WASHINGTON — The more we study animals, the less special we seem.
Baboons can distinguish between written words and gibberish. Monkeys seem to be able to do multiplication. Apes can delay instant gratification longer than a human child can. They plan ahead. They make war and peace. They show empathy. They share.
“It’s not a question of whether they think — it’s how they think,” said Duke University scientist Brian Hare.
Now scientists wonder whether apes are capable of thinking about what other apes are thinking.
The evidence that animals are more intelligent and more social than we thought seems to grow each year, especially when it comes to primates. It’s a hot scientific field with the number of ape and monkey cognition studies doubling in recent years, often with better technology and neuroscience paving the way to unusual discoveries.
This month, scientists mapping the DNA of the bonobo ape found that, like the chimp, bonobos are only 1.3 percent different from humans.
Josep Call, director of the primate research center at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, said, “Every year, we discover things that we thought they could not do.”
Call said one of his recent more surprising studies showed that apes can set goals and follow through with them.
Orangutans and bonobos in a zoo were offered eight possible tools — two of which would help them get at some food. At times when they chose the proper tool, researchers moved the apes to a different area before they could get the food, and then kept them waiting as much as 14 hours. In nearly every case, when the apes realized they were being moved, they took their tool with them so they could use it to get food the next day, remembering that even after sleeping. The goal and series of tasks didn’t leave the apes’ minds.
And then there is the amazing monkey memory. At the National Zoo in Washington, humans who try to match their recall skills with an orangutan’s are humbled.
Zoo associate director Don Moore said, “I’ve got a Ph.D., for God’s sake. You would think I could outthink an orang, and I can’t.”
The intelligence of primates was one of the factors behind a report last year by the Institute of Medicine that said the National Institutes of Health should reduce drastically the number of chimpanzees it uses in biomedical research.
The NIH is working on new guidelines that would further limit federal medical chimpanzee use, down from its current few dozen chimps at any given time, said NIH program-planning chief James Anderson.
Animal science
It’s not just primates that demonstrate surprising abilities. Dolphins, whose brains are 25 percent heavier than those of humans, recognize themselves in a mirror. So do elephants. A study in June found that black bears can do primitive counting, something even pigeons have done, by putting two dots before five, or 10 before 20 in one experiment.
