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Jeremy Narby

Intelligence in Nature: A Predator's Inquiry


One day, in 1985, as a young anthropologist living among Ashaninca people in the Peruvian Amazon, I accompanied a tobacco shaman, a tabaquero, to visit his old teacher. The old man was at least 80 years old, all covered in wrinkles, but it was hard to say exactly what his age was because he was born before Ashaninca people started counting years. He was sitting on a mat, wearing a cotton gown and eating tobacco paste from a small stick that fit into a gourd. When I was introduced he looked at me with a glint in his eye and asked whether I was his father-in-law.

I wasn't even a third his age at that point, so this was clearly a joke. I decided to play along with him and answered yes. He laughed and then he asked me again, "Konki" (father-in-law)? And I answered yes. He laughed and then he asked me again and again, I counted 20 times. And each time I answered yes and each time his laughing got a little longer. Well, I learned later that night from my main informant that his question also meant, "Can I have sexual access to your daughters?" So the joke was on me.

I finally interrupted our exchange and asked if I could have some of his tobacco paste. He handed me the gourd and I put a good stick's worth between my lips, and then sat to the side to allow the gentlemen to get on with their business. After a short while sitting there, thinking about nothing in particular, I ran my tongue under my front teeth and they seemed to be particularly long and sharp. And my face seemed to have cat whiskers growing out the side that allowed me to sense the environment more sharply. My mouth tasted of blood, and though I was a vegetarian, I found that this tasted good. My senses were telling me that I was turning into a feline. Well, this wasn't the kind of thing that I thought possible, but the impression was lasting and felt real. This feline feeling made me feel powerful and wise. I eyed some chickens that were clucking about, and like a benign jaguar, I decided not to pounce on them -- you know the tobacco paste is strong when the anthropologist starts attacking the chickens!

This feline predatory impression was so strong that it remains with me to this day, but I did not discuss it in my doctoral dissertation. In fact, for years I didn't know what to make of it. Understanding Amazonian ways of knowing can take a lot of time.

Amazonian people believe that plants and animals have intentions, and that shamans communicate with other species in visions and in dreams, whereas western sciences tend to deny intention in nature, and consider living beings as "automata".

Over two decades I searched for common ground between western science and indigenous knowledge and, in recent years, found increasing scientific evidence that nature teems with intelligence. Now scientists show that single celled slime molds solve mazes, brainless plants make correct decisions, and bees with brains the size of pinheads handle abstract concepts.

Philosopher John Locke proclaimed in the 17th century, "brutes abstract not" but in fact brutes abstract, and reductionist science just proved it.

Western observers are coming to see that we are nearly identical to many animals--eye for eye, brain for brain, gene for gene--and many behaviors once thought to be exclusively human, turn out to be shared by other species. The zone of the specifically human as determined by science has been shrinking. There has been an "awkward growth of knowledge," as the editor in chief of the journal Science recently put it. Awkward, because we're having to step down from the pedestal.

In 2001, I began investigating "intelligence in nature" by traveling to the Amazon and speaking to the Ashaninca, Shipibo, Shawi, Kichwa, Kandoshi and Awajun shamans and specialists of their culture. These people believe that all beings have souls, and that plants and animals think, make plans, have knowledge. In Amazonian cosmologies, humans have kinship with other species and humanity is a condition that applies to all of the beings in the world. We see fish and birds but when these creatures go home at the end of the day they take off their animal suits, and out step people. Here, the dichotomy between nature and culture, so dear to anthropology, flies out the door.

By investigating intelligence in nature, I wanted to act as a diplomat between systems of knowledge. The point was to see if the two sides could work together. As an anthropologist with field experience in the Amazon, I was going to have to take on a new field with scientists and laboratories in different countries. I decided to put everyone on the same ontological footing and to treat scientists with the same respect as indigenous shamans.

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I began in Toulouse, France at the laboratory of animal cognition, at the National Center for Scientific Research, where a biologist called Martin Giurfa and his colleagues had demonstrated that bees can handle abstract concepts. They'd done this by building a simple Y-shaped maze, the entrance to which was marked with a symbol--the color blue, for example. Bees flying through the entrance to the maze encountered a branching pathway where they had to choose between paths. One path was marked with the color blue, the other with the color yellow. Bees flying down the blue marked path discovered at its end a vial filled with sugared solution. Bees flying down the yellow marked path received no rewards. The bees soon learned that the same sign equals sugar.

In subsequent experiments, the signs were changed to horizontal and vertical lines, for example, and the bees passed with flying colors. This simple experiment shows that bees, with brains containing about a hundred thousand times fewer neurons than our own, can handle abstractions such as sameness and difference. Martin Giurfa, the man behind the experiment, said that the more we understand about how animals make decisions and learn, the more we have to recognize that they do not act mechanically. Bees have minds of their own, he said, which enable them to "extract the logical structure of the world."

Bees are sentient minded beings, not flying toasters, but what about plants? Plants lack brains entirely. So, what does science say about plant intelligence? In 2002, I found an article in the journal Nature, written by a biologist called Anthony Trewavas, stating that plants have intentions, make decisions and compute complex aspects of their environment. Trewavas is a professor of biology at the University of Edinburgh, and a member of the Royal Society, and he was claiming that the investigation of plant intelligence was becoming a "serious scientific endeavor."

In early 2003, I traveled to Scotland to interview Trewavas and he explained that the molecular genetics of the 1990s had revealed the signals and receptors that plant cells use to communicate and learn. Plants assimilate information and they can respond on the whole plant level, and to do this they use molecular and electrical signals, some of which are identical to those used by our own neurons. Plants don't have brains, so much as act like them.

Just being a plant, sending down roots in a branching structure, and deploying leaves so as to gather a maximum amount of sunlight involves sensing a wide range of variables, computing complex decisions, and then enacting them and embodying them. For example, the Amazonian stilt palm, which has a stem raised on prop roots, moves around in search for sunlight by allowing new prop roots to grow on the sunny side and letting those in the shade die off. The stilt palm actually walks around like this over several months, fending off competitive neighbors and foraging for sunlight at a speed imperceptible to humans. Trewavas called this "avoidance action" a clear sign of "intentional behavior" and plant intelligence.

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But what is intelligence exactly? The word in its original meaning refers to choosing between-- inter-legere--and implies the capacity to make decisions. But the concept has often been defined in exclusively human terms, meaning that by definition it could not apply to other species. And people have fought so extensively over the definition of intelligence that it is probably not very intelligent to try to define it any further at this point. This was made most clear to me in Japan.

In the summer of 2003, I traveled to Hokkaido to interview Toshiyuki Nakagaki, the scientist who had demonstrated that single celled slime molds solve mazes. Nakagaki and his colleagues had published their results in the journal Nature in an article that used the word intelligence. In the media attention that ensued, Nakagaki told me, Japanese reporters were mainly concerned with the details of just how such an organism had solved a maze, whereas, western reporters tended to focus on whether the phenomenon constituted intelligence or not. Nakagaki attributed the difference to the animist background of Japanese culture, and to the Japanese word for intelligence--chi-sei--in which 'chi' means to know, and 'sei' means property of, or capacity of. Most Japanese people do not hesitate to attribute chi-sei, or a capacity to know, to other species, including the single celled slime.

I asked Nakagaki how he had dealt with the dilemma involving westerners and intelligence. He said that he'd gone on to notice that when he used the word "smartness" instead of "intelligence" to refer to the slime mold, westerners agreed. So now he only uses that word. Which is pretty smart. The only problem being that the word smartness in its first meaning refers to elegance, cleanliness and tidiness, and is not that pertinent to "intelligence in nature."

"Nature" itself is a tricky concept. Dictionaries often define it as "the phenomena of the physical world... as opposed to humans or human creations." "Nature," as an idea, implies a disengagement from the world. If one is strict with words, "intelligence in nature" is a contradiction in terms because "intelligence" excludes non-humans and "nature" excludes humans. But this mainly shows that our concepts, which disengage us from other species, hamper our thinking. We struggle with words when the slime mold solves the maze because our concepts don't fit the data. It is not that nature lacks intelligence, but that our own concepts do.

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Objective knowledge of the biological realm runs into an obstacle. Each and every observer is a subjective, biological being. I long for a biology in which observers include themselves as objects of study and state their point of view. Mine is:

I am an animal, and move about to feed on organic matter. Unlike plants I can't just stay still and eat sunlight. Though I feed on other species, I recognize that I am related to them through genes and kinship.

I see myself in simple life forms, like the hydra for example. The hydra is a small tube-like animal that lives in the water. The hydra has no head, no front or back, no legs or fins, no heart, no brain, but it does have a concentration of neurons close to its mouth. We animals tend to have neurons concentrated close to our mouths. That's why my brain is situated close to my mouth. I know I am a predator and stand in a long line of predators.

As a contemporary human I stand at the top of the food chain. In the Amazon, jaguars do the same. They eat but are not eaten. It is easy to identify with them on this count. Shamans claim they can transform into jaguars or get into jaguar mind space by means of certain songs and by ingesting certain plants. Well, jaguars are versatile cats. They can both swim and climb trees, and their prey ranges from fish, caimans and turtles to rodents, deer and monkeys. They often kill their prey with one swift bite to the skull. They have no rivals besides humans, but they lead discrete lives. In fact, jaguars move around with such stealth, that biologists have difficulty studying them. These impeccable predators control their power. They are at the top of the food chain, but discreet. They could be role models.

Homo sapiens sapiens is a young species. We've only been around 200,000 years according to the fossil record and analyses of DNA. That's just 10,000 biological generations, which for a species is next to nothing. Jaguars and other efficient predators, like octopuses, have been in business much longer than we have. Octopuses have been around 350 million years. In comparison, we're just getting started. We still have a lot to learn when it comes to controlling our predatory nature.

Shamans believe that human predation requires mediation, and when shamans mediate human predation they try and turn it into a revitalizing exchange with nature. In their view, humans as predators have responsibility towards other species because we are related to them and because we eat them to live.

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Shamans have been pointing out for a long time that nature undergoes constant transformation. Scientists agree and show that we are all hybrid beings resulting from ongoing evolution.

Science itself is evolving, moving away from a mechanical understanding of nature. The idea of a kind of intelligence active throughout nature is gaining support within the scientific community, affirming the view long held by indigenous people and shamans.

Now the entire edifice of life from top to bottom seems shot through with intelligence, suggesting that the evolutionary process itself may be intelligent, and that evolution may be guided by an intelligence within, as opposed to blind chance or an intelligence above. But that debate is about final causes and the different views cannot be conclusively demonstrated one way or another. Some questions are fascinating to us because they concern us, but that does not mean that they can be answered in any definitive way.

One urgent question that we can work on is: how can we as predators learn to stop degrading the world we live in? Our predation is souped up through knowledge, ideas, and technology, so we have to get a grip on our sciences and industries.

This would be intelligent evolution. By understanding ourselves as animals, by understanding other species as intelligent, and by understanding the intelligence of predators, we can learn to transform ourselves into intelligent predators.

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Philosopher John Locke proclaimed in the 17th century, "brutes abstract not" but in fact brutes abstract, and reductionist science just proved it.