Extraterrestrial Civilizations Read online

  ANIMALS

  In our search for nonhuman intelligence on Earth, then, having eliminated all the wonderful things the human imagination has constructed out of nothing, we must find what we can in the dull things we can sense and observe.

  Of the natural objects on Earth, we can, in our search for intelligence, at once eliminate the inanimate, or nonliving ones.

  This is by no means an indisputable decision, for it is not an impossible thought that consciousness and intelligence are inherent in all matter; that individual atoms, even, have a certain microquantity of such things.

  That may be so, but since such consciousness or intelligence cannot (as yet, at least, and we have no choice but to go with the “as yet”) be in any way measured, or even observed, it falls outside the Universe as I intend to deal with it, and we can eliminate it.

  Besides, if we are looking for nonhuman intelligence, it may be taken for granted that we are seeking for intelligence that, while present in something other than a human being, is nevertheless at least roughly comparable in quality to intelligence in a human being. That means it must be intelligence we can clearly recognize as such, and whatever intelligence there may be in a rock, it is not the kind of intelligence we can recognize.

  Ah, but must all kinds of intelligence be the same, or even similar, or even recognizable? Might not a boulder be as intensely intelligent as we are, or more intensely, but be so in a completely unrecognizable way?

  If that is so, there is nothing to prevent us from saying that every individual object in the entire Universe is as intelligent as a human being, or more intelligent than one, but that in the case of every single one of those objects, the nature of the intelligence is so different from ours as to be unrecognizable.

  If we can successfully maintain that, all argument stops right there and there is no room for further investigation. We must set limits, if we are to continue. In searching for nonhuman intelligence, we can reasonably limit ourselves to such intelligence that we can recognize as such (even if only dimly) from reproducible observations and by using our own intelligence as a standard.

  It is possible that intelligence may be so different from ours that we don’t recognize it at once, but do come to recognize it by degrees. However, in all the years of human association with inanimate objects, there has been no real reason to suppose any of them to have shown any sign of intelligence, however small* and it is as reasonable as anything can well be to eliminate them.

  If we pass on to animate objects, we might next raise the question of how we distinguish between inanimate and animate objects. The distinction is harder than we might think, but it is irrelevant. All those objects that offer the slightest chance of confusion as to their classification, whether living or nonliving, clearly do not represent reasonable claims to the possession of nonhuman intelligence.

  And of those objects that are indisputably living, we can eliminate the entire plant world. There is no recognizable intelligence in the most magnificent redwood, the sweetest-smelling rose, the most ferocious Venus’s-flytrap.*

  When it comes to animals, however, matters are different. Animals move as we do and have recognizable needs and fears as we do. They eat, sleep, eliminate, reproduce, seek comfort, and avoid danger. Because of this, there is a tendency to read into their actions human motivation and human intelligence.

  Thus, to the human imagination, ants and bees, which follow behavior that is purely instinctive and with little or no scope for individual variation, or for behavior change to meet unlooked-for eventualities, are viewed as being purposefully industrious.

  The snake, which slithers through the grass because that is the only way its evolved shape and structure makes it possible for it to move, and which thus avoids notice and can strike before being seen, is imagined to be sly and subtle. (This characterization can be upheld on the authority of the Bible—see Genesis 3:1.)

  In similar fashion, the donkey is thought of as stupid, the lion and eagle as proud and regal, the peacock as vain, the fox as cunning, and so on.

  It is almost inevitable that wholesale attribution of human motivations to animal actions will lead one to take it for granted that if one could but establish communication with particular animals one would find them of human intelligence.

  This is not to say that particular human beings, if pinned to the wall, will admit believing this. Nevertheless, we can watch Disney cartoons featuring animals with human intelligence and remain comfortably unaware of the incongruence.

  Of course, such cartoons are just an amusing game, and the willing suspension of disbelief is a well-known characteristic of human beings. Then, too, Aesop’s fables and the medieval chronicles of Reynard the Fox are not really about talking animals, but are ways of expressing truths about social abuses without risking the displeasure of those in power—who may not be bright enough to recognize that they are being satirized.

  Nevertheless, the enduring popularity of these animal stories, to which one can add Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus” tales and Hugh Lofting’s “Dr. Dolittle” stories, shows a certain readiness in the human being to suspend disbelief in that particular direction; more so, perhaps, than in others. There is a sneaking feeling, I suspect, that if animals aren’t as intelligent as we are, they ought to be.

  We cannot even seek refuge in the fact that talking-animal stories are essentially for children. The recent best-sellerdom of Watership Down by Richard Adams is an example of a talking-animal book for adults that I found profoundly moving.

  —And yet, side by side with this ancient and primordial feeling of cousinship with animals (even while we hunted them down or enslaved them) there is, in Western thought at least, the consciousness of an impassable gulf between human beings and other animals.

  In the Biblical account of creation, the human being is created by God through an act different from that which created the rest of the animals. The human being is described as created in God’s image and as being given dominion over the rest of creation.

  This difference can be interpreted as meaning that the human being has a soul and that other animals do not; that there is a spark of divinity and immortality in human beings that is not present in other animals; that there is in human beings something that will survive death, while nothing of the sort is present in other animals.

  All this falls outside the purview of science and can be disregarded. The influence of such religious views, however, makes it easier to believe that human beings alone are reasoning entities and that no other animal is. This, at least, is something that can be tested and observed by the usual methods of science.

  Nevertheless, human beings have not been secure enough in the uniqueness of our species to be willing to let it stand the test of scientific investigation. There has even been a certain nervousness about the tendency of those biologists with a strong concept of order to classify living things into species, genera, orders, families, and so on.

  By grouping animals according to greater and lesser resemblances, one develops a kind of tree of life with different species occupying different twigs of different branches. What starts out as an inescapable metaphor suggests only too clearly the possibility that the tree grew; that the branches developed.

  In short, the mere classification of species leads inexorably to the suspicion that life evolved; that more intelligent species, for instance, developed from less intelligent ones; and that, in particular, human beings developed from primitive species that lacked the capacities we now consider peculiarly human.

  Indeed, when Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, there was an outburst of anger against it, even though Darwin carefully avoided discussing human evolution. (It was to be another decade before he dared publish The Descent of Man.)

  To this day, many people find it difficult to accept the fact of evolution. They don’t, apparently, find the suggestion offensive that there are human characteristics in animals such as mice (who can be more lovable t
han Mickey?), but they do find it offensive that we ourselves may be descended from subhuman ancestors.

  PRIMATES

  In the classification of animals there is an order called Primates, which includes those popularly known as monkeys and apes. In their appearance the primates resemble the human being more than any other animals do, and from that appearance it is natural to deduce that they are more closely related to human beings than other animals are. In fact, the human being must be included as a primate, if any sense at all is to be made of animal classification.

  Once evolution is accepted, one must come to the inevitable conclusion that the various primates, including the human being, have developed from some single ancestral stem and that all are to varying degrees cousins, so to speak.

  The resemblance of other primates to human beings is both endearing and repulsive. The monkey house is always the most popular exhibit in a zoo, and people will watch anthropoid apes (which most closely resemble the human being) with fascination.

  The English dramatist William Congreve wrote in 1695, however, “I could never look long upon a monkey, without very mortifying reflections.” It is not hard to guess that those “mortifying reflections” must have been to the effect that human beings might be described as large and somewhat more intelligent monkeys.

  Those who oppose the idea of evolution are often particularly hard on apes, exaggerating their nonhuman characteristics in order to make less likely any notion of kinship between them and ourselves.

  Anatomical distinctions were sought, some little bodily structure that might be present in human beings alone and not in other animals, and most particularly not in apes. None has ever been found.

  In fact, the superficial resemblance between ourselves and other primates, and in particular between ourselves and the chimpanzee and gorilla, becomes all the deeper on closer examination. There is no internal structure present in the human being that is not also present in the chimpanzee and gorilla. All differences are in degree, never in kind.

  But if anatomy fails to establish an absolute gulf between human beings and the most closely related nonhuman animals, perhaps behavior can do so.

  For instance, a chimpanzee cannot talk. Efforts to teach young chimpanzees to talk, however patient, skillful, and prolonged those efforts may be, have always failed. And without speech, the chimpanzee remains nothing but an animal. (The phrase dumb animal does not refer to the lack of intelligence of the animal, but to its muteness, its inability to speak.)

  But might it be that we are confusing communication with speech?

  Speech is, we may take for granted, the most effective and delicate form of communication of which we are aware, but is it the only one?

  Human speech depends upon human ability to control rapid and delicate movements of throat, mouth, tongue, and lips, and all this seems to be under the control of a portion of the brain called Broca’s convolution, named for the French surgeon Pierre Paul Broca (1824–1880). If Broca’s convolution is damaged by a tumor or a blow, a human being suffers from aphasia and can neither speak nor understand speech. Yet such a human being retains intelligence and is able to make himself understood, by gesture for instance.

  The section of the chimpanzee’s brain equivalent to Broca’s convolution is not large enough or complex enough to make speech in the human sense possible. But what about gesture? Chimpanzees use gestures to communicate in the wild; could that use be improved?

  In June 1966, Beatrice and Allen Gardner of the University of Nevada chose a one-and-a-half-year-old female chimpanzee they named Washoe and decided to try to teach her a deaf-and-dumb language of gestures. The results amazed them and the world.

  Washoe readily learned dozens of signs, using them appropriately to communicate desires and abstractions. She invented new modifications, which she also used appropriately. She tried to teach the language to other chimpanzees and she clearly enjoyed communicating.

  Other chimpanzees have been similarly trained. Some have been taught to arrange and rearrange magnetized counters on a wall. In so doing, they showed themselves capable of taking grammar into account and were not fooled when their teachers deliberately created nonsense sentences.

  Young gorillas have been similarly trained and have shown even greater aptitude than chimpanzees.

  Nor is it a matter of conditioned reflexes. Every bit of evidence shows that chimpanzees and gorillas know what they are doing, in the same sense that human beings know what they are doing when they talk.

  To be sure, the ape language is very simple compared to the language of human beings. The human being is enormously more intelligent than apes, but again the difference here is one of degree rather than kind.

  BRAINS

  To anyone considering the comparative intelligence of animals, it is clear that the key anatomical factor is the brain. Primates have larger brains in general than the large majority of nonprimates, and the human brain is the largest primate brain by a good deal.

  The brain of an adult chimpanzee weighs 380 grams (13½ ounces) and that of an adult gorilla weighs 540 grams (19 ounces or just under 1¼ pounds). In comparison, the brain of an adult male human being weighs on the average 1,450 grams (3¼ pounds).

  The human brain is not, however, the largest that has ever evolved. The largest elephants have brains as massive as 6,000 grams (about 13 pounds) and the largest whales have brains that reach a mark of 9,000 grams (nearly 19 pounds).

  There is no question but that the elephant is among the more intelligent animals. In fact, the intelligence of the elephant is so apparent that human beings tend to exaggerate it. (There is a greater tendency to exaggerate the elephant’s intelligence than the ape’s, perhaps because the elephant is so different from us in appearance that it represents a lesser threat to our uniqueness.)

  We do not have the opportunity to study whales as we do elephants, but we may readily believe that whales are among the more intelligent animals, too.

  Yet, although elephants and whales are relatively intelligent, it is quite clear that they are far less intelligent than human beings, and may well be less intelligent than the chimpanzee and gorilla. How may this be squared with the superhuman size of their brains?

  The brain is not merely an organ of intelligence; it is also the medium through which the physical aspects of the body are organized and controlled. If the physical size of the body is great, enough of the brain is occupied with the physical to allow little for the purely intellectual.

  Thus, each pound of chimpanzee brain is in charge of 150 pounds of chimpanzee body, so that the brain-body ratio is 1:150. In the gorilla, the ratio may be as low as 1:500. In the human being, on the other hand, the ratio is about 1:50.

  Compare this with the elephant, where the brain-body ratio is as little as 1:1,000 and the largest whales, with as little as 1:10,000. Now it is not so surprising that there is something special about human beings that the large-brained elephants and whales do not seem to duplicate.

  Yet there are organisms in which the brain-body ratio is actually more favorable than in the human being. This is true for some of the smaller monkeys and for some of the hummingbirds. In some monkeys the ratio is as great as 1:17.5. Here, though, the absolute mass of the brain is too small to carry much of an intellectual load.

  The human being strikes a happy medium. The human brain is large enough to allow for high intelligence; and the human body is small enough to allow the brain space for intellectual endeavor.

  Yet even here the human being does not stand alone.

  In considering the intelligence of whales, it is perhaps not fair to deal with the largest specimens. One might as well try to gauge the intelligence of primates by considering the largest member, the gorilla, and ignoring its smaller cousin, the human being.

  What of the dolphins and porpoises, which are pygmy relatives of the gigantic whales? Some of these are no more massive than human beings and yet have brains that are larger than the human brain (with weights up
to 1,700 grams, or 3¾ pounds) and more extensively convoluted.

  It is not safe to say from this alone that the dolphin is more intelligent than the human being, because there is the question of the internal organization of the brain. The dolphin’s brain may be organized for predominantly nonintellectual purposes.

  The only way to tell is to study dolphin behavior, and here we are sadly hampered. They seem to communicate by modulated sounds even more complicated than those of human languages, yet we can make no progress in understanding dolphin communication. They seem to show signs of intelligent behavior, even kindly and humane behavior, yet on the other hand their environment is so different from ours that it is difficult for us to get inside their skin and grasp their thoughts and motivations.

  The question of the exact level of dolphin intelligence remains, at least for now, moot.

  FIRE

  In the light of the previous sections of this chapter, the question as to whether nonhuman intelligence exists on Earth must be answered: Yes.

  It would seem that my contention early in the chapter that science has made us alone has not been demonstrated. There are a number of animals with surprisingly high intelligence, and these include not only apes, elephants, and dolphins. Crows are surprisingly intelligent when compared with other birds, and octopi show a level of intelligence far surpassing that of other invertebrates.

  And yet absolute differences do exist; unbridgeable gulfs are there. The clue lies not so much in the mere presence of intelligence but in what is done through the use of that intelligence.

  Human beings have been defined as tool-making animals and, to be sure, even the small-brained hominids who were our precursors were already making use of shaped pebbles a couple of million years ago. This is not surprising, since even the small-brained hominids had brains that were rather better than those of the apes of today.

  However, other animals, even some who are quite unintelligent, make use of stones and twigs in ways that can only be considered as tool using.