It hasn't come to that...not quite. But in a lab at the University of Arizona in Tucson, there's an African Gray parrot named Alex whose conversational skills have become the talk of animal-intelligence circles. Alex, says Dr. Irene Pepperberg, who has trained and tested him for 22 years, "is as intelligent as a 5-or 6-year-old child."
Asked, "What color corn?" Alex answers, "Yellow." Shown two green objects and asked, "What's the same?" he answers, "Color." He can recognize and name 50 objects, seven colors and five shapes. "I believe he thinks," says Pepperberg, 50. "What he does is complex information processing, and that's how I define thinking."
While Pepperberg's work has won her the acclaim of fellow scientists, it hasn't convinced everyone. "Parrots have this exquisite vocal apparatus," says Dr. Herbert Terrace, a Columbia University psychologist. "But the fact that they can imitate English doesn't mean they understand the words."
The Brooklyn-born daughter of a teacher and a homemaker, Pepperberg, who is divorced from physiologist David Pepperberg, was a grad student at Harvard in 1973 when she became fascinated with animal communication after seeing a Nova series on the subject. Although her Ph.D. was in chemical physics, she switched fields, becoming an animal biologist. She bought Alex in a Chicago pet store in 1977. "Otherwise," she says, "people would say it was specially bred."
Since then, Pepperberg has added African Grays Griffin and Kyaaro to her flock. Neither is in the same league as Alex, who sometimes screeches "Bad boy!" when Griffin messes up. But does Alex offer to tutor his labmate? Of course not—he's all talk.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
