The Dolphin in the Mirror (27 page)

While the world of subsistence for the great apes is relatively undemanding and predictable, the world of interpersonal interaction in complex social systems is anything but. And this was the nub of Humphrey's insight: "I propose that the chief role of creative intelligence is to hold society together,"
¹⁶
he wrote. The overall structure of chimpanzee society is known as fission-fusion, which means that from time to time small groups come together to form a larger group that eventually splits apart into the original subgroups, with some change in group membership occasionally taking place. Mothers and offspring (females and younger males) are at the center of chimpanzee society; older juveniles form their own groups; and older males are sometimes solitary and sometimes band together for hunts or even attacks on neighboring groups. When young males reach maturity, they leave to find another group, where they spend a lot of social skills being accepted as members.

The organizing principle of chimpanzee society, indeed of all animal societies, is reproductive success. Males attempt to sire as many offspring as they can, while the females' goal is to be courted by the most genetically desirable males. In most animal societies, the outcome of a challenge by one male to another (for access to females) is rather predictable. The winner is the bigger male, or the one with longer canines, or the bigger antlers (or whatever weapon of male-to-male combat is appropriate). Not so for chimps, baboons, and other large monkeys. Although physical prowess is helpful in these higher primates, an individual male's ability to form friendships or alliances with other individuals, both male and female, is key to reproductive success. A weakling male can sometimes mate with a desired female, provided he times his amorous advances well and moves in when his friends are at hand to help him fend off a challenge by a more dominant male or when the other male's allies are not around to intervene.

Being socially adept in a complex social group therefore requires remembering who is related to whom, which individuals have recently formed an alliance, whom you have helped recently and therefore might expect help from when the need arises, and so on. The intellectual challenge is made greater by the constant shifting of alliances, as other individuals in the group change their allegiances, in hopes of greater advantage. A shift in allegiance by a single individual might subtly change the balance of power, causing further changes to cascade throughout the group.

Every individual, in order to maximize his or her reproductive success, is constantly calculating and recalculating the balance of power in the group among older and younger uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, and unrelated individuals too. It's a very complicated game with a constantly changing set of rules.

These multigenerational groups provide protection and an environment in which the young can learn subsistence and parenting skills. Yet the social challenges were novel in the world of nature when they arose in higher primates. "It asks for a level of intelligence which is, I submit, unparalleled in any other sphere of living,"
¹⁷
wrote Humphrey. With the evolution of higher-primate societies, individuals had to become what Humphrey called "nature's psychologists." And once social skills become an effective element in the equation of reproductive success, a feedback loop arose:

"If intellectual prowess is correlated with social success, and if social success means high biological fitness, then any heritable trait which increases the ability of an individual to outwit his fellows will soon spread through the gene pool. And in these circumstances there can be no going back: an evolutionary ‘ratchet' has been set up, acting like a self-winding watch to increase the general intellectual standing of the species."
¹⁸

Nature's psychologists need to be more intellectually gifted than creatures whose social environment is less complex. Humphrey called this the social intelligence hypothesis
^*
and used it to explain the evolution of big brains relative to body size. This line of reasoning quickly became popular (and still is), and was co-opted in a way by Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten, primatologists at the University of St. Andrews; they preferred the phrase the
Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis.
Niccolû Machiavelli (1469–1527) was an Italian philosopher whose most famous work,
The Prince,
instructs the reader in the ways of social and political success through clever manipulation of relationships and alliances. Many people, myself included, believe the phrase Machiavellian intelligence sounds unnecessarily negative. I prefer the term
social intelligence
or
social cognition
—the skills are related to attraction and cooperation, not just competition.

Humans, like chimps, live in a fission-fusion society. So do bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), several other primate species, and many nonprimates, such as lions, deer, and even some fish. The dolphins' social organization is also fission-fusion.

Dolphins form close and long-lasting bonds with one another that can last lifetimes, and they often interact collaboratively and cooperatively in alliances in their myriad of foraging strategies, in mating, and in the rearing of young. Alliances can last from minutes to hours or can be long-term relationships. For example, three male dolphins may spend the majority of their time together swimming and finding food in what is called a first-order alliance. At times they may rejoin their larger social group or mix and mingle with other individuals in other alliances and form new, more temporary alliances. Related or unrelated females with young calves form another type of alliance and spend time together in subgroups collectively caring for their offspring. Dolphin mothers, like human mothers, seem to have to learn about parenting skills, and depending on their knowledge and disposition, they show varying degrees of vigilance toward their youngsters. I have observed a wide range of mothering skills and styles over the years. Females will often allomother—baby-sit and care for another's calf, allowing the real mom to forage or rest a bit. Dolphins can spontaneously begin to lactate and, like wet nurses, provide needed nourishment for an orphaned calf.

Richard Conner and his colleagues have reported that bottlenose dolphins living in Shark Bay, Australia, form multiple-level male alliances within a social network; they suggest that this level of alliance complexity has been found previously only in human societies.
¹⁹
If you're a male dolphin living in Shark Bay, you may cooperatively herd females with the one or two members of your first-order alliance—your closest buddies. But you may also join up with another alliance to form a larger second-order alliance, or even meet up with other alliances to form a multiple alliance of males that cooperatively work together to compete with other multiple alliances of males in herding and guarding females with whom they hope to mate. Alliance formation and cooperative behavior is considered a hallmark of social complexity and requires sophisticated social cognition.
^*

Where does self-awareness, or consciousness, fit into this hypothesis? Are nature's psychologists really just automatons, animals with "clever brains, but blank minds"?
²⁰
Or are they creatures that are aware of their actions and feelings, conscious of themselves in the world? Does self-awareness make a more effective social individual? Many of these ideas are showing up in studies of consciousness, an area that until recently was avoided by neuroscientists because it seemed too difficult to quantify and experiment with. This is changing.

***

First, a word about consciousness, a topic that has long enthralled and bewildered philosophers and biologists alike. To certain philosophers, consciousness is a private phenomenon, something we humans enjoy as individuals, giving one a sense of self and sometimes even an experience of transcendence. But according to this line of thought, consciousness doesn't materially contribute to physical well-being. And because it is private, consciousness (in humans and, if it exists, in animals) is therefore necessarily inaccessible to the forces of natural selection and to scientific investigation.

To most biologists, however, consciousness is presumed to be a beneficial trait, the product of evolution by natural selection. If so, consciousness cannot be entirely a private thing, because it produces behaviors that are visible to natural selection. Individuals with well-developed consciousnesses should have an advantage over those who are less gifted. If this is true, it means that consciousness will become more sharply honed in the population over time, an evolutionary ratchet of a sort. Consciousness should, in principle, be accessible to scientific inquiry. But as you saw in the mirror self-recognition work with Delphi and Pan, and with Presley and Tab, self-awareness resists easy detection, at least in an objective, scientific manner. And is self-awareness the same thing as consciousness? I know I am conscious, because I experience "me." And I assume you are conscious too, because you are a fellow human being. But
assumptions
about nonhuman animals are much more tenuous, even though one might viscerally
feel
the presence of consciousness in a nonhuman, sentient animal.

Nonetheless, let's consider what the utility of consciousness could be, why it would have evolved through natural selection. Or, to put it another way, How does it benefit a human or a dolphin to look into a mirror and recognize the image as one's self?

Although consciousness is what we experience as self, most of what goes on in our minds is veiled from our conscious experience. Most of the brain's activity is concerned with maintaining the myriad physiological and motor systems, keeping the biological machine in good working order. We have no need to be conscious of the constant monitoring of activities and the requisite activation signals. Even an action that requires intense concentration to learn, such as riding a bike (which demands, among other things, constantly monitoring balance) or serving the ball in tennis (which requires careful monitoring of how the ball is thrown into the air and how to swing the racket), become automatic once one becomes proficient. What had been a conscious effort no longer is. And many a person has had the experience of being at the wheel of a car and suddenly realizing that he has not been actively aware of driving the car for the past couple of miles. The conscious mind was "elsewhere" while the unconscious mind was dealing with the practicalities of driving safely along the road.

All of our active behaviors—getting out of bed in the morning, cooking breakfast, going to work—can be accompanied by conscious feelings and explanations concerning what's happening: wishing to stay in a warm bed for just a few more minutes; feeling hungry; feeling the need to make a living. In other words, the conscious mind has the capacity to monitor one's state at any particular moment of the day and to report it to the self. But, as with the "driving blind" experience, it is possible to imagine doing all the above activities on autopilot, without emotions or explanations coming to mind.

Even the smartest of species with the cleverest of brains often operate on cognitive autopilot, deftly navigating the daily practicalities of subsistence and social interaction while beyond the realm of awareness. How, then, is consciousness an advantage? It's the first step in social reasoning. An individual who is aware of his own actions and emotions under particular circumstances is, in principle, able to predict the actions and emotions of another individual under those same circumstances. In the game of social interactions, as among the complex social systems of chimps, self-awareness confers a distinct advantage. An individual endowed with consciousness would be able to navigate the ever-changing web of relationships among the alliances within its community far more effectively than a behaviorist. Once the faintest spark of consciousness arose in the minds of individuals in a species, the forces of natural selection would inexorably fan it, generation after generation, so that eventually it would glow brighter and brighter. Ultimately that species would possess an aspect of what has been called the theory of mind—the ability to predict what is in the minds of others based on one's own experience.
^*

In the literature of evolutionary biology, the discussions around the existence and utility of consciousness among nonhumans focused exclusively on higher primates, notably the great apes and some of the larger Old-World monkeys, such as various species of baboon. This primate-centered focus was presented by primatologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff in a landmark paper titled "Do Chimpanzees Have a Theory of Mind?"
²¹
published in 1978. In the introduction to the paper, Premack and Woodruff said, "An individual has a theory of mind if he imputes mental states to himself and others." Which is an appropriately academic way of saying "I have an idea of what's on your mind, because I know what's on mine."
^†
Premack and Woodruff answered their own question affirmatively: yes, chimpanzees do have a basic theory of mind.

By the 1980s, most biologists agreed that chimpanzees have the kinds of minds they have because of the highly complex social environment in which their ancestors evolved. Individuals produced more offspring if they were socially adept; social intelligence—the ability to correctly assume what was going on in the minds of others—was a powerful tool.
Homo sapiens
occupied the peak of this mountain, but the great apes were allowed to camp in the foothills; they were not as cognitively endowed as us, of course, but they were above the common ground of the rest of the animal world.

Do dolphins have creative intelligence, as chimpanzees do? Absolutely. Do dolphins have a theory of mind to the extent that chimpanzees have? I have no doubt that they do. Dolphins are, in the words of Louis Herman, "cognitive cousins" of chimpanzees.
²²

As it turns out, dolphins have other cognitive cousins, in addition to humans and chimpanzees. Gordon Gallup first suggested that dolphins might pass the mirror test because, like chimpanzees, dolphins have large, complex brains, lead complex social lives, and show evidence of empathy toward others. Gallup reasoned that these factors correlated with the ability for mirror self-recognition in chimpanzees, so he was not surprised when Presley and Tab passed the mirror test.