Evolution: "Animals with self-consciousness, the thinking goes, are in a unique position to use what they know about themselves to make inferences about other beings and their needs."
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Mirrors reflect elephants' intelligence
November 1, 2006
ELEPHANTS can recognise themselves in a mirror and use their reflections to explore hidden parts of themselves, a measure of subjective self-awareness that until now has been shown definitively only in humans and apes.
The research findings confirm a long-standing suspicion among scientists that elephants, with their big brains, complex societies and reputation for helping ill herd mates, have a sufficiently developed sense of identity to pass the challenging "mirror self-recognition test".
The test, which in this case required construction of a huge "elephant-proof" mirror at the Bronx Zoo in New York, where the experiments were conducted, provides an index of an animal's ability to conceive of itself. It is a quality of self-consciousness that some scientists believe is a prerequisite for the emergence of empathy and altruism.
Animals with self-consciousness, the thinking goes, are in a unique position to use what they know about themselves to make inferences about other beings and their needs.
"It really is a clue about the evolution of intelligence," said Diana Reiss of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, who led the study on the endangered species with Frans de Waal and Joshua Plotnik of the Yerkes National Primate Research Centre in Atlanta.
"It tells us you can come to this same endpoint with very different creatures and with very different brains," said Ms Reiss, who has seen similar but less certain signs of self-recognition among dolphins.
Gordon Gallup, a psychology professor at the State University of New York at Albany who developed the mirror test nearly 40 years ago, praised the elephant study as a "very solid, very impressive piece of scientific work".
But some scientists took a more sceptical view, indicative of the controversy that has long engulfed the field of animal intelligence generally and the meaning of the mirror recognition test in particular.
"Far too much has been made of a very trivial task in all these mirror experiments, and it has lately reached some dizzyingly bizarre heights," said Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool, in England.
He criticised the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the journal that published the results in its early online edition, for what he called "poor editorial standards".
Researchers over the years have provided body-size mirrors to hundreds of animals in zoos and other habitats, with the same reactions in virtually every case: the animals act as though the image they see is of another.
"Most animals seem incapable of learning that their behaviour is the source of the behaviour in the mirror," Professor Gallup said. "They are incapable of deciphering that dualism."
By contrast, human babies get it by the time they are two years old, as do adult chimpanzees, bonobos and orang-utans.
Monkeys, which are more distantly related to humans than are apes, never catch on. |
