Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [21]
How had we come from Darwin, who admired the mental faculties of ants, to this? I turned this question over in my mind for days. It was as if most Western biologists had fallen into a mechanical trance for close to a century, out of which they were only just emerging. I did not fully understand why things had happened this way. But I did feel relieved that science was changing and revealing intelligence in nature once again. And this confirmed some of the most ancient beliefs of indigenous people.
I had spent years working with indigenous Amazonian people for the recognition of their territories and support for their bilingual education programs. Their ways of knowing can be hard for rationalists to grasp. But they had impressed me as pertinent. Now I wanted to see if science and indigenous knowledge could be bridged, if only to reconcile them in my mind. Bringing these two approaches together on the question of intelligence in nature could lead to fresh insights about how life works, and to a richer understanding of ourselves and of other species. This would be precious knowledge in todayâs world.
By the end of the winter, several things seemed clear to me. Scientists from many countries have set themselves on the trail of intelligence in nature, and I wanted to learn more about what they were discovering. Science has gone through profound changes in recent decades, and scientists are starting to argue against sacrosanct principles such as Occamâs razor. Some scientists are realizing that there is little evidence that nature is simple, or that simple accounts are more likely than complex ones to be true. A few scientists are even starting to argue in favor of anthropomorphism. For example, primatologist Frans de Waal wrote in 2001: âCloseness to animals creates the desire to understand them, and not just a little piece of them, but the whole animal. It makes us wonder what goes on in their heads even though we fully realize that the answer can only be approximated. We employ all available weapons in this endeavor, including extrapolations from human behavior. Consequently, anthropomorphism is not only inevitable, it is a powerful tool.â
One day, the sun came out and the snow began to thaw. I went for a run and soaked up the rays and warmth with gusto. As I made my way along the trail up in the pastures next to the woods, my eyes caught a strange sight. A large pink earthworm was crawling very slowly across the snow, coming from an earth bank exposed to the sun. I stopped to observe it for a while. Like me, it had made its way out into the first warmth of the year and appeared to be going somewhere.
Chapter 5
INSECT MINDS
It was mid-May, and spring was turning to summer. I made a beeline for the South of France. Coming from the Swiss hills, I felt hot for the first time that year. I had an appointment at the University of Toulouse with Martin Giurfa, a scientist who had recently demonstrated that bees can handle abstract concepts.
The work by Giurfa and his colleagues had caught my attention in a scientific journal. They reported on an experiment in which they exposed honeybees to a simple Y-shaped maze. The entrance to the maze was marked with a particular symbol, such as the color blue. A bee flying through the entrance encountered a branching pathway, or âdecision chamber,â where it could choose between paths. One path was marked with the color blue, the other with the color yellow. Bees that followed the blue-marked path discovered at its end a vial filled with sugared solution. Bees that took the yellow path received no reward. The bees soon learned that sugar lay at the end of the route marked with the same symbol as the one marking the outside entrance. âSameâ equals âsugar,â in other words. In a subsequent experiment, the opening to the maze was marked by a different symbol, such as horizontal dark lines. In that case, on entering the decision chamber, the bees reencountered the two pathways, which were marked this time not with colors but with