Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [26]
At that moment, I felt jubilation, and kinship with the bee. Like some humans, it was a fast learner. I asked Giurfa whether he thought finding intelligence in insects means they deserve better treatment. He said he agreed with the question and explained that there was research he would never do, in particular inserting electrodes into bee brains. He had not heard of animal-rights activists opposing research on invertebrates, though at the University in Berlin there had been much resistance to scientists studying vertebrate neurobiology. âAt that time we chose the invertebrates exactly because we did not want to offend the sensibilities of some students,â he said. âIf you want to study biology of the whole, and see all the possible fields it has, you have to see and try these experimental techniques and approaches. Being an experimental biologist, I could never approve of thinking that everything could be done with simulations and models.â He added that he would not perform the experiments he did on bees on cats, dogs, or apes, due to his âparticular personal sensibility,â which he knew was âjust an anthropocentric point of view.â
Though he refused to put electrodes into the brain of a living bee, he admitted that exposing the beesâ brains and submitting them to calcium imaging was injurious to them, and would lead to their being killed. I returned to the question of whether bees feel pain. He laughed and called it a difficult question. In labs in South America, he said, scientists have shown that bee nervous systems produce opioids, presumably to induce analgesia. However, given that bees and humans are separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution, he questioned whether the human concept of âpainâ applies to bees. In his view, no one knows the answer.
I asked about the overall implications of his work on bee cognition. He said it shows that brain size is irrelevant when it comes to the capacity of performing highly demanding cognitive tasks. He also said it is time to do away with the arbitrary barrier that scientists have erected between vertebrate âlearners,â such as apes, pigeons, dogs, cats, dolphins, and humans, and all other ânoncognitive organisms.â
We spent half an hour with the students, then left them to their painstaking research and went out to lunch at a nearby restaurant. We talked about several subjects. He asked me about the Peruvian Amazon, where he had traveled. I asked him about his intellectual influences. He spoke of his thesis advisor in Argentina, and of his love for bees.
At one point I asked for his view on plant intelligence. He said the problem with plants is that they do not move, which makes it difficult to perform scientific experiments on them. I mentioned the parasitic dodder plant, which roams about and correctly gauges the nutritional content of other plants. He immediately suggested research questions about dodder. Can it learn to avoid certain substrates through negative reinforcements? If it demonstrates a capacity to learn, at what level of its cellular structure does the learning establish itself? âWhen you talk of learning, or cognition, the problem is that by definition you need a change of behavior resulting from individual experience,â he said. âThat is the only way to show that learning, or memory, has occurred. This means that all the approaches based on molecular biologyâfinding such-and-such a receptor or neuron Xâare of no use whatsoever unless you demonstrate a change in behavior. When a given behavior changes, you can go and look into the box and find the molecules. But if you go looking for molecules without the change in behavior, you can say nothing. Learning manifests itself once the individualâs behavior changes. Changes at the cellular level are not necessarily