Sorry, Monkeys Are Not Counting Numbers Like Humans
I love how science likes to glorify the ability of animals and intentionally misleads people into thinking that certain animals such as monkeys can do things like count and do math exactly the way humans do it. This is yet another one of science’s fantasies that wishes it were true and even goes as far as saying it in the titles of some articles related to that specific topic. I’m about to put this false claim to rest for good though as I believe this needs to be addressed.
Of course, humans created arithmetic and numbers to keep track of things and to measure things like space and time but these things come from our own human brains and perception of the natural world. Monkeys, obviously, did not create numbers nor any other animals for that matter. When scientists conduct these experimental tests for the mathematical capabilities of these certain animals they are teaching them based on our already perceived understanding of numbers and arithmetic. And a lot of the time, the scientific data reveals that they are not counting like humans with basic math at all but approximate instead.
An article from Science.org titled Monkeys Can Do Math clearly corroborates my assertion that monkeys are not naturally imbued with the ability to count the way humans do. Here’s a part of that article showing this.
But when Livingstone and colleagues started analyzing the data in more detail—they had the results of hundreds of tests per day for months on end—they realized that the monkeys weren't 100% accurate. They tended to underestimate a sum compared with a single symbol when the two were close in value—sometimes choosing, for example, a 13 over the sum of eight and six. The underestimation was systematic—when adding two numbers, the monkeys always paid attention to the larger of the two, and then added only a fraction of the smaller number to it.
The monkeys' systematic errors argue against one theory of how the mammalian brain processes numbers.
That last paragraph is important to note. And yes, this is quite an obscure way of doing basic math which is entirely inconsistent with the way humans do basic math and count. But notice how there’s a lot of approximating going on with these monkeys’ math? They are clearly approximators. Interestingly, though, there is another animal that does math which is consistent with the way monkeys do it and that is pigeons, surprisingly. In this article Dr. Damian Scarf who was one of the leading researchers from the experiment pointed this out.
"Our research not only shows that pigeons are also members of this exclusive club, but, somewhat surprisingly, their performance is on a par with that of monkeys," the study's lead author Dr. Damian Scarf, a researcher at the University of Otago in New Zealand, said in a press release.
Of course, still, he went on to make it evident that pigeons are still a far cry away from counting the way humans do.
"While this is obviously a long way away from how humans can count, it shows that an animal with a brain structured quite differently to ours is still able to perform complex mental tasks of which only humans were once thought capable," said Scarf.
Well, I think this pretty much sums it up nicely. Pigeons and monkeys can do math the same way but are definitely not doing it the way us humans do it. But for those that are still not convinced, there’s one more article I would like to present which forms the knock-down argument in my post. Even so, it’s not like there isn’t already a good amount of scientific evidence I’ve brought forth to substantiate my position. There is but I know how stubborn some people are out there. So, let’s continue.
In this study of Macaque monkeys these neuroscientists also did a series of math tests to find out how Macaque monkeys do their math. They even studied the Macaque monkey’s brain and showed why it cannot count the way humans count. And I believe this article holds compelling scientific evidence for my case against monkeys being able to count like humans and or being able to understand the human’s perception of numeration.
When the researchers presented two sets of numbered objects these Macaque monkeys were given the option of choosing whether two sets of objects shared the same quantity. In their first analysis they found that the monkeys could not differentiate when the two sets of numbered objects were closer in value. Something us humans can easily do.
“First finding: After some training, the monkeys performed this task remarkably well. They succeeded with a great variety of configurations, and could clearly focus solely on number. Their only problem was to answer “same” when the two numbers were close, like 4 and 5. Thus, monkeys cannot count but can only estimate an approximate quantity of items.”
They found out if monkeys were able to count they would’ve easily noticed that 4 is less than 5 and 5 is greater than 4 or could discern two sets of values that are close to each other but are not the same of course. So, monkeys are not really counting the number of objects but instead approximate like I said many times earlier in this post. Here’s their second analysis explaining why these monkeys have the lack of ability in counting numbers.
“Second finding: The macaque brain contains neurons tuned to number. Each of these cells responds to a certain number of objects. Some fire only when the animal sees one object; others prefer two; still others are stimulated by seeing three, four, or five objects. Each neuron possesses a favorite number, but their tuning is not perfectly sharp: Neurons that fire the most to four objects, for example, also respond to three or five objects. Again, monkeys’ number sense is approximate.”
It’s as clear as days now. Because of their wiring these monkeys do not have the ability to count. Thus, they approximate instead because that’s all they can do. Monkeys are approximators, period. They do not have the natural ability to count numbers like humans do. There’s no denying the overwhelming scientific evidence for this.
And then there are those 2007 articles some proponents of ‘monkey intelligence’ like to quote from which purports that “Monkeys Rival College Students’ Abilities to Estimate.” A totally bogus and egregious title for such an article to denigrate human intelligence, clearly. But what they don’t tell you in the title to the actual study is that the monkeys did not actually rival the college students and it was an approximation test based on mental addition to see how well college students and monkeys were able to approximate the amount of dots on a computer screen. Here are the results.
The same test was presented to college students, who were asked to choose the correct sum without counting the individual dots. While the college students were correct 94 percent the time and the monkeys 76 percent, the average response time for both monkeys and humans was about one second.
Sorry, but that’s not considered ‘rivaling’ college students in an approximation test of mental addition. This is the difference between getting a solid A on a school test over a solid C. Who is actually doing better? The college students, obviously, and it shows you that college students are still better approximators than the monkeys ever could be.
I believe a lot of this emphasis on trying to make monkeys look as intelligent as humans has to do with the belief in human evolution. Science is desperate to make a connection between the family of primates and humans anyway they can. And trying to prop up ‘monkey intelligence’ with math was their failed attempt at trying to pull this fast one under our noses to make it look like we share strikingly similar intelligence in math due to some evolutionary product. In actuality, we are on a whole different playing field than the monkeys when it comes to how we do math.
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