Category Archives: Science

Frans de Waal – Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? (New York: W.W. Norton, 2017).

The short answer to the title’s question is kind of, but not really. We can never truly get into even another human being’s head. It is impossible to tell is someone else sees the color red the same way you do, or feels hot and cold the same way. It is also clearly impossible to do this across species, which have different sensory thresholds–and in some cases, different senses–than we do.

But de Waal’s core argument is more about empathy and decency. You can tell a lot about a person by how they treat animals. By building up a persuasive case that animals have complex intellectual and emotional lives, de Waal gives good reasons for treating other species with respect. We are them, and they are us. Or, at least, we’re a lot closer than most people think.

Humans have three types of cone cells in our eyes to perceive colors, hence our three primary colors; birds have four. Mantis shrimp have 17. We will never see the world as they do. Cats and other nocturnal animals have more types of rod cells than humans do. These detect black-and-white and relative brightness, and are useful for low-light conditions. Insects have compound eyes, which are very different from our camera-style eyes. Butterflies can see ultraviolet light, which they use to assess potential mates. The UV-reflective scales on their wings wear away with age, so abundant UV reflections on their wings are indicators of youth and health for them, though humans will never know this.

But these differences are no reason to believe such animals lack intelligence. We do the same things ourselves, just in a different way. All animals live by the same four Fs: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating. We have evolved different ways of going about it, but the fundamentals are the same.

De Waal is also concerned with emotions. And yes, animals do feel many of the same emotions humans do. And again, our differences are more of degree than of kind. Animals feel pain, love, loss, hunger, and happiness. Maybe not in exactly the same way we do, but they do feel them.

Elephants and other animals mourn their dead, and even hold funeral services. Blood chemistry tests show that yes, your cat really does love you. Interactions with their owners release the exact same oxytocin “love hormone” that shows up in human blood when we interact with our loved ones.

Chimpanzees and bonobos—de Waal’s research specialty—have complicated social dynamics that require sophisticated emotional intelligence. They have similar notions of family and friendship, and they form complicated three-way alliances and rivalries that are very similar to the ones human nation-states build to maintain a balance of powers within the group–or in our case, global geopolitics. Our cousins, with whom we share a common ancestor as recently as six or seven million years ago, are different than each other, and from us. But the fundamentals are the same, and deserve more respect from humans.

Jennifer Ackerman – The Genius of Birds (New York: Penguin, 2017).

Her occasional lapses into prophecies of ecological doom take away from the seriousness of her case, but Ackerman has written a fascinating look at avian intelligence. Despite their tiny brain size, many birds are highly intelligent in a wide variety of areas. “Bird brain” should be a compliment, not an insult.

Parrots and songbirds are keen linguists and mimics. Corvids—crows and jays—have a strong social intelligence, long memories, an ability to learn on par with human 5-year-olds in some areas, and show tool use. Some birds are also able to differentiate the works of different artists–even ones within the same style, such as impressionism.

Migratory birds have mastered a variety of methods and senses to find their way. They use a combination of landmarks, the sun and stars, barometric pressure, a built in genetic clock (fly south for a certain amount of days, then stop), listening for the differences in sound reflections between ocean and land, as well as changing odors.

Even hummingbirds, for all their hyperactivity and tiny size, show a keen memory for food sources and plan their routes to save precious energy. Scientists have even observed hummingbirds return to the same feeders each year within a day or two every spring when they return north.

There is also good reason for birds packing as much intelligence into as little brain size as possible–it saves weight. To fly, birds have to be as light as possible. Their bones are hollow. Their lungs can absorb oxygen on both the inhale and exhale, making them nearly twice as efficient as ours, and much lighter. They have light keratin beaks instead of heavy bone jaws. So of course evolution figured out ways to make the best possible use of small and lightweight brains.

Ackerman’s case for bird intelligence would have been further strengthened if she had discussed Gordon Tullock’s famous article “The Coal Tit as a Careful Shopper,” in which Tullock finds that birds have an intuition of the laws of economics.

The coal tit, a small bird in Britain, likes to eat a kind of grub that lives inside pine cones. When food is abundant, the bird will get the easiest grubs, and leave the more difficult-to-reach ones alone. That way it spends less time getting the calories it needs, and can use the freed time for other uses, such as attracting mates and avoiding predators.

When food is scarce, those calories become more valuable in comparison at the margin, and the coal tit changes its behavior to match. It will spend more time on each pine cone, getting even the most difficult-to-reach grubs, because doing so is better than alternative uses of its time and energy. This small creature is able to use economic principles such as the law of demand, marginal thinking, and opportunity costs to improve its odds of survival.

David Eagleman – Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (New York: Vintage, 2011)

Interesting and engaging, but second-rate compared to the leading works of the genre. Eagleman describes how the brain’s conscious and unconscious systems interact. The human brain turns out to be a wonderful economist. It is constantly taking in more information than it can process, and has evolved sophisticated, almost automatic algorithms to prioritize its resources to focus on what is important, and ignore what isn’t, to save energy. If it didn’t do this, our energy-hungry brain, which already accounts about a fifth of an average person’s calories burned despite being about 2 percent of body weight, would outpace what the body can provide it.

Along the way he gives the reader a tour of both famous and overlooked research, teaches brain anatomy, and at times turns philosophical. It also briefly name-checks Ryan Braun, one of my favorite baseball players, who won the National League MVP award around the time this book was written. As it turns out, the paths outfielders such as Braun take to catch flyballs are determined mostly unconsciously. Rather than direct routes to where the ball will likely land, even the best players take curving, circuitous routes that nobody would consciously follow. Same goes for hitters. The human eye cannot track a 90-mph fastball. Every swing is a guess, based on an unconscious algorithm. Deliberate thought simply isn’t fast enough.

Eagleman’s main public policy proposal is statistically-based sentencing for criminals, based on the likelihood of a person’s recidivism. This is not that far removed from the movie Minority Report, based on a dystopian Philip K. Dick story featuring a department of pre-crime, which punished people who have not committed crimes, but are about to.

Statistically-based sentencing proposal has two fatal flaws. One is a knowledge problem. Well-meaning experts cannot reliably predict who will re-offend, and who will not. Today’s most advanced experts might as well flip a coin, Eagleman points out. The second is a public choice problem—those experts are not always well-meaning.

Experts are subject to the same cognitive biases, mood swings, personal grudges and corruptibility as everyone else—which Eagleman describes elsewhere throughout the book. And the real-world government that would enact such a proposal would be influenced by electoral politics, by ideological and rent-seeking special interests, and would be bogged down by bureaucratic infighting and turf battles among prestige-seeking experts. Anyone interested in criminal justice reform should take a hard pass on Eagleman’s idea.

But Eagleman does offer up a good read on how the brain’s conscious and unconscious systems interact, and describes a lot of the research in an entertaining way. He does not operate at the same analytical heights as Kahneman and Tversky, Robin Hanson, Steven Pinker, or Michael Shermer. Eagleman’s certainty about philosophical determinism is also questionable, given that he, too, has the human brain’s cognitive shortcomings and shortcuts that he convincingly describes. But even if this book is a B or a B- compared to the top tier, most readers will still get quite a lot out of Incognito.

Giulia Enders – Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ

A good popular-science book about the digestive system. Enders offers insights about the digestive process, the human microbiome, how the body extracts nutrients from food, and more. One fun nugget is that the stomach “knows” how long to work on different types of food before passing it along to the intestines. Liquids can pass through in as little as ten minutes, whereas tougher-to-digest foods that need substantial breaking down can linger for several hours. Enders doesn’t offer anything groundbreaking here, nor is she offering s controversial new thesis. It’s just an enjoyable, if at times a little gross, way to learn some biology.