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PHILOSOPHERS they clearly are not, but baboons may be capable of
reasoning.

Given a painstaking education, the monkeys can learn to make analogies,
researchers have found. The discovery, possibly a first in a non-ape species,
may force us to rethink our ideas about animal intelligence.

Researchers in the US and France trained two adult guinea baboons, one male,
the other female, to recognise grids of pictures showing images such as a light
bulb, an arrow or the Sun. The monkeys first saw a four-by-four grid of either
16 different pictures, or 16 identical images. Then they were shown two new
grids laden with another set of images. Again, one had 16 different pictures,
and one had 16 duplicates.

The challenge for the baboons was to recognise the new grid most like the one
that they were originally shown. The monkeys used a special joystick to select
the computerised grids, and were rewarded with a banana pellet if they managed
to choose the right one.

Choosing the right grid required the baboons to make an analogous link
between two similar but different sets of pictures. The ability to form an
analogy is believed to be the basis of human reasoning and abstract thought.

After almost 5000 painstaking trials, the male baboon learned to spot the
right grid four times out of five. The female baboon reached a similar level of
competence after just over 7000 trials.

As a control, the research team, led by Joel Fagot of the CNRS (France鈥檚
national research organisation) in Marseille, compared the baboon鈥檚 abilities
with those of a man and a woman. The two people took less than 100 trials to
figure the task out, even without the lure of a banana pellet to focus their
minds.

Baboons may not be very good at figuring out relationships, the scientists
admit, but they can do it. The finding is important because it is a strong
indication that non-ape species are capable of this type of thinking. Chimps are
also up to the task, but they are part of the family that humans evolved from.
Baboons, on the other hand, belong to a branch of the primate family that split
off from our antecedents more than 30 million years ago.

Mike Tomasello from the Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology in
Leipzig, Germany, says that a study done in the 1980s suggested that squirrel
monkeys may have some feel for abstract concepts.

But similar experiments in the past have usually failed with non-ape species.
Fagot thinks this may be because they used too few images. In further
experiments with their baboon and human subjects, the team found that the
baboons didn鈥檛 perform as well when shown grids with fewer images.

Fagot鈥檚 colleagues, Edward Wasserman of the University of Iowa in Iowa City,
and Michael Young of Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, now intend to
see if pigeons can be trained to perform the task. 鈥淲e鈥檝e been putting it off
because we鈥檙e not sure we have the patience,鈥� says Young. 鈥淚t could take a
year.鈥� Fagot is planning to see if preverbal children fare any better than
baboons.