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…
