Transcript of journalist and senior media executive Richard Sergay's interview with Dr. Brain Hare for the"Stories of Impact" series.
Watch the video version of this interview.
RS = Richard Sergay (interviewer)
BH = Brain Hare (interviewee)
Brian Hare is a professor at Duke University in the Evolutionary Anthropology department.
BH: The Templeton grant that we have is important because the goal is to bring together resources that are all over the planet, that one single researcher never could bring to bear to some of the most interesting questions that we face if we want to understand how intelligence evolves and if we want to identify unique and new types of intelligence.
RS: The grant will allow you to do what?
BH: So the grant is really all about building tools to collaborate and helping researchers who study animal psychology find each other and work together. If we do that we can answer a whole bunch of questions that really have been off the table.
RS: Never been done before?
BH: No.
RS: Why not, it's so obvious.
BH: It is obvious. I mean that was one of the fun parts about the meeting was that a lot of feedback from...
So that was one of the fun parts of, you know, people responding to this idea was, it's a lot of people said this seems so obvious, we can't believe no one's done this before. and it is-- I don't know why but we just really haven't done it before in our field unlike say physics or genetics where lots of people work together on a big project that they could never accomplish on their own. In our field that really hasn't been the tradition. And so we're going to, the whole goal of this project is to make that happen. And part of our problem is just a logistical problem. Every university has zero to one people who study animal psychology. So it's very hard if you're doing comparative cognition, you're comparing different species to one another. But you're the only person there, who are you going to compare with. So we're going to link up everybody all over the world so that we can work together and compare animals and really have added value. And it'll be you know we're going to make a community.
RS: This is an online tool?
BH: Yes it's going to be an online tool so that people can find each other and collaborate and we're going to pool people's resources together so we can answer a whole bunch of questions we couldn't otherwise.
RS: A multi disciplinary approach or just within the animal research community?
BH: Well I think that it is a multidisciplinary approach because we're going to be able to look at evolutionary questions, psychological questions, potentially even questions that are relevant to culture and language. So I do think it is multidisciplinary.
RS: Why study animal psychology?
BH: So I think the reason that you would study animals and animal psychology is really if you want to understand humans, if you want to understand what it is to be human I think we have to first know what it is to be not human. How in the world are we going to know what it is that makes us different or unique? How can we explain why we're able to cooperate, why we're able to do all the amazing things we do, if we don't know what is so special about our species. Because a lot of ideas that people have about oh, well, you know, you can take it back to the original discoveries of Jane Goodall. People arguing about oh well what it is to be human is we make tools and we're the only species that makes tools. Well that's not true. We now know that lots of animals make tools so we can find out that ideas like that aren't true. But what this, what we want to build towards though, for this project is really a second question that people haven't tended to ask which is once you do figure out what it is that's human, how did it happen, what was the process. And so a lot of people, the research program is over when you see oh well chimpanzees use tools like we do so oh well, that's the idea was wrong. But if you're interested in how that ability came to be, well then the fact that lots of animals use tools is an amazing opportunity because you can look at what is it that makes all those species that use tools and make tools different from all those that don't. And because it's happened repeatedly gives you a big chance to test some ideas. But right now we haven't been able to do that because there we, we, you know, that requires large numbers of people working together.
RS: What does it mean to be human?
BH: So that is an easy question, what does it mean to be human. So what does it mean to be human? I mean the truth is that I don't typically ask the question what does it mean to be human. I ask the question what makes us human. What I mean by that is psychologically, what are the types of problems that we can solve that other animals can't solve that allow for things like language, that allow for self-awareness, that allow for thinking about the thoughts of others, and being able to imagine what it is to be another person. You know why do we have the rich cultures that we have? So-- so that's really how people have tried to empirically test ideas about what it is that makes us human. But of course all of those things are vital to what it means to be human. All the meaning of human life, I mean, if you-- if you can't imagine what it is to be like someone else, how can you love someone. You know, if you can't participate in culture, how can you appreciate art? So you know, of course understanding what it is that makes us human has everything to do with what it means to be human.
RS: So connecting it to animals in terms of understanding the meaning of being human, explain to me understanding how a dog quote thinks or acts, helps you understand humans?
BH: So if you want to understand for instance there's some-- there's something that we do as a species that we're really curious, why do we do it. Animals often have answers for us. So the types of answers may be something about how we develop, it might be because we share an ancestor, it might be that animals can help us answer why natural selection or evolution would have favored the thing that we were interested in explaining. In each of those cases animals can help us understand all those things. So, and then of course finally it's mechanism. So a lot of times animals, let's say there's some kind of perceptual ability where we can see things in a certain way. Well a lot of times animals have a similar perceptual ability and we can study how they do it and it tells us about ourselves. So there are so many questions that animals help us understand about ourselves. And you know it can be everything from how we develop, to when the thing that we're trying to understand in ourselves first appear, is that it's only our species or is in lots of species. What's the mechanism, how does it work? And you know what's it good for, what's the function. How does it help for survival and reproduction? So animals have something to say about all those questions.
RS: How does Darwin fit into our understanding?
BH: Darwin fits into our understanding of all these questions, I mean obviously evolution is the, is central for us and Darwin was really trying to think about, I mean the way-- he wrote The Origin of Species in 1859. He writes The Descent of Man in 1871. So he waits 12 years to write his book about humans. And, but The Origin of Species really was all about trying to understand you know, humanity, and the evolution of our species. So obviously Darwin is you know the beginning of everything for us and the challenge he had though for the purpose of the things that we do is psychology didn't exist as a field. And so he was trying to think about human psychology when there was no psychology. So really he was before his time in many ways. And one of the big challenges that he had to solve was humans can appear so different from other animals that it's actually for-- I mean often the first thing I have to do is explain how good animals teach us anything about ourselves, because we seem so different from other animals. So his first challenge was to say, and I think he really awoke the scientific world in many ways saying no, the psychology of animals is going to tell us a lot about ourselves. And then the second thing is he said, and really it's his question that this grant is trying to finally be able to approach in a serious way is, is it really that all of these different ways that animals interact with our world, they've evolved and we can explain them you know, using evolutionary theory. And his-- his predictions about how the mind evolves.
RS: How did our psychology evolve?
BH: Psychology evolved as a field in Europe and the United States. And really the, you know, Western psychology evolved in Europe and the United States sort of in parallel. I guess the main schools were folks who started thinking about evolution. There were folks who were really sort of trying to do the first experiments. And they used a technique called introspection where they would just think about what it was like to be human. But then they started to use experiments. Obviously there was you know, Freudian psychoanalysis, and all those things sort of happened in Europe. In the U.S. actually, one of the big contributions of psychology in the United States was animal psychology. And using some of the you know, the first experimental approaches and trying to adopt them to try to understand animal psychology. And so really those were the forces that work together to create what you know, became one of the most successful scientific fields there is.
RS: When you look at animal kingdom, are there non-humans who should not be considered?
BH: So if you're thinking about which animals are useful and are there animals that should or should not be considered as relevant to thinking about ourselves. I mean the truth is that any animal is going to be relevant because if your question is especially, how does intelligence happen, how does it evolve, why do some species solve problems one way and other species solve problems another way. Then all species are irrelevant to answering that question and testing your ideas about it. And of course mapping that out has big implications for then finally trying to understand ok, well then what about our species. Now that we know how this happens in all these other species, how then can we use that information to answer questions about ourselves?
RS: Cognitive evolution, hidden life inside your mind?
BH: Cognitive evolution is just you know, just like any other type of evolution. It's a biological process. It means that there's changes in the brain that lead to changes in how animals solve problems. But those changes in the brain would be heritable, they wouldn't be changes in the brain that you acquire during your life. So cognitive evolution would be between two species, there are sort of heritable changes that have occurred in two different organisms' brains, that lead them to behave, solve problems, and interact with one another in really different ways. And the study of cog-- cognitive evolution is trying to understand well why do those changes happen. What are the forces that drive those changes? For instance, is it that ok, well one species eats fruit and the other species eats leaves, and if you eat leaves well leaves don't run away and leaves are sort of everywhere. Whereas fruit, they're not always there, they're not always ripe. Obviously there's periods where they're available and not, and that's a more complicated problem potentially to solve. So is it the fact that some species eat fruit and others eat leaves, what's driving the change in the brain and how it expresses problem solving.
RS: Diet and intelligence?
BH: So the first time we brought a lot of people together to work on a problem of cognitive evolution, we were able to present 36 different species with a problem that we thought would measure self-control. Sort of you know, you have to resist making a response that seems like the obvious solution to a problem. Now when we studied all these different species we also had a lot of other information about their lifestyles and about their brains. And so one of the big surprises was and one of the things I was really excited about was testing the hypothesis that really the thing about their lifestyle that made them make species solve problems more flexibly is their social world. But what we found instead was that really if anything in their lifestyle was shaping how they could express self-control, it was their diet and what they eat and so that gave us a hint that really the force that may be driving changes in self-control in evolution is diet, perhaps more than the complexity and the political machinations going on in animal social lives.
RS: Example?
BH: What we found was that animals that have more complex diet, so basically just eating different types of food, a larger range of food were the species that did better on the self-control tasks. Species that had a much narrower diet, they-- think of a narrower diet would be like a panda eating bamboo or a koala eating you know, a few types of eucalyptus leaves, versus say a great ape where you know, all apes, humans included, eat hundreds of different-- of different species. And so the idea there is perhaps when you're having to make decisions as you're foraging about what to eat when, and you have to sort of inhibit oh, well there's food here and I'm hungry but actually I'm not going to get as much out of the thing I'm sitting in front of, I should move to the next source where I'm going to actually get a bigger payoff. And so you have to show some self-control. If you're just a panda and you're just always eating bamboo. I mean there's always bamboo. You just eat the bamboo. There's really no need for self-control. So the taking is, that this force, this need to rely on different types of food may have shaped the brain so that you're able to self control and move between different food resources.
RS: Why is understanding self-control so important?
BH: Well, we got interested in self-control because it's vital to almost everything that we do as humans or that animals do. You know, every decision requires sort of con-- you know, contemplating different options and then making a choice. And often there's competition between those choices and you have to sort of have enough self-control because maybe one-- one choice seems really obvious. You have to have enough self-control to then contemplate which one might really be in your best benefit. And almost every decision you can think about is going to involve self-control. Whether it's a social decision, what should I say next, what should I do next, what should I eat, where should I go. All of those decisions involve self-control. So it's thought to be, you know, really central to decision making in humans and animals.
RS: In the animal kingdom, self-control as an example?
BH: Self-control in animals would be something like you know let's say I want to go eat food over in that tree. But there's the individual who's dominant to me. So I have to actually wait till they leave, I have to have enough self-control to wait till they leave so that when I go over to eat I don't get attacked. So you know, you really have this urge to go eat, but you've got to control your urge to do it, because it's in your best interest until they leave. Another example of you know self-control would be I'm on a tree and I'm a squirrel, let's go with an animal that is not a primate. I'm a squirrel and a tree. I really see some great food in the next tree over but it's too far for me to jump. So I've got to control my urge to get closer to the food because I'm not going to make it and I've got to go all the way down and take a detour and then go all the way back up the next tree to get the food. So self-control is really important for so many decisions whether it's foraging, finding food, or making decisions socially.
RS: Self-control versus memory?
BH: Well memory is, in animals and humans, is what allows us to use our previous experience to solve new problems. If, without memory you know, everything would be new every time. And so, you know, memory has been powerfully demonstrated in lots of different animals and even more interesting there's different types of memory. It seems that different animals have really in some cases much better memory than even humans for very specialized types of memory.
RS: Such as?
BH: Well probably the favorite example is there are birds that are called Clark Nutcrackers, they live in the western part of the United States. And they hide thousands of items during the spring and summer that they rely on during the winter. And they have to go back and find them during the winter. But when they hit them there's no snow when they find them there is. Somehow they're remembering where they're hiding thousands of items and when they've been brought in and tested for their memory, it's not just that they're using some kind of funny strategy where you know, they hide it in some pattern that they could just repeat that pattern. No, they really remember the locations that they're hiding all these things. I mean I can't even remember where my keys are in the morning and these birds are remembering thousands of locations where they've hidden things. It's super impressive. So some animals have cognitive abilities that can outstrip our own. Some animals have types of intelligence we don't have in our species. I mean the most, the best example and I love to say this to people when they, when they, you know, how can you say that an animal can be more intelligent than a human. And I always say well how did you do on the echolocation test. You know, obviously you'd be hopeless. We don't have the ability to echolocate. There's-- you know, echolocation has evolved multiple times in mammals. You know bats can echolocate and so can cetaceans. That is the type of intelligence and perceptual system that our species does not have and it's incredible how cool it would be to locate. So you know, that would be a type of question we would want to address is why is it that that type of intelligence evolved in those species and it did not evolve and our lineage and our close relatives and of our species.
RS: How do you define diverse intelligence?
BH: So for me it was a natural fit, diverse intelligence, because while many people in psychology, especially those who have studied humans have really focused on something called general intelligence and the argument is that among individuals within our species, there really is this one factor that can explain intelligence. And it's general intelligence are also known as GI. But that starts to fall apart, that thinking starts to fall apart when you consider other organisms because going back to our thinking about echolocation, I mean, how does echolocation fit into it GI. I mean how-- how you know, somebody who has a really high IQ on IQ test that would be attributed with high GI? How do they do in echolocation tests? Well they'd get a zero. And so what that paints in stark relief is there are diverse intelligences. There are different forms of intelligence on this planet and if you study evolution, now you have the fun task of trying to explain why. Why is it that there are these different types of intelligence? And take memory. We know that from neurobiological work that you can have damage to certain parts of your brain and it affects a certain type of memory that you have, let's say your autobiographical memory, but it doesn't affect your spatial memory and how you remember where things are in space. So even in humans we know that it's not just that there's this one thing that we can call intelligence even with our own minds there's different types of memory.] Now memory is just one type of intelligence. That doesn't you know we think there's intelligence for empathy or intelligence for you know, deceiving others or trying to remember social events or you know, where things are in space. And then of course things we normally think about mathematical ability or abstraction, creativity. When you study animals it makes it difficult to settle on this concept of general intelligence as a diverse intelligence is a natural fit.
RS: Is it appropriate to use the term intelligence?
BH: I'm happy using intelligence for creativity or other ideas like that simply because when you take an evolutionary perspective, all of those abilities, they are products of our minds. And they certainly have an evolutionary history. And I would posit that they have a function. And so for me intelligence is solving problems that are going to help you survive and reproduce and almost certainly they involve your brain that is representing storing and processing information you're taking in. And if it's involving those, if it involves those things, you know it's intelligence to me.
RS: What would you mark as important milestones?
BH: I think Darwin obviously played an important role because he's the first to say listen, I think the gap or the or the distance between human and animal psychology is not what philosophers and others have imagined, that there is a bridge between the gap in human and non-human psychology that launches you know a thousand ships and people then go and observe animals behaving naturally and start to understand their psychology better and obviously then we have experimental approaches. So in terms of diverse intelligence, obviously the observation and discovery of echolocation, of the fact that some animals use electricity to perceive the world that some animals perceive the world using types of energy, light, sound, that we can't perceive.
RS: Such as...
BH: Elephants have ultrasonic frequencies of communication that we can't hear. Dogs can hear frequencies that we can't hear. There's ultraviolet perception in many animals, bees that are foraging, flowers are presenting themselves with the visible spectrum of light for humans but they also present themselves in UV. We can't see it but animals that are pollinating those flowers do. So I would say that the first step is just the wide diverse range of perceptual abilities that then problem solving and flexibility is built on top of because you have to be able to bring in information to then process it and make decisions with it. And the first recognition is well, actually, the way we perceive the world is one way to perceive the world. But many animals perceive the world differently and use different senses or even types of information to make decisions. And then I would say the next step is realizing that I think in Western science there's a tradition to think that you know, nature is moving towards human perfection and that animals that sort of look more like us and that are large like we are going to be more intelligent. And there has been discovery after discovery where animals that people would not have thought could do anything particularly interesting have amazing types of intelligence. And often you know, challenge even our greatest abilities.
RS: Examples.
BH: Well one we've-- one is the Clark Nutcracker I can remember so many different hiding locations. Another would be just the fact that when it comes to communication with humans, dogs are remarkable, and in fact if you were to ask me the species that is most like a human infant in its ability to communicate with us, it's not organisms like a chimpanzee or a bonobo that are have much larger brains and are obviously closer relatives to us. It's the humble dog that is so good at this. So it's not that as you get closer to humans or large animals for instance that are going to be the smartest or most intelligent. I think that's the next step in diverse intelligence. And then the third step is to realize that there's different types of intelligence, some of which our species doesn't even possess, and that I think the key thing is that they very independently. So if you are an incredibly empathic species, it doesn't mean that you have amazing abilities to remember things in space.
RS: Example.
BH: Take for instance just the comparison between bonobos and chimpanzees that are incredibly closely related. For all intents and purposes they look identical. So chimpanzees are incredible at making tools and using tools to get food that they couldn't have access to. It ends up that bonobos aren't that good at it. And they don't use tools for extractive foraging in the wild. Flipside is that bonobos are incredibly empathic, they're very sensitive to the emotions of others and get very upset when others are upset and want to hug and console anyone who is upset relative to a chimpan-- relative to chimpanzees they're sort of masterful at this. And chimpanzees less so. So you have these two close relatives where, oh which one's more intelligent you know, is it a chimp or a bonobo, you might ask me. And what I would suggest is well, that's the wrong question. The question is, what are these different specie's cognitive profiles? Because we have diverse intelligence, there's different types of intelligence, they vary independently from one another, and it ends up that the bonobos have a profile where they're not reliant on tools the way chimps are, chimps are masterful bonobos not as much. And it's the flip for when you're thinking about empathy for -- chimps not so empathic relative to bonobos.
RS: Chimps can be much more violent?
BH: Yeah we could talk about the social behavior as well and that is probably related to the psychology. And I do think it's important to make the distinction between behavior and psychology. So you know if we take for example, bonobos and chimpanzees. So chimpanzees tend to be more aggressive, especially male chimpanzees. They will murder each other, they-- females can be coerced and beaten in horrible ways. Bonobo males really don't do any of those things. Bonobos definitely, have aggression, but the severity is much reduced. So you could say well isn't that intelligence. Well I would say those are behaviors, those are, one species has less severe aggression than the other. It has a psychology though. The psychology is what produces the behavior. And so I've spent a decade comparing chimpanzees and bonobos trying to understand what is the psychology that produces the different behavior and so that psychology is the difference in the cognitive profile, the difference in the intelligence, that's leading to more or less aggression in one species over the other. And I think what we've found in bonobos is that they are actually attracted to strangers. They actually have a preference for strangers, whereas chimpanzees are very fearful of strangers, and that really is the psychology that's leading to a lot of these behavioral differences in aggression.
RS: Bonobos select for friendliness?
BH: Yes, when comparing those two species what we've discovered is that in many ways bonobos are sort of like the domesticated dog of our ape family, chimpanzees would be more wolf-like relative to bonobos. So if you have, that analogy is that you know bonobos are like dogs to chimpanzees being wolves, and comparing everything for their morphology, their behavior, their psychology, their physiology. Many of the differences between, we see between wolves and dogs, we see between bonobos and chimpanzees. And this is a perfect example of what our project would be all about, trying to understand why that is. Why is it that you have these two distantly related pairs of species that have become so similar in the way that they've changed from one to another. What was the process that drove it. We think it's the same evolutionary force that has shaped dogs from wolves and shaped bonobos from a chimpanzee-like ancestor. And we think that force is selection for friendliness. Now the problem is if you just have two pairs of species, so we just have bonobo-chimp, wolf-dog, that's not a powerful enough test to really look at is it really friendliness that's doing this. We need to have dozens of pairs of species like this that are sort of independent measures of evolution, so that we can look at ok, so every time we have sort of these traits that look like domestication in a variety of different species, ok, it really is that friendliness is what's driving this. Then we know, okay. So when you have selection for friendliness you get the set of traits that we see in bonobos and dogs.
RS: Was friendliness an aha moment for you?
BH: Friendliness was not something that I was, you know, had on top of my mind as something that drove cognitive evolution. It certainly was the animals that taught me that. And it was, it was really two moments. So we were studying chimpanzee cooperation and while we have seen so much evidence for cooperation in wild chimpanzees, when we began studying cooperation in captive settings, trying to use experimental approaches, we had failed miserably to get chimpanzees to cooperate. So it was a big puzzle. If there's no cooperative in the wild, why is it that we can't get them to cooperate in the laboratory, and so there was this big argument in the literature about who is right. Well we finally realized the reason we couldn't get them to cooperate in captivity was because it really mattered who they were with and if they were with somebody that they had a friendly relationship with, boom, they could cooperate instantly. But if there were somebody that they were intolerant of, they could never cooperate. And we could turn on and off their cooperative ability just by rearranging them with different individuals. Now that seems so obvious, the problem was, and it goes back again to the program of this website, the real reason we didn't make that discovery earlier was it was a logistical, a feasibility problem. The people who were studying chimpanzee cooperation didn't have access to enough chimpanzees to rearrange them and so they had no choice but just sort of put them in these pairs and pairings to work together with individuals they didn't like. They had no other choice methodologically. So a website like ours, somebody who's trying to ask a question about cooperation will be able to go in and find the right resource no matter where it is in the world to design their experiment, to do a better and really launch our science forward. So the other thing that was the key moment for understanding how important friendliness is for the evolution of psychology and cognition was visiting the Belyaev foxes in Siberia. Now when I went to Siberia to study the foxes that had been selected for decades by the Russians to be friendly towards people, I mean I personally did not think that that selection regime was going to make them better at communicating with humans. The Russians, when they began the experiment in 1959, cognitive psychology didn't exist. They weren't thinking about you know, communicative intentions and you know, were foxes reading the goals of humans and reacting to the intentions of others. I mean they weren't even thinking about those things, those weren't even ideas and you know concepts that existed. So they just selected the foxes based on their willingness to approach and be excited to interact with a human, be friendly. And what happened was, over you know now it's been 50 plus years, they were able to cause evolution in the population of foxes they selected to be friendly. And not only did it change their morphology, their floppy ears and curly tails and they have piebald coats and white spots on their forehead at a very high frequency. But it also changed their psychology. And so what we found when I went to visit and tested the foxes is that they're better at communicating and reading humans than the other line of foxes they maintained for the same amount of time but bred them randomly for how they interact with humans. So that was the moment where when we went over there and I started studying the foxes, you know I would have said well if you want to breed a smarter fox you take two smart boxes and breed them together. But what we've found is if you want a smarter fox you breed friendly foxes together, and that's a surprise. You know, if you want a clever fox you breed friendly foxes. But that's what we got. And that was the first big hint, together with the importance of tolerance and friendliness in leading chimpanzees to solve co-operative problems we couldn't get them to solve otherwise. We had two pieces of independent evidence that wow, if you want to have more flexibility and more advanced social cognition you better be more friendly.
RS: Lessons for humans, in the future you might be able to breed friendly humans?
BH: Those are two complicated questions. Let me do the second one first. So there was, so you might conclude that wow, if animals get smarter by being friendly wouldn't it be nice for our species to be friendlier. Why don't we just do what they did with the foxes, we could just breed people to be friendlier and nicer. Well there's a challenge with that and it's history. And there's-- anytime you have institutional policies around humans reproducing, it very quickly becomes morally repugnant. So I think if you look at the eugenics movement of the previous century, there's overwhelming evidence that we probably don't want to revisit that. So that's number one against the friendliness. But let's just say that you know, for some reason this did, people thought this was a great idea anyway. I hope they wouldn't. But let's just say that they did. Logistically it would be impossible. And the reason it would be impossible is because it ends up that the genetics of human friendliness is supported by literally hundreds if not thousands of different genes. And even if we could identify them and even if we could identify them in individual people to know who would be the people that would lead to increases in friendliness, the fox experiment required that only one percent of that population bred every generation. So it would mean that out of the 7 billion people on this planet only 1 percent would breed if we could even identify those people and the genes involved. It's not going to happen. So we're going to have to use other strategies for ourselves. But I do think that the I do think that learning this, you know, points to important lessons for our species for sure.
Well the idea that you know, first of all that you know, I love the story of our chimpanzees versus our bonobos, for instance. Trying to study-- trying to solve cooperative problems. So we presented chimpanzees and bonobos with a cooperative problem. They had to pull a tray using ropes to be able to eat food. And once we had tolerant chimpanzees together, on the first trial they would run in, they'd pull the rope and they'd get the food. No problem. And we were able to show that once they were with someone who was tolerant that they realized that they needed their partner, that they understood that some partners were better than other partners because some had more skill at it than others. We even were able to show that they were able to negotiate, that they could negotiate if we gave them different problems with different payoffs. They really understood everything about how the problem worked. So then what we did is we actually, now that they understood everything we put them back with individuals that they weren't particularly tolerant with. And you would think then that they would be successful, but they weren't. It was like they hadn't had all that knowledge, they hadn't had all that information about how to solve the problem. So being skilled at cooperation, being, having tons of knowledge about how things work, does nothing for you if you are intolerant. Now revisit-- let's go back and-- what the Bonobos do. Well these are, the bonobos are far more tolerant than chimpanzees. We gave them the same set of problems but they had never seen it before. They didn't have any knowledge and it didn't matter who we paired them with. They solved it spontaneously. We could repair them with anybody, they had no knowledge about work, they hadn't done any of the other experiments to teach them, you know, all the vital things that made them successful. So I don't think they understood anything about why they were successful. It didn't matter because they were friends and they were tolerant so they could do it together. So it really is, when you put them in direct opposition, knowledge versus tolerance in a cooperative task, tolerance wins every time against knowledge.
RS: You've got video of this?
BH: Oh sure. Yeah, yeah.
RS: In understanding the social systems of animals, why is that important, and how does that help us as humans.
BH: So understanding humans-- sorry. Understanding the social systems of different animals does have implications for thinking about ourselves. So one of the things that we see is that there are lots of different ways that animals organize themselves socially. So some animals have really strict hierarchies. But there are other animals that don't, that are quite egalitarian. And so we can look at those different animals and ask questions about why do these different forms of social organization, you know, evolve. What-- what's the advantages for them and what the environments in which they are advantageous. Sometimes there are actually morphological signals that go with these social systems, differences in social systems. So for instance species where you have a lot of competition between males and in species where there tends to be a pretty strict hierarchy between males. Males tend to be a lot larger than females. In species where you have males mating with fewer individuals, where you can even have monogamy, males and females tend to be a similar size.
RS: Example?
BH: Well we could take New World monkeys like tamarinds, that are very similar in size and males actually are very committed to their partners, and they raise offspring together. In fact the males carry the offspring, carry their babies around for months as they grow up. You can have on the flipside are baboons, where baboons are incredibly aggressive with one another, the males are twice as big as the females, and they are constantly fighting and jockeying for position with one another and they live in really large groups and they have many partners and an alpha male is trying to dominate all the other males and keep the females sort of as his property as it were. So the fact that there's this variety of social systems in different animals, we can look at why would these different systems evolve where they did, what sort of psychological and morphological traits that go along with them, and then we can think about our own species. Because there's a mystery as once our species splits off or our lineage splits off from the other eight lineages. Well what happened. You know why-- why do we-- why did we have all the way we did. And one of the arguments is that well, a lot of it was social pressures that were leaving our brain to become larger. And that led to culture, language, self-awareness, all the things that give us meaning in our life are here because there was some huge social pressure pushing human brain evolution. So we can look at for instance, we were talking about the differential size in males and females in some species, so monogamous species seem-- males and females tend to be the same size and species that are less monogamous, you have males that are much bigger. What about our human ancestors and the fossils that have been found. What is the story there that they tell us about the social system of the past? And so what we see is that Australopithecines, that have smaller ape sized brains. They look more like baboons do where males are much bigger than females. So that suggests that they had a social system more baboon-like. What about humans? Well when you first see humans arrive with much larger brains, Homo erectus, Homo habilis probably being the earliest representatives of our own genus, well the thinking right now based on the fossils we have is that males and females were much more similar in size. So there seemed to be pressure for males to be more committed to females and probably that has everything to do with how we raise our young and the fact that our infants were more dependent and were more helpless for longer and it took a village to raise a human child with this large brain. So animals have given us the hints to be able to interpret the fossil record. Without the animal work we wouldn't be able to interpret the fossil record. And then more than that you can think about humans now. You can think about modern humans and modern humans. I think often we think of industrialized, Western people, many of us do when we think of modern humans. But when I mean modern humans I mean humans alive today. And there are humans that live the industrial life that we're used to, but on the other end of the spectrum there are people who still live as hunter gatherers, that are still living without any or with a relatively small amount of agriculture, and they hunt and gather every day. And what you see when you look at hunter-gatherers and obviously you know, some of this data is historical as well, because sadly there's fewer and fewer hunter-gatherers, is that hunter-gatherers do not have the hierarchy or the hierarchical-- hierarchical system that you see when you have agriculture and agricultural societies, state societies. Instead they have really a more egalitarian and what's been called a reverse dominance hierarchy, where small groups of 100 or sorry, 10 to 150 people living together. There is no chief. The first chief appeared after the first seeds were sowed. And that's something that most people don't typically realize is that you know, in political discourse people right now are often saying oh we're being tribal, oh it's so tribal. And you know the truth is that there were no conflicts between different groups before there were tribes. Because a tribe was someone with a chief. And there was never a chief until you had agriculture. So the work with animals helps us understand that if we want to understand the social system of humans before agriculture and agriculture is only ten thousand years old which is just a blip in evolutionary time. So for millions of years our genius was living as hunter-gatherers. If we want to think about how that reverse dominance hierarchy, and that more egalitarian social system evolved, well we're going to have to look at other animals and there are other species that have social systems that sort of can be used to model what we see in hunter-gatherers.
RS: Much of the work is behavioral, understanding animal interaction. Talk to me a little bit about the breakthrough in neuroscience and what that's doing to your understanding of animal psychology.
BH: So thinking about neurobiology, I mean how neurobiology is very helpful when you're thinking about diverse intelligence is, it really is another signal and another really important piece of the puzzle that makes it impossible not to see that there are different types of psychology or cognition or intelligence, whatever you want to call it, and that they can very independently. We know that there are different structures in the brain and that they are more or less active depending on what type of problem you're solving. There are areas of the brain that are in charge of movement. There are areas of the brain that are more responsible for solving social problems. There's areas of the brain that are responsible for processing emotional stimuli and so that's not what you would necessarily think if you know oh they were just sort of one measure of intelligence. Instead, these different parts of our brain, while they form a really gorgeously connected network they can interact and integrate all this different information, there are really different skills and talents of these different regions and so animals help us, first of all interpret and discover those, you know, that different neural architecture. And neurobiology often helps us think of hypotheses that we can then test about why different animals may behave the way they do, Bonobo Chimpanzee aggression for instance. So bonobos having less severe aggression, well, because we know about the underlying neurobiology of aggression we can ask the question well, is the area of the brain known as the amygdala, that is in charge of sort of how you respond to novel, surprising, events. Is it somehow different in bonobos than it is in chimpanzees? And the answer comes out that yes, it is, it's different in ways that were predictable given the severity of aggression you see between the two species. So it gives you another way to get at this diverse intelligence idea that areas of the brain that are involved in different types of intelligent behavior are actually changing differentially between different species depending on the types of problems that they need to solve to be successful at surviving and reproducing.
RS: Absolute brain size matters?
BH: So this is a funny story, absolute brain size. So the work that we did that led to our Diverse Intelligence Grant was funded by the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Knesset. And we had three workshops and we brought scholars from all over the world together to solve the problem of how can we study cognitive evolution. And there were really two problems that we faced. One is known as the Bitterman beach trap. The Bitterman beach trap is, if you're going to study animal cognition, how animals solve problems, it means you've got to give animals problems for them to solve. Ok, well you have to physically present them with something, either they have dissolved on their own or together if you're interested in their social skills, but what do you do about the fact that some animals have hoes and some have hands and some have trunks and some have tentacles and you know some have fins. How can you present a fair test that's going to measure essentially the same thing across all these different animal types and come away with anything that's meaningful. And that's the beach Betterman trap, is that comparing all these different species with different perceptual systems, different motor pathways, you know different you know appendages, oh my gosh. You know, how do you do it in a meaningful way? So that was, you know, the first problem. And then...
RS: How do you do it.
BH: Well how do you do it is, you-- it actually leads to the second. So the second problem is where are the animals are tested. Because most universities have zero to one people who study animal psychology. So you know, most people aren't doing comparisons because they have no animals to compare. So that's why the study of cognitive evolution really has not advanced as rapidly as other areas of evolutionary study. So we had this group, we brought together and we're going to solve this problem. And the answer to the Beach Bitterman trap is that if you can get enough people together who have enough resources to study and enough different types of animals, well then you don't compare distant relatives that have different appendages to one another. You use what's called a phylogenetic approach. And basically phy-- phylogeny is like a pedigree of life, it's the tree of life. It's the understanding of how different species are related to one another, and with that knowledge you can actually compare close relatives to one another but lots of different sets of close relatives that actually have the same perceptual system appendages and you know, motor abilities. And you can give tasks that are appropriate for those close relatives and then you can have related tests that are slightly different for a set of other close relatives that aren't close to the other set of species. So you've got all these basically close relatives across the tree of life that are really different. Each group or family of species is really different from the other family species but within the family they're pretty closely related. And you repeat your test over and over and over and over in these different families to see if in each family the differences you see between the members of those families repeat. Again and again and again. But you can use different tests now, because it's seeded in the tree of life and you have this phylogeny. Before that's not what people were doing. They weren't using a phylogenetic approach. It was just you know, oh, let's just compare animals and see who's smarter. And the truth is we just didn't have the knowledge of how the animals were related. But with phylogenetic approaches that everyone uses in any other type of evolutionary biology, if you're studying antibiotic resistance in bacteria they're going to have a tree of life for the bacteria and they're going to study why is it that this strain of bacteria is so successful at resisting antibiotics and they're going to use oh, it's in this family that happens to use enzymes in this way and that's why it's so rapidly evolving. They're going to use phylogeny. We just happened as a field not to be doing that. So when we-- when we started using a phylogeny we brought everybody together so that we could do it. We had enough resources where now we could use a phylogenetic approach. Well it solves the Beach Betterman trap problem.
RS: Examples would be bonobos-chimps?
BH: Right. So what we did is in that study we had, for example one of the families we looked at was we looked at canids. Canids have paws, right. We looked at you know, coyotes, wolves, and dogs. We also looked at a whole host of primate species and primates obviously have hands and thumbs and are very manipulative. We also looked at birds. Birds don't have, you know, arms, they have beaks and feet. And so we were able to look at different families like this and everybody who is an expert working with those animals came up with their own sort of specialized method to test the animals in an appropriate way for who they were.
RS: So it's fair to say you can compare species. It is a fair comparison or not.
BH: So if you were going to compare a goldfish to a chimpanzee, that's going to be difficult. If you're interested in questions beyond sort of you know, basic things, so extremely, distantly related species, it's very difficult to have fair comparisons. Where you-- where we can do really, really well is closely related species. So say two different species of goldfish to one another. Oh-- we can do that. Two different ape species compared to one another. We can do that. And then using a phylogenetic approach, you're actually treating each of those comparisons as one individual. So then the question is not really about are chimps smarter than bonobos, you're-- you're-- what you're interested in is your hypothesis, that it's social complexity that leads to a change in how animals remember things. Ok, well one goldfish has a really more, slightly more complex social system. This ape has a slightly more complex social system and we have different measures of memory in those distant relatives. But both of the species that have more complex social system have a more sophisticated memory system. Now what-- it wouldn't be-- two examples wouldn't be enough. We'd have to do this dozens of times with dozens of sets of distant relatives. But that's the power of phylogeny, is we can test these hypotheses about how psychology evolves by looking at lots of sets of close relatives all across the tree of life.
RS: Where are we in the arc of understanding the cognitive evolution and what do you look forward to coming years.
BH: Well what I would say is, I think we know a lot about how animals are different from humans. I think we know a lot about how humans sort of, the first question is sort of, what is it that makes human psychology different animal psychology. I think we've got a pretty good handle on that compared to where we used to be. I think where we know nothing is how psychology evolves, how cognition evolves in the animal world. There's been so little attention and effort and the reason is because we can't, we have to bring lots of scholars together, we have to pool tons of resources and expertise, and we have to use the tree of life to do it. But there hasn't been a way to facilitate that. And that's what this is all about, is we're going to build the tool that's going to change everything. And it's really going to create the moment and the possibility to really rapidly move forward on our understanding of cognitive evolution.
RS: This change in thinking about the Tree of Life. Explain to me how it differs from what was done before to why phylogeny is so important today in your understanding of cognitive evolution.
BH: So when people began comparing animals to one another or to humans, the assumption was sort of if you're bigger than if you're, look more like a human you're probably going to be more intelligent. There wasn't really, the comparisons that were made were not guided by thinking about how species make their living in the world. It was not guided by how species are related to one another. In fact the genetic revolution that allows us to build this tree of life hadn't happened. And so there really wasn't a way to make an informed set of comparisons that would have led to you know a powerful test. So...
RS: The breakthrough that has allowed that to happen is what?
BH: Well the breakthrough that allows for you know, that will allow for all these powerful tests is, moving past sort of using physical traits of an animal, just sort of what they look like and their morphology to decide how they're related to one another. To complement and in some ways, in some cases replacing that with comparing their genomes. And that has changed everything about how we understand the relationship of life and all the different organisms and the tree of life, but it also sets up this amazing opportunity to look at how different families of animals have evolved relative to one another, and have the same forces push forward or lead to a diversification of intelligence in all these different families, and not knowing who is related and in what family, we weren't able to do that.
RS: We've always considered apes to be our closest cousins, could we find out that whales or an eagle is actually closer?
BH: So-- so if you're thinking about chimpanzees when is it that we've come to find out that they're our closest relative. When did the scientific consensus sort of arrive at that? The truth is if you were to ask me that data I'd say 1997, and probably for certainty in 2000. The first hint is that-- and technically it is that chimpanzees and bonobos are more closely related to us than they are to gorillas. So really the discovery wasn't about us, it was about them. And the big surprise is that these, you know, large, hairy, animals, Bonobo Chimpanzee, that look like gorillas, actually are more closely related to us than they are the thing that they look more like. The first hint that was the case from non-morphological data is in 1984 comparing their blood types and blood proteins. So really the revolution began in 1984 and probably I would say we knew for sure by 2000 with the publication of the chimpanzee genome. So knowing that bonobos and chimpanzees are more closely related to us than the other great apes is actually a relatively new thing.
RS: It was the genome sequencing that is the breakthrough.
BH: Yeah. And that-- and that's happened throughout the Tree of Life. So this richer, better, understanding of the tree of life, is you know a 20 year phenomenon. And that's what allows us to do what we're going to do.
RS: So as you peek into the future -- give me a sense of top challenges in some of your theories and breakthroughs in coming decades.
BH: So I think the thing I'm most excited about with this Diverse Intelligence Grant and the know, resource and this tool we're going to build, is I think we're going to discover new types of intelligence. I think there are species that have been ignored or have never been studied in how they interact with the world psychologically. And when you have the ability to get lots of people excited and working together I think that's the first thing that becomes possible is we're going to discover some new types of intelligence either there they're going to be species that can solve problems we didn't know they could solve or maybe even there's it's like a completely new way to solve problems that we are unaware of. I think the other thing that always gets me excited is with these phylogenetic comparisons we're going to find intelligence, flexibility, sophistication, where we least expect it. For instance watch out for I'm pretty sure we're going to find some fish for instance doing some things that even primates are struggling with. I love that. And then more at a high level you know, theoretically, I think what we're going to be able to look at for the first time is really the ability to, so I think what we're going to be able to do for the first time is really have some competitions between explanations. And you know by using this approach we can say all right well I think social complexities have driven cognitive evolution. I think it is that you know how animals find food is what drives evolution. I think it's that-- it's the aquatic environment. Oh, I think it's the arboreal environment, people have all sorts of ideas about what shapes psychology. And we can finally put those ideas into competition. Because currently what happens is you go out and you test your idea and you find some support for it but it's very difficult to actually put those ideas into competition. But with lots of people working together and all crowdsourcing data, what is absolutely possible becomes extremely feasible.
RS: Field testing versus controlled environment?
BH: So I think a lot of people when you think of intelligence you think of, especially in the US, people think of you know, experiments and a captive environment and certainly you know I have done my fair share of working in captivity and doing, using experiments in captivity. But our field is not narrowly focused on captivity. We-- in fact we absolutely have to have observations of intelligence in the wild. Minds in the wild. There's no way that we will make progress on understanding cognitive evolution if we don't know the function, how is it that the mind, intelligence, is supporting survival and reproduction. So absolutely we will have to take an approach where we are observing animals in the wild. Hopefully people will be able to come up with ways to actually do experiments with wild animals and then will also be you know these more captive approaches will be important too, especially if folks are wanting to understand more about how the brain is impacting some of these abilities as well. So really you know, the field will have to run the gamut if we're going to make progress.
RS: Cognitive evolution, arc of history. Are we sort of at the beginning? Are we in the middle, where are we as you look at the long term history of understanding evolution?
BH: So if we're talking about where we are in the history of understanding cognitive evolution, to the exclusion of humans, so just the evolution of cognition on this planet. I mean yeah, I mean we're at the very I would say we're in an infancy where we are crawling, I'm not sure. And the hope is that you know this effort through the support from this diverse intelligence initiative will get us crawling and maybe even running if we're lucky.
RS: AI-- will that make a major contribution?
BH: I don't know. That's hard for me to say. I hope so. I mean certainly it's an interesting thing to-- let's put it this way. There have been lots of times where it would have been easy to say that some approach wasn't relevant to the questions we were interest-- interested in. And it became the most important part as you got to know what it was. So I would not be surprised if AI became central to some of the studies that are going to make the big discoveries about cognitive evolution.
RS: You've loved dogs a long time?
BH: Well, probably the reason I study animal psychology is because of my pet dog growing up, his name was Oreo and just like every dog owner, he looked deeply into your eyes and you'd look deeply into his eyes and you want to know what he was thinking. And you know, this is my guy now, his name is Congo, and same thing. What's going on through his mind and how does he think about us and how does he solve problems. That's what endlessly fascinates me.
RS: What is dognition?
So, dognition is the combination of two words, dog and cognition. but dognition that we created was a chance for you, the dog owner, dog lover, to play some of the same games that we've invented in science, to use those same games at home with your own dog, and compare your dog to all the other dogs that have played the same games. and what do you get from that is you get to understand how your dog thinks relative to all the other dogs that have played those same games and the surprise is I think a lot of people think about intelligence as something you either have or you don't have or you've got a lot or a little of. But there are diverse forms of intelligence, and this guy's got a diverse form of intelligence and so do people, and what you come to learn when you compare your dog to lots of other types of dogs is that sure, your dog may not be the best communicator, maybe your dog doesn't have the best memory, but have you ever thought about your dogs empathy? Have you ever thought about whether your dog is capable of making inferences? And it ends up that a lot of dogs who maybe they don't communicate so well or maybe they don't have the best memory, they're amazing at other things. And that's what dognition helps you understand is you know, a dog that maybe has incredible empathy you know, isn't-- doesn't have the best memory or maybe a dog that has amazing memory is incredibly empathic. So it sort of challenges this notion that there's one way to measure intelligence and people have really enjoyed playing these games at home, so it's a form of citizen science, we basically deputize you and you get to be a scientist, learn more about your own dog. But all the data that you produce and you play these games at home with your dog but you basically through our platform you can tell us what your dog did. and then everybody gets to learn from the data that you generated.
RS: Why study dogs?
BH: Well dogs are fascinating for so many reasons in terms of, you know, why they're such an interesting species. First of all they share an evolutionary history with us for the last 25 to 40,000 years.
So why dogs as species, I mean they-- why would you focus on dogs. Well, for several reasons. one is that they share an evolutionary history with us for the last 25 to 40,000 years. Their evolutionary story I think in many ways tells us about our own story. Another reason is that they're domesticated and we can look at how domestication shapes psychological behavior. And the third reason is that dogs have jobs. And they have more jobs than ever. You'd think in the era of AI and the internet, what could a dog possibly do, well more than ever. There are dogs that are helping to detect endangered animals, there are dogs that are helping people with mental and physical disabilities, there are dogs that are checking for bed bugs, finding cancers, you know, anything that involves detecting some kind of olfactory signal dogs are being trained to do really, really quite successfully. So all of those things put together, understanding our evolution, understanding the effect of domestication and the fact that they have jobs makes dogs really one of the most interesting and important species to study. and understand for instance, if they evolved as we think they did to be masters of communicating with humans, how do we use that information and the tests that we developed to conclude that, to better identify the best dogs who are going to do jobs. or how do we use our measures of psychology to identify the right job for the right dog. not every dog is going to be best suited for finding bombs versus helping somebody who is in a wheelchair. So how do we put dogs in the jobs that they're going to enjoy and be most successful with. The other thing is you know, how do we think about domestication as it relates to the happiness and well-being of our dogs in our families, and how do we think about domestication as it relates to how we teach dog things-- dogs things. How do we train dogs ? So for instance, to be concrete about it, there's debate about, so to be concrete about it, there's debate about how we train dogs. How we teach them new things. One group of trainers might argue that well dogs are like wolves, and so therefore you have to be the pack leader and be dominant to dogs so that they will obey you, and be obedient. Another group of trainers would argue that no, dogs learn like every other animal and so what you need to do is really reward them and be positive and you know, a lot of repetition, which one's right? Are-- do dogs learn like wolves and you have to be alpha and have them be obedient to you, or is it just about elbow grease and being positive and making it fun. What's the right way to teach a dog? And domestication and the effect that domestication has had on dog psychology I think is an important part of that. Because if it really is the case that domestication has fundamentally altered how dogs view social interactions, especially with humans, do we really need to be alpha over them? Are they really looking at us like wolves look at each other? and then in terms of training them with elbow grease and positive reinforcement, a lot of things that dogs learn they might be able to learn really quickly if you just give them a problem that they could solve more intuitively. or show them the solution to a problem where they can arrive at the answer more intuitively, let me give you a concrete example. So for instance, if you think that dogs learn everything kind of the same and you just have to really just practice and a lot of elbow grease, well you're going to have a difficulty explaining the following, which is that if you give dogs the problem of they have to go around a fence. let's say a fence 10, 15 feet across. And they can go around the edges of that fence to get food or be near a person or whatever they want to get that's on the other side of the fence. Well when you give dogs that problem on their own, it takes dozens of, if not hundreds of repetitions to figure out that they have to go around the fence. It's unbelievable but they cannot figure it out on their own. Wolves figure this out very quickly. But if you show dogs the solution, if you just have a dog walk around, or if you as a person walk around the fence, on their first trial they'll solve the problem. So it really just depends on how you're showing dogs solutions to problems they have to solve.
RS: Evolution from wolves?
BH: So what do we know about the evolution from dogs to wolves? So I think what we know about the evolution of dogs from wolves is that without a doubt they're, so what do we know about dogs from wolves? I mean there actually was debate about whether wolves really were the ancestor of dogs. Darwin actually thought that maybe some breeds of dogs evolved from jackals, for instance. We know now that really all dogs evolved from a common ancestor with wolves and probably that common ancestor is very much like wolves are today. There's tremendous debate about where dogs evolved, whether it was multiple events, but we do know that it was before there was agriculture. So it was hunter-gatherers, and interactions with hunter-gatherers that led to the evolution of dogs, which is fascinating because the normal story we tell about oh, people go and decide to create dogs and wouldn't it be great to have some you know, dogs around, let's make wolves, let's take some wolf puppies and turn them into dogs. I mean that just doesn't make any sense anymore, if you're talking about hunter-gatherers. Because wolves and humans were in direct competition for the same food. not to mention when you're hunting and gathering, you're going to leave wolves with your children, like that doesn't make much sense. So it had to be something else. the, I think some of the other fun discoveries is looking at how in many ways dogs have converged and become more like people, more like humans than wolves. So for instance, we know that the genes that are involved in high altitude breathing, the same genes that allow Nepalese people to live in the Himalayas are the same genes that allow Tibetan Mastiffs to do the same thing. The genes that confer malaria resistance in West Africa to humans, it also confers malaria resistance to dogs. the genes that allow us to digest starch, even though gluten-free is the big thing right now it ends up that humans have genes in our saliva and in our intestines that allow us to digest starch, and it ends up that dogs have convergently evolved the exact same approach to digesting starch. So wolves do not have a gene called, that allows for amylase, this enzyme that can break down starch to be produced in saliva and in the intestines, dogs have it. So, they're more like us than wolves on all of those counts. Their malaria resistance, their ability to breathe in high altitude, and to digest starch.
RS: Friendliness?
BH: Well, the selection for friendliness, I mean when you realize that dogs evolved when interacting with hunter-gatherers, and then you look at the effect that selection for friendliness has on the Belyaev foxes, it doesn't take much to then imagine that as humans start living at higher density, that what do we do amazingly well is create garbage, and the garbage that we create is a new ecological niche. That wolves whose diets overlap you know, almost completely with ours, especially when it comes to the you know the animals that we, that humans would be preying on. So if you're a wolf that can sneak in and get close and take advantage of the resources that humans are producing as we start living at higher density, oh, you no longer have to get kicked in the face and you know, chase whatever you eat. You know, it's going to be a reliable, sustainable, source of food. The selection though, that's going to be acting on you, if you're no longer afraid of humans, you're attracted to humans. That's exactly what Belyaev and his colleagues selected for. and so what we think happened is over many generations, there was this really strong selection for traction to humans, and friendliness and a lack of aggression. And all the effects that we see in the Belyaev foxes occurred as a result. That's the hypothesis.
RS: Some dogs have different brain power than others?
BH: I think when people-- most people when they think about dog intelligence, they're going to immediately go to breed differences, they're going to say oh, breeds. You know, different groups of dogs that we call breeds are going to tell us a lot about dog intelligence. Actually tells you almost nothing. It tells you what they look like and very little else. what-- do demonstrate what I mean by that is, when we've compared Labrador retrievers that are service dogs to Labrador retrievers that are bomb detection dogs, their cognitive profiles, how they perform on an array of cognitive tests, is as different as we see in some species. If I showed you pictures of all those Labrador retrievers, you wouldn't be able to tell me which ones find bombs and which ones help people. but when I look at their cognitive profiles, if you're going to be a bomb dog you're going to have incredible inhibitory control. If you're going to be a bomb dog, you are going to be incredibly uninhibited and you're going to have amazing working memory. If you're a dog that's helping people with disabilities, you're going to be incredibly inhibited and your memory is not as important, your use of social information is essential. So, you're going to be tapping into different skills, and your cognitive profiles are totally different in determining if you're going to be successful at your job.
RS: That's taught by humans.
BH: So, are those different cognitive skills that are important for different jobs that dogs do, is that just something that they learn and are trained or is it something that they are born with, bred for. And it's going to be both. Anytime we're talking about what creates a behavior, it's always an interaction of genes and environment. But what we know from the case of these dogs is, that they are all from the same breed, and we see many of these differences, even before they get their intensive training for these jobs.
RS: Understanding gestures?
BH: Understanding gestures is this amazing thing. It seems to develop extremely early in dogs. Of course the reason we got interested in this is because it's the skill that is so important and early emergent in our own species as kids start to learn culture and pick up language skills. in dogs, it seems to appear very early also and basically if you're a domesticated dog you're really good at using human gestures is the summary of lots of research, and it seems to, while other cognitive abilities show age decline, so as your dog is getting older, just like people, they sometimes have declines in their memory and other cognitive functions. But this use of social gestures is totally robust against aging.
RS: Example.
BH: When we have used dognition and looked at dognition data where we have fifteen thousand people or more have provided data and learned about their own dog playing these games, we can look at this large data set and ask ok, of all the different games that people have played and there's all these different aged dogs that have contributed, what are the games, what are the cognitive skills that decline as dogs are getting older. And what we see is it's things like memory, it's things like the amount of eye contact that they make, but using pointing gestures or using the direction that we look to infer what we want or where we want them to go, the oldest dogs are performing very, very well. So it doesn't, it seems like it really can survive aging really, really well. So it appears early, it lasts throughout their lives, it doesn't decline as other types of cognitive functions do, it's kind of remarkable.
RS: Big surprises?
BH: Well, I mean-- when you talk about surprises, I would say I mean there's lots of surprises from my own research. But when you say the biggest, the biggest I feel like is when I have said, when I've heard about other people doing research on topics, I say there's no way the dogs do that, I can't even believe they're trying that. and then they do it. And they do it really remarkably well. So the one that really struck me was the fast-mapping, or learning of words, rapidly. It's often misreported as sort of oh, dogs have a lar-- some dogs have been trained to have a large vocabulary. That's not the finding. The finding is that they, with one trial learning, are able to label an object, a novel object and remember that label for a week or a month later. But that's not the surprise, I mean that was surprising but the one that really, really got me, because when they were doing follow-up studies on this to see really, how do they do this, isn't like kids, where kids not only will label and object and you pair a word, but there's, you can then learn a symbol And it's that symbolic representation of the new label for that object, that really, that's one of the hallmarks of human language acquisition. and so two of the three dogs they found that could do this fast-mapping, did really, really well on using symbolic representations to pair with those object labels. So let me be concrete. So if you were to show one of those dogs a picture, and say get this object in the picture, they could go get it. Now that-- that may sound like no big deal, but it's a two-dimensional representation, it's different size, I mean, that is effectively symbolic representation. So that-- when they told me they were doing that, I thought there is no way a dog is going to do that. I can't even believe you're trying, but yeah, go for it. And not only did they do it, they did it really well.
RS: Language?
BH: So when, I think when people normally think about language, I think what most people are concentrating on is syntax and semantics. So grammar and meaning. but language is much greater than that, it requires a larger, more diverse range of intelligences. to operate. and fundamental to language is understanding intentions and reading intentions in people's actions, and that's where dogs are masters. And they're really, really skilled at understanding when we're trying to communicate with them and we think that they're flexible enough where we-- it seems like we're reading our intentions like young kids do, the other thing is that learning object labels where there's a new object you have to infer that when I say oh, find the meek, well what the heck's a meek, so you have to infer that a meek isn't a red ball and blue Frisbee, I already know the labels for those, you have to infer oh, a meek is that new thing I've never seen before. Dogs, some dogs can do that, that's another critical ingredient of human language.
RS: Tone?
BH: I was just about to get there too, and then the final piece is where dogs really what dogs are really relying on as well when they communicate with us, is the tone of our voice and they are very sensitive to you know, basically what you might call baby-ese, so talking like a baby versus a gruff more growly you know, vocalization. They absolutely are sensitive and attribute meaning to those tones. So you put those three things together, understanding intentions, understanding novel object labels and tone, and that's what makes them such good communicators with humans.
RS: Are dogs man's best friend?
BH: Are dogs man's best friend... uh... I don't know, humans, are dog's human's best friend? I'm happy to say that. I know some cat lovers that get upset about that kind of thing. But I certainly would be happy to make the case for it. but you know, it's important not to lose sight, that there are other species that humans have had partnerships with. So if you take the Hadza, hunter-gatherer group in Tanzania, almost a quarter or more of their calories every day come from honey. And most of the honey they find uses the information they get from honey guides. It's a small species of bird, and every day or so the honey guides will come visit the Hadza, and they will get their attention, and then they will lead them to honey that is ready for harvesting. And the Hadza harvest the honey and the honeyguides eat all the larvae and the garbage leftover. So dogs are not the only species that have evolved an amazing partnership with humans, where everybody benefits.
RS: Lessons that humans can learn from dogs?
BH: Lessons from dogs be nice, don't bite. lessons that humans can learn from dogs. I mean I think the thing that everybody loves about dogs of course is that they're so optimistic, and you know, my dogs at home, everyday is the best and they're just always so optimistic that you know, now's going to be the fun time and and then just so forgiving. And you know, loving. So you know, I hope I can be the person my dog thinks I am. I think we'd all be better if we could manage it.