Dumb but not Stupid

A long time ago I worked with a rather unpleasant fellow who amongst other things tried to convince me that intelligence is impossible without language. I disagreed with him, but I couldn’t prove him wrong – but recent developments seem to prove that, in some fields at least, language is not a precursor for intelligence.

Recent experiments with Native Australian (Aborigine) children have shown that you don’t need a word for a number to understand it. They did some tests on some English speaking Aborigine kids in a suburb of Melbourne and on another group of children in the Outback. The Outback children didn’t speak English and their mother tongue had no words for numbers bigger than 3 or 4 – basically they count “one”, “two”, “more than two”, and finally “a lot more than two”.

Both groups were given a bag full of discs and then asked to listen to someone repeatedly banging two sticks together. They then had to selected the same number of discs as clicks. To the researchers’ surprise the children in the Outback who have no words for numbers did just as well as the kids in Melbourne who could count. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7563265.stm

In another interesting experiment it has been suggested that elephants can count too. Obviously they have no words for numbers, but in Japan one Indian elephant called Ashya can nevertheless count. To demonstrate this she is presented with two large empty buckets. The keeper then randomly and repeatedly drop a few apples into each bucket. Two into the left, three into the right, five into the left, three into the right, etc… and then the keeper offers both buckets to the elephant. Aysha has been trained that she will only be allowed the contents of one of the buckets and not both. Amazingly, given that the elephant “can’t count or add” because she has no words for numbers, she picks the bucket holding the most apples 75% of the time. See http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/dn14569-elephants-master-basic-mathematics.html

This ability is apparently very different from the one ‘Clever Hans’ had. Clever Hans was a horse that could apparently do sums and understand German (not surprising as he was from Germany). When asked “What is 2 + 3?”, Hans would tap his hoof on the ground 5 times, when asked “What is 6 divided by 3?”, Hans would tap his hoof twice. But when asked “What is the square of the square root of 144 minus the square root of 81” Hans got the answer wrong, so he wasn’t a great mathematician.

Hans could also read. If he was shown a written question he would still get the answer right… providing that his owner also saw the question, and knew the answer…

What “Clever” Hans was doing was reading the body language of his owner who knew the answers to the simple questions. Hans would simply tap his hoof until he reached the right answer known by his owner. At that point Hans’ owner would unconsciously relax and Hans would stop tapping… So Hans couldn’t count or even understand the questions, but he did understand his owner, so he wasn’t so stupid either. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_hans

I do hope, by the way, the testers of the elephant and the Australian children took steps to avoid the “Clever Hans Effect”!