Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [22]
This research falsified the notion that âbrutes abstract not.â It also showed that small brains do not hinder thought. I felt moved to meet the person behind this research and hear his point of view.
The University of Toulouse has a sprawling campus. Despite the signs and pathways, it took me half an hour to find the Laboratoire dâEthologie et de Cognition Animale. It was located in a four-story building that was being renovated. As I walked in, drills resonated from the floors above.
Martin Giurfa had recently been chosen by Franceâs National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) to head their new center for the study of animal cognition. We had not met previously or spoken on the phone and had only communicated by electronic mail. As I knocked on his door, I considered the possibility that he might wear a white lab coat and speak with detachment.
Instead I found a youngish-looking man sitting in front of a computer at a comfortable desk, wearing a green-checked shirt with short sleeves. The room was filled with plants, and the blinds were down to fend off the sunlight. Giurfa wore wire-rimmed glasses, and his hair was dark and short. He smiled and invited me to sit down in the chair next to his desk. He spoke English with an indeterminate accent. I asked where he was from. He said that he was born in Argentina and that his family had come from Italy.
As a cultural hybrid, I felt at ease with Giurfa. I was curious to know how he had come to develop an interest in biology. âSince I can remember, I have loved animals,â he replied. âI was always fascinated by the observation and the magic of the living machine. But I have just made a big mistake: I used the term machine to describe living organisms. That is exactly the opposite of what I think. In fact they are not machines. But I was always fascinated by looking at the living organism, from the point of view of the exterior observer, seeing how it moves, takes decisions, and so on. It was always fascinating for me how a wasp decides to go here and not there, how a wasp finds its way home and identifies the nest, how a bee forages from flower to flower, always going from the flowers of one species to the same species.â As a child, Giurfa kept different animals as pets, including insects, water snakes, and a boa constrictorâmuch to his motherâs dismay.
Giurfa explained that he had referred to bees as âmachinesâ because that was how he used to think about them in the past. But the more he understood how animals make decisions and learn, the more he had to admit that they do not act mechanically. His view started to change in 1990, when he went to Berlin and began working in a leading neurobiology institute, alongside sixty colleagues from different fields of science who were all studying memory and learning in honeybees. It soon dawned on him that bees learn in an intelligent way. For example, their capacity to navigate surpasses our own: âIf I take you to a distant part of the campus,â he said, âand release you there, you wonât find your way easily back here. But bees can. How they do it is the question. This is why I started to think about cognition in invertebrates, which, of course, at the time, was considered a kind of contradiction in terms. People said, âYou are absolutely crazy for raising this kind of question. How could you think that invertebrates could have this kind of intelligent behavior?â That is what people were saying to me.â
âWhat did you make of that resistance?â
âI simply didnât care about it. That was an advantage in Berlin; you had intellectual freedom to raise questions and perform research work.â
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