Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [23]
Though Giurfa was critical of the robotic view of insects, he admitted that it had helped advance the study of insect movements and behaviors. âConsidering insects as simple robots has, for instance, stimulated the creation of machines like the Mars explorer, which was inspired by how insects move their legs and so on. This point of view is of course short minded, if you will, but at least it had this positive aspect.â
Someone knocked on the door, interrupting the conversation. Giurfa had a brief exchange in French with a colleague, and I noticed that he spoke with greater fluency than in English. Once he was done, I renewed the conversation in French and we continued in that language. I asked whether there had been resistance to his recent work on the capacity of bees to handle abstract concepts. He said he was confident that the experiments were well conducted and that the results, which were published in the journal Nature, could not be attacked scientifically. But he did mention resistance from a group of researchers at a nearby center for the study of primate cognition. They contacted Giurfa to say that they had tested monkeys on the same task and found that certain species could not do it; therefore, they did not believe it was possible bees could. Giurfa said this kind of reaction occurred less and less frequently.
In his view, when animals are found not to accomplish a given task, this is not proof of their stupidity. âIn most cases, the problem lies with the person conducting the experiment and involves incapacity in the researcher to develop experiments that pose the problem correctly and allow one to answer it properly. If you will, a negative result shows nothing, in the final analysis. A positive result shows something. But when an animal cannot do something, the question remains: Is it incapable of doing it or have I not been clever enough in my research concepts and experimental design?â
âSo, would you say that the problem for the moment is not that nature lacks intelligence but that researchers studying it do?â I asked.
âThat is one of the problems, certainly. I think we are a long way from having made a kind of mental jump which would allow us to ask certain questions.â
I had read several recent books that discounted the intelligence of individual insects, referring instead to âswarm intelligence.â The idea seemed to be that bees were mindless robots programmed according to a series of simple rules, and that intelligent behavior emerged from the interactions of the mindless parts. âEmergenceâ was a concept that was used to explain how âdimwittedâ individuals could appear to act intelligently. I asked Giurfa what he thought about âswarm intelligenceâ and âemergence.â
He replied that these concepts could explain some behaviors, but not all, and that it was important to distinguish between group behavior and the intelligence of the individual. âAll these studies on emergent properties are certainly interesting, and they are a good challenge for me. I like these studies because they make me rethink my own research from another perspective.â He said it was important not to take his own point of view too far by claiming, for example, that bees are capable of the highest and most flexible forms of learning. In fact, bees sometimes behave stupidly. If placed in a maze with a glass cover, for example, they perform as well as rats up to the point of reaching the food reward, but they are incapable of turning around and going back to where they have come from. Once bees eat, they are rigidly