Intelligence in Nature - Jeremy Narby [44]
The next day, the typhoon was still raging, and we traveled to Yokohama, the countryâs second biggest city, which now forms an uninterrupted megalopolis with Tokyo. I had an appointment at the University of Yokohama City with Kentaro Arikawa, a professor who has been studying butterfly neurology for twenty-five years. Arikawa is the scientist who discovered that butterflies have color vision, and that their tiny brains contain sophisticated visual systems. He also discovered that butterflies have eyes on their genitals.
The Tokyo subway system is mainly signposted in Japanese, and labyrinthine. We ended up finding the over-ground line to Yokohama, which we rode for an hour through an unending urban landscape. The train shook from the storm raging all around us. Once we reached our final destination, I called Kentaro Arikawa from a public phone outside the station, as he had instructed me to. A few minutes later, he appeared driving a gray car and flashed his lights in our direction. We were easy to recognize as the only gaijin, or foreigners, in the vicinity. We rushed through the downpour and got into his car as quickly as possible. We shook hands, then Arikawa drove off saying that we did not have far to go.
I sat in the front seat and wiped the rain from my face. Arikawa was a lanky man with short black hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a kind, gentle face. He was in his mid-forties. He wore a a short-sleeved shirt, dark pants, leather shoes, and a big watch that looked suited to underwater diving. After a short drive we reached the campus of Yokohama City University and pulled up in front of the Graduate School of Integrated Science, where Arikawa teaches and conducts research. As we dashed from the car to the main entrance, I asked him what butterflies do during typhoons. âThey hide in holes in trees,â he said, âor under leaves.â
This time we did not take off our shoes. We walked over to the elevator, went up to the fifth floor, and proceeded into Arikawaâs office. He invited us to sit around a comfortable table and offered to make some tea. I explained my interest in his work by describing my investigation and saying I saw clear indications of intelligence on nearly all levels of nature, including in plants.
âI donât know much about plants,â he said, âbut our intelligence must have originated from animals which were our ancestors. So intelligence, the mechanism of making decisions, must exist in present-day animals. And as you say, it is widespread, even in butterflies.â He described the work he and his colleagues are conducting, looking at the capacity of butterflies to see colors: âWe have already found an enormous complexity in the eye. And of course we are looking at conscious behavior, and we showed that they can clearly see colors and have color constancy.â
Arikawa explained color constancy by giving the example of a human observer who sees a red apple as red in both sunshine and regular room light, though the spectral contents of sun and room light are very different; in such a case, the subjective experience of red remains the same, because the observerâs brain adjusts its perception of the wavelengths reaching the eyes. This is color constancy. It turns out that the microbrains of butterflies are also capable of this feat.
Arikawa pulled out a black page showing a series of colored patches and began explaining how he and several colleagues had demonstrated that Japanese yellow swallowtail butterflies have color vision and color constancy. The scientists trained the butterflies to feed on sugared water placed on a patch of a particular color in a cage set in the laboratory. Then they presented the