Love at Goon Park (15 page)

Even in so small a cluster, the three males formed one of Maslow's dominance hierarchies. Capuchin was the boss monkey, Cinnamon second, and Red third. Capuchin was not a nice monkey. He was a bossy, greedy little food-hoarder. He took the best treats for himself. He took the others' scraps, too. He would share with Cinnamon, but not with the lowly Red. Red, perpetually hungry, was driven to plotting for his meals. He would creep cautiously up, when Capuchin was busy, and sneak back his stolen dinner.

One summer morning, Harry and an anthropology student, Leland Cooper, were standing somewhat idly by the capuchins' outdoor cage, when Red came by on a crumb-foraging expedition. Up stepped Cinnamon, the big fat tattletale, screeching out threats and
yelling for Capuchin. To all appearances, Red then lost his temper. He grabbed a stick from the cage floor and gave Cinnamon an angry poke. And when the alpha monkey, Capuchin, muscled his way over, Red whacked him, too, even though “he had never been known to use a stick for striking at any time prior to this.”

Once having realized the weapon's potential, though, Red didn't forget it. Cooper later reported another incident in which Red and a fellow capuchin were sharing cage space with five burly rhesus macaques. Macaques are bigger, tougher, and meaner than capuchins. They slid into bully mode, forming a circle around the two smaller monkeys. According to Cooper, Red picked up a stick again and started whistling it through the air around him. But the macaques were too quick for him to reach and they leaped resentfully out of range. Still, they stayed out of range and left the little capuchins alone after that.

One of the most interesting aspects of the story of Red, the stickwielding capuchin, is how long it took Harry Harlow to tell it. The observations were made in 1936. The report was published in 1961. He explained that “publication delay resulted from the authors' reluctance to report this unusual observation until they had achieved established reputations.” Animal intelligence was an oxymoron when Harry Harlow was building his primate laboratory. This was the day, after all, of the conditioned response and the simple and reflexive brain. For an animal to reason that a stick was a useful weapon would suggest thought and calculation. A scientist who reported that kind of cognitive ability in monkeys in the 1930s was likely to be branded a sloppy observer or a wishful thinker. Or both.

It was a rare moment of caution for Harry. Perhaps even caution is too strong a word, for some calculation was also involved. He knew that monkeys were smarter than the profession would admit. The trick was figuring out how to prove that. Plenty of scientists before him had based their arguments on similar anecdotes and failed to sway the crowd. Nineteenth-century proposals for animal intelligence had been dismissed as sentimental or as based on anecdotes
rather than evidence. Some very good early twentieth-century psychologists had done studies showing strong evidence of problemsolving abilities in chimpanzees without reversing the general prejudice against intelligence in other species. They included the respected American psychologist, Robert Yerkes, and Wolfgang Kohler, a German gestalt psychologist who had done a famous series of experiments in the early 1900s when he put chimpanzees in a cage with bananas dangling overhead. To reach the bananas, the apes had to figure out that they could stack boxes, which were tumbled in the cage, and climb them. Kohler had argued that this was a genuine “Aha” moment, that chimpanzees were capable of insight. Kohler's work is heralded today. At the time, though, he struggled to make his point. The leaders in behaviorist psychology accused him of superimposing human behavior on another species. As Harry's student, Abe Maslow complained, successful psychologists wouldn't even listen to the argument: “It is now fashionable to despise Gestalt psychology,” he wrote in his journal. “Accordingly, they all despise it.”

It would be easy for Harry to become more of an outcast than he already was. To make his case, he needed more than good monkey stories, clever anecdotes. There had to be a way to devise a believable intelligence test for monkeys, something systemic, something objective. He was working cautiously in that direction when two events drove him more directly into the fray: He went to New York. And he lost his temper.

In 1939, Harry received a one-year fellowship in anthropology at Columbia University. The Harlows moved to Manhattan for the academic year. The call from New York was perfectly timed; Harry had that restless, itchy, something-around-the-corner feeling about his work. Clara was expecting their first child. She decided to take the months in New York as an opportunity to enjoy being a mother and to think about what might come next. She wrote to her mother, with typical determination: “I have a feeling that a job will get me again but not until we have a firm hold on family plans. I do not agree with women who take six weeks off to have a baby. I want first to know my
own child thoroughly so I will know what parts of his life to leave to others and what to keep management of myself.” Robert Mears Harlow was born on November 16, 1939, and both Harry and Clara were mesmerized. The baby, according to Clara, was just “irresistible,” and Harry was spending extra hours at home to admire him.

At least he was until Kurt Goldstein came to lecture.

Goldstein was one of the great European neurologists of the day—intense, brilliant, passionate. His research blended concern for mental health with hardheaded clinical study. A native German, he had worked long and desperate hours trying to help soldiers with head injuries after World War I. Goldstein's experience with brain damage had led him to try to understand how the brain was organized so that he could learn how to repair it. He had patiently tested injured soldiers, seeking to determine which head injury produced which specific failure of memory or motor skills. What kind of damage twisted numbers around? What made words vanish?

Goldstein had found that the brain-damaged soldiers were more rigid and inflexible in their responses. They could do what he called “concrete” learning—rote memorization, simple recitation of stored facts. But ask them to reason through a problem, such as change the order of numbers, the pattern of the shapes, and the soldiers struggled. They seemed almost paralyzed by the shift in perspective. His patients had lost their “abstract attitude,” in Goldstein's terminology. They were unable to adjust their answers. Their thought processes seemed to have stiffened and become “concrete,” he said.

Early in 1940, when little Robert Harlow was just a few months old, Columbia scheduled a series of lectures by Goldstein. The old neurologist promptly began talking about his famous division of concrete and abstract intelligence. He went beyond brain injuries, though. He used the same dividing line to separate humans from the other primates. Goldstein had never been fully able to accept Darwin's evolutionary ideas, the notion that the brains of humans and other animals might have common origins. At Columbia he declared flatly that monkeys sat on a lower rung of intellect. They could accomplish
rote learning, he said, but nothing complex, and never abstract reasoning. Monkeys were born to be no more than the brain-damaged soldiers in their abilities. The other primates were concrete learners. Only humans could achieve analytical intelligence.

Harry sat through those lectures in a state of increasing disbelief. Goldstein was an inspiring teacher, Harry said, but he was absolutely and completely wrong about other primates. Harry had now spent eight years watching monkeys. He knew that they could reason their way through a problem, rethink a challenge. Wasn't that exactly what Red had done, when defending himself with sticks? And there were countless others, from Jiggs and his puzzle work to Tommy's pleasure in getting the right answers. Back in Wisconsin, Harry had another monkey that he considered a natural engineer. In one simple test, that capuchin had matched Kohler's chimpanzees when he balanced sticks and boxes against the side of a building to reach food that the scientists had cleverly dangled from the roof. Harry found himself indignant on behalf of his animals. If his teacher really believed that monkeys possessed only concrete thought processes, Harry wrote to a friend, then Goldstein was “a cement wit” himself.

When Harry came home at night, he walked the baby up and down in the small Riverside Drive apartment, talking, pacing. Baby Harlow's nighttime lullaby was a litany of the history of psychology. The cocktail hours with Clara were filled with discussion of wrongheaded science; indeed, “work was the background music of our lives,” one of Harry's children would later recall. Harry picked his way through Goldstein's arguments. He was out of patience finally and completely with the rat-psychology view of the world, with the simple brain and simple behaviors, with ignorance and prejudice toward other species. It seemed to him that by dismissing the abilities of other species, in the end, psychologists were dismissing the abilities of their own.

He knew how deep the counter-arguments ran. It wasn't just that Romanes and Kohler and other distinguished scientists had failed to
persuade. It wasn't just that Watsonian behaviorism and Pavlovian conditioning were dominant. Scientists had been insisting for centuries that animals were basically brainless. The other species could be conditioned, they could be made to respond; but think, feel, analyze, grieve—never. Back in the 1700s, French philosopher René Descartes had likened animals to machines; animals could never think as humans do, he said. They were soulless creatures, beast machines. That perception held even when Charles Darwin made his evolutionary arguments. Darwin undeniably suggested that humans and other species must share common brain structures and therefore common abilities. It was too much for Goldstein, who responded by dismissing evolution outright. But even those who believed in Darwin often could not quite accept that animals possessed the kind of complex brains that had long been reserved for humans.

The idea of intelligent animals had a particularly rough time in the United States. One of the most famous books on the subject,
Animal Intelligence,
published in 1898, basically concluded that animals weren't intelligent at all. The author, New York psychologist Edward Thorndike, tended to side with Ivan Pavlov. Animals could be trained—or conditioned—to look intelligent. But that, Thorndike said, was misleading. His most famous test involved putting cats into boxes and testing their ability to escape. The boxes were small enough to make the cats feel just a little squeezed, a little antsy to get out. Thorndike provided them with an escape mechanism. The boxes had panels that could be opened when the cats pressed a button or pulled on a string. To reward the cats for opening the panel, Thorndike placed a food treat just outside the box. To strengthen the intensity of that reward, he kept the cats hungry. His experiment involved measuring the length of time it took a cat to break free.

After some time in the box, the cats would push, bump, and eventually trip the string or step on the button. The next time in captivity, the captives would move more directly to the button. The more often the cat went into the box, the faster it got out. After a few trial runs, some cats were pulling the string almost as soon as the box was closed.

Some people would call those cats smart. Thorndike concluded almost the opposite. The feline behavior showed no evidence of thought, he said, merely “the accidental success of the animal's natural impulses.” Thorndike went on to develop “laws” of animal behavior. His Law of Effect came directly out of the cat-in-the-box work. It said this: If a movement is followed by the experience of satisfaction or the removal of annoyance, that movement will be “connected” with the solution. In other words, if the cat pulls the string and the box opens, eventually it will connect string-pulling with boxopening. His second law, The Law of Exercise, said that the more this happens, the stronger the “connection” between action and result. In other words, the cat will become a string-pulling automaton. Thorndike first called this somewhat robotic turn of events “stamping in” behavior. He later came to prefer the word “reinforcing,” a term still used in psychology and animal training today. He considered his laws comparable to the laws of motion and energy in physics, another step toward making living creatures as predictable as clockwork.

The mechanical animal—incapable of love or reason—obviously fit well with the teachings of early behaviorists such as John B. Watson. But it got an even bigger boost from Harvard-trained researcher Burrhus Frederick Skinner, perhaps the most famous psychologist of Harry's generation. Known as B. F. Skinner to most of the world and as Fred to his friends, Skinner was adamant in his belief that animals do not have feelings. He was appalled once when, watching a squirrel gobble a nut, a friend remarked that the animal “liked” the acorn. Of course it didn't, Skinner replied. Animals don't like things; liking is an emotion, and squirrels don't have those. Skinner described himself as a neobehaviorist, a builder of a more sophisticated version of the earlier science.

In pursuit of that ideal, Skinner created a device that became known far and wide as “the Skinner box,” an updated version of Thorndike's apparatus. The square box was soundproofed and equipped with a bar or lever. If a rat pushed the lever, a food pellet
tumbled out. If a pigeon pecked the bar, it, too, received food. The rodents and birds pushed and they pecked and they ate, just as Skinner had predicted, in the most convincing way. During World War II, Skinner was able to use his box to train pigeons to peck at a target. He tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the U.S. Army that the birds could be put into the nosecones of missiles and used to guide weapons. Of course, if the food-delivery mechanism jammed—which it sometimes did—the pigeons rapidly lost interest in pressing the bar or pecking the target. After all, what was the point of thumping on cue if no food came out? From a scientific point of view, Skinner appreciated this reluctance. It was, as he pointed out, a classic Pavlovian extinction curve. But Pavlov's beautiful calculation of vanishing behavior made army officials doubt the reliability of pigeons as bomb-delivery systems.