The Secret Intellect of Animals, Part 1

In the 18th century, David Hume wrote that “no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endow’d with thought and reason as well as men.” Yet animal cognition has remained a controversial subject in science ever since. In the first of two episodes, Christian and Joe 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Christian Sager, 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.

(00:25):
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 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 twenty
eight days later, I think he did. Yeah, and he
also just worked on X makin A that movie that

(00:47):
came out it's a good one, and directed it. Yeah. Okay,
so we're already off on a tangent. But what are
we gonna be talking about today? Well, this is going
to be the first part of a two part episode
on animal cognition. Animal intelligen 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

(01:10):
together and play. We have plain aids. Joe's dog is
named Charlie, and my dogs are Winchester and see Blue,
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

(01:32):
and I bring the book into my house and I'm
sitting on the couch reading it, my dog Charlie will
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 dog
is Charlie's friend. Yeah, so right there, just in a

(01:56):
very personal anecdote situation between the two of us, have
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

(02:19):
having thoughts? Is it putting things together in its head?
In 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,

(02:41):
So that leads us to our main expert that we're
going to be consulting for these episodes. And he's a
guy named and this is how I'm gonna 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. He's

(03:05):
also a director at the Yerkeys 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

(03:26):
the reason why we're talking about Devol 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

(03:47):
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 and animals or

(04:08):
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 pages, the answer is yes,
but there are some qualifiers, right, which is basically, uh,

(04:30):
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 nineteen seven, and he's most
known for his research on empathy in 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.
This guy's I think it's fair to say prolific, UH.

(04:53):
And 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.
One of one of his early books was, for example,
about Machiavellian behavior in chimpanzees, which is UH, which is great,

(05:17):
like the idea of looking at the politics of chimpanzee
behavior through the eyes of jockeying for position, 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.

(05:39):
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

(06:00):
them liked it. And Duval 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 primate 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

(06:22):
you told him that when he met with him. But uh,
so he had to go to the dark side Carter,
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

(06:45):
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

(07:06):
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 uh an idea that is that the devol attacks
with two swords in each hand. I would say he's
a dual handed attacker. Yeah. Nice, I like that. I
think I've read that actually, if you hold swords in

(07:28):
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. So, when you see

(07:49):
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. One is instinct responding

(08:13):
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 hit their brains in
a certain way. When those triggers hit their brains, they

(08:36):
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 pathways to change right right. And that's

(08:58):
the second thing that would be conden stioning. 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 leads us to cause new behaviors.

(09:20):
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, it's what you've been

(09:41):
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. 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 silly explicable as either instinct or conditioned uh,

(10:04):
conditioned responses their 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 are these at leasts? And
let's keep in mind too, we're keeping this within Duvol's framework.

(10:27):
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 schema that he presents us

(10:48):
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 in to knowledge about the
environment and the flexible application of this knowledge. So that
would be sort of like, um, I think for example

(11:09):
of a multi use tool, 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 a laugh out of

(11:29):
your buddies. Depending on the hammer, you can pull nails out, right, Yeah,
certainly if it's a claw hammer, that's a good word.
It's great one word or a phrase. I don't know anyway,
but this is this is flexible application of knowledge. You
you take some knowledge about your environment, in this case,

(11:50):
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 been around

(12:12):
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 that information right,

(12:34):
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 really
like is that intelligent. And Robert and I just talked

(12:55):
about this in another episode we did. I like, the
definition is of intelligent and says, 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. Um.

(13:16):
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

(13:38):
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 seeing them and these

(14:00):
as weapons and tools in their claws. And not only
that but if they only have one of them, because
they like to duel 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 these anemonies. That is theoretically

(14:26):
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 want to think, Wow,

(14:48):
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 like u

(15:08):
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 that it's more
likely to be instinctual, But I don't know. That's what

(15:32):
we're We're in the black box. This is 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
underpinning the discussion of this book. So, when we talk

(15:53):
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 these episodes. What is
the correct position of a scientific skeptic on the subject, Like, so,
if you are being skeptical of new claims, what is
the default assumption before any tests are done about animal cognition?

(16:16):
Uh So, back up and give some context. Default assumptions,
we use them all the time. Generally are default assumptions
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 true if you hadn't done any
experiments yet. Okay, but see, it's interesting that you're using
the term skeptic because devol uses that term um and

(16:40):
it's more along alignes 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 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

(17:02):
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 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 journal, Right,

(17:23):
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 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

(17:46):
I believe that's true. 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, I don't know, Well, you should click
on everything you're interested in. That's what I mean. You
should click on all the melts. You shouldn't just read
headlines and assume that they're true. Yeah. Also side note,

(18:10):
if you're going to argue with an article, read the
article first. Don't argue with the headline. In fact that
we're going to get to that later on. But Daval
has strong feelings about that. Right. But so there's the question.
You you've got this standard 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

(18:31):
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. So they're actually
historically totally different ways to go on this. So one

(18:52):
way that I think is much more in line with
Devall's thinking is the famously skeptical eighteenth century Scottish philosopher
David Hume. Right, he brings him up in this book. Yeah,
and so Hume says, the natural starting position is animals
do think it's obvious. And what Hume says is, um quote,
no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts

(19:13):
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 kind of thinking was
actually common leading up to and a little bit after Darwin. Um. Yeah,

(19:36):
I mean this kind of thinking I think was there
with Darwin. Darwin believe, yeah, 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 we're going to be
referring to as behaviorism here. Uh yeah, or um, well,
just denying animal cognition in general, but it's often associated

(19:58):
with the behavior at school of psycho oology. 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 behave, that we judge their
internal likewise to resemble ours. And the same principle of reasoning,

(20:20):
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, we must apply the same hypothesis
to both. So there he's saying, like, Okay, humans have cognition,

(20:42):
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 I I see
my dogs every day and interact with other animals in
my life. That's how I feel about them. Surely they

(21:05):
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 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

(21:27):
that I don't know. We're 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 fall in terms
of like where we live in history, 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, it

(21:49):
would be like a crank and a pulley. But but anyways,
somebody taking really crappy dictation exactly we would we would
probably have different assumptions. Based on cultural expectations. Sure, this
idea has been it 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

(22:11):
de cart Descartes famously Decartes he were so he thinks, well,
I think, therefore I am, but animals don't think he
regarded animals as automata or machines. Essentially, there's some scholarly
back and forth. I tried to find what's the best
interpretation of what Descartes's position was. Uh, did he deny
them all possible interiority of any kind? It's not exactly clear.

(22:34):
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 decart when I was an undergraduate. You know,
decart 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

(22:56):
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,
but he would not think the same thing as possible
for a dog or a chimpanzee that maybe they're because

(23:16):
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, and anthropocentrism. Uh.
He talks a lot in the book about anthropocentrism, the
idea of of humans being the you know, the center

(23:38):
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
and and cognition divide. All right, let's take a quick
break and when we get back, we'll talk more about

(23:58):
animals and of all, so the way that devolve defines it,
as he says, you know, up until I don't know, like,
what would you say, maybe thirty years ago in the
discipline even shorter, possibly that we've really been living in

(24:18):
a behaviorist influenced society 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 to an
agricultural one. This is interesting because we're well into agricultural

(24:41):
society by the time, you know, behavioral thinking comes around,
but for 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 would run around in the woods
and either try to hunt them down own or avoid
being their prey. That's really interesting because so if you're

(25:04):
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 is a tool. It's the thing
you use. Yeah, exactly, So the two dominant states of

(25:25):
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 devolves wording that they're
quote robots that are endowed with instincts. He doesn't actually
think they're mechanical robots. He means robots and sort of
the metaphorical sense, right. Uh. And anyone who thought about

(25:49):
animal emotions at all was just deemed unscientific and kind
of blacklisted almost, right. And so skeptics, for instance, believe
that animal alls are trapped in 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.

(26:09):
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. I believe the term anthropo denial,
which I found is a very interesting principle, and I
wanted to stop and linger on that for a second.

(26:30):
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 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,

(26:51):
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 person of aation of
an inanimate object in some sense, right, like when when
you get mad at your computer, my microphone. I've named
my microphone Jimmy, and Jimmy doesn't like it when I
get too close and breathe into him like this, right,

(27:11):
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 express my love to human. What else is
CPR for? That's recreational, right yeah? Uh no. But so
a lot of times the charge of anthropomorphism, I think

(27:32):
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,
because the similarity of the action to our human mouth

(27:52):
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
tongue like they're not familiar with the French method. But

(28:13):
according to duvol but nobos do do indeed French kiss. Yeah.
On the other hand, Dval 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 animals when

(28:34):
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 he

(28:59):
through much of his career and the work that he's done,
has had people say to him, Uh, 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, uh, so

(29:19):
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 and

(29:44):
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
does make biological sense. Right. And then his other example

(30:07):
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 epe uh, and then got a mouthful
a tongue because it was just it was a powerful kisser.

(30:29):
The bonobos have a different kissing culture. The bonobos. He
was 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 his Scala not try. I think that's terrible Greek,

(30:51):
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 application, 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
minds of fish? Right? Uh So Deval lays the blame

(31:14):
for this kind of thinking on the rise of behavior
of 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 a lot of other birds because a lot
of like gulls, other seabirds might nest in open areas

(31:36):
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. The kitty wakes, you can you
can put a strange young ling in their nests and

(31:57):
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 between they're young and somebody else is young. Yeah,
So he says, for the behaviorist though, such findings like

(32:20):
this are thoroughly puzzling. Two 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 wakes should be the same as any other bird, right, right.
So the behaviorist idea is that behavior is explained by
these universal principles of reward and punishment reinforcement. It's all

(32:42):
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 one of human controlled versus natural behavior. Uh.
And tenant here is that comparative psychologists had animals perform

(33:05):
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 kittywake example, we
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 between their young and somebody else's young,
some other birds young, then you would go, what's wrong

(33:27):
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 Duvall's book is the idea
of understanding uh. It's a It's a term that's known
as an animal's um velt, and the um velt is
the idea of it's an animal's world view from its

(33:47):
natural place in the world. So each animal has its
own niche has its own way of interacting with its environment,
the things that naturally has to do. And sometimes 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

(34:08):
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. And
if you don't understand that, you're probably going to be
testing the animal in ways that are not appropriate for

(34:29):
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. Uh, but
uh oom velt translates into surviving world, and it's essentially
describing an animal sensory context. Dv All calls this in

(34:50):
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 it produces a well that never goes dry. Right.

(35:10):
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 get the gold out of the middle of it.

(35:30):
They kill it, and then there's no gold inside. 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 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 up
and it just keeps producing more and more gold from

(35:53):
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 you have
found their magic well, you know they're sort of area

(36:13):
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 gives one example here,
I like, as like bringing it back to the behaviorism

(36:36):
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 the skills
of human soccer stars or dancers? Makes a good point there, right,

(36:58):
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 at the Yerkes Center,
which is here in Atlanta, that's a primate study facility,

(37:19):
and he says that in the nineteen fifties, actually the
center was founded 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 were testing so that
they would be more likely to respond to reward based conditioning.

(37:40):
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 properly starve, you know what it
reminds me of. Have you seen any of the current
batch of Planet of the Apes movies? Oh? Yeah, I have.

(38:02):
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 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

(38:22):
kemping 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. It's a good ape storytelling.
So all right, I'm gonna take us on a tangent
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

(38:44):
guy we're all taught about in high school basic basic
psychology usually involved some kind of Skinner research, right, The
Skinner was massively influential in twentieth century psychology. Now, I've
got a weird example here about Skinner's thought process, but
it's also related to my own education. Okay, so you

(39:06):
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
in high school that Skinner put one of his children
in a Skinner box. Hold on, you got to explain
the concept of a Skinner box. I'm going to I

(39:26):
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 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

(39:48):
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 any
behavior could be train 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.

(40:09):
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. Close, and
he put his daughter in it. It's true he did
put his daughter in this thing, but it was not
anything like what we commonly think of as skinner boxes.

(40:31):
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
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

(40:54):
or something like that, 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 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,

(41:14):
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 like he. I think it was
commercially available, 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.

(41:38):
The baby receives the same amount of attention, if not more,
inside of my baby tender slash aircrib. Wow. Yeah, so
another trivia question about Skinner. Do you know? Skinner wrote
like a utopian novel. Yeah, it's called Walden two. I
didn't know about this until I have heard about that
reading about this for the episode, and apparently it has

(41:59):
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 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

(42:22):
it's like top down control of culture in a way
that is maximizing people's you know, good tendencies or 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 where people
like debate about things. Well, he was certainly a renaissance man.

(42:44):
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 not true.
In fact, there were the rumors turned into urban myths
about him doing experiments on her and that she eventually
committed suice side because of her lack of social conditioning.
None of that is true. She went on to lead

(43:04):
a life and lived in London, I believe, um, But yeah,
I learned this in ap psych in high school. You know,
we we learned the basics of operat conditioning. And then
my teacher just told us that story, like oh yeah,
he even put his kit inside of skinner box and
I was like, anyways, uh, le's get back too, Yeah,
let's come back from this diversion. That was me just

(43:24):
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
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.

(43:47):
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
people use the term non huge uman 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

(44:07):
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
negative feedback about that? Like in the comments and stuff.
People really get rubbed the wrong way. And apparently the
vol also hates it. But I think for different reasons. Yeah,

(44:29):
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
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.

(44:50):
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 that
the implies an absence of humanity within the animal kingdom,
which 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

(45:13):
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 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

(45:35):
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 about an animal's cognitive capacities either needs
to familiarize him or herself with the species in question

(45:55):
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 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

(46:17):
you'd want is somebody who dispassionately observes an animal, uh
with you know, with a little baggage as possible, to
just come in and strictly observed behaviors in the test environment.
And there's some 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.

(46:38):
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 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

(47:01):
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 habitats um. This comes up I think
in the the idea of like, okay, so how should

(47:22):
we do science with respect to the idea of anecdotes?
This is a disgust A lot of 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 want to just have our scientific
ideas about animals completely informed by anecdotes where somebody says, hey,

(47:44):
one time I saw a chimpanzee do X 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,
So you have anecdotal rances. But then again, on the
other side, you could have this mentality that says, well,

(48:04):
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
like that. But that's just a story you have that's
not like something that we have repeatedly tested. There's validity

(48:27):
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,
So you start with an anecdote. You observe animals, for example,
in their wild behavior, and you see one do something interesting,

(48:49):
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 he or
and get them to do the same thing. So let's
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

(49:12):
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 tested with with what is called Morris's
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,

(49:35):
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 what we're doing it for research, right,
and the babies somehow kind of figure out how to
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

(49:56):
thrown into a pool. Let's see, I can think of
lots of scenes in movie Is 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 natural habitat though. Right. Another thing he says to
keep in mind about most labs, and I didn't know this,

(50:19):
is that most labs keep their test animals at eight
of their typical body weight. And this is so that
they'll be more motivated by food as a reward. Yeah,
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
be if they're hungry. Yeah. It was criticized by the

(50:41):
well known primatologist Harry Harlow actually, and he argued that
animals learn from curiosity and free exploration. Uh, and that
would 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 different topics of intelligence. So Duval argues

(51:03):
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, 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

(51:25):
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 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

(51:45):
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 animal's temperament, their interests, at
anatomy and sensory capacities. Faced with negative outcomes, we need
to pay close attention to differences in motivation and attention.

(52:09):
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 counter to this behaviorist mode of thinking that has
really dominated our thought about animal intelligence for at least

(52:30):
a century or more, uh Duval talks about the discipline
of ethology. Ethology the study of animal behavior, but specifically,
uh sort of instinctual animal behavior that is common to
all of the members of a species. Yeah, 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,

(52:54):
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
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

(53:16):
modern synthesis of evolution. But you, I guess you could
say that this is very specifically based on thinking about
how behaviors are evolved traits, because I guess with behaviorism
you would say that the capacity to learn is an
evolved trade. But that can just be applied to anything
I asked, because you know, evolutionary theory predicts cognitive similarities

(53:39):
based on the relations between a species and 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 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
probably heard me throw around on the show a lot

(54:02):
because of my background in rhetorical theory. But ethos is
the Greek word for character, and they used that to
describe species 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 of habits and instincts. Uh So, ethology, you know,

(54:27):
without diving too deep into this, well, it has its
own language to talk about instincts, stereotypical behaviors, stimuli that
illicit specific behaviors, etcetera. 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

(54:48):
Lorenz and tin Bergen Uh And they were partners within
this discipline. They were actually separated by opposite sides during
World War Two. Just fascinating. One of them was what
like a medic for Nazi Germany, and the other one
was where was it in the Netherlands. I don't think
he was in the Netherlands anyways. It's fascinating they knew

(55:11):
each other before this, they were separated by the war,
and then afterwards they got over their differences and work
together again. It's really fascinating. He this is a great
part of the book where he just goes into this
history between these two guys and 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.

(55:37):
That makes a lot of sense to me. I mean,
if you're an mythologist and you're trying to understand an
animal's role 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

(56:01):
substrate for behavior. 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 he'll, as
ud All talks about in the book, is it's less

(56:22):
of a division today and it's more of a synthesis.
So 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

(56:43):
being scientists by anecdote, like not super rigorous scientists saying
like 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.

(57:04):
And a lot of misinformation came out of scientific anecdotes
like you're talking about. The guy's name was George Romanez
I believe 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,

(57:27):
that they would pass these eggs down to their holes.
This sounds like a Disney cartoon to me, like the
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

(57:48):
the monkey smeared the blood on its hand and held
that hand, the bloody hand up to the hunter to
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

(58:08):
ape was trying to make the hunter feel guilty. That
seems a little crazy, right yeah? Um So. Romanez subsequently
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,

(58:31):
and then there was a response within the discipline to him.
Another example is a great story and I 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. The
idea here was that apparently Hans would literally be trotted

(58:51):
out to crowds and his owner would ask it to
perform math problems and it would get that answer right, clump,
it's hoof. I think 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

(59:14):
out that it was actually through conditioning right that the
horse was. Probably what they think happened was the horse
was responding to cues from its owner, so it would
start clumping 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 they said

(59:36):
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 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

(59:59):
thought the this horse this yeah, and but this serves
as a great cautionary tale about about these kind of
anecdotes where we attribute to we're 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

(01:00:20):
because they because of the whole clever Hans incident, and
Duval actually argues 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 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

(01:00:41):
than a five year old child in different domains of knowledge? Um,
but a very common problem with this is the 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

(01:01:04):
ways in which these testing scenarios are not equivalent, and
yet there the results are being treated as if they're
done across an even playing field. Yeah. 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 be in the same
room as their mothers. Like they're literally testing these children

(01:01:25):
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, 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 Bergen started a friendship, and it

(01:01:48):
started ongoing criticism not of each other's camps, but within
each camp of its own tenants. And I think each
each 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,

(01:02:10):
obviously animal behaviors or combinations of instincts and learned behaviors.
As we outlined at the beginning, it's like saying that
it's only nature, it's only nurture. Try to use a
little bit of both, right. But then also this leaves
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

(01:02:32):
the role of thinking. Well, let's get to that in
our next episode. We've basically covered the gamut of 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,

(01:02:54):
Maybe you've interact with animals in various capacities, cows. Maybe.
We had a lot of people right into us recently
about our butter episode with the cow with the window
in it. Yeah, exactly, the cow with the window in it,
because I mentioned that in the episode, and a lot
of people who had worked with them before. So have
you seen, uh, your own versions of this play out

(01:03:14):
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 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
get in touch with us. We're on social media all
over the place you can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler.

(01:03:37):
We are also on Instagram, although I don't know that
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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.

(01:03:59):
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
possible image to go along with the podcast episode. I
am very good at our selection. 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

(01:04:20):
always email us if you want to let us snow
feedback on this episode or any other, or to give
us ideas for future episodes that blow the mind. At
how stuff works dot com, well more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com.

(01:05:00):
She was twenty times to the bot