From Cacophony to Symphony: The Harmonious Interplay of Animal Cognition and Communication with Dr. Tecumseh Fitch

Episode Transcript
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Andrew MacIntosh (00:09):
If you were looking for the primate cast,
don't worry, you're in the rightspot.
And no, that wasn't a clip oftoday's guest.
That was Hoover, the TalkingSeal from New England Aquarium,
recorded decades ago.
But Hoover, along with manyother stars in the animal vocal
learning world, does come up ina wide-ranging conversation I
had with Dr Tecumseh Fitch aboutcognitive biology,

(00:32):
communication and evolution.
All that and more after thetune hey everyone, and welcome

(01:04):
back to the primate cast.
I'm your host, Andrew McIntoshof Kyoto University's Wildlife
Research Center, and the podcastis brought to you by the Center
for International Collaborationand Advanced Studies in
Primatology at KyotoUniversity's Center for the
Evolutionary Origins of HumanBehavior.
In today's installment of thepodcast, I am super excited to
share a fascinating conversationthat I had with Dr Tecumseh

(01:26):
Fitch about the evolution ofcognition and communication.
Tecumseh Fitch is professor ofcognitive biology at the
University of Vienna, where heco-founded the Department of
Cognitive Biology, and plays aleading role in the radically
interdisciplinary ViennaCognitive Science Hub, where
they gather biologists,psychologists, neuroscientists
and even computer scientists andmix them up with linguists,

(01:48):
philosophers and musicologiststo really understand cognition
and communication in theirbroadest sense.
But more than that TecumsehFitch is an icon in the fields
of cognitive biology andlanguage evolution.
His mastery of these topics areon full display in this
conversation, as are hisstorytelling skills, and we
ended up with such a richtapestry of insight into how

(02:10):
language and cognition evolved,how they shaped the lives of
animals across the spectrum,from bees to naked mole rats to
chimpanzees, and how they've setthe scene for our own human
experience.
So if you want to hear usmeander from American Civil War
generals to the question of whydogs can't dance, or even find

(02:30):
out why macaques couldanatomically ask questions like
will you marry me, but to myknowledge are not known to have
ever done so, then stick aroundfor the next hour plus and I
guarantee you will not bedisappointed.
I always learn a lot throughthe conversations I have for the
primate cast, but I gotta saythat this one had me cognitively

(02:50):
locked in and I hope it doesthe same for you.
So here's my conversation withDr Tecumseh Fitch.
Listeners of the primate castwon't have heard me ask a
similar kind of question in thepast, but I'll start by asking
you We'll not have, we'll nothave heard, yeah.
I'll start by asking you who wasGeneral William Tecumseh

(03:11):
Sherman.

Tecumseh Fitch (03:13):
Well, among many other things, he was my great,
great great grandfather and hewas a Civil War general.
He was the general who,together with Grant and Lincoln,
decided on the final policythat ended the Civil War and did
his famous march from Atlantato the sea, which cut off the
supply lines and basicallyfinally ended the Civil War, at

(03:37):
least a year after it wastechnically or militarily lost.
People just weren't giving up,and so, from one point of view,
I once had a colleague who saidSherman freed the slaves.
So that's one perspective fromthe South.
He's also now rather infamousin the South.
So I remember once being inMississippi, got picked up

(04:00):
hitchhiking and the guy saidTecumseh, you mean like Sherman?
Yeah Well, he was like WilliamTecumseh, sherman, that's me.
And he was like you get out ofthis truck, and if I see you
coming again, you better watchout.
Oh my, there's a bit of anantipathy towards him in the
South.

Yeah, that's incredible how I mean I guess
now, in the kind of moment ofour society, there's a lot of
reflection on the past, for goodand for bad but it sounds
pretty intense that that canstill bubble to the surface in
that kind of a way.

in a way I grew up in his shadow.
I am the male hto, so my wholename is William Tecumseh Sherman
Fitch the Third my grandfather,my grandfather, my great friend
they were all Tecumseh Shermanso, and I have his lucky
rabbit's foot and his gold lapel.
I inherited some stuff and wehave a big painting of him in

(04:59):
the wall.
The general was kind of afigure looming over when I was
growing up, right.

So do you?
I mean, this is quite a longhistory in an American family.
Maybe the impression from theoutside and you can tell me if
it's true or not is sometimeslike those family legacies seems
to have a lot of influence onthe descendants in different
ways.
But I wonder if you have, apartfrom the direct experiences of
being told to FF, basically inthe South?

Yeah, I don't know, I wouldn't count that as
any formative experience, ofcourse, kind of an oddity in my
life Sure, do you have, likemaybe, other examples maybe of
how that's kind of stuck?
Well, my grandfather was alsovery successful, and he started
a company and you know, became amulti-millionaire, and so I

(05:47):
would say I grew up in theshadow of two great men and
always had the assumption that Itoo should be a great man, and
I think that's been a weight onmy shoulder and I finally kind
of given up on that.
It's like, well, you know, I'mdoing pretty well in science and
I'm having a pretty good time.
What else do I need to do?

(06:08):
So yeah.
I guess it has been somethingof a weight, but I've finally
offloaded, yeah.

Well, it seems like you've definitely come a
long way since then and maybesome things that will weave into
this conversation, butcurrently you're at the
University of Vienna and so youstarted this, the Vienna Cogsci
Hub, or at least we're part ofthe founding team of that.
Yeah, and so can you tell us?
Maybe that's also related towhy you're here in Japan with us
right now, so can you maybetalk a little bit about the

(06:41):
Vienna Cogsci Hub?

Well, the Cogsci Hub came later.
So I came to Vienna to createthe Department of Cognitive
Biology in the biology faculty.
But because I have this dualbackground as a biologist and a
cognitive scientist my PhD isactually Cognitive and
Linguistic Sciences, but I'vealways considered myself and
I've always operated as abiologist I was always an
outsider in cognitive science,kind of like various people

(07:07):
around here.
We're cognitive scientists, butwe mainly work on animals.
So, yeah, I went to found thisDepartment of Cognitive Biology
with Ludwig Huber and ThomasBugnar in 2009 and that was
really exciting because it's ina biology faculty but very
focused on cognition, with somegreat colleagues.

(07:28):
And now we've enlarged thedepartment and we've been
growing and we've been verysuccessful and we've been
supported by the university andsupported by funding agencies.
So I'm very pleased that I meetstudents who came to Vienna
because they heard aboutCognitive Biology and they said
I would say that's what I reallyfounded the Cogsci Hub is.

(07:51):
I recognize when I got to Viennathat there was a lot of good
cognitive science happening, butat different departments but
also different faculties, andthe University of Vienna doesn't
really have a center.
Everybody's distributed all overthe city and what that meant is
there wasn't as muchcollaboration going on as we

(08:13):
thought would be healthy.
And one thing I've done is gota couple big grants together
with psychologists, well, withvarious other disciplines and
other faculties, and that's beenone thing.
But then the Cogsci Hub wasthat the whole idea of that was
to really make this a fixture inthe university by creating a

(08:34):
center for all the cognitivesciences and it's kind of
dominated by the biologists andpsychologists.
But we have art historians,philosophers, computer
scientists.
It's a very broad mix of people.
Even for cognitive science,which tends to be very
psychology dominated, To haveart historians and biologists

(08:54):
and linguists is, I think, we'reunusually broad.
But that's not a department,it's an administrative unit
without really being a placewhere students can come.
We have a master's program, butnot anything bigger than that.
So yeah, I feel my real baby atthe University of Vienna is the

(09:17):
Department of Cognitive Biology.

So, coming back to that you mentioned
earlier about how cognitivescience is not really just now
dominated by psychology.
I've also heard you talk aboutthe kind of why.
So why, as biology I don't knowif the right way to frame it
has been slower to kind of catchon or more reluctant to engage
with some of the other thoughtsin cognitive science.

(09:42):
Or is that the right way tothink about it?

It's not the way I think about it.
I don't know what the right wayis, but from a historical point
of view.
So I guess.
When I decided to go intocognitive science, I read a book
by Howard Gardner called theMind's New Science, which was
basically an early history ofthe field of cognitive science.
And what he said in variousother reviews of the history
that I've read is thatpsychology, computer science,

(10:10):
philosophy, anthropology, thosewere the, and then neuroscience,
which, as it existed in thevery early days of neuroscience,
those were kind of the foundingdisciplines.
And somehow biology, ethology,sociobiology, behavioral ecology
just wasn't there at the tableand that was a broad enough mix

(10:33):
that was hard enough to pullthat together.
So I think that's one reason,purely historical, just who was
at the meetings and ethology was, of course, well-established.
Noam Chomsky told me that hewas reading the ethologists Back
in the 50s.
He knew about Tim Bergen and.
Lawrence and he was reading thatand that was part of his
inspiration for coming up withUniversal Grammar, which when he
told me that, I was quitesurprised.

(10:54):
But so yeah, I think, otherthan neuroscience, and that was
very focused on humans and maybeanimal models of humans, but
humans it was really focused onhumans.
So I think that's one reasonand I think the other reason and
it meant that cognitive sciencenever really had an
evolutionary point of view.

(11:14):
That idea, that which wouldhave come naturally with Tim
Bergen and Lawrence, never gotinjected in those early days.
And then, once the traditionsare set up, these things have an
inertia.
Scientific disciplines havetheir own inertia.
I think the other reason isbecause of behaviorism and in

(11:35):
one way of seeing cognitivescience is it's the triumph of
mentalism over behaviorism andby mid-1970s everybody was
willing to accept that forhumans.
But when it came to animals,that game is still not over and
I think we still, in animalbehavior, animal cognition, what
we call cognitive biology,there's still a feeling that if

(11:58):
there's any behavioristexplanation for a behavior you
have to exclude that that'ssomehow to be preferred, even if
it's ridiculouslyunparsemonious, even if you have
to imagine 10 steps of unlikelyreinforcements, et cetera, et
cetera.
If someone can come up with abehaviorist explanation, it's

(12:19):
our job as cognitive biologiststo exclude that.
And various people I mean DickByrne has spent 20 years saying
how stupid that is.
I agree with him.
But so I think the very notionof animal minds has taken a long
time to take off, and DonGriffin wrote this book Animal

(12:39):
Minds In the mid-70s.
It hit a stone wall.
I mean he was very.
I knew Don Griffin pretty welland he was very unsatisfied with
the uptake on that.
To him it seemed kind of he hada good term Mentophobia.
He said mentophobia, the animalbehavior.
People are mentophones, we'reafraid of talking about minds

(13:01):
and I think the field of animalcognition I think now in 2023,
we're finally at the point where, at least when it comes to
corvids or primates, people arewilling to accept it.
But I still have hadpsychologists say I talk about
fish cognition and I won't saywho it was, but he said do you
think fish have minds?

(13:22):
What an obviously absurdproposition.
So yeah, I think we have a waysto go.
But so I think those are thetwo things.
This sort of behaviorism, theghost of behaviorism, is still
with us in animal cognition in away that it was pretty much
exercised by the mid-1970s.

Yeah, I got you.
Maybe one interesting follow upto that is how should we think
about the definition, then, ofmind, if we to determine whether
or not we should accept some ofthe ideas?

Well, as you might imagine, as a founder of a
discipline called cognitivebiology, I'm very open-minded
and, first of all, I take a verybroad view of cognition, even
in humans.
So I would include, for example, emotions.
I don't just think of quoteunquote higher level cognition,
playing chess and doingmathematics as cognition.
I think the entire rewardsystem is crucial and emotions

(14:25):
are part of that.
So I would never make adistinction between, say,
cognition and emotional decisionmaking and cognitive decision
making.
I think any time you haveintervening abstractions over
peripheral data and immediatemotor actions, you've already

(14:45):
got the beginnings of minds.
And by that definition.
Of course, yes, fish have minds, Fish know individuals, they
know their way around, they havegoals and plans and memories.
And yeah, what else are thosebut mental constructs?
So to me I have a quite broadyeah.
When it comes to planarians orflies, I think it's a little bit
harder to say I'm open-minded,but I think showing those

(15:08):
intervening concepts is a bitharder.
But for honeybees, yeah, I'mhappy to say honeybee cognition,
Absolutely.

So I think throughout your career, I mean a
big focus has been in thecognitive biology, has been on
comparative studies, and I meanyou've already in five minutes,
you've already talked about Idon't know seven, eight
different kinds of species.
They're not even closelyrelated to each other, and so
maybe you could talk a littlebit about how important it is to
have that comparative frameworkwhen we're thinking about

(15:36):
cognition and its kind ofevolutionary history.

Yes.
Well, I think that's wherecognitive science is really
missing out, and particularlyevolutionary psychology.
So the whole idea that humansevolved in the Pleistocene to me
it's not false and lots ofinteresting cognitive evolution
happened since our separationfrom chimpanzees.
But most of our brains, most ofour minds, most of our

(16:02):
cognitive apparatus vastlypredates that.
And we're not just talking.
It goes back to Devonian fish,but it goes back to the earliest
neurons.
We have the same kind ofneurons as a jellyfish.
So to me, to take that a broadcomparative viewpoint is very
natural for a biologist and it'swhat people in behavioral

(16:23):
ecology just take for granted,what the ethologists took for
granted.
That was Lorenz's main thing.
We're going to look at a bunchof ducks and figure out how duck
courtship behavior evolved.
So I think that's a place wherethat's part of why I ended up
deciding to do my PhD incognitive science rather than
sticking with behavioral ecology, social biology, something like

(16:45):
that is because I saw thatstrong lack of evolutionary
grounding and the comparativemethod is our primary toolkit in
evolutionary biology.
Another thing, so I think that'sgeneral, that speaks to say
primate cognition andcomparisons between humans and
apes and monkeys.
But I think the other value istaking a very broad comparative

(17:07):
approach.
And even for biologists thisdoesn't always go over so
smoothly, but having spent a lotof time watching birds and
learning about bird cognition, Ithink they teach us so much
about even though it'sconvergently evolved I mean,
many aspects are convergentlyevolved it can teach us so much
about why particular cognitiveabilities evolve.

(17:29):
To look at convergent evolutionso I'm not just focused on
homology I think convergence isjust as powerful a tool, and I
think it's the great, sad factof evolutionary psychology that
at its birth it was psychologyand not comparative, and I think

(17:50):
the good evolutionarypsychologists know this and do
what we biologists think isnormal, but a lot of people
don't, and so I think this isstill a work in progress in
terms of really bringing anevolutionary viewpoint into
human cognition.

That's super interesting.
I mean, even Darwin mentionedthat our cognition is just a
matter of a difference in degree, but not kind, and I suppose
that idea didn't takeimmediately, as most of his
ideas didn't take immediately,but it seems like it's taken.
Well, you can tell me maybe?
Is that really something thatcognitive scientists still kind

(18:28):
of debate about, and where mightthe debates have shifted from
the time of Darwin to where weare kind of now and thinking
about that?

Yeah.

Are there any huge, great leaps in human
cognition that are unfounded, oris it really all just a matter
of scale?

Well, just a word about Darwin.
So Darwin's notion of naturalselection took off like wildfire
.
I mean basically as soon as hepublished, everybody was like
yeah natural selection.
Sexual selection, which followedby a few years.
Equally great idea took a longtime to take off, and

(19:04):
particularly the idea of femalechoice.
Darwin was ridiculed by hiscolleagues for that.
So it really took almost 100years.
It took till the 1970s beforethe idea of sexual selection.
In particular, all theVictorians were happy to have
males fighting each other andbuilding big antlers OK.
But when it came to femaleschoosing those males, people

(19:25):
didn't want to accept that.
So some of Darwin's ideas werevery rapidly accepted and others
weren't With when it comes tomind.
I think this Darwin's claim is avery strong one, because is it
really the case that a kind ofreflex arc that controls the
nematodes forward versusretraction response is just a

(19:48):
difference in degree from amental map that a human or a
honeybee has, I don't know.
I mean, it depends on whetheryou're a lump or a splitter.
What I would say is, in thesame way, that there are major
transitions in evolution, nicelydocumented by Maynard Smith and
Sampmari, from single celledlife to multicellular life, to

(20:13):
social behavior, social insect,et cetera.
I think there are majortransitions in the evolution of
mind, and whether you call atransition a difference in kind
or a difference of degree is amatter of taste.
So, yes, it's a difference of,it's a gradual thing in the
sense that it's building on whatcame before.
But I think you can havetransition, what a physicist

(20:35):
would call a phase transition inmind, and I think there are
many examples of that and Ithink that's part of the power
of the comparative approach iswe can document those and we can
look at a lamprey brain and anadvanced teleost brain and an
alligator brain and a mammalbrain and say, ok, there are

(20:56):
various things that happen andthey have various functions.
We can try and understand whatthe cognitive implications of
those neurophysiologicaldifferences are.
So I guess I would take issuewith I'm a Darwinian, obviously,
but I would take issue with avery strong statement that it's
just gradual.
And of course, in cognitivescience Chomsky is probably the

(21:16):
most famous exemplar of somebodysaying look, language is
different in kind from all othersystems of animal communication
.
And again it's a matter oftaste.
I think he makes some goodpoints there.
I would say it builds so muchon preexisting not just
communication but cognition thatthere are a few key things.

(21:38):
There are a few key adaptationsor key components that may be
new, but whether that makes theentire apparatus completely new
is, as I said, a matter of taste.
And that is not my.
That's not what I teach Sure.

So I want to transition a little bit into
talking about communication andalso broadly its relationship to
cognition.
But I don't know if you'vewritten or done much thinking
about it, but I was remindedthinking about language and
communication, at least in theprimate side of things, and
understanding not understandingis the wrong word but the mid

(22:20):
20th century, later 20th centurymovement towards the great ape
language programs, where therewere suddenly a whole bunch of
apes, gorillas, chimpanzees,bonobos that were in these
programs raised by people tryingto teach them or have them
learn human language what do youthink they get wrong?
There's probably a lot ofthings they get wrong about that
idea, but I wonder if you couldmaybe comment on that as we

(22:43):
kind of transition to thinkingabout communication.

Well, what they got right was recognizing that,
trying to do vocal communicationwhich the haze with Vicky, that
was kind of the early days ofthis trying to teach a
chimpanzee to speak, and it justdidn't work and it seemed like
obviously a mistake.
And I think the great insight ofthe gardeners with Washoe and

(23:08):
that was continued on, is okay,wait a minute, give them another
modality, the visual, manualmodality, and start teaching
them some signs and wow, we canget a lot further, a lot more
quickly.
I still think well, here we arein the Kyoto research, well,
what is it called?

(23:29):
Now here we are in Inuyama,where ant ape cognition has been
a focus for so long.
I still think we miss out whenwe think that the royal road to
cognition is via communicationand that you only have human
cognition if you have ahuman-like communication system.
So that language is crucial.

(23:51):
I think what we know from apesis they're incredibly smart,
they can figure out all kinds ofstuff, they're amazing tool
users, they're amazingwayfinders, they have incredibly
complex social interactions andmodels of each other's
knowledge, etc, etc.
I think very sophisticatedcognition, but when it comes to
communication they feel a lotmore like most other animals.

(24:14):
To me, they have a set ofsignals that they use that are
very important and very usefuland they can use them
strategically and theircontext-dependent interpretation
all that is not really verydifferent from what a dog or a
cat or any other primate do whenyou give them a system like a
manual system.
Or you know, you give Kanzi theYurkish keyboard, so he's got

(24:36):
this keyboard and he can mixthat with gestures.
It's a rich communicationsystem.
He can use it, but he's notthat interested.
It's not like he sits down withPanbonitia, who can also use
this system, and they havelittle conversations or tell
each other what they had forbreakfast or what I dreamed last
night, and I have no doubt thatKanzi knows all this stuff.

(24:58):
But the drive to share thatinformation simply isn't there.
And I mentioned why rewards anddrive are so important.
I think humans, the Germans,have a great word for it
mitailungsbedürfnis Wow.
That means a drive to share,essentially a drive to share
your mental contents.
And this is what happens whenyou sit down on a plane and the
person beside you is like, hey,what's your name?

(25:20):
Hey, I'm.
You know, I just divorced mywife.
It's like, okay, that's amitailungsbedürfnis.
And humans, particularly humanchildren, the very the fact that
a four-year-old just runsaround and points at things and
says its name, that's somethingthat apes don't do.
Even when you give them thetool, they don't seem to have

(25:41):
that drive to share theirinformation.
So I think that is one of thecrucial ingredients of human
language.
Was, in fact, why did thatevolve?
Why did we evolve?
To share our mental contentswith others?
And the fact that chimpanzeesdon't like to do this is, you
know, it's not because theydon't have the cognitive

(26:03):
apparatus, not because theydon't know things, they're just
not that interested.

It's super interesting and I think you've
also found that.
So not only is it notnecessarily about the cognitive,
the neural circuitry or anatomy, but also the vocal tract.
So, as I understand it, manyspecies can actually.
I don't know if chimpanzees arethe right example here, but
many species actually canproduce speech like sounds.

(26:30):
Absolutely.
I think there may be amisconception there.
Even for myself, I thought thatthe general consensus was it
was part like cognition, partanatomy, but maybe that's not
the case.

I would say that and this is something I've been
working on really since my PhDmy thesis supervisor, phil
Lieberman, was the one who cameup with this idea that the
reason chimps now talk isbecause they can't from a purely
output from, because theirvocal apparatus doesn't have the
right configuration.
And when I first read his bookand first started I thought he

(27:05):
was right.
I just assumed he was right andthe more I started thinking
about it and looking at it andpushing, the more I realized
that's a pretty stronghypothesis with some pretty weak
evidence, and I've spent a goodpart of my career knocking that
down.
So what I would say is that anymammal certainly a chimpanzee
we've shown it with macaques,but I think it would be true of

(27:27):
a dog or a pig I think it's ageneral fact of a seal.
So we're actually studying sealvocal production You're a
mammal.
You have lips and a tongue and ajaw that can move up and down
and a larynx that you cancontrol.
You can make all the sounds.
You would need to have aspeech-like communication system
.
I'm not saying it'll soundexactly like human speech, but

(27:49):
it would be enough to work with.
So I don't think that vocaltract configuration is the
reason that animals don't dothis.
I think it's mainly neural and,as I said, not just kind of
computational circuitry but alsoreward circuitry.
But yeah, you put a human brainin control.
Not only could a chimpanzeevocal tract speak, but, a pig or
a dog, vocal tract could speak.

Super interesting.
You mentioned seals a secondago too, so maybe you could just
transition over a bit 90degrees to Hoover the talking
seal.

Yeah Well, I didn't work with Hoover, I will
take a little credit.
And then I sort of rediscoveredhim, in the sense that he was
already dead by the time.
Terry Deacon, who's a goodfriend and who's a brilliant
scientist, actually encounteredHoover, the talking seal,
walking through Boston one night.
He mentioned it.

(28:41):
He has a chapter in his book,the Symbolic Species, About it,
and I just started noticing inthe, particularly in the
evolution of language world,people kind of grudgingly agreed
that birds can imitate sounds,but people didn't really seem to
accept that other mammals coulddo it and that made humans seem

(29:02):
much more unique.
And what we now know is thatmultiple marine mammals, so
basically all the both groups ofcetaceans, at least several
seal species, and then bats andelephants and then humans, all
of these mammal groups inaddition to the hummingbirds and

(29:22):
parrots and songbirds, so abouthalf a bird species, all of
these groups can imitate soundsin a way that no other primate
can, in a way that chimpanzeescan.
So that's a beautiful examplemultiple convergent evolution of
this capacity to hear a soundin your environment and produce
it so technically called novel,call production learning.

(29:43):
That's what we're talking abouthere.
So it's all over the place andHoover.
You know people started saying,all right, we know marine
mammals.
Can we know that whales can dothis?
Because they're learning eachother's songs?
and you can train dolphins toimitate whistles Great, Okay.
But when it came to the seals,this story of Hoover, people
just thought, I don't know, it'ssomething, it's one paper, it's

(30:06):
like on TV, but do you reallybelieve it?
And I kind of made it my own.
I made a little bit of a littlemission to rehabilitate the
story of Hoover and the firsttime I ever presented this at a
big speech conference at ICVPSin Denver back in I don't know
2000.
It was one of my first keynotetalks and 300 people in the

(30:27):
audience and I played Hoover andI had multiple people come up
to me afterwards saying that'sbullshit, right, that's a joke,
right.
I was like no, it's for real,this is a real recording of a
seal, because you've heard himright.
I mean these recordings yeah,Hoover, Hoover, Hoover, Hoover,
Hoover, Hoover, Hoover.

(30:47):
Yeah, it wasn't language, he wasjust imitating the sounds of
his foster father.
But you know, like a parrot orlike a mina, he had that
capacity and I think that'sstill the best evidence.
We have lots of now moreexperimentally controlled
evidence in other seals, inharbor seals and in other seal
species, all of it pointing inthat same direction.

(31:08):
But Hoover's just thisremarkable example.
So Hoover himself is not what'sinteresting.
I think it's the fact thatpenipeds have evolved the
capacity, that some penipedshave evolved the capacity for
vocal learning is what'sinteresting.

So what is the major, then evolutionary driver
of that?
Since you see it in so manydifferent branches of our
phylogenetic tree, it seems likethere should be a significant
pressure towards it.

Yeah, I think there are both pre-adaptations
for it and apparently aquaticlife is one of them.
So, if you look at theorganisms that have it, we've
got multiple clades of aquaticorganisms.
We've got birds, whichbasically need to free the
respiration from locomotion batsas well flying.

(31:57):
So it's a kind of a weirdcollection.
The only normal ones areelephants and us.
How normal is that?
So it does seem like there arepre-adaptations having to do
with respiratory control.
Particularly if you're goingunderwater, you better be able
to voluntarily inhibit yourinhalation reflex or you'll
drown.
That's got to be a powerfulselection pressure on any

(32:18):
aquatic organism and I thinkthat's a pre-adaptation.
I don't think that's enough, butthat's a pre-adaptation for
vocal learning as far as once acapacity is started, what drives
it?
The two big contexts that wesee are our song, which is
usually territorial or matingdriven, and in many cases in

(32:40):
birds it's only in males, andthen in parrots or in orcas, or
in humans or dolphins we see itin equally developed in both
sexes, and there I think it'sactually much more about social
cohesion, about keeping thegroup together, about mother,

(33:00):
infant bonding and communication, so the infant's picking up
their own, the signaturewhistles of their mother and of
their community.
So I think there are at leastthose two different selective
forces operating, and obviouslyin humans it's not just sexual
selection or we would see bigdifferences but males and

(33:22):
females and we don't.
So yeah, I don't think there'sprobably a single selective
pressure for vocal learning.

But I had a follow up, because you also
recently wrote a piece aboutvocal learning in that wonderful
species, one of my favoritesthe naked mole rat what is going
on?

here, you know the naked mole rat.
I think what we have is partialevidence there.
I wouldn't, and I said in mylittle review, I don't think we
can really say vocal mole ratsare vocal production, are a call
production learners.
Yet I think it's verysuggestive, very interesting,
and I think, you know, as usual,more research is necessary.
But yeah, again, weird littleorganisms, very, very

(34:06):
hierarchical dominant system.
But yeah, I'm sure that thereare other.
I mentioned these, these sick,you know the different groups
that have it, but I'm sure thereare other species, there are
other clades which have evolvedvocal learning that we don't
know about and in fact theaquatic hypothesis that I just
mentioned Would suggest that weshould be looking at things like

(34:26):
otters or marsupial otters,these completely convergent,
anyone beaver, nutria and anyaquatic rodent, muskrats, and
basically nobody's look.
So you know, I would be shockedif there aren't a bunch of vocal
learning species, of callproduction learning species that
we don't know about yeah thatsciences so part of the field, I

(34:49):
think has been opening, openingour minds to the importance of
this, especially when it'sconverging, evolved for testing
hypotheses like the ones wetalked about earlier.

It seems interesting.
I mean, humans seem to standout among the primate lineage,
since other primates don't seemto have this, this capacity,
yeah yeah, and that's of coursea big mystery, because unless
you buy the aquatic aphypothesis which Well, yeah it's
not crazy.
When you mentioned aquaticspecies, I was gonna throw that
out there arguments there.

I'm not open minded, but yeah, I think the
reason humans evolved that andyou know there's a lot of
argument now that it's acontinuum rather than a discrete
category, which, okay, that'salways true I still think Even
what we know, for example inmarmosets, or the context

(35:41):
dependence in chimpanzees, youknow it just pales by comparison
to any songbird or hoover.
So I wouldn't say primates havezero call, call, vocal, vocal
production, learning Abilities.
but yeah, for some reason humansjust took off crazy and I think
that is darwin hypothesis thatthat's because in an earlier

(36:04):
stage we were singing Like youknow, if you imagine givens
which do complex song and itserves multiple roles it's
territorial but also serves apair bonding.
It can serve as a predatoralarm.
So you know singing in givenswhich has a very, very strong
innate component.
So you can get hybrid songs ifyou hybridize givens.

(36:27):
If you raise them in isolation,they can produce these things.
If you put two givens ofdifferent species together, they
each sing their specific songeven though they're acting like
doing the male and the femaleparts.
It's a, you know, I think it's apretty strongly canalyzed
system but if you look at thefunction, you can imagine how.

(36:49):
You know, if ouraustralopithecine ancestors
started doing singing likegivens do, or you know maybe
we're doing it all along thatthere would be advantages to
being able to do that vocal, todo vocal learning on that, to
create more diverse songs tolearn songs from other or to
imitate other sounds.

(37:10):
So I think it's pretty easy tosee how, once you have a song
like system, the drive for vocallearning becomes powerful.
It's clearly what happened inmany birds, it's clearly what
happened in the in the bay, leanwhales I come back wills, etc.
So you know it's anadvertisement song that becomes
learned.
So I think I think darwin'shypothesis this I call it

(37:32):
musical proto language deservesa lot more credit and attention
than it tends to get In thelanguage evolution world because
of the comparative data,precisely because we know that
happens a lot in evolution.

Yeah, I think that's a good place to kind of
transition to, to the role ofsinging in humans.
So I believe one of the mainhypotheses set you and others
have put forward is that this isit has a very strongly social
bonding Function.
So maybe you could and in thatcase it's maybe quite similar
functionally to Gibbons that youjust mentioned in the in the

(38:09):
terms of bonding, and alsosongbirds.
It's often used in those.
I study penguins I've been outin penguin colonies in
Antarctica and it's quiteimpressive to see them, the male
and female, when they pair,singing and calling together and
of course they use that as itsrecognition as well right of
each other.
But I wonder if you can kind ofelaborate on that a little bit.

Yeah, I think a really good model for this is
the parents, which are similarto humans in many bizarre ways.
So, and a lot of parents willbe in these fission fusion
groups and when they join a newgroup they adopt the contact
calls of that group so this hasbeen shown in you know, analyzed
in detail and budget regards.

(38:50):
So it seems there that you knowpart of being a group member is
sharing this kind of groupsignature call and parents can
flexibly when they change groupsthey can do these different
calls and we don't know thatmuch about the reward circuitry
in parents but my guess is onceyou do, once you've been
introduced to a group and youcan do the call and other group

(39:11):
members are calling you back,that they get a good little
short shot of dopamine and maybeoxytocin or whatever reward sir
, reward Cocktail their brain isproducing because it's part of
group membership.
Now, when it comes to humans, Ithink Most of my musician
friends are like wait a minute,you published a big, long paper

(39:35):
that got a lot of attentionsaying music does social bonding
.
It's like duh, that's soobvious.
So I think for a lot of peoplethat seems obvious and, frankly,
to me it seems obvious.
I grew up in a very musicalfamily.
Some of my earliest, mostprecious memories are singing
along, where the whole familyyou know my dad was playing
guitar, the whole family wassinging, everybody was happy and

(39:59):
you know, I was four years oldand I was like this is what I
want.
It's incredible, yeah, and I'vejust had a very recent
experience.
I was in Israel for a month inJuly, right before everything
went very, very far south, andwe had a group that got together
and sang and really by the endof this month we were like

(40:21):
singing almost every night andeverybody in the group would
sing along and we all just fellin love with each other.
It was like this giant familyafter a month, and of course
there were many reasons for that, but I think one of the reasons
was that you were doing musicso much and it really inclusive.
So I don't think this happenswhen you have an audience and a
band and you know, I think ithappens with dancing to some

(40:43):
extent but really creating themusic yourself, the group
creating music together.
So there's this larger wholecreated by all the individuals
and each person.
You know, some people maybe areplaying instruments, some
people maybe are percussing,some people sing better than
others.
It doesn't matter.
In music it becomes this canvasand the whole group can add

(41:05):
their strokes to the big picture.
And you know, language doesn'tdo that.
So I think, when you ask, whydo humans have music and
language?
Language is great for whatwe're doing right now, one on
one, diatically taking turns,sharing information.
Language is great for that.
And it comes to taking acommunity of 10 people and

(41:27):
bringing them together.
You know, we can chant inunison, you know in church, but
it doesn't have the same thingas where each person fits in in
some way.
Each person is still audible.
It's not just about submergingthe self into some greater hall.
There's still individualitythere.
So I think music plays a veryspecific role in human

(41:48):
communication precisely becauseof these design features, you
know, being able to createrhythms together, being able to
sing in tune, meaning that weall share some model of what the
tonic and what scale we're inand what the chords are.
We do that, all of thatautomatically.
That's part of you.
Don't have to be trained as amusician to do that.
That's part of our humanity,what Heng Yan-Hoonin calls our

(42:12):
musicality.
That's a shared aspect that allhumans have.
I think the more we do it, theless death and destruction we
would be doing to one another.
So yeah, music is socialbonding.
There are other hypotheses.
So I wouldn't say that's by farthe.
There's still debate inliterature, but I do think it's

(42:35):
a pretty obvious and a prettystrong one, the reason we wrote
that paper was because thathypothesis had been kind of
dismissed, particularly byevolutionary psychologists, to
say, well, that's groupselection.

No, it's not.

It's not group selection.
So we tried to make a goodargument on multiple different
levels for why this hypothesisdeserves to be taken seriously.

I think the message has gone over quite well
.

Paper's gotten cited a lot, and almost always
positively.

We had Heng Yan-Hoonin here.
Not that long ago he gave aquick lecture about his work on
evolution of musicality andtesting across macaques, for
example, for rhythmicity, beatperception and all of this.
And of course we have YukoHattori here, who's a faculty,
here with us, who also looks atrhythmic entrainment in two

(43:27):
benzies.
So there seem to be somebuilding blocks, I suppose, of
music in other species, Right.

Yeah, in the same way that I think the only
way to understand language ishaving a lot of components that
are shared and a few that arerelatively unusual, like this
capacity for vocal learning, Ithink musicality is exactly the
same.
There's a capacity for melodyand for learning new melodies,
which I call song, and that,obviously, is a big part of

(44:00):
human music.
But there's also this capacityfor rhythmicity and rhythmic
entrainment, which is alsocrucial, and I think it's
particularly crucial for thatgroup bonding, because by
sharing a shared notion of abeat, we don't all have to clap
in unison.
We can do things that build onthat beat.
So I think rhythmicity in songI would say dance is a part of

(44:24):
musicality.
The ability to move your body toa beat, to a shared beat, is
crucial, yeah, and of thosecomponents we can find, I would
say, drumming, the capacity tomake nonverbal percussive sounds
.
That's something we clearlyshare with chimpanzees and
gorillas, no doubt about it.
So, yeah, I think each of thesecomponents can be found in

(44:45):
other species in many cases,like in song, many other species
.
And so, yeah, it's perfect forthe comparative approach,
because we can find bothhomologies, like chimpanzee
drumming with human drumming,and analogies, convergent
evolution, like whatever parrotdancing and human dancing.

Right, the famous snowball.
We had John Iverson as well onthe podcast many years ago and
talking about snowball and yeah,really interesting.
But I think that maybe part ofthat also is just maybe there's
a reward in built intosynchronizing behavior with each
other as well.

Absolutely.
I mean, I think there can be nodoubt.
There's some argument aboutwhat exactly the neural basis of
that is, but for example, weknow that just listening to
rhythmic music activates motorcenters.
So Jessica's Grom's work andmany others now, and John
Iverson as well it's clear thatin a way, even if your body is

(45:44):
motionless, your brain is movingto the beat and that's
rewarding.
And particularly doing ittogether.
There's lots of nice workshowing that doing music
together in general hasrewarding effects.
People Robin Dunbar has done alot, bronwyn Tar, many, many
people have shown that doingmusic together.

(46:06):
We have a paper on singinginquires.
So decreasing cortisol.
Where the arguments come?
Is that with oxytocin playing abig role?
Is it endorphins, as RobinDunbar would argue?
So I think there's still plentyof open questions.
But that in general, makingmusic makes people nicer to each
other, makes them reportfeelings of more togetherness

(46:28):
with the group members.
That all seems pretty much tobe a fact and we're just trying
to figure out what exactlyunderlies that.

That's so cool .
You just reminded me aboutspeaking of oxytocin.
Dogs are not one of the speciesthat we typically see Many of
these, which is okay.
Probably there's no instance ofa canid finding any evidence of
this, either vocal learning orethnicity or whatever but for

(46:59):
dogs specifically, it strikes meas a little bit interesting,
given our shared evolutionaryhistory now between humans and
dogs, and maybe it's not thatmuch time in the grand scheme of
things.
But there are other ways wherewe're bonded and synchronized
and communicative with eachother, and there's morphological
adaptations in dogs and there'sbeen interesting papers about

(47:21):
how dogs have hijacked ourneurohormone system to make us
more attracted to them.
I wonder if this couldpotentially go anywhere or if
there's any.

Well.
I would say two things.
Yes, it hasn't been that long.
So, depending on who's counting, we've got maybe 30,000 years
of selection of humans, or weshould say dogs and humans
co-selecting each other fromtheir wolf ancestors.
And we know from very detailedcomparisons of wolf cognition

(47:57):
and dog cognition that there aredifferences.
These are biologicaldifferences.
I don't think there's any doubtabout that.

Pretty Rika.

Ranga's work at the Wolf Science Center in
Vienna also shows thatupbringing plays an important
role.
So if you raise wolves withmore human contact, with more
human eye contact, they're morelike dogs.
And if you raise dogs in a morewolf-like situation, in packs,
they're more wolf-like.
So I think we can't justcompare wild wolves and

(48:24):
domesticated pet dogs.
We need to do something likewhat Ranga and her colleagues
have done, but given that thereare still clear biological
differences in the last 30,000years.
But when it comes to either ofthe things you've mentioned
vocal learning or entrainmentdancing, yeah, clearly, just not
there.
And what Frederica argues and Ithink she's right is that wolves

(48:46):
were pre-adapted forinteracting with humans,
precisely because of the socialbehavior that they have.
They're cooperative hunters,they live in these family groups
, they form strong social bonds.
It's crucial to their survival.
So, in all of these ways, theycame into the domestication game

(49:06):
prepped with somepre-adaptations that have led
them to be able to whether youwant to call it hijacking our
social bonding mechanisms,whatever, it's a mutually
beneficial hijacking, for themost part between dogs and
humans.
And you see dogs at a partywhen everybody's dancing and

(49:31):
they get in the middle andthey're wagging their tails.
They know everybody's having fun.
They want to be part of it.
That's a case where they havethe reward mechanism, but I
don't think they've got thecognitive mechanism.
So dogs don't dance.
That's one thing that hasreally been pretty clearly.
If they did, we'd have muchbetter evidence.

We'd have some evidence actually.

So, yeah, I think that's a case where
there's a computationalmechanism there that you need to
have and dogs don't have it.
Same thing with, I think ifdogs could talk, they would say
a few things.
You sit, yeah, we might notwant to hear what they have to

(50:14):
say.

So do you think that maybe this will be a
last question, that I have a fewhidden questions in here that
were given to me by some of yourfellow travelers around here
and then we'll wrap it up.
But I was just thinking aboutthis communication cognition.
Now, with the massiveadvancements in AI, one of the

(50:37):
things people are thinking abouta lot is does it look like
we'll be able to improve ourcommunications with other
species?
And I wonder if that'ssomething that you'd thought
about.

Yeah, yeah well, I've thought a lot about it and
talked a fair amount about it.
And I'm teaching a bio datascience course right now and
we're doing machine learning.
I think AI is a wellcontemporary deep neural
networks are incredibly powerfulengineering tools.
They allow us to solve problemsthat you simply couldn't solve,

(51:11):
and chat.
Gpt can translate betweenprogramming languages, and it's
pretty good, it's prettyincredible.
And the image processingcapacities for a lot of these
different whatever, YOLO andmany other models are incredibly
powerful.
They've got the benefit ofpentabytes of data and vast

(51:32):
amounts of computational power.
That underlies that success.
So I don't think they're verygood models for the mind,
whether the human mind or ananimal mind, but I think they're
incredibly powerful tools foranimal behavior, and
particularly things like videoanalysis which is incredibly
time consuming.

(51:52):
It's one of the most costlyaspects of animal cognition
research and animal behaviorresearch is having humans go
through these videos and scorewhat's going on and identify the
individuals.
Now we're really at the placewhere AI can help us do that.
And I think because of that wecan take advantage of all this
expense and computation that'sgone into trading the human

(52:14):
models and with some tweaking, alittle retraining, we can make
those work with chimpanzees ormacaques or birds.
That's what we're trying to doin.

Vienna.

And that's great .
So that's an engineering toolthat allows us to deal with
large amounts of data that wewouldn't otherwise be allowed to
, that we wouldn't be able towork with.
I think if we then try andcorrelate that with
vocalizations, it's also apowerful tool for understanding
communication systems and whatdifferent vocalizations mean.
That can go beyond humanintuitions and the very slow

(52:47):
work of playback experiments etcetera.
But I think we still have weneed more proof of that.
I think that's more of ahypothesis to be tested, but I
think that's going to be thecase.
I think it will be a veryimportant tool in animal
communication research for us tounderstand what animals are

(53:08):
saying to each other with theircalls.
What I don't think you can do isjust drop a hydrophone in the
water and record 1,000 hours oforcas or humpbacks or anything
else and make any sense of it atall with AI, and what we know
from chat to EPT is it'llconfabulate.

(53:29):
It'll make up If it doesn't knowthe answer it'll make one up,
so I'm quite skeptical aboutthat line of research.
I don't think AI is going tosolve animal language.
I think we have a long way togo before you could, for example
, have an app where I can do nowwith Japanese and type in
Japanese, or even speak.

(53:49):
Well, I type in English anddoes it Japanese, or I can speak
in English and I can output itin Japanese.
That's pretty amazing, butthose are human languages that
have very unamazing amount ofshared structures.
It's different as they seem.
They're much more similar.
Chinese and English are muchmore similar than language and
dog barking.

(54:10):
Yes so the idea that we're goingto have a cat translator that
turns your words into meows ofdifferent sorts.
I think that's, I really thinkthat's nonsense.
So I guess I am an enthusiastof AI, but I'm also very wary.
The entire discipline of AI isone case of hype after another
From Marvin.
Minsky in the 1950s saying, ok,we can play chess, therefore we

(54:35):
can do language Didn't work Toright now, where people think,
oh yeah, we're going to solvechimpanzee or orca language by
dropping, by making recordings.
I think that's just uninformedand dangerously hyped.

So, unfortunately, then, we're not
going to get the new updatedversion of the cat singing the
Christmas hits in actual wordsanytime soon.
So that's unfortunate, allright.
Well, let me finish off byasking a couple of student
seated questions.
All right, I canvassed some ofthe group that you're here with
in the autumn school.

Oh really.

For a few things that they were interested
in, and one that I really likedwas let me find it here what
was your favorite animalcourtship ritual?
And the second part of that,which I love which one did you
use on your wife?

What the second part of it.
This must be.

This must be.

I told him I'm not going to tell you who seated
any of these yeah, this must bea reference to this paper I
published with us of Gazenfar,where our example was.
So we modeled the monkey vocaltract to show what we talked
about at the beginning, thatactually a monkey vocal tract
would be capable of producinghuman language.
So we took x-rays of monkeysand we built a computerized

(55:54):
model of what a macaque vocaltract could do and then we did a
bunch of vowels and we did abunch of controls like acoustic
testing.
But that was kind of boring andso I thought, oh, let's see Bart
, and I decided to bark to abore.
It was the main computer guythere decided to do something
more fun and we actually didsome Christmas.
We did like Merry Christmas andJoy Hood Newell and Frohe

(56:17):
Weinacht and because it wasaround Christmas time.
But I also just had somerecordings of my wife saying
will you marry me?
And the reason we chose thatphrase is because it's very
continuous.
You have continuous formantsand it was just kind of a random
phrase.
But we did that.
We made the monkey say will youmarry me?
And it went absolutelyballistic.

No doubt yeah.

So that must have been what somebody was
getting at Favored animal court.
Seriously, I've watched a lotof animals in my life, from fish
to alligators, to frogs tobirds to I would have to say
that my earliest days with fish,where they change colors and
they do these dances with oneanother and they vibrate the

(57:02):
water.
It's just so foreign to usTrying to imagine what it even
feels like to have someonevibrating in the water beside
you and to pick that up withyour lateral lines.
I'm not sure it's my favoritein terms of them.
It's beautiful, but itcertainly really opened my mind
to how different the sensory andaesthetic worlds of animals

(57:23):
could be from human beings andyet still be intelligible.
It's very obvious what's goingon, but I don't know I could go.
Alligator bellows, that's anamazing amazing vocalization
that has sent shivers down myspine.

So you know beautiful bird song.

I love bird song .
I really love it.
I could spend hours, days anddays just listening to birds
singing, so I would be hardpressed to say which one is my
favorite.

Sure, they're all good and I'm amazed any from
my wife.

So I think that's the only thing.
That's the only thing thatquestion could be getting at is
that will you marry me?
Phrase from the monkey paper.

That was quite good.
I actually wanted to bring thatup earlier, just as an add on
to what you were talking about.
The larynx structure, ok, maybeone from Japan here.
Do you have what's yourimpression of the chimpanzee and
macaque work here?
Do you have any ideas forcollaboration with folks?
Absolutely yeah.

Yeah, no, I'm very excited.
So Ikuma Dachi and I have beenwell, I've already been
collaborating with TakashiNishimura, and we had this paper
in Science a couple years ago avocal anatomy, but we've been
talking a lot about what kindsof cognitive tests we can do.
So I think there's a lot ofplaces where you need to do

(58:48):
international collaborations,where this is, inuyama is the
place, and these chimpanzees, ofcourse, are amazing in world
famous, but also the macaqueshere.
The whole facility is such aworld international center for
primate cognition.
I sure hope it keeps gettingfunded and keeps going strong.

(59:08):
It's got a long tradition.

Yeah, it does.

Yeah, so I think there's really good, very
strong grounds for internationalcollaboration.

Cool, so maybe a round two in the future
sometime then with the updates.

Yeah, absolutely , I ought to be back.

What about your cats?

Yeah, so I just published, we just published a
paper, christian Herbst, who'salso here at the Autumn School.
We published a paper on purringin cats and one of the stars of
the of the of the paper is mycat, stanley, 13 year old male,
who has a very strong purr andlikes to spend a lot of time on

(59:51):
your lap purring, and so I havelots of good recordings of
Stanley meowing and purring andso but yeah, this, the whole
phenomena of purring is isphenomenon of purring has been a
very very interesting one,because what our new paper seems
to show is that the old ideasthat it was very active muscle

(01:00:12):
contraction, that you each pulseof the purr required a muscle
contraction, isn't necessarilytrue.
So so it seems like the cat'slarynx is actually built to purr
and I think that's a aninteresting hypothesis about a
very fascinating phenomenon.
But it also shows how sometimeswe can be too quick to think
something's cognitive when it'sactually it's more peripheral.

(01:00:36):
But I think we can also makethe opposite mistake.
I think what's happened inprimate communication for a long
time is people thought it wasthe peripheral apparatus, when
in fact it's the, the cognitiveapparatus, the neural apparatus.
So I guess the big picturestory about all this is we
should be open minded.
We should never jump toconclusions that something is

(01:00:57):
more anatomic or peripheralanatomy or more neural.
We should just treat both as beopen minded, treat both as
plausible hypotheses and do whatwe have to do to figure out
what it is, and in many cases itmay be both.

Andrew MacIntosh (01:01:14):
All right.
Last question for me, thisone's for me Now that you're in
Japan.
You said you've been herebefore and you're a big fan of
music, doing music, listening tomusic.
I assume I haven't asked youwhat your kind of genre or what
you're mostly into, but have youdedicated any time to exploring
Japanese music?

Tecumseh Fitch (01:01:33):
Not as much as I would like, so as it.
When it comes to my own music,yeah, I write songs and in my
last, the current, incarnation,I've been setting great poems to
music, so taking Shakespeare orWordsworth or whatever great,
great poems from from thecenturies and setting them to
any genre.
And I used to play in a salsaband.

(01:01:53):
I've played, I've done Africandrumming, I played in a rock
band.
So I do, you know, I have likeheavy metal, I have, I have
salsa, I have Afro pop, I haveall kinds of styles, so I'm a
genre omnibor.
When it comes to Japanese music, we just had a in Kyoto.

(01:02:16):
We went to a temple which had axylophone, and then they also
had this water harp which uses,which uses formants to
musicalize drops of water, thisbeautiful, just amazing
soundscapes.
And even, is that music?
I don't know, it's, it's itsure sounds good.

(01:02:39):
But I, you know, Pat Savage,who's a long friend and a long
time term collaborator, is areal expert in Japanese music
and he published a paper lookingat Japanese folk songs and
comparing them with EuropeanEnglish language folk songs, and
so I listened to a bunch ofthat stuff and I find it
fascinating and beautiful.
But it's such a huge world thatI would say I'm intrigued.

(01:03:03):
But completely naive and Ihaven't.
I've never done a deep diveinto Japanese music.
No, not at all.

I wish I had time.

Yeah, it's very appealing, it's very beautiful.

So can be quite tranquil as well, Maybe
from what you yeah.

That's, I guess I'm more yeah, this kind of Zen
garden aspect.
This may be more when there'salso Japanese techno and
Japanese death metal Absolutely.
It's a vast, vast musicalculture.

So I, I spend a fair amount of time.
I wouldn't even know where tobegin to say.
Japanese music Because, if youknow, it's a a thing that you
don't see that much anymore.
But I spent some of myformative years inhabiting these
kind of underground dungeonlive houses full of rock and
metal and punk, and so it's kindof a different scene than most
people see in Japan, but italways struck me as as creative

(01:03:51):
and of so many dedicated people.

Yeah, Well, that's the amazing thing about
Japan as a culture is thisstrange combination.
It's a strange combination ofinnovative and conservative, of
traditional and very avant garde, and it seems like the Japanese
can almost absorb anything andmake it different, make it

(01:04:16):
unique, make it Japanese.
You know, that's true forcuisine, it's true for art, it's
true for music.
So it is a remarkable culturein that way, because you know,
there's so much new stuff.
I guess, when I say Japanesemusic, I kind of mean
traditional Japanese folk music.
But yeah, this you know, like Isaid, there's every single genre

(01:04:37):
, absolutely.
Yeah, it's kind of an amazing.
I think it's an amazing.
I love Japan.
I think it's an amazing culture.
I wish I could spend more time.
I think you're lucky to livehere.
But yeah so as far as Japanesemusic, I'm a beginner.

All right, then.
I think it's a good place toclose but to come so.
Is there anything that wedidn't cover that you want to
mention, whether it's comingback to something that you want
to add to, or Well?

one thing I might say that we didn't really
touch on.
I mentioned at the beginningthat both homology and analogy
are important in the comparativemethod and I think one worry I
have in primate cognition isthat, maybe partly because
primatology has often beenhoused in anthropology

(01:05:25):
departments, there's a tendencyto see primate cognition as
little but well, to see primatesas little humans and to be more
readily anthropomorphic withnon human primates than we are
with, say, dogs or or well,people are super anthropomorphic
with dog, yeah, then whales orthen seals or then birds, and I

(01:05:47):
think that's a problem forprimatology.
So I think it's reallyimportant that this broad
comparative approach, thinkingabout, say, bird cognition and
what it can teach us, is superimportant.
And I think there's really nicework now, for example, with
some of my colleagues, likeThomas Bougnard working with
Raven and other Corvid cognitionand you know asking why are

(01:06:07):
these smart birds so much likeapes and primates?
And there are neural answerswhich we've explored.
You know they have a lot of,they have a lot neurons in their
brain.
But I think there are deeperquestions there and it really
will be who primatologists totake this broad comparative
approach and not just stick in,you know, particularly human

(01:06:29):
primate, human, non humanprimate comparisons.
I think that's a bit of a deadend and I think, taking a
broader perspective frombehavioral ecology and you know,
how are marmosets differentfrom macaques, different from
chimpanzees?
Those are just as interestingas how are any of those three
groups like humans.
So I hope primatology also getsthis broad comparative approach

(01:06:51):
.
I think that's a superimportant thing going to a
moving forward in the future.

All right, well to come to fit.
Thanks so much for joining meon the podcast my pleasure,
Thank you.

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