Okay. It's a real pleasure to
be at Bioneers. And Bioneers is
something special.
One day in 1985,
as a young anthropologist living among
Ashninkan 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 Ashninkan 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. And when I was introduced,
he looked at me with a glint in his eye,
and asked me whether I was his father-in-law. [LAUGHTER] And I wasn't even a third
his age at that point. So this was clearly a joke.
[LAUGHTER] And I decided to play
along with him, and answered, "Yes."
[LAUGHTER] And he laughed,
and then he asked me again, "Konki?"
Father-in-law? And I answered, "Yes,"
and he laughed, and then he asked me
again, and again. And I counted 20 times.
[LAUGHTER] 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 that question also meant, Can I have sexual access
to your daughters? [LAUGHTER] So, the joke was on me.
[LAUGHTER] Besides, I don't have
any daughters. But in any case,
I finally interrupted our exchange and asked if I could have
some of his tobacco paste.
And so he handed
me the gourd, and I put a good sticks-
full between my lips, and then sat to the side
to allow the gentlemen to get on with
their business. And 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. [LAUGHTER] And my face seemed to have
cat whiskers growing out the front here that allowed
me to sense the environment more sharply.
[LAUGHTER] My mouth tasted of blood. And though I was a vegetarian,
I found that this tasted good.
[LAUGHTER] 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, [LAUGHTER]
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.
[LAUGHTER] 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.
[LAUGHTER] 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 dreams, whereas Western science
has tended 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.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah. 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.
[LAUGHTER] Awkward because we're having
to step down from the pedestal.
[APPLAUSE] In 2001, I began investigating
intelligence in nature by traveling to the Amazon
and speaking with Ashninka, 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 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--
sorry-- a new field with
scientists in 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.
[AUDIENCE REACTS] 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 reward. The bees soon learned
that 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.
[LAUGHTER] Yeah, let's hear it
for the bees. [APPLAUSE] This simple experiment
shows that bees with brains containing about 100,000
times less 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. [LAUGHTER] 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 the 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. [LAUGHTER] 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. A tree that walks. Trewavas called this
avoidance action, a clear sign of intentional
behavior and plant intelligence.
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.
[LAUGHTER] This was made most
clear to me in Japan. In the summer of '03,
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. He attributed the difference
to the animist background of Japanese culture, and to the Japanese
word for intelligence chi-seiin 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 single-celled slime.
I asked Nakagaki how
he had dealt with the dilemma involving Westerners
and intelligence. He said that hed
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.
[LAUGHTER] Which is pretty smart.
[LAUGHTER] 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 to the
exclusion of humans and of human creations. Nature as an idea implies
a disengagement from the world. So, actually, if one is
strict with words, intelligence in nature
is a contradiction in terms because intelligence excludes
non-humans, and nature excludes humans.
[LAUGHTER] 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. [APPLAUSE] Exactly.
[LAUGHTER] 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. [LAUGHTER] 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's 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 discreet lives. In fact, jaguars move around
with such stealth that biologists have
difficulty studying them. These impeccable predators
control their power.
Top of the food chain
but discreet. They could be role models.
[LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] Homo sapien 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 octupuses 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 to turn it into a revitalizing
exchange with nature. In their view, humans as
predators have a responsibility towards other species
because we are related to them and because we eat
them to live. 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. [APPLAUSE]
[LAUGHTER] 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 intelligence predators. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE].
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