Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (5 page)

Poor Taylor's mind gets measured, and dismissed, in much the same way. It seems that ape psychologists followed right along with this human linguistic prejudice. Zira, perhaps the most empathetic and charitable of the ape researchers, cajoles the imprisoned humans to do more than peer and grunt. “Well, . . . And what do we want this morning? Do we want something? Come on, . . . speak.” She's thrilled with “Bright Eyes” precisely because he seems to be attempting to speak (or perhaps pretending he can speak), even though she is met with skepticism from her colleagues. Once the prejudice against non-speaking humans is in place, there is nothing Taylor can do to prove himself smart—much as there is little or nothing the ‘Bright Eyes' in
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
can do to persuade her human keepers that she is merely protecting her child, or that Caesar can do to appease the next door neighbor who is convinced he is vicious. Muteness, human or ape, seems a sure way to become oppressed. Even Taylor is not immune from the tyranny of language as he gazes at the beautiful
Nova, and wonders aloud if she is capable of love, given her lack of speech.

Once a language barrier has been established (between Greeks and barbarians, humans and apes, researchers and studied animals), we can try to understand the mind of the other through non-linguistic tests. Dr. Zira immediately muses about how Taylor might do on the “Hopkins Manual Dexterity Test,” no doubt a Hollywood version of the real Minnesota Manual Dexterity Test, in which one must nimbly put discs in holes as quickly as possible. While dexterity is a far cry from an indicator of intelligence (Stephen Hawking, for example, would fail such a test), it's easy for us to read into these test results, thinking that those who are smart are also dexterous, and vice versa.

In
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
, Dr. Zira and Cornelius arrive on twentieth-century Earth and are subjected to testing. They have agreed not to divulge their ability to speak without gathering some information on how the humans might react. Since they seem mute to the curious humans, tests seem the right way to investigate these apes-gone-astronaut. The first test is called the “Wisconsin Multiphasic” in homage to two well-known and well-respected psychological tests: the Wisconsin Card Sorting Task, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. In the real Wisconsin task, subjects are asked to identify and respond to patterns presented in cards, and the more aptly they do it, the more they are said to have good
executive function
. Akin to outright intelligence, executive function is the ability to plan, solve problems, work through steps of a problem, and complete a logical sequence of events or tasks. The Minnesota Multiphasic is a completely different kind of test. It is a several-hundred-question-long psychological survey aimed at discovering the inner workings of your personality. Are you depressive? Neurotic? Your score on the MMPI will tell you.

Amusingly, the fictional Wisconsin Multiphasic test that Zira is subjected to seems to be a simple memory task. But it's given in a way that is standard for much psychological testing. She sits opposite the examiner, and is allowed to see objects presented by the tester. Then, a shade is drawn between them,
and the examiner adds more objects. She must select the old objects and ignore the new ones, showing she can remember what was first presented. When she succeeds at this, the human psychologist presents her with the container for all the objects—with holes cut in the right shape for every object. Lightly insulted, Dr. Zira completes the task without effort.

The human psychologists are very pleased with Zira's results, and present her with a classic task first given to chimpanzees by researcher Wolfgang Kohler in 1913. In this task, as in the film, a banana is suspended out of reach, and the hungry chimpanzees have to find a way to obtain it using things in their environment, such as boxes. Kohler's famous studies showed that chimpanzees did not have to use trial and error in order to learn and solve problems: that is, they could solve such a problem on the first try, using
insight
, a clear mark of intelligence. In the movie, the boxes have almost Tetris-like shapes, made for easy stacking. Kohler's original task was a bit harder, with ordinary boxes that were not so easily stacked. Dr. Zira, who probably learned about, if not performed, similar experiments with humans as she pursued her doctoral work in psychology, stacks the boxes in a familiar and deliberate way, and then sits with the banana easily in reach, gazing at her human examiners. Why doesn't she take it after completing the task? “Because I loathe bananas,” Dr. Zira shouts. And with that, just as with Taylor's “Take your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape” in the original movie, and Caesar's exclamation of “No” in
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
, the notion of the “animal,” and its intelligence and moral status, is forever changed.

Delightfully, Dr. Zira's exclamation is accurate to real ape preferences in comparative psychology laboratories—everyone who works with chimpanzees recognizes that they prefer grapes. Indeed, recent studies by Frans de Waal show that chimpanzees who receive cucumbers for completing a task, but can see that their companion in the neighboring cage are receiving grapes for the same work, first become enraged and shake the cage, then throw the cucumber back at the experimenter, and finally refuse to do the task altogether until the grape is given rightfully and equally to both working parties. DeWaal's recent TED talk entitled “Moral Behavior in Animals” reveals some delightful moments of these experiments and can be found on YouTube.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes
opens with “Bright Eyes” completing “the Lucas Tower,” which is modeled on a well-known and often-employed real psychological task called the Tower of Hanoi. Composed of three small poles and a series of discs of decreasing sizes, the object of the task is to move the disks from the left hand post to the right hand post without ever placing a larger disc on top of a smaller disc. It's considered a task of “executive function” because it demands that the subject plan ahead so as to never misplace the discs. Bright Eyes is doing amazingly well at the task, completing it in twenty moves. Caesar later masters the same task in fifteen moves at a young age, with a plot line that mirrors the research of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. This researcher worked with bonobos (a chimp-like ape species), and trained the mother of the famous bonobo, Kanzi, on a symbol board, hoping to get her to associate symbols with meanings and thus use the board as a proxy for speech. The mother of Kanzi never did do well on the symbol board, but Kanzi did, suggesting that a young brain is indeed more amicable to training than an adult brain—and that a young monkey can indeed benefit intellectually from experiencing the training aimed at its mother.

Finally, in
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
, young Caesar exhibits intelligence as he swings about the kitchen, steals a cookie, and swings back to replace the lid on the cookie jar in order to cover his tracks. In doing this, he passes a well-respected “deception task” in comparative psychology. Animals that can fake out other animals through deception are thought to be intelligent because they must understand that the animals being tricked have mental states—specifically, beliefs—and that these beliefs can be manipulated in a variety of ways.

Ravens, for example, will steal the fish from the lines of ice fishermen, and then carefully place the line back in the water so that the unsuspecting human does not know he was robbed. Likewise, an octopus in a west-coast aquarium would slither from its tank at night to eat the luscious salmon and crabs in neighboring tanks, slither back into its own tank, and shut the top. The baffled humans lost several shipments of crab and fish before they installed a camera in the aquarium to find out what was happening at night. This story marked the beginning of serious consideration of octopus intelligence by comparative psychologists. No wonder Caesar is shown stealing cookies at
an early age—he's portrayed as exceptionally bright every step of the way.

But, as Zira quips in
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
, “Primitive? . . . These tests are prehistoric! They couldn't test the intelligence of a newt.” Cognitive ethologists argue that laboratory tests such as these show us little of animal intelligence, and that we must measure the intelligence of all creatures through observation of their behaviors in a natural environment. They argue that the lab is too artificial, and too biased toward human values to really help us understand what animals are thinking, and how smart they might be.

Measures of intelligence from cognitive ethology—the kind of research that observes animals in their natural environment—are based on things the animal does to preserve itself and plan for its future. The original crash landing of Taylor and his colleagues reveals many of the operative principles in cognitive ethological observation. The first thing they do is attempt to establish where they are in space and time: “It's not so much where we are, it's when we are,” quips Taylor. They ponder the accuracy of their instruments, contemplating the tools they used to get to the planet, and wonder just how off course they may be. Notions of location and time are important measures of intelligence for ethologists. Birds such as bluejays that can remember not only where their favorite food is, but how old it is (as it gets less tasty as it ages) put bird brains on the map of animal intelligence research because they demonstrate a sense of time as well as an excellent memory.

The crash-landed humans proceed to try to figure out what went wrong. Why did Stewart die? Is the theory of relativity accurate, or was there a miscalculation in trajectory? Problem solving is a well-respected measure of intelligence, and understanding cause and effect relationships is an important part of problem solving. Soon, however, as their ship sinks into the lake and they realize that the problem cannot be solved because they are “here to stay,” they turn to more practical matters of locating ammunition, food, and shelter. Determining that they have enough food for three days, much like bluejays, they decide that they need to search for future supplies. From
their actions, they exhibit intelligence, for they can remember, plan, and problem-solve. In a habitat that is not so natural, the team passes several cognitive ethological milestones in the measure of intelligence.

Once we see that they can take care of themselves, another, more sophisticated cognitive function enters the arena. The dialogue shifts from survival to emotion. The astronauts discuss their grief for the lost colleague Stewart. Mourning behavior is seen as an indicator of not only memory, but emotional attachment, which in turn is taken by cognitive ethologists to be an important precursor to moral behavior. No wonder we're so fascinated by elephants, who travel for miles to visit the boneyards of their ancestors, and spend hours fondling the skeletons of their relatives. They seem to remember, and feel, in just the way human beings do as we visit gravesides and perform ceremonies. Recently it has been reported by researcher Marc Bekoff that magpies also perform ceremonies for their dead, carefully placing grass and baubles near the deceased before flying away.

And from grief at the loss of Stewart, the conversation turns to the more abstract grief at the loss of their civilization, of everyone they have ever known, and of their once-important ambitions, now so meaningless as they traverse the desert. Emotions run high as the astronauts contemplate the fate of the Earth as well as their own futures. With the range of emotion and abstract thought the astronauts display, we can imagine that the apes are thankful for their scarecrows up on the hills, for by cognitive ethological measures, these astronauts do seem to be intelligent—and intelligence is often dangerous. (But of course, the most frightening thing about them is still that they can speak.)

At the end of
Planet of the Apes
one of the best accepted measures of intelligence in the world of ethological research is found—evidence of play. That talking doll, a toy, is of great significance, for play suggests counterfactual reasoning—imagining the world as it is not, and interacting with things that aren't real.

Social play is even more important as a measure of intelligence, because beings that play together must somehow agree with each other about an imaginary universe in which they will both participate. When children play cowboys and Indians
or war, they do not kill each other because they understand that the scenario they co-create is not real. That takes tremendous cognitive ability: to imagine, to remember, to treat one's friends as friends, as well as to create a narrative about something in an imaginative plane that is shared. The doll at the end of the film speaks volumes about cognition well beyond language—cognition that includes co-operation, imagination, and the envisioning of how things could be different.

We're reminded of just how important language is as a measure of intelligence when we learn early in
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
that by eighteen months Caesar was signing up to twenty-four words, when in
Planet of the Apes
we see that Landon has been subject to some sort of language-erasing lobotomy, and when in
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
, the apes caution each other with “Our safety is in our silence.”

There is no threat from the apes in
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
—no matter how many intelligent “tricks” they perform—until Caesar mutters “Lousy human bastards.” Amidst the chaos at the chimp facility in
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
the stupefied human population asks “What happened?” The answer given in the film is not that the chimps broke free, nor is it that they organized, planned, and co-ordinated an attack on human civilization. Rather, says Rodney, “He spoke.”