From the Vault: The Secret Intellect of Animals, Part 1

In the first of two classic episodes, Joe and Christian discuss the work of Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal, and ask the question of not just whether animals are smarter than we understand, but why the evidence of animal cognition is often so difficult for we humans to grasp. (Originally published 2/21/2017)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the Vault for an older episode
of the show. This was originally from February. This is
an older episode than most of the Vault episodes we've
been doing recently, but this was an episode that our
previous co host, Christian Saga, and I did where we

(00:27):
talked about the work of the Dutch American primatologist Friends
to Vall We I think we talked about his book
Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?
All right, let's jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to
Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,

(00:50):
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is
Christian Saga and I'm Joe McCormick, and our regular host
Robert Lamb is not with us today. Where is he?
He is on the beach somewhere, a beach. I don't
know which beach, but he just referred to it Stephen
King's Beach World. I think it might be the beach
from that Leonardo DiCaprio movie where he punches the shark

(01:11):
in the face. Did you ever read that book. I
didn't read the book, but I like, Um, what's the
guy who wrote that? Alex Garland. Yeah, Alex wrote twenty
days later I think he did. Yeah, and he also
just worked on x Makina, that movie that came out
it's a good one, and directed it. Yeah. Okay, so
we're already off on a tangent. But what are we
going to be talking about today? Well, this is going

(01:32):
to be the first part of a two part episode
on animal cognition, animal intelligence exactly how smart are all
the beasts that occupied this planet? Yeah? So, uh, Joe
and I both have dogs, and sometimes our dogs get
together and play. We have plain aids. Joe's dog is
named Charlie, and my dogs are Winchester and see Blue.

(01:54):
And we like our dogs a lot. I think it's
fair to say we love our dogs. I hate my dog.
I know I love my dog, and my dog loves
your dog. So if you this is a thing you
should know out there. If Christian loans me a book
and I bring the book into my house and I'm
sitting on the couch reading it, my dog Charlie will

(02:14):
come sit next to me. Then he will get a
crazy look in his eye and begin to sniff the
book vigorously and sniff all over it. And what we
figured out is that probably it's that this book has
been in Christian's house and it smells like Christian's dogs
Charlie's friend. Yeah. So right there, just in a very
personal anecdote situation between the two of us, we have

(02:37):
a example of animal emotion and or intelligence it could be.
And so whenever you see an animal behavior, there's always
gonna be questions about how that behavior is brought about.
Is the animal acting purely on instinct? Is the animal
having thoughts? Is it putting things together in its head

(02:59):
and a conscious way? And in a lot of cases,
it's difficult for us to know, right Like, we always
want to know what the minds of our pets are like,
but it can it can be a black box to us.
Sometimes we we just perceive behaviors and we can't see
inside the box to know what's triggering the behaviors. Yeah.
So that leads us to our main expert that we're

(03:21):
going to be consulting for these episodes, and he's a
guy named and this is how I'm going to pronounce
it for this episode, Franz Davol. He's a Dutch primatologist
and pathologist, but he refers to himself, as we're going
to discuss through this episode, as a researcher of evolutionary cognition.
And he's actually based here in Atlanta at Emory University.

(03:42):
He's also a director at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center,
which is also based out of here, uh and he
studies primate social behavior. Now we're gonna be talking about
Dr Duvall's work in today's episode and then the next episode,
but we're also going to be bringing him on the
show to chat with us in the next episode, so
be sure to come back for that next time. So

(04:03):
the reason why we're talking about devolve specifically and his
his work but also his survey of the history of
animal intelligence is because he came out with a book
last year called Are We Smart Enough To Know? How
Smart Animals Are? So not the catchiest title in the world,
but it's a really good title because it very well

(04:24):
encapsulates the core question of the book. Um, it's not
just how smart animals are, though that is a primary
concern of of the book and and his research, but
it's also about if they are smart how would we
know it. Would we be clever enough to figure out
ways to detect complex intelligence and cognition in animals or

(04:45):
are we so limited by our own narrow worldview that
we are unable to find the ways to see the
intelligence in these other creatures? Right? And he says right upfront,
probably in the like first five page, is the answer
is yes, but there are some qualifiers, right, which is basically, uh,

(05:07):
that we're getting there, We're working on we're getting better
at it. Um. Now, some background on him. He got
his doctorate in biology in ninety seven, and he's most
known for his research on empathy and primates, which is
something we're gonna be covering in the episode after this. Uh.
He published fifteen books and has over a dozen articles.
Guy's I think it's fair to say prolific uh. And

(05:31):
his focus has been on research related to primate alliance, formation, reconciliation,
and quote the roots of moral behavior in the most
political of animals meaning us. Right. So yeah, Well, one
of one of his early books was, for example, about
Machiavellian behavior in chimpanzees, which is uh, which is great

(05:54):
like the idea of looking at the politics of chimpanzee
behavior through the eyes of jockeying for position and forming alliances,
trying to gain power, seeing the will to power in
our in our closest ape cousins. So have you heard
another anecdote? Have you heard this anecdote about Daval and
Jimmy Carter and New Gingrich. No, I've heard about uh.

(06:16):
I think that New Gingrich put one of Duval's books
on a reading list for his uh for I don't
know who, for people, for people in Congress, or for somebody. Yeah,
it might have just been his staff, I'm not sure.
But the story, the way that I read it through
Daval in an interview, was essentially, I can't remember which
books were which, but Carter read one of his books
and Gingrich read one of his books, and both of

(06:37):
them liked it. And Daval was basically like, I really
wish that they had swapped the books, because I think
they both would have gotten something else. Oh, so, like
one is about jockeying for power among primates and another
one is about empathy among primates. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly,
So it's kind of fun, like little anecdote, And he
said he met with Jimmy Carter actually I wonder if

(06:59):
he told him that when he out with him. But uh,
so I need to go to the dark side Garter,
I don't. That's not the impression that I get from him, actually,
and we're not going to talk about it a ton,
uh in these episodes applying his work to modern politics.
But he that is something he does with his work. Um,
what we're more going to focus on is this book

(07:22):
and how it summarizes between case studies and a history
of the discipline. I guess i'll call it of looking
at animal intelligence, uh specifically how it is coming to
defy the notion that humans are alone as moral in
thinking animals. Yeah, I think one of the central things

(07:43):
we want to talk about, and I'll revisit this later
in this episode, I'm sure is the idea of claims
of uniqueness about humans that that's central to this book,
and an idea that is the Devol attacks with two
swords in each hand. I would say he's a handed
its actor. Yeah, nice, I like that. I think I've

(08:03):
read that. Actually, if you hold swords in each hand,
it's not actually an advantage in battle, Like you can't
balance well. By D and D rules, you get a
negative two to one hand attack. Something along those lines.
I did not know that unless you have a special feat. Okay,
well let's go back to We started with the idea
of our pets. You know, we want to get in
their minds, but sometimes they can feel like a black box. Um.

(08:25):
So when you see an animal perform of behavior, an
animal does something, I'd say that there are three main
explanations you can go to, and it's not like the
explanation is just one or the other. Usually complex behaviors
might be explained by combinations of the following, but they're
they're basically three wells you can draw from to explain behaviors.

(08:48):
One is instinct responding to instinct. An instinct is a
hardwired behavior. It's an activity that we imagine being done
automatically and programmed by your genes. It's without much adaptive
flexibility or applicability to solving new problems. So birds fly
south for the winter. There are just natural triggers that

(09:09):
hit their brains in a certain way. When those triggers
hit their brains, they fly south. When I think of
instinct in my human brain, when I think about my
brain and how it reacts, it's like that my my
brain has that certain wiring, right, and that those pathways
are aligned to respond a certain way, to react a
certain way to things. But you can theoretically train those

(09:33):
pathways to change right, right, And that's the second thing
that would be conditioning. So first, you've got instinct that's inborn,
it's determined by your genes. But you've also had conditioning,
which is learned behaviors. You've had experiences. Some experiences turned
out good, some turned out bad. You can think of
those results as rewards and punishments. And thus conditioning also

(09:54):
leads us to cause new behaviors. If you've done something
that has gotten you a reward in the past, you'll
become conditioned to do that behavior more in the future. Now,
I wouldn't say that these things are like one to
one in an analogy, but it's sort of the nature
nurture argument, right, No, I think it totally is. Yeah,
So instinct is nature, Uh, conditioning is nurture. It's your environment,

(10:17):
it's what you've been conditioned to do. But then there's
a third explanation you can talk about. And the third
explanation is more complex than the other two. It's cognition. Right,
So humans do things all the time that are not
easily explicable, or at least we would say some some
you know, behaviorist or somebody might disagree with us, but
at least I would say, are not easily explicable as

(10:38):
either instinct or conditioned uh conditioned responses. They're complex behaviors
that seem to emerge from patterns of thinking. Right, right,
So before we get like way too far down the
rabbit hole here, let's like stop and define what we
mean here when we're talking about intelligence and cognition. What

(10:59):
are at least And let's keep in mind too, we're
keeping this within Duvol's framework. So maybe, um, you're out
there listening and you've got experience in psychology or in
biology and some other uh part of the discipline, and
you might disagree that we would love to hear from
you on that, But we're specifically we're not saying this
is the absolute truth. We're saying this is Duval's UH

(11:23):
schema that he presents us with in this book. Right, sure,
So cognition, well, it's basically information processing, right His direct
quote is it's the mental transformation of sensory input into
knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge.
So that would be sort of like, um, I think

(11:45):
for example of a multi use tool. Okay, an example
of cognition might be, uh, you pick up a tool
like a hammer, and you figure out that with a hammer,
you can drive nails, you can crack nuts, you can
smash windows if you want to, you could maybe uh,
you can maybe throw the hammer at somebody and get

(12:06):
a laugh out of your buddies. Depending on the hammer,
you can pull nails out right, Yeah, certainly if it's
a claw, hummer, claw hammer, that's a good word. It's
great one word or a phrase. I don't know, maybe
too anyway, But this is this is flexible application of knowledge.
You you take some knowledge about your environment, in this

(12:27):
case about the uses of a tool. You understand the
affordances of this tool, the different things it can do,
and then you can apply it to new situations that
you've never been presented before. That would probably be an
example of cognition. So then we get to intelligence. And
I've already used some D and D analogies and here
you know, out there listeners, if you're you know, you've

(12:48):
been around in our audience for a while, we kind
of throw that stuff out there. Intelligence and D and
D is basically like your your aptitude at certain things,
how much knowledge you have in your head? Right. Uh here,
what we mean by intelligence is processing that information from
cognition successfully. So you're intelligent if you can successfully process

(13:10):
that information, right, it's doing cognition good. Yeah. I like that.
That's the quote of the episode one of I called
the episode that do cognition good? Do cognition good? I'd say,
we do cognition okay? Uh no. I. So there are
a lot of different definitions of intelligence. One that I
think goes pretty much along with this, but that I

(13:30):
really like is that intelligent. And Robert and I just
talked about this in another episode we did. I like,
the definition is of intelligence as uh, the tendency of
a system to accelerate the solution of problems. So like
when you solve problems better than chance, when you start
to do better than random behavior, that is degrees of intelligence. Yeah. Um.

(13:53):
But I think I think the key to understanding this
idea of cognition, and the key in this book is flexibility. Right. Okay,
So animals can, as we've said, performed tasks that seem
very complex, but they are still acting on coded instinct.
Cognition happens when animals show the flexible application of knowledge,
and that's what to keep in mind. The animal knows

(14:15):
something and is able to put that knowledge to use
in a novel way. So an example of this would
be the episode that Robert and I just published previous
to this about Pomp Pomp crabs or the Boxer Crab.
Do you know about this, well, I've seen you guys
talking about it a little bit. Yeah, So the we
have just discovered, and we did a whole episode on
it that these crabs um they use c anemonies as

(14:37):
weapons and tools in their claws. And not only that,
but if they only have one of them, because they
like to dual wield, they will take the other one
and they will very purposely rip it in half so
that it causes it to regenerate into two different anemonies again,
so they're forcing reproduction upon the as anemonies. That is

(15:02):
theoretically an example of animal intelligence, because not only are
they tool using animals, but they know how to exactly
rip apart another living being to turn them into like
a tool. Now we're brought back to the initial problem here,
the black box problem, because I could look at that
and say, that's very impressive behavior that almost makes me

(15:23):
want to think, Wow, maybe crabs are much smarter than
we thought. But then again, on the other hand, I'm like, well,
I mean, that's an invertebrate. It doesn't have much brain
to speak of. Uh, So is that really cognition or
is that just some kind of weird application of an instinctual,
hard coded behavior that we're not understanding, some kind of

(15:44):
like u um uh symbiotic relationship between these two species
that's just developed, instinctually, fully evolved, and that it's not
like the crab has to think it through uh And
I I don't know. I mean, it's hard to tell there.
The fact that the crab has such a simple nervous
system would tend to make me want to assume that

(16:04):
that it's more likely to be instinctual, But I don't know.
That's what we're We're in the black boxes exactly where
we land with this current like area of the discipline.
It's like, you see a study like that, we don't
exactly know how to approach it in terms of saying
is that animal intelligent or not? Right? And that gets
us to one of the ideas that I think is

(16:26):
underpinning the discussion of this book. So, when we talk
about animal cognition and a scientific context, I want to
ask a question of you Christ Yes, this is something
I think we should consider throughout both of these episodes.
What is the correct position of a scientific skeptic on
the subject. Like, so, if you are being skeptical of

(16:47):
new claims, what is the default assumption before any tests
are done about animal cognition? Uh So back up and
give some context. Default assumptions. We use them all the time,
generally our default assumption, and there are things that seem
most in line with what we'd expect given the rest
of nature and natural law. It's what you'd think was

(17:07):
true if you hadn't done any experiments yet. Okay, yeah,
but see, it's interesting that you're using the term skeptic
because duvol uses that term um and it's more along
the lines that how I think of it, based on
his book, is that these skeptics are looking for evidence
in laboratory and experimental settings exactly that that's what a

(17:30):
skeptic would do. I'm saying, like, what's the skeptical starting assumption?
You don't have any evidence yet, which would you just
assume is true. Would you assume that animals do have
cognition or would you just assume that they don't. Uh So, Obviously,
if somebody, if somebody publishes a study zoology papers saying
we found a Siberian freshwater fish that can die and

(17:53):
then spontaneously come back to life twelve days later, you're
going to be resistant to that idea, even if it's
published in a good journ all right, You're gonna be like,
I don't know, I you know, I want to understand
more about this. I'm skeptical of the findings. You'd want
to see it replicated. Just one person's first hand testimony
is probably not going to be good enough. Likewise, if
you had other crazy stuff, you know, I found a

(18:14):
tree frog in the rainforest that poop's weapons grade plutonium,
you would just think like, I don't quite believe that.
I'd want really really good evidence before I believe that's right. Yeah. Um,
you definitely have to click through the headline, like, that's
not one way you can just read the headline and
Facebook and just trust it, right. Uh And so that's
because a joke everybody you should click on everything. Oh,

(18:37):
I don't know well, you should click on everything you're
interested in. That's what I mean. You should slick on
all the melts. You shouldn't just read headlines and assume
that they're true. Yeah. Also side note, if you're going
to argue with an article, read the article first. Don't
argue with the headline. In fact, we're gonna get to
that later on. But the ball has strong feelings about that. Right.
But so there's the question. You you've got this standard

(18:59):
skeptical assumption, the starting place, the default assumption. Which way
should it go with the idea of animal cognition. Should
we just assume that animals are stimulus response machines without
anything going on inside unless somebody proves otherwise. Or should
we assume that they process information and have interiority just
like us and arrive at new ideas unless somebody proves otherwise. Um,

(19:23):
So they're actually historically totally different ways to go on this.
So one way that I think is much more in
line with Devols thinking is the famously skeptical eighteenth century
Scottish philosopher David Hume. Right, he brings Hume up in
this book. Yeah, and so Hume says the natural starting
position is animals do think, it's obvious. And what Hume

(19:45):
says is, um quote, no truth appears to me more
evident than that beasts are endowed with thought and reason
as well as man. So I think it's important to
note here that Hume, let's repeat that again, he's an
eighteenth century Scottish philosopher. Right, so there's this understanding at least,
this is what I got from Duval's book, that this

(20:07):
kind of thinking was actually common leading up to in
a little bit after Darwin. Um yeah, well, I mean
this kind of thinking I think was there with Darwin.
Darwin believe Darwin did too. Yeah, But then we got
into a mode, I would say, uh, in the second
half of the nineteenth century that leaned more toward the
idea what we were going to be referring to as

(20:28):
behaviorism here, Uh yeah, or um well, just denying animal
cognition in general. But it's often associated with the behavior
at school of psychology. Right, So what's the reasoning behind
Hume's default assumption than animals think. He says this quote
tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals
to those we ourselves perform. So because animals behave like humans,

(20:50):
behave that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours,
and the same principle of reasoning, carried one step farther,
will make us conclude that, since our internal actions resemble
each other, the causes from which they're derived must also
be resembling. When any hypothesis therefore is advanced to explain
a mental operation which is common to men and beasts,

(21:13):
we must apply the same hypothesis to both. So there
he's saying, like, Okay, humans have cognition, they have behavior.
Animals have behavior that seems parallel to human behavior, so
we just extend back and say they probably have cognition too.
And I would say that's like generally before like researching
for this episode where I sort of landed on these lines, right, Like,

(21:34):
I I see my dogs every day, I interact with
other animals in my life. That's how I feel about them.
Surely they must be thinking and having emotions because it
resembles my own experience. Yeah, that's totally my default, my
intuitive assumption. Then again, I think our our intuitions we
should be strongly suspicious of. We we want to feel

(21:56):
certain ways. We like our pets, we want to think
they're like us. So we should be open to the
opposite idea too. But I think that's also my natural
starting place is that I don't know where animals we
think other animals, and even if in some rudimentary way,
probably do in some sense kind of think. And that
could have something to do with where you and I

(22:16):
fall in terms of like where we live in history. Yeah,
you know, I mean like if if we were recording
this podcast in the late nineteenth century, I don't know
how we do, that would be like a crank and
a policy. But but anyways, somebody taking really crappy dictation
exactly we would we would probably have different assumptions based
on cultural expectations. Sure, and this idea has been It

(22:38):
wasn't just you know, later after jar when it wasn't
just like people in the behavior at school that didn't
like this idea of animal cognition. For example, you go
way back to the philosopher Renee de cart Descartes Decartes.
He were so he thinks, well, I think, therefore I am,
but animals don't think. He regarded animals as automata or machines. Actually,

(23:00):
there's some scholarly back and forth. I tried to find
what's the best interpretation of what Decartes's position was. Did
he deny them all possible interiority of any kind. It's
not exactly clear, but in any case, he did not
think that animals could think. This is interesting to me because, like,
you know, I got the like very general philosophy one
oh one approach to Deckart when I was an undergraduate.

(23:23):
You know, Deckard had that that theory that he thought
hard on about whether or not he was just a
brain in a jar that like a demon was torturing
by like providing him like a matrix like sort of
virtual reality that he thought was the real world. It
was his total doubt about empiricism is that I can't
believe anything of my senses because it could be the
case that some magical being is is just giving me illusions. Yeah,

(23:47):
but he would not think the same thing as possible
for a dog or a chimpanzee that maybe they're because
they're not even perceiving and he's part of their imagination. Right.
He wouldn't even consider that. And that goes right back
to the heart of all of this, which Duval comes
back to a lot, which is human centrism. Yeah, anthropocentrism. Uh.

(24:09):
He talks a lot in the book about anthropocentrism, the
idea of of humans being the you know, the center
of the universe, or humans being totally unique, humans being
the one thing that's different than everything else. Uh. And
and I think we can talk about that a little
more towards the very end of this episode. But we
should come back to this, uh, this behaviorism ethology and

(24:29):
and and cognition divide. All right, let's take a quick
break and when we get back, we'll talk more about
animals and devoll. So the way that duvol defines it,
as he says, you know, up until I don't know,
like what would you say, maybe thirty years ago in

(24:51):
the discipline even shorter, possibly that we've really been living
in a behaviorist influenced societ id when it comes to
thinking about animal intelligence or emotion. So the basic split
that he defines here in thinking about human to animal
cognition comes from the move from a hunter gatherer society

(25:13):
to an agricultural one. This is interesting because we're well
into agricultural society by the time, you know, behavioral thinking
comes right, right, but have been for what years? Yeah,
But he says this is why science hast thought of
animals as being subservient rather than us having an empathy
for a view of the world from their perspective in
the way that we used to have to when we

(25:34):
would run around in the woods and either try to
hunt them down or avoid being their prey. That's really
interesting because so if you're a hunter, an animal is
almost like an enemy. It's like a thing that you
have to you have to empathize with, you have to
understand its mode of thinking, and it's a very active
agent that you're in competition with, whereas an agricultural animal

(25:54):
is a tool. It's the thing you use. Yeah, exactly.
So the two dominant states of thought that have we've
really viewed animals with during this time have been either
like Joe mentioned that their stimulus response machines or and
this is Devol's wording, that they're quote robots that are

(26:16):
endowed with instincts. He doesn't actually think they're mechanical robots.
He means robots in sort of the metaphorical sense. Right. Uh.
And anyone who thought about animal emotions at all was
just deemed unscientific and kind of blacklisted almost, right, And
so skeptics for instance, believe that animals are trapped in

(26:38):
the present right, that they don't make plans for the future.
One example he gives is that they couldn't possibly say
goodbye to each other. But Duval argues otherwise, and he
provides examples in this book, especially from his own experience
working with primates. Right, he comes across this idea of
or not comes across. I'd say he coins this term.

(26:59):
I believe the term anthropo denial, yeah, which I found
is a very interesting principle and I wanted to stop
and linger on that for a second. That's cool with you.
So it's related to the idea of anthropomorphism, which is
this concept that we often employee in a really accusatory way.
You know, I'm saying, uh, if you think your dog

(27:20):
thinks like a human, if you think your dog loves you,
you're being anthropomorphic. You're you're turning the dog into a
human in your mind, and that's that's bad behavior. That's
being irrational. The dog is not like a human. Yeah,
it would even be like it's seen as like the
personification of an inanimate object in some sense, right, like
when when you get mad at your computer, my microphone

(27:42):
I've named my microphone Jimmy, and Jimmy doesn't like it
when I get too close and breathe into him like this, right,
something like that. They would go, oh, like, why would
you possibly think about a dog or an ape like that?
But that's not like a human at all, because humans
love it when you breathe into them. They do. That's
how I expressed my love the human. What else is
CPR for? That's recreational, right, yeah, uh no. But so

(28:06):
a lot of times the charge of anthropomorphism, I think
is a fair one. Like a lot of times people
do draw unjustified parallels between humans and something that isn't human.
One example would be if you have some fish in
a bowl and you see the fish touching their mouths together,
and you characterize that as kissing, you're probably anthropomorphizing, right,

(28:26):
because the similarity of the action to our human mouth
touching behavior. It's incidental. Like, it's not that the fish
are having an emotional connection and they're sharing a passionate
kiss to show how much they love each other. It's
just a behavior that involves mouth touching that's unrelated to
our behavior that involves mouth touching, and fish don't use

(28:47):
tongue like they're not familiar with the French method, but
according to duvol Binobo's do indeed the French kiss. Yeah.
On the other hand, of all says that you can
practice the opposite of anthropomorphism, or maybe not the opposite,
the inverse, which is anthropo denial. It's an unjustified ape
a priori rejection of analogies between humans and non human

(29:10):
animals when those analogies are in fact apt. It's just
being prejudiced against comparing human and animal behaviors, even in
situations where those comparisons probably are in some sense justified.
The example here would be apes kissing. And this is
not like fish kissing, No, not at all. And Duval
has both experience with ape kissing and anthropo denial right like,

(29:35):
he through much of his career and the work that
he's done, has had people say to him, this is
clearly not real science, like the things that you're saying
about these animals. And yet let's let's look at one
of his case studies with these apes. What you mean
like tickling, well, tickling and kissing. Yeah, yeah, kissing is one.
Tickling is another one. So when you when you say,

(29:55):
uh so a young ape gets tickled. Right, you got
a chimpanzee baby, you tickle it and it makes rapid
in and out breathing noises. Should you call that laughter? Uh?
If you did, some people might scold you as being anthropomorphic, saying,
how can you know that this ape is laughing? Uh?
Maybe you don't know, But it does seem like a
fair analogy because humans in chimpanzees or phylogenetically extremely close

(30:20):
and humans exhibit this behavior pretty much in the same
context being tickled, and so it just sort of does
make sense that you could say this is pretty much laughter. Right.
It might not be laughter in exactly the same way
as human laughter. There might be very important differences, but
it's also a close enough analogy that the human comparison

(30:40):
does make biological sense. Right. And then his other example
was the kissing that we've referred to, And if I
remember correctly, it was something along the lines of, Uh,
there was a researcher observing this practice between their banobo's right,
and then themselves sort of said, well, let's see what
this is like. I'll show some affection to this and
I'll kiss this eight uh, and then got a mouthful

(31:02):
a tongue because it was just it was a powerful kisser.
The benobos have a different kissing culture. The benobos used
more tongue than the chimpanzees doing. Apparently, this is this
is what we've learned, So we haven't always thought like
this though, Like I mentioned earlier, Darwin himself wrote about
animal emotions, for instance, and Aristotle actually classified animals in

(31:25):
his Scala not try. I think that's terrible Greek, but
I think that's what it was. It was like his
great chain of being. Yeah, it was his simple way
of measuring like animals by human standards. The implication, though,
until recently, has been that we study animal cognition only
so we can better understand ourselves. Why would we possibly
want to know what's going inside going on inside the

(31:46):
minds of fish? Right? Uh So Duval lays the blame
for this kind of thinking on the rise of behavioral psychology.
So he provides us with an example here, specifically looking
at these birds called kittie wakes. Right. So these are
birds in the gull family, and he talks about how
these birds nest on narrow cliffs, and they're different than

(32:08):
a lot of other birds because a lot of like
gulls other seabirds might nest in open areas where their
nests are open to invasion and predation and stuff like that.
So these nests are like really high up right, yeah. Yeah,
And so the the other seabirds might need to keep
a close eye on their offspring and make sure others
don't try to come into the nest. The kitty wakes don't.

(32:29):
The kitty wakes, you can, you can put a strange
young ling in their nests, and they don't seem they'll
treat it just like it's one of their own. They
don't recognize that it's an invader. And this seems to
be because the kitty wakes leave live on these little
narrow cliffs where there's just not really much opportunity for
something else to get into the nest. Yeah, So why
would they have developed the capacity to recognize the difference

(32:51):
between they're young and somebody else is young? Yeah, so,
he says. For the behaviorist though, such findings like this
are thoroughly puzzling. Too, similar birds differing so starkly and
what they learn makes no sense because learning is supposedly universal, right, So,
from the behaviorist perspective of the kitty wake should be
the same as any other bird, right, Right. So the

(33:11):
behaviorist idea is that behavior is explained by these universal
principles of reward and punishment, reinforcement. It's all conditioning based
on what has rewarded you or punished you in the past. Yeah.
So he draws the line and he says, the difference
between behaviorism and then this other school of thought called
ethology that we're going to get into has always been

(33:32):
one of human controlled versus natural behavior. Uh. And the
tenant here is that comparative psychologists had animals perform arbitrary
tasks unrelated to the problems that they actually face in
their natural environment. And this was how we gathered and
tested their intelligence. So, using the kitty wake example, we

(33:53):
weren't you know, if you took them out of their
natural environment and you noticed that they didn't happen to
understand the difference. Betwe mean they're young and somebody else's young,
some other birds young. Then you would go, what's wrong
with this bird? Right? But when you understand the context
that the bird lives within, it makes more sense. This
is a big theme of dvl's book is the idea

(34:15):
of understanding. Uh. It's a it's a term that's known
as an animal's oom velt, and the oom velt is
the idea of it's an animal's world view from its
natural place in the world. So each animal has its
own niche has its own way of interacting with its
environment the things it naturally has to do. And sometimes

(34:35):
we might be totally unable to appreciate why an animal
behaves the way it does if we don't appreciate what
its role within its natural environment is, what does it
normally have to do to survive? And those are the
things that define that animal's mentality. It would also be
things like that animals particular types of heightened senses. Its
peak specialization in the environment is the animal's oom velt.

(35:00):
And if you don't understand that, you're probably going to
be testing the animal in ways that are not appropriate
for that animal. Yeah, And he gets this term from
a guy named Ya cub Funks Cull. This is a
tough name for me to pronounce, man, if you look
at all the consonants in front of me here. But
umvelt translates into surviving world and it's essentially describing an

(35:24):
animal sensory context. Of all calls this in his book,
he refers to it as the magic well of the
life of animals, right, and each each species has its
own magic well. The magic well is another really interesting
idea that he draws on in the book repeatedly. That's
a it's a metaphor for the idea of a well
that the more you draw out of it, the more

(35:44):
it produces a well that never goes dry. Right, It's
like the well wouldn't be like the golden goose because
if you keep if you try to get the gold
out of the goose, it dies. This would be the
opposite of that. This would be like the more you
kill the goose and pull the gold out, the more
gold is in it. I didn't know that the golden
goose died if you just kept taking gold out of it.
Is that the myth? Well, No, I think it's that
the goose lays golden eggs and then somebody wants to

(36:06):
get the gold out of the middle of it. They
kill it, and then there's no gold inside and realize that. Yeah,
that's the story. It's to punish you for being greedy
and not being happy with what you have. But but
the analogy is the golden egg once a day and
you want, okay, right, and so I stretched this analogy
to a really torture rack position. But this would be
the goose that you kill it and you open it

(36:27):
up and it just keeps producing more and more gold
from the inside. It is a magically re replenishing source.
And the idea here would be a magically replenishing source
of new ideas and information. Interesting things to learn about
an animal. One example would be the b But with
many species, you can find their magic well. And once

(36:48):
you have found their magic well, you know they're sort
of area of specialization you can you continue to find
more and more surprising and interesting things about them. Yeah.
The way he says it is that animals are driven
to learn based on their context. So once we immerse
ourselves within that, there's a whole magic well of things
to learn about that animal and their intelligence. Uh. He

(37:09):
gives one example here, I like as like bringing it
back to the behaviorism versus ethology sort of schism. He says,
one can train goldfish to play soccer and bears to dance.
I knew about the dancing. I didn't know you could
train gold fish to play soccer. But it sounds right,
he says, it sounds like one of those good studies,
but does anyone believe that this tells us much about

(37:30):
the skills of human soccer stars or dancers. Makes a
good point there, right, you know, like, yeah, through conditioning,
you can get a fish to do this, or you
can get a bear to do this. But what does
that say about the human condition? Not a whole lot.
And what does that say about bears or fish Benga,
Probably not much about them either. Yeah, So I think,
as we mentioned at the top, he is a director

(37:51):
at the Yurkey's Center, which is here in Atlanta. That's
a primate study facility, and he says that in the
nineteen fifties, actually the center was found it in Florida,
and so there was a lot of tension there between
their staff and the behaviorists who came in and worked there,
because the behaviorists wanted to starve the chimpanzees that they

(38:11):
were testing so that they would be more likely to
respond to reward based conditioning. Uh. And he said the
rumor was that the staff would sabotage the lab by
feeding the animals at night, and the behaviorists just basically
we're totally disgusted and threw their hands up. We're like
we can't do anything with this. It's fascinating. You won't

(38:32):
properly starve you know what. It reminds me of. Have
you seen any of the current batch of the Planet
of the Apes movies? Oh? Yeah, I have, like the
first one with James Franco. I thought that movie was
bad until all the human actors left and it just
became about the apes. And once it was about the apes,
it was great. Yeah. Yeah, I kind of like them.
I haven't seen the second one yet. I think I

(38:52):
think the third one is coming out soon. I don't
know the second one. I thought the second one was
kind of good. Yeah, okay, well I need to check
it out. But that this is what was comping up
in my head as I was reading. I can't totally
vouch for scientific accuracy. Yeah I don't. We'll have to
ask what he thinks about it's a good ape storytelling.
So all right, I'm gonna take us on a tangent

(39:12):
here for a second, because many of you may hear
behaviorism or operating conditioning and the first thing that pops
into your head is B. F. Skinner, because he's the
guy we're all taught about in high school. Basic, basic,
psychology usually involves some kind of Skinner research. Right. The
Skinner was massively influential in twentieth century psychology. Now, I've

(39:33):
got a weird example here about Skinner's thought process, but
it's also related to my own education. Okay, so you
were put in a box with electric shocks. Yes, but
that doesn't have anything to do with this. No. Uh.
I had heard this whole story from my psychology teacher

(39:54):
in high school that Skinner put one of his children
in a Skinner box. Explaining this, hold on, you gotta
explain the concept of a Skinner box. I'm going to
I remember I remember being like really, like that's allowed,
Like I couldn't believe it, And here it is and
it isn't and I'll explain why. So, but I'm using

(40:14):
this as an example. It's a little bit of a diversion,
but it shows you the kind of thought processes that
Skinner had when he was testing. Okay, so uh, there's
confusion about Skinner boxes. The ones we typically recognize are
the metal boxes that he invented to test rats by
giving them rewards for training and operating conditioning in which

(40:35):
any behavior could be trained using variable reinforcement. Right, teaching
a bear how to dance, teaching a fish how to
play soccer, teaching a rat to you know, I don't
know what they were doing, like pushing panels and stuff
like that. Skinner also invented something called the air crib,
which is also sometimes referred to as a skinner box
or a baby tender. It sound like a chicken tender clothes.

(41:01):
He put his daughter in it. It's true, he did
put his daughter in this thing, but it was not
anything like what were we commonly think of as skinner boxes.
So this is where my my high school teacher got confused. Uh.
It was a spacious compartment that was mounted on a
wheeled table, and it had a window in it and
temperature and air control, and you would put these babies

(41:22):
inside it and the baby could move freely around within
it while it's mother was within visual context. So say
like the mother needed to go cook in the kitchen
or something like that, and she couldn't constantly, you know,
be holding the baby while she was cooking. She put
it inside the baby tender, wheel the baby tender over
near the kitchen and she'd cook and kind of keep

(41:42):
one eye on the baby. Uh. This was Skinner's like solution.
It was specifically because his wife was like, they had
a second child, and his wife was like, oh my god,
it's so difficult to do all these things for the
first year of the baby's life. Okay, so other people
actually used this device. I think it was commercially available,

(42:02):
but it didn't really take off per se um. There
are a lot of critics of it though, and they
said that babies would be socially starved by being put
in these boxes. Skinner himself argued, that's not true. The
baby receives the same amount of attention, if not more,
inside of my baby tender slash aircrib. Wow. Yeah, So

(42:24):
another trivia question about Skinner. Do you know Skinner wrote
like a utopian novel. Yeah, it's called Walden too. I
didn't know about this in LA I have heard about
that reading about this for the episode, and apparently it
has been the inspiration for some real like planned communities,
something that Peter Teal would be into. I don't know
about him. But no, actually no, I think it is

(42:46):
not a It's not a rapture libertarian right. Uh. No,
it's more like utopia. It is more like a thing
where you have it's essentially I think behaviorism put into practice,
so it's like top down control of culture in a
way that is maximizing people's you know, good tendencies or

(43:07):
something like that. I don't know that much about it,
so I can't speak about it. But he did write
a utopian novel, and as people going to this planned
community is sort of like a novel of ideas and
people like debate about things. Well, he was certainly a
renaissance man. I think we can say that about B. F.
Skinner Um. But just to clarify, hear all these rumors
about him putting his daughter in a skinner box, They're

(43:29):
not true. In fact, there were the rumors turned into
urban myths about him doing experiments on her and that
she eventually committed suicide because of her lack of social conditioning.
None of that is true. She went on to lead
a life and lived in London, I believe, Um. But yeah,
I learned this in a p psych in high school.
You know, we we learned the basics of operat conditioning,
and then my teacher just told us that story, like,

(43:52):
oh yeah, he even put his kit inside a skinner box.
And I was like, anyways, uh, he's get back to devolved. Yeah,
let's come back from this diversion. That was me just
sort of showing you the methodology of behavioral thinking. Yeah,
but so yeah, so we are. We're back to this
idea that the behaviorists, according to Daval, you know, he

(44:12):
made this charge that they treated all animals kind of
the same. They didn't want to think about instincts so much.
They didn't want to think about what was natural for
this animal in their environment, and it was all just conditioning.
You could apply the standing animal and that that's not
what Dvol is down with, right, and he especially hates
it to sort of the opposite side of this when

(44:34):
people use the term non human animals when they're doing
current research, and you're grinning. I think you know where
I'm going with this here at how stuff works when
we write scripts for videos or sometimes for podcasts, uh
talking about animal research. I don't know about you, but
some of our colleagues use the term non human animals.
I use the term and uh, man, do we get

(44:57):
negative feedback about that? Like in the comments and stuff.
People really get rubbed the wrong way? And apparently Devol
also hates it. But I think for different reasons. Yeah,
I mean the idea. When I mean I use that term,
I'm just using it to say, like animals other than humans.
I think. I think his problem with it is that

(45:17):
in some ways that it's used, it implies that it's like, well,
there's humans and then there's all these other animals and
they're all fundamentally different. I'm just trying to use it pragmatically.
When I use it, I think to say like research
on non human animals, meaning research on animals that aren't
Homo sapiens. Yeah, I tend to agree. He says it
implies an absence of humanity within the animal kingdom, which

(45:40):
he's you know, he firmly wants to ground ground us
in thinking of ourselves as being animals and being part
of the animal kingdom. Uh. And so this leads us
to actually the naming of his other field, which we're
gonna get into later. But he says, really, what we're
talking about here now is evolutionary cognition, and this is
where we look at the world from the animal's viewpoint

(46:02):
the velt so we can appreciate their intelligence. And this
is where he comes up with that rule for research
that I was telling you about. Earlier and probably would
apply this as well to your criticism of articles that
you read online or maybe on Facebook or something like that. Okay,
so he calls it to know thy animal rule, and
he says, anyone who wishes to stress an alternative claim

(46:25):
about an animal's cognitive capacities either needs to familiarize him
or herself with the species in question or make a
genuine effort to back his or her counterclaim with data.
And then he says, anyone who intends to conduct experiments
on animal cognitions should first spend a couple thousand hours

(46:45):
observing the spontaneous behavior of the species in question. Now,
this is interesting because a lot of people would say, like,
wait a minute, why do I need to study that?
I mean, in many cases, what you'd want is somebody
who dispassionately observes an animal, uh with you know, with
as little baggage as possible, to just come in and
strictly observed behaviors in the test environment. And there's some

(47:07):
truth to that. I mean, you don't want to let
your biases and your feelings about an animal guide what
kind of observations you make in a test. But at
the same time, when you're designing a test of animal intelligence,
if you don't totally understand that animal and how it
naturally behaves, you're very likely overlooking something absolutely crucial that

(47:29):
could change the way your tests should work or how
to interpret your results. Going back to the bird example,
knowing that these birds live in such a high, out
of reach places, why would they possibly care if another
bird of the same species fell into their nest? Right? Yeah,
And this is another theme that comes up, the idea
of observing animals in their natural behaviors, in their natural

(47:53):
habitats um. This comes up I think in the the
idea of like, okay, so how should we do science
respect to the idea of anecdotes? This is a disgust
a lot in the book. It's another conflict between two
different desiderata in in getting the best scientific view of
an animal. So one thing would be that we don't

(48:14):
want to just have our scientific ideas about animals completely
informed by anecdotes where somebody says, hey, one time I
saw a chimpanzee, do x R right? Well, And that
that's going back to our example from the beginning of
the episode. You and I have experienced anecdotal experiences with
our dogs right, but they're not under laboratory conditions, right,

(48:35):
So you have anecdotal experiences. But then again, on the
other side, you could have this mentality that says, well,
I'm not interested in anecdotes about what animals have done
in the wild. You know, you may have been observing
chimpanzees in the wild and you think you saw them
do something once that indicates a certain type of cognition.
You may have seen them do something that you think
indicates that they understand how other minds work, or something

(48:58):
like that. But that's just a story you have that's
not like something that we have repeatedly tested. There's validity
to that point of view, but only to a certain extent.
And duval Uh doesn't think that anecdotes should comprise our
scientific knowledge, but he does strongly think that they should
inspire our scientific exploration. Yeah, he sees value to them. Yeah,

(49:19):
So you start with an anecdote. You observe animals, for example,
in their wild behavior, and you see one do something interesting,
and that observation of one doing something unexpected or interesting
forms the basis of a controlled test. You say, Okay,
now I wonder if we can isolate the variables here
and get them to do the same thing. So let's

(49:39):
bring that around to one of my favorite lines in
the book. This is this is I laughed out loud
at this. Okay, he said, would anyone test the memory
of human children by throwing them into a swimming pool
to see if they could remember where to get out?
And he's using this example because this is actually how
many rats are t did with what is called Morris's

(50:02):
water maze, right to see if the rats can figure
it out? So would we? I mean I immediately was like,
this is like a perfect example of humor at work, right,
Like the idea of taking something as taboo is just
throwing a child into a pool. But then it's it's
along the lines of, well, we're doing it for research, right,
and the babies somehow kind of figure out how to

(50:25):
climb out of the pool. It's the same kind of
thing he says about the rats. Well, like, how many
situations would these rats be in where they just get
thrown into a pool? Let's see, I could think of
lots of scenes in movies where they're like surging currents
of water with rats in them. Yeah, there's like one
in the Indiana Jones in the last crusade, there's like
a rat flood in there, and that's not really their

(50:46):
natural habitat though. Right. Another thing he says to keep
in mind about most labs, and I didn't know this,
is that most labs keep their test animals at eighty
five percent of their typical body weight. And this is
so that they'll be more motivated by food as a reward. Yeah,

(51:06):
but this could also go the other way. I mean,
it could also be causing problems for test results, because
what if animals don't behave the way they normally would
if they're hungry. Yeah. It was criticized by the well
known primatologist Harry Harlowe actually, and he argued that animals
learn from curiosity and free exploration. Uh, and that would

(51:27):
be stifled by making them fixated on food. Yeah. So,
but basically, what we're looking at is a variation on intelligence.
We're not looking at different topics of intelligence. So Duval
argues that if we fail to find cognitive capacity in
a species, well there's something wrong in our approach as
human beings, not with the actual species itself. Right, So,

(51:51):
going back to the crab example, you know, uh, we
haven't come up with an approach yet to quite understand
what's going on with the crabs that are ripping these
anemones apart and using them as a two handed weapons.
You know, I don't know what that approach would be.
I need to spend a couple of thousand hours with
these crabs before I could do that. I guess it

(52:12):
could be. I mean, a way of testing what kind
of thing leads to this would be trying to put
them in situations where they could, uh, where they could
create new advantages of tool use that might be similar
but wouldn't necessarily play on the same instincts if it
is instinct driven uh. And then he says the challenge
is to find tests that fit an animals temperament, their interests, anatomy,

(52:37):
and sensory capacities. Faced with negative outcomes, we need to
pay close attention to differences in motivation and attention. He's
referring to the animals here. All right, we need to
take a quick break and when we come back there
will be more on animal intelligence and cognition. Okay, So

(52:59):
count or to this behaviorist mode of thinking that has
really dominated our thought about animal intelligence for at least
a century or more. Uh, Duval talks about the discipline
of ethology. Yeah, ethology the study of animal behavior, but specifically, uh,
sort of instinctual animal behavior that is common to all

(53:20):
of the members of a species. Yeah. He he refers
to it as being about spontaneous behavior. So going back
to our examples from the beginning, right, it's more instinctual. Um. So,
I have a question for you and and maybe for
del I'm a little confused here. Did this spin out
of evolutionary theory from Darwin? Uh? Well, yeah, I would

(53:42):
think so. I mean, it seemed like it, but I
couldn't draw a direct line. I mean, all all modern
biological theories are in some way rooted in in the
modern synthesis of evolution. But you, I guess you could
say that this is very specifically base Ston thinking about
how behaviors are evolved traits, because I guess with behaviorism

(54:05):
you would say that the capacity to learn is an
evolved trade. But that can just be applied to anything,
because you know, evolutionary theory predicts cognitive similarities based on
the relations between a species in their habitat. It sounds
like velt to me. Uh So, okay, yeah, we're we're
shaped by our environments and so yeah, our behaviors are

(54:27):
shaped by our environments. Well, ethology actually started in the
eighteenth century, and that it was started by French researchers.
And they used the term ethos, which you've probably heard
me throw around on the show a lot because of
my background in rhetorical theory. But ethos is the Greek
word for character, and they used that to describe species,

(54:48):
typical characteristics. Now, William Morton Wheeler is the guy who
made it popular in English speaking study. This was in
nineteen o two and he called it a study habits
and instincts. Uh. So ethology, you know, without diving too
deep into this, well, it has its own language to
talk about instincts, stereotypical behaviors, stimuli that illicit specific behaviors,

(55:12):
et cetera, similar things to behaviorism. Now, the two people
that that Devol really mentions heavily in his book and
I Gather are inspirations for his own work our Lorenz
and tin Berken, uh. And they were partners within this discipline.
They were actually separated by opposite sides during World War Two.

(55:35):
Just fascinating. One of them was like a medic for
Nazi Germany. And the other one was where was he
in the Netherlands. I don't think he was in the
Netherlands anyways. It is fascinating they knew each other before this,
they were separated by the war, and then afterwards they
got over their differences and worked together again. It's really fascinating.
He this is a great part of the book where

(55:57):
he just goes into this history between these two guys
and kind of how they've inspired an entire generation of
people who study animal intelligence. Yeah. Now, he says, mythologists
are usually zoologists, while behaviorists are usually psychologists. That makes
a lot of sense to me. I mean, if you're
an athologist and you're trying to understand an animal's role

(56:19):
in its environment, you're thinking about the animal itself and
how that informs potential behavior, and thinking if you're if
you are a behaviorist, like the animal is almost incidental.
You're just thinking about the animal is a substrate for behavior,
and any animal really could be a substrate for behavior.

(56:40):
And I wonder if, uh, you know, as we're moving
along towards a sort of chronological history of this of
this discipline, if as they're coming together more, if we're
seeing a blend of zoology and psychology. You know, yeah,
I think so. I mean this division, as you'll, as
ud All talks about in the book, is it's less
of a division today, it's more of a synthesis. So

(57:03):
both ethology and behaviorism were actually a reaction to what
we're folk explanation of animals, right, just kind of I
guess what we would call urban myths today, right, or
even people who you know might have been thought of
as scientists of the time, but we're sort of being
scientists by anecdote, like not super rigorous scientists saying like

(57:25):
I once saw you know, bird do this, This is
what birds can do well. Actually he gives a very
good example of this. Uh. And he blames it all
on the guy who followed Darwin, who Darwin chose to
be like his successor in this theory of evolution. Uh.
A lot of misinformation came out of scientific anecdotes, like
you're talking about. The guy's name was George Romanez. I

(57:47):
believe it is how you pronounce it, uh, And he
was a perpetrator of this. Here are two things that
he said. He said that rats would form supply lines
to hand down stolen eggs from like a you know,
either like a farm or like just a chicken's nest,
that they would pass these eggs down to their holes.
This sounds like a Disney cartoon to me, like the

(58:09):
idea of them, like they're in a little like assembly line, right,
and they're just passing the egg back and forth, singing
a song or something. Uh. And then the other one,
this one's nuts. Uh. He told the story about a
monkey that was hit by a hunter's bullet and then
the monkey smeared the blood on its hand and held
that hand, the bloody hand, up to the hunter to

(58:31):
make the hunter feel guilty. Now, even as somebody who
is uh sympathetic to the idea of complex animal cognition,
that seems like a stretch. How do you know, even
if that's really what happened, how do you know the
ape was trying to make the hunter feel guilty. That
seems a little crazy, right, yeah? Um So. Ramanez subsequently

(58:53):
led to a guy named Lloyd Morgan, and Morgan had
an interpretation that animals are mainly stimulus response machine. So
that's basically how we got to that behaviorist thinking. Because
of this this one guy who kind of just went
rogue and then there was a response within the discipline
to him. Another example is a great story and I

(59:14):
had heard this story before reading the book, but it's
a wonderful story. The story of Clever Hans. Right, the horse,
Clever Hans who could do he was a math genius.
Yes to the idea here was that apparently Hans would
literally be trotted out to crowds and his owner would
ask it to perform math problems and it would get

(59:36):
that the answer right, every clumpets hoof, I think that's
how to count off a number. That would be the answer,
and everybody's like, Wow, this horse, it's got an amazing brain.
It can do square roots. Can a horse do that? Yeah? Exactly.
And they figured out that it was actually through conditioning
right that the horse was probably What they think happened

(59:57):
was the horse was responding to cue from its owner,
so it would start clamping a number, and then the
when owner got to the when it got to the
right one, he would be like ah, yes, yeah. The
owner would show like either positive body language or I
think he They said something about a hat with a
big brim. Yes, he would. He had a hat with
a brim that he would be looking down at the

(01:00:19):
horse's hoof while the hoof was tapping, and then when
it got to the right number, he would stop looking
at the hoof and lift his head up, so the
horse would subsequently stop. That was what was going on,
basically to the point where when this was revealed, it
wasn't like the owner was duplicitous and like trying to
trick everybody. He himself thought that this horse was able
to do this. Yeah, and but this serves as a

(01:00:40):
great cautionary tale about about these kind of anecdotes where
we attribute to were too credulous. We attribute too much
cognition too readily to animals without being scientifically rigorous. This
actually led us to using blind studies with animals because
they because of the whole Clever Hans incident, Duvall actually argues,

(01:01:02):
he says, you know, it's interesting, though we don't do
the same thing when we test the cognition of human children.
Though there's a whole section about this in the book,
uh Improper analogies between they're all these tests that try
to say, oh, is a chimpanzee smarter than a three
year old child? Is a chimpanzee smarter than a five
year old child in different domains of knowledge. Um, but

(01:01:23):
a very common problem with this is that the chimpanzee
and the child, the human child are just not on
an equal playing field in terms of test environments. Children
are surrounded by members of their own species. They're probably
much more at ease and comfortable, maybe with their parents
in the room. Uh, They're just all kinds of ways
in which these testing scenarios are not equivalent, and yet

(01:01:46):
they're the results are being treated as if they're done
across an even playing field. Like his example is in
the same way that we wouldn't have clever Hans being
a room with his owner and his brimmed hat, we
shouldn't necessarily have these children being this ame room as
their mother's, Like they're literally testing these children while they're
in their mother's laps. So it's interesting he points out
the contradiction there. Now these two schools finally come together,

(01:02:11):
and I think this is where we're gonna cap off
this episode. But basically, behaviorists and mythologists started working together
in nineteen fifty three, and this is when Daniel Lerman
and Tim berg and started a friendship and it started
ongoing criticism not of each other's camps, but within each
camp of its own tenants, and I think each each

(01:02:34):
camp obviously had legitimate things to say about the other one, right,
I mean today, if you would try to if you
try to be a chauvinist about you know, it's it's
all instinct or it's all learned behavior. I mean, I
think either of those positions is silly today. I mean,
obviously animal behaviors or combinations of instincts and learned behaviors.
As we outlined at the beginning, it's like saying that

(01:02:54):
it's only nature, it's only nurture. Try to use a
little bit of both, right. But then also this lead
is the question, even even if you're you're talking about
an acknowledgement of the influence of both these things, there
is still the question, what's the role of complex cognition,
what's the role of thinking? Well, let's get to that
in our next episode. We've basically covered the gamut of

(01:03:17):
where the discipline of looking at animal intelligence was, but
we're gonna look forward in another episode to talking about
where it is and where it's going. Now, my question
for you out there you're listening to this, maybe you
have pets, maybe you've interacted with animals and various capacities cows.
Maybe we had a lot of people right into us
recently about our butter episode with the cow with the

(01:03:39):
window in it. Yeah, exactly, the cow with the window
in it, because I mentioned that in the episode and
a lot of people had worked with them before. So
have you seen, uh, your own versions of this play
out with animals? Have you seen what you think of
as only instinctual responses with these animals, or maybe have
you seen examples of them learning from conditioning, like giving

(01:04:00):
them treats, for instance, to make your dogs sit down,
which is something I'm working on with my dogs right now.
Let us know, there's a lot of different ways to
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We are also on Instagram, although I don't know that
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look at very pretty pictures of us, uh and what

(01:04:22):
about stuff to blow your mind? Dot com? Well, of
course that's our website where you can find blog posts, articles, videos,
other past podcasts, and our vast archive with some more
pretty pictures. Probably, Yeah, there are lots of pretty pictures.
You know what, Robert Lamb isn't in the room with
us right now, so let's just honor him by saying,
Robert Lamb has a singular talent for finding the best

(01:04:45):
possible image to go along with the podcast episode. I
am yeah, he's so good at it. I'm always surprised
at the images that he's able to pull together. But
of course, also you can always email us if you
want to let us now feedback on this episode or
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that blow the mind at how stuff Works dot com

(01:05:15):
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