By FRANS de WAAL: refuted (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, November 09, 2016, 17:23 (2722 days ago) @ David Turell

Another review of his book refuting his claims of animal intelligence:

http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/47452/title/Opinion--Assessing-Fr...

"The essential burden of science is to replace dogma, sentiment, and superstition with an as-far-as-we-now-know theory based on verifiable facts, all the while striving for objectivity. Yet, in his work, de Waal replaces one dogma—the Cartesian/behaviorist stance that animals are mere oblivious response machines—with another.

"Following “Charles Darwin’s well-known observation that the mental difference between humans and other animals is one of degree rather than kind,” de Waal notes that there is no fundamental difference between man and beast—not even mentally. The problem is not the idea, it is that de Waal posits this as a preordained fact to be illustrated rather than a hypothesis to be tested.

"In order to make this stick, de Waal redefines intelligence as whatever mental capacities a given species needs within its own Umwelt—its own limited experience of the world. The beauty of this position is that all species are equal, which is why he abhors the term “stupid animal.” Taken on their terms, judging from their needs, all species are optimally intelligent. The downside is that this perspective robs “intelligence” of all meaning, reducing it to the Darwinian notion of relative fitness. Unsurprisingly, in de Waal’s world, even the most mundane of animal achievements are labeled “extremely advanced,” “impressive,” or “sophisticated.”

***

"With great gusto de Waal tells us of “Alex,” the enigmatic miracle parrot who did arithmetic and juggled abstract concepts with the best of them. There is an intriguing clip of Alex, who died in 2007, in which the animal’s only spontaneous activity is to repeat time and time again that it wishes to be returned to its cage. To no avail, there is always one more chore, and Alex complies like a good little parrot. But the animal wasn’t always so obliging.

"This behavior of Alex reveals an essential flaw in all those attempts to stimulate animals to show behavior they don’t show of their own accord (and I’m sure de Waal would agree on this point): it is all chores. None of the apes that were trained to become lingual would ever initiate anything like a conversation. Their utterances typically served to secure an immediate reward, usually food or attention—Nim for one, often begged to be tickled. Once a project was over, not one ape continued to use its acquired abilities spontaneously. This raises serious doubts as to whether what we see is actually more than rote learning, tricks we teach the animals to perform by bribing them with food and attention.

"Let us not forget that what we get to see, both in popular accounts and in scientific journals, are invariably high-pressure compilations of highlights.

***

"De Waal ignores all this, just like he does not mention the constant pressure needed to keep animals in training with the program. And so he does precisely that which he reproaches others for: he puts the goal posts just where he wants them and then concludes: See? I told you so!"

Comment: I work with horses. The reviewer has it exactly. Animals are trained to respond exactly as you want them to. They are conscious, respond to command, and have no self-aware consciousness. Nothing like humans. We are not degrees of difference. We are different in kind.