The Terrific Human Animal

While the normal amount of grungy science and doom have been crossing my desk of late, I'm still disinclined to comment on them. Recent primaries notwithstanding, there are larger issues of inspiration and imagination to be considered. Sometimes I think such topics will change our way of thinking about the tough problems we do face. Other times I think it's just fiddling while Rome burns.

Regardless, it's very interesting fiddling.

Most intelligence studies have involved primates. This isn't too surprising. The only species that has demonstrable intelligence is our own, in part because we define intelligence as something we do. It's the scientific equivalent of the definition of art: if I look at it and decide it's art, it's art. Similarly, we look at our own accomplishments and define intelligence. Once Darwin comes along and shows us we have actual relatives, it's a natural thing to look to them as mirrors.

The recent Nova episode, Ape Genius, goes a little further than most. Often in such documentaries there's a sort of embarrassed, back door conservationist theme. A sort of Watergate recording problem:

Narrator: "Look at those guys. They're just like us."
Pause as the director is pointing desperately at the mike. The narrator, getting the hint, leans close to the microphone and intones,
"And wouldn't it be a shame if they just disappeared. We should conserve them."

Ape Genius doesn't bother. The show isn't about apes. Its about what humans are and what makes them different from apes. The only criticism is how chimpanzee-centric the show is. I would have liked a bit more on orangutans and gorillas. Even so, the show is well worth watching but in case you don't watch it, I'll give you a hint: teaching, impulse control and encouragement aren't so prevalent in chimps.

But intelligence isn't the sole province of primates. Animal cognition has been studied in elephants, cetaceans, birds and cephalopods with varying results. The variation, in my opinion, often comes from trying to generalize a feature of one species (humans) against another species that doesn't necessarily have hands, upright posture or language.

To this list of apparently intelligent animals now comes hyenas. Kay Holecamp has been studying hyenas for some time and finds in them a fair intelligence. The jury is still out on how intelligent they are since laboratory studies have not yet been performed but her findings are intriguing. In the article she comments on selection for intelligence as a community function-- something that would dovetail neatly with elephants, cetaceans and birds. Possibly this is a vertebrate model since it does not fit with cephalopods. Squids, octopi and cuttlefish they have no community to speak of.

To investigate this eventually brings us back to human beings, a truly interesting animal. I've spoken of TED (Technology Entertainment Design) before. Two talks came across my desk that truly brought home how interesting humans are. The first is the talk of Steve Jervetson, Venture Capitalist by Day, Rocket Aficionado by Weekend. He belongs to the Rocket Mavericks, a fairly motley crew of model rocketeers. Watching his talk is an excursion into excitement of things forced supersonic and (sometimes) exploding.

The second talk is very recent. This is Roy Gould's talk on the World Wide Telescope, coming out later this year. The WWT takes all of the astronomical pictures available and blends them into one seamless whole so that a user can look at a section of sky and go as deep as the data exists, seeing galaxies in a smudge, suns in the galaxies and gas around the suns. As Gould says, this shows our relative size to the universe but it also shows our significance in that we have created the means by which this universe can be perceived. That we do something like this at all says something truly wonderful about humans. That it is sponsored by Microsoft says that there is something truly wonderful about humans everywhere.