动物到底有多聪明？.doc

The Brains Of The Animal Kingdom 动物到底有多聪明？ Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares. 人猿相比，谁更聪明？这个问题取决于比较的是什么方面。比如说在日本京都大学(Kyoto University)2007年的一项研究中，一只名为“步”(Ayumu)的雄性小黑猩猩的记忆力就让人类自愧不如。步通过一块触摸屏接受训练，它能够记得由一到九任意组合而成的一组共九个数字，并能以正确的顺序在屏幕上把它们点出来，尽管这些数字只显示了短短一瞬间便被白色的方格所取代。 I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers -- and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the chimpion. 我自己也尝试了这项测试，但我能回忆起的数字不超过五个──尽管我获得的时间比那只聪明的黑猩猩要长得多。在这项研究中，步的表现也比一群京都大学的学生好出一大截。它在第二年还战胜了来自英国的记忆测试冠军──本?普里德莫尔(Ben Pridmore)，一举成为“猩猩冠军”。 How do you give a chimp -- or an elephant or an octopus or a horse -- an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science today. Over the past decade, researchers on animal cognition have come up with some ingenious solutions to the testing problem. Their findings have started to upend a view of humankinds unique place in the universe that dates back at least to ancient Greece. 你会如何对黑猩猩、大象、章鱼、马进行智商测试？这听起来可能像是故意开玩笑，其实它是科学界当下面临的最棘手的难题之一。过去十年间，研究动物认知能力的科研人员想出了一些有独创性的解决方法。他们的发现开始逆转至少可追溯至古希腊时期的有关人类在宇宙中的独特位置的看法。 Aristotles idea of the scala naturae, the ladder of nature, put all life-forms in rank order, from low to high, with humans closest to the angels. During the Enlightenment, the French philosopher Rene Descartes, a founder of modern science, declared that animals were soulless automatons. In the 20th century, the American psychologist B.F. Skinn