Alex Wanted a Cracker, but Did He Want One?<\/strong>
\nBy GEORGE JOHNSON<\/p>\nIN \u201cOryx and Crake,\u201d Margaret Atwood\u2019s novel about humanity\u2019s final days on earth, a boy named Jimmy becomes obsessed with Alex, an African gray parrot with extraordinary cognitive and linguistic skills. Hiding out in the library, Jimmy watches historical TV documentaries in which the bird deftly distinguishes between blue triangles and yellow squares and invents a perfect new word for almond: cork-nut.<\/p>\n
But what Jimmy finds most endearing is Alex\u2019s bad attitude. As bored with the experiments as Jimmy is with school, the parrot would abruptly squawk, \u201cI\u2019m going away now,\u201d then refuse to cooperate further.<\/p>\n
Except for the part about Jimmy and the imminent apocalypse (still, fingers crossed, a few decades away), all of the above is true. Until he was found dead 10 days ago in his cage at a Brandeis University psych lab, Alex was the subject of 30 years of experiments challenging the most basic assumptions about animal intelligence.<\/p>\n
He is survived by his trainer, Irene Pepperberg, a prominent comparative psychologist, and a scientific community divided over whether creatures other than human are more than automatons, enjoying some kind of inner life.<\/p>\n
Skeptics have long dismissed Dr. Pepperberg\u2019s successes with Alex as a subtle form of conditioning \u2014 no deeper philosophically than teaching a pigeon to peck at a moving spot by bribing it with grain. But the radical behaviorists once said the same thing about people: that what we take for thinking, hoping, even theorizing, is all just stimulus and response.<\/p>\n