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Animal Architects: Building and the Evolution of Intelligence \
From Publishers Weekly In order to elucidate the thought processes of animals-and those processes' evolution-the Goulds (The Animal Mind) consider those animals' egg caches, cocoons, webs, nests and other structures. According to the authors, "complex nervous systems exist to make sense of the world"; therefore, by looking at the material construction sprung from those nervous systems, one can begin to understand how those systems function. It makes a fascinating journey, with plenty of surprises. Beginning with the simplest structures of ants, wasps and bees, the authors introduce concepts of neural mapping to show what levels of brain complexity are necessary for the construction of such structures. Distinguishing instinctual neural program from questions of spontaneity and creativity, the Goulds suggest that creatures as small as wasps can react with spontaneous problem solving behaviors. The creativity of bower birds and beavers is more astounding: the former is known to build and decorate "maypoles," clearly demonstrating aesthetic sense; and the latter display abstract reasoning, and even insight, in the maintenance and repair of their lodges, dams and canals. This book is filled with fascinating vignettes illuminating the intelligence capabilities of species us humans would like to think of as inferior; again and again, the Goulds show that human beings aren't necessarily the smartest kids in class. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist The Goulds (he's a leading animal behavior expert, and she is a science writer) present an eye-opening survey of an underappreciated facet of animal life--the building skills of insects, birds, and mammals. Because most animal architecture is hidden from human view, we are unaware of the extent of animal ingenuity, so the revelatory tour the Goulds conduct elicits one wow after another. They dissect the sophisticated construction and elegant aesthetics of coral reefs, webs, cocoons, hives, nests, dams, lodges, and towers, marveling at the resourcefulness of animals in terms of the materials they produce and collect, the tools they fashion, and the "astonishing complexity" of their structures. They also dispel the old assumption that animals are simply programmed to build, creating out of instinct. Instead, as painstakingly gathered evidence reveals, animals invent new skills to solve problems and communicate their intentions. As our ancestors knew, there is much to be learned from other species, especially now as we endeavor to create ecologically sound human architecture and technologies. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Reader Reviews What do animals think? That is a pretty advanced question; after all, a lot of human thought has gone into denigrating even the possibility of thought in animals. We accept, perhaps reluctantly, that some animals can hear better than we can, for instance, and certainly some are faster or stronger or bigger. It is well accepted, too, that we do a better job of thinking and abstracting ideas than any other creature does. It is also clear that any thinking that animals do is a lot different from what we do, since our thinking is so heavily freighted with symbolic language. "Mental activity is, by its nature, private; what goes on in the brain has to be inferred. In tracing the evolution of cognitive strategies, the most tangible evidence is found among animals that build - in what they build and how they build it." So write James R. Gould and Carol Grant Gould in Animal Architects: Building and the Evolution of Intelligence (Basic Books). The book is packed with examples of animal creations and thoughtful, careful, unexaggerated attempts to understand what is going on in the minds of the builders from the insect, bird, and mammal worlds. The thinking of other animals is, by turns, quite different and quite similar to our own, and throws light upon evolution of brains and behavior in general and upon our own evolution. The Goulds are always on the lookout for the most parsimonious explanation of behavior. For centuries, people thought that animals just acted on instinct and nothing more, and indeed there are plenty of examples here of such behavior. Many insects, the Goulds say merrily, "... lead intellectually unchallenging lives." But spiders and the social insects show that they are not acting like mere robots, but have some understanding of the larger purpose of their activites. Flexibility and understanding are surely shown by many birds, although plenty of their behavior is robotic. Nest building is often a planned activity and can be studied and experimented upon. Pigeons just toss sticks at their nest site, and the friction between the rough twigs holds them together eventually. If you give pigeons only smooth dowels to build with, the result is an unstable mess; if you give both dowels and twigs, they will preferentially use the twigs. Complex behaviors in nest building evolved from scraping sand or twigs together; once birds had learned to build a platform for a nest, they developed ways of piling sticks or mud and sticking the results together with saliva. Nest-building is an activity that cannot be completely hardwired, because in general no two nesting sites are the same; there has to be flexibility in behavioral options that can be selected, ordered, and modified to achieve the goal of a functional nest. Nests are practical structures, but bowerbirds make their elaborate creations with no purpose other than to impress other bowerbirds. They stack the bowers and decorate them with paint from berries and with shells and rocks and butterfly wings. The variety of the bowers seems to indicate that building behavior is not encoded in instinct and is also not due to rote memorization. Observations over the past 125 years show that builders go through fads of favoring one flower as a bower decoration over another. Darwin wrote that bowerbirds have a sense of beauty, and the proposal that bowerbirds have an aesthetic sense is not frivolous. The many examples given here show that there is evidence for some degree of understanding in many of our fellow creatures. When experimenters can manipulate the circumstances of the building of structures, it is clear that some animals can compensate for unusual situations, use novel materials, and have an understanding of an end goal. (Beavers seem to do this in the highest degree, engineering their dams and lodges.) The building of structures and the manipulation of objects toward a purpose are things we ourselves probably started doing as primates, starting out with less skill than some of the animals described in this book. It is probably impossible for us to fully understand the alien intelligences of spiders or birds, but the Gould's book is a welcome reminder that intelligence does not belong to us alone. Comment | | (Report this)
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