themselves in a mirror. The relationship (if any) of this ability to "self concept" is difficult to assess.

FORESIGHT From time to time it has been proposed that man is the only animal that has foresight, the ability to anticipate what will be likely to happen in the future. Indeed, a large proportion of man's energies are spent on activities which are preparations for the future.
No modern psychologists would defend, however, that man is unique in this ability. McDougall (1928, 1931) found that all animals anticipate the future at least to some extent. Thorpe (1963) concludes that an element of expectancy or foresight "is as fundamental to organisms as is perception of space" (p. 115). A rat in a Skinner box pressing a lever for food certainly acts as if it knows what its actions will lead to.
Although no psychologist or ethologist would claim that man is unique in his ability to anticipate the future, many would agree that mankind's foresight is certainty far more extensive than that of any other animal. As yet, no one has succeeded in discovering if man's foresight is different in kind from that of the other animals, and, if this is so, exactly where and why the difference exists. Human foresight will be discussed in a great deal more detail in Chapter 5.

There is, however, one remaining proposed difference which has yet to be discussed. This proposed difference is of such importance that it is given a chapter all to itself.

Chapter 1 The Intelligent Animal

Chapter 1
The Intelligent Animal