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CHAPTER TEN

The Intellectual Chess Game

Were I (who to my cost already am

One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man.)

A Spirit free, to choose for my own share,

What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleas’d to weare,

I’d be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear.

Or any thing but that vain Animal,

Who is so proud of being rational.

The senses are too gross, and he’ll contrive

A Sixth, to contradict the other Five;

And before certain instinct, will preferr

Reason, which Fifty times for one does err.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

The time: three hundred thousand years ago. The place: the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The occasion: a conference of bottlenose dolphins to discuss the evolution of their own intelligence. The conference was being held over an area of about twelve square miles of ocean so that the participants could fish in between meetings; it was during the squid season. The sessions consisted of long soliloquies by invited speakers followed by a series of commentaries in Squeak, the language of Pacific bottlenoses. Squawk speakers from the Atlantic were able to hear memorized translations at night. The matter at issue was simple: why did bottlenose dolphins have brains that were so much bigger than those of other animals? After all, the bottlenose brain was twice as large as that of many other dolphins. The first speaker argued that it was all a matter of language. Dolphins needed big brains to enable them to hold in their heads the concepts and the grammar with which to express themselves. The ensuing commentaries were merciless. The language theory solved nothing, said the commentators. Whales had complex language and every dolphin knew how stupid whales were. Only the year before a group of bottlenoses had fooled an old humpback whale into attacking his best friend by sending out soliloquies about infidelity in humpback language. The second squeaker, a male, was more favourably received, for he argued that this was indeed the purpose of dolphin intelligence: to deceive. Are we not, he squeaked, the global masters of deception and manipulation? Do we not spend all our time scheming to outwit each other in the pursuit of female dolphins? Are we not the only species in which ‘triadic’ interactions among alliances of individuals are known? The third squeaker replied that this was all very laudable, but why us? Why bottlenose dolphins? Why not sharks, or porpoises? There was a dolphin in the River Ganges whose brain weighed only 500 grams. A bottlenose brain weighed 1,500 grams. No, he replied, the answer lay plainly in the fact that of all the creatures on earth, bottlenose dolphins were the ones that had the most varied and flexible diet. They could eat squid, or fish, or … well all sorts of different kinds of fish. That variety demanded flexibility and flexibility demanded a big brain that could learn. The final squeaker of the day was scornful of all his predecessors. If social complexity was what required intelligence, why were none of the social animals on land intelligent? The speaker had heard stories of an ape species that was almost as big-brained as dolphins; indeed for its body size it was even bigger. It lived in bands on the African savannah and used tools and hunted meat as well as gathered plants for food. It even had language of a sort, though with none of the richness of Squeak. It did not, he squeaked drolly, eat fish.1

The Ape That Made It

Around eighteen million years ago there were tens of species of ape living in Africa and many others in Asia. Over the next fifteen million years most of them became extinct. A Martian zoologist who arrived in Africa about three million years ago would probably have concluded that the apes were bound for the dustbin of history, an outdated model of animal made obsolescent by competition with the monkeys. Even if he noticed that there was one ape, a close relative of the chimpanzees that walked on