Self-awareness

Preface

Lives of animals, from ants to whales, are full of challenges that demand minute-to-minute decisions from them: to fight or flee, to court or ignore, to dominate or obey, to take off or share with, to eat or spit out. Learning serves for adaptive tuning of species-specific stereotypes to the changeable environment, and intelligence helps animals to use the experience gained in new situations. Studying animal intelligence seems to be a daunting task due to numerous different species to investigate which possess hardly comparable intellectual skills. Although animals and researchers have achieved remarkable results in displaying cognitive skills from one end and measuring them from the other end, and many excellent books and papers on animal intelligence have been published, we are still far from the complete understanding of the specificity of thinking both in human and non-human beings.

In this book I am trying to present a unified approach to studying a quantity of displays of animal intelligence and thus help the readers to enter the world of wild intelligence through the analysis of adventures of ideas and methods, rather than through theoretic modelling. I think that such an approach reflects the real situation in the field, because now, after more than 125 years since the very first scientific books about animal intelligence were published, it has became apparent that the rise of the scientific study of animal intelligence may be portrayed as progressive changes in experimental methods. Measuring the most pronounced manifestations of intelligence more and more elegantly, experimenters have demonstrated animals’ abilities to catch regularities, to communicate in complex and flexible ways, and to navigate a social landscape.

In this book many possible forms of learning and cognition, from simple discriminations to categorisation, social learning and theory of mind, are analysed from the experimenter’s standpoint. Pooling resources of ethology, behavioural ecology and comparative psychology, I develop here the idea of «species geniuses», whether they are pig-headed or bird-brained: members of some species display very fast and advanced learning within specific domains, closely connected with their ecological traits and evolutionary history. Basing on ideas of sociobiology, this book raises an intriguing problem of whether there is a room for intelligence within frames of social specialisation in animal communities. It is also worth to note that, being a student of social insects and advocating their intelligence, I am trying to bridge studies of intelligence in vertebrates and invertebrates. It seems a common rule that investigators of vertebrate animals refer to results obtained by the explorers of invertebrates much less than vice versa. Besides, people do not expect intellectual feats from creatures with more than four legs. Here I hope to attract attention to cognitive ability of insects and other invertebrates.

In general, if this book increases interest of the new generation of ethologists, ecologists, evolutionists, zoologists, physiologists and psychologists to interdisciplinary problems in the field of animal intelligence and establish links between laboratory experimentalists and field researchers, it will have done its job.

Acknowledgements

I thank many friends and colleagues for their help and encouragement.

While writing this book, I discussed general aspects of animal intelligence as well as my own contributions in this field, with the following colleagues: Patrick Bateson, Donald Broom, Nicola Clayton, Renee Feneron, Raghavendra Gadagkar, Bennett Galef, Linda Gottfredson, Juergen Heinze, Bert Hö lldobler, Ludwig Huber, Tanya Humle, Kevin Laland, William McGrew, Linda Marchant, Ulrich Maschwitz, Randolf Menzel, Irene Pepperberg, Carel van Schaik, Peter Slater, Juergen Tautz, Frans B. M. de Waal.

I am very grateful to William McGrew for writing the foreword.

I am truly grateful to the colleagues who kindly provided me with photographs of their experiments which helped me to make my reasoning about animal intelligence more vivid: Shigeyuki Aoki, Raimund Apfelbach, Michael Beran, Andrew Bray, Anton Chernenko, Marietta Dindo, Elena Dorosheva, Timothy Judd, Ludwig Huber, Linda Hollé n, Ann Gö th, William McGrew, Tatyana Novgorodova, Sofia Panteleeva, Emily Sue Savage- Rumbaugh, Duane Rombaugh, Adam Seward, Harunobu Shibao, Paul Sherman, Anna Smirnova, Caroline Tutin, Marina Van… atov<, Frans de Waal, Alex Weir, Ivan Yakovlev, Zoya Zorina.

A special word of thanks to Daniil Ryabko who provided detailed comments on many drafts of the manuscript and contributed enormously to improve logical structure and technical aspects of the book.

It was supportive for writing the manuscript that Donald Michie visited me and my co-author Boris Ryabko in Novosibirsk after reading our paper about «ant language» in Complexity, 1996, and then published a paper about his impressions in «The Independence on Sunday".

I kindly thank commissioning editors and stuff at Cambridge University Press who shepherded this book since the very first idea for writing it in 2001. I started this project with Shana Coats, then proceeded with Tracey Sanderson, and finished it with Martin Griffiths whom I thank for an outstanding job in producing this volume.

While writing the book, I have been supported by the Russian Fund for Basic Research (02-04-48386 and 05-04-48104).

June, 2006. Institute for Animal Systematics and Ecology, Siberian Branch RAS, and Novosibirsk State University.