There was one question from Leila’s beaver interview yesterday that I didn’t post. It was the “How smart are beavers?” trope. I thought that was a bigger conversation and wasn’t ready to get into it yesterday. Today there is a new article in The scientist about how creative they are. So I guess we’ll make time.
Opinion: Biodiversity Loss Worsened by Extinguishing Animal Innovators
To some people—road engineers, for instance—beavers and their dams may seem like the ultimate foe of human progress. But to the scientists who study them, beavers exemplify animal creativity. In a recent study on methods for rewilding freshwater wetlands, researchers found that the reintroduction of beavers as ecosystem engineers often creates unique habitats that benefit biodiversity at numerous spatial scales. Importantly, beavers actively creating and maintaining their ponds also produces aquatic habitats superior to those that are human-made. In other words, by exercising their unequaled creativity, beavers benefit not only themselves, but myriad other species, large and small, that share their ecosystems in ways humans simply cannot accomplish.
Allow me to be the first to say that beavers are wonderful and perfect and I love them very much. Beavers are better than otters and better than border collies and they are excellent at what they do.
But they are not creative. They are not smart.
The beaver, at once a potential solution to biodiversity loss and a troublesome force acting against the goals of human development, illuminates our conflicted relationship with the approximately 2.1 million other animal species who share our planet. If we understand that nonhuman animals—and not only beavers—also have inherently valuable skills, unique to individuals and to species, might we widen our tunnel vision to see them as collaborators and guides in conserving their habitats and biodiversity?
Remember that once upon a time I was an actual psychologist who administered actual intelligence tests and routinely commented on the capacity for things like set shifting and recall memory. Even though I have long since melted down all my Stanford Binets and Weschler’s into Beaver belt buckles It is fair to say I still know something about intelligence.
Intelligence is about shortcuts. Saving time. Accomplishing the same thing with less work. Facing problems with new solutions. Creativity is about trying new things in new ways and creating solutions no one ever considered before.
Beavers never look at a stream and think, “Wait just this once I’ll try building my dam on the bank”. Beavers never invent tools for building dams faster. They also never realize “All this building is kind of pointless, its just going to wash out anyway and I’ll just have to do it again.”
Beavers are BETTER than smart or creative. Yes. I’ve said it. Creativity and intelligence are only useful when the problems keep changing or have new challenges or you are super busy and have to fix it in a very short amount of time before you move on to the next problem.
Beavers don’t have anywhere to be and water has been flowing pretty much the same way since the big bang. They don’t need any new skills. There completely prepared for their environmental challenges. Because they are not burdened by being ‘smart’ they never look at their last years work and think “I GIVE UP!” They just keep trying. Sometimes they decide to try somewhere else.
Growing interest within the humanities and sciences in how the creative impulse works across many domains, not only in the arts, has fostered a reluctance to limit creative license to only a few special human individuals. The idea that creativity may be a common thread that runs throughout human activity has become accepted throughout the academy just as ideas about animal creativity are gaining traction in the biological sciences. Appreciating beavers for their contributions to biodiversity is not a hard sell among many biologists. But being open to the possibility that creativity exists across species requires open minds, a willingness to see behaviors in a new way, and a comfort with complexity. These qualities, the same ones often associated with creative behaviors, will assist humans in understanding that the creative agency of animals is a foundation of biodiversity. The world loses their genomes when species disappear, but what also disappears are creative pathways to saving ecosystems and habitats for all on this planet.
You saw it first hand in your own life I’m sure. You went to high school with off the chart smart or creative people that never amounted to much. I’m here to tell you the secret your guidance counselor never shared. And it’s a secret beavers taught me. Being persistent is more important being smart or being an innovator or being the best. Keeping at something is more important than having talent at it.
They say writing a novel is about 10% Inspiration and 90% perspiration. Beavers don’t write novels. And I’m not even sure they perspire.
They work.
