From the Vault: The Secret Intellect of Animals, Part 2

In the second of two classic episodes, Joe and Christian continue their discussion of animal cognition, including animal morality, tool use, mental time travel, culture, and other strange clues to the intellectual complexity of our cousins in the animal kingdom. Afterwards, they speak to Dutch-American primatologist Frans de Waal about his book and his thoughts on the future of animal intelligence research. (Originally published 2/23/2017)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the Vault. This episode originally published
in February, and this is the second part of a
pair of episodes that I did with our previous co host,
Christian Seger, where we talked about the work of the
Dutch American parmatologist Friends Duvall and his book Are We

(00:28):
smart enough to Know How smart Animals are? In this episode,
we actually speak with friends of All himself. Yeah, and
so this is literally the prime reason I realized we
needed to rerun these I don't think we've run these
uh AS Vault episodes previously, and here we have this
great interview. Uh it just had to see the light
of day again. Let's do it. Welcome to Stuff to

(00:52):
Blow Your Mind from how stup works dot Com. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. I'm Joe McCormick
and I'm Christian Seger, and our regular host Robert Lamb
is not with us today. He's off chilling somewhere else.
So Christian and I are flying solo. This is going
to be part two of a two part episode on

(01:15):
animal intelligence and cognition, specifically with regard to a book
that we read by the primatologist and evolutionary cognitition. Would
that bean the terms? Yeah, I was trying to figure
out how you would singularize that. Yeah, cosmetologist, not uh
Franz Duval who wrote this book. Um, are we smart
enough to know how smart animals are? Right? Yeah? So

(01:37):
if you if you haven't, uh, we encourage you to
go listen to that other episode, Part one will will
lay the groundwork for this one that we're talking about today,
And within that episode, we mainly use Devol's work to
talk about the history of how science has looked at
animal intelligence. Uh. And in this episode we find ourselves

(01:58):
now in the present day, looking at a field that
Dvol likes to call evolutionary cognition. Right, and so this
is sort of a synthesized field that has come about
more recently by combining the best parts of previous ideas
like the you know, the comparative psychologists or the behaviorists.
These were the people who emphasized learning and conditioned responses,

(02:20):
and then the ethologists, the people who specialized in studying
animals in their natural habitats to see what they're naturally
inclined behaviors were. Yeah, and so to recap very briefly
from the last episode, Uh, he compares the wall between
studies of behaviorism and studies of ethology and even now
going into evolutionary cognition as similar to ideology, and specifically

(02:46):
he compares it to the ideology between science and creationism. Wow.
So that's saying that there's like a pretty pretty hard
stop in between them. It's not like it's easy to
argue from one position to the other. Yeah. In fact,
I don't believe that he came up with these categories,
but this is within the book that there are three
types of players within this argument, okay about animal cognition. Yeah,

(03:09):
And he refers to the first as slayers. And slayers
in this case are the people who felt empowered by
the human centric idea that we are the center of
the cosmos and how could animals possibly be intelligent? Who
insist on human uniqueness and I want to talk more
about this in a minute. Yeah. The other two are skeptics,

(03:29):
and the third group is proponents. So the proponents obviously
would be the people who are in favor of the
idea of animal cognition, saying, yeah, animals are thinking cognition
is an idea that makes sense with them. And the
skeptics would be the ones who are uh skeptical. They're
reserving judgment. They're saying, I'm not sure yet, give me
more research. How about you do a study showing me X,

(03:50):
Y and Z that kind of thing. And Duvall and
I think most evolutionary cognitionists uh that they would say
the layers are mostly gone nowadays, but the skeptics and
the proponents remain. And Daval says he really appreciates having
the skeptics around because it makes for better research. He
himself is a proponent. He says, yeah, I think we

(04:12):
can find clear evidence of animal cognition, animal thinking, and
strong animal intelligence. But it's good to have skeptics forcing
us to be honest and trying to keep us on
our toes. But evolutionary cognition is essentially a blend of
these two schools, right, yeah, of behaviorism in ethology or
comparative psychology and ethology. And he sees himself actually as

(04:34):
being part of what he calls the third generation of
evolutionary cognition scientists. Yeah, so he says that there are
two generations before him. He's sort of, you know, lucky
that he he saw somewhat of this this ideological battle
play out the wall, but that it's mostly come down, uh,
and that people are working together now. So another one

(04:55):
of the really interesting ideas in this book is uh,
the way I've say maybe it's one of the central
claims of the book. One of the central things that
Devol is driving at is against claims of human uniqueness
um and devolve. For example, one form of this he
uses this term, which is gonna sound inflammatory to some people.

(05:16):
He uses the term neo creationism, which he says it's
different than intelligent design, which Devol just basically considers regular
creationism under a scientific disguise. But so if if you're
not familiar, creationism is just opposition to historical science, to evolution,
to geology and all that stuff. It's the idea that

(05:36):
the Earth was created you know, six thousand years ago
or ten thousand years ago, or actually I guess there
are now also Old Earth creationists who think that the
Earth is uh, you know, billions of years old, but
that humans were created in some recent time frame. I
always thought it was only a hundred years old. I mean,
were you there? No, I was there a hundred years ago.

(05:58):
It was I was a different life, right, I was
actually Charles Darwin. Oh you were weird. Charles Darwin was
not here one years ago. But it's a little a
little known fact that Charles Darwin actually faked his own
death and was me, I don't know where you're going
with this, but it's good. I don't know anything, okay, um,
but yeah, So what does he mean by neo creationism, Well,

(06:20):
this is within this mindset that he's attacking of human uniqueness.
So a neo creationist, according to Duval, would probably nominally
accept evolution as the biological mechanism for creating all life,
including humans, including human bodies, but implicitly, sort of under
the table, it rejects evolution as the mechanism for creating

(06:41):
human minds. In other words, it's this implicit kind of
hidden belief. They wouldn't say this out loud, but they
act as if they believe that evolution stops at the
human head, you know, So they would say like, well,
you know, of course evolution has created all life on earth,
but you know, we will just never see that animals
have the kinds of mental capacities that humans do, They're

(07:03):
in a totally different category. You know. Here a chimpanzee
could never hope to come close to the mind of
a human. One example gives in his book is the
primatologist Mark Howser, who apparently at some point said, there's
probably more difference between the human and chimp cognition than
than between chimp and beetle cognition. Interesting and for d

(07:27):
of all, that is a ridiculous statement. Yeah, so you
know this is unrelated. But you know what this makes
me think of combining creationism with neo creationism. When I
was in Sunday school back in the day, I once
asked a question, will my pets go to heaven? Will

(07:47):
they be in heaven with me? There's some different theological
viewpoints on this, and I was I was heavily reprimanded
that of course they would not. Why why would animals
go to heaven? They are not uh and is intelligent.
They don't have souls like we do. So the Descartes
point of view, really the animals are automo. I didn't
know it then. I was probably like, I don't know,

(08:08):
six years old or something, and I was traumatized by
the whole idea that like my the pets that I
loved were somehow less than me and this, and therefore
did not deserve to live for eternity. Uh, I don't know.
Maybe that was the beginning of the end for me
when it came to just being active and organized religion. Well,
there are different theological viewpoints on this this and I

(08:30):
think the the I don't know, the insoulment of animals
or whatever you would call it. There there there are
some things that maybe we should do an episode on
that sometimes would be kind of caunimal in soulment theology,
it's sort of tangentially related. I'm putting us on a
little bit of a diversion, but but it's sort of
the same idea, right. Well, whether you're talking about the
religious mindset or even the mindset of many philosophers and

(08:53):
scientists who are operating supposedly under secular principles, there is
still this strong tendency to say, no, no no, no, humans
are unique. There's nothing like us. We are totally different,
totally totally different, and nothing else comes close. This is
another one of these ideas that I think Daval is
coming with a sword in both hands at and so

(09:15):
he actually in the book calls for a moratorium on
human uniqueness claims, at least for a few decades, given
how miserably these claims, he says, have performed in the past.
So what does he mean by that, Well, he discusses
lots of examples of intellectual traits that over the years
have been proposed as completely unique to humans. Examples would

(09:35):
be all kinds of things, social organization, theory of mind.
Theory of mind is the idea that you can take
the perspective mentally of another person. So when I imagine
what Christian could be thinking right now, this theory of mind,
and this heavily plays into what Dvoll and others define
as sort of the pillars of morality. Right, oh, yeah,

(09:57):
this is one of those pillars will come to Yeah, yeah,
they connects to the idea of empathy, which is perspective taking,
putting yourself in somebody else's mindset or their position. But
then another one. Only humans can do mental time travel.
Only they can episodically recall the past or think about
the future. Only humans can recognize themselves in a mirror.

(10:18):
Only humans can display moral behavior, and and treat others
with fairness and mercy. And in each case, observation of
animal behavior followed by controlled experiments has really started to undermine,
and I would say, in some cases completely demolish, the
idea that these traits are totally unique to humans and
not found in any other animal. Yeah. One of the

(10:40):
examples he gives in the book, which I I slightly
referenced in our previous episode, was the idea that animals
couldn't possibly say goodbye to one another, And yet he
is observed in experimental conditions the chimpanzees, in fact do
go around and say goodbye to one another in their
own way from within their social group, but where they
know when they know they're leaving the like compound that

(11:03):
they're in. Yeah, and we can talk about a few
more examples of of these different types of animal intelligence.
But I do want to come back and say, I
don't get the sense in the book that he said
he totally rejects the possibility that humans are unique in
any way. For example, the one thing he does seem
to suggest might be unique about humans that we don't
really know for sure yet might be unique is language.

(11:24):
Language might be the magic well of humanity, Like you know,
many other animals have peaks of specialization that are unique
to them. Maybe the one thing that might set us
apart is our flexible use of syntax, And you know,
flexible syntax that symbolic and communicates all different kinds of
things that we don't really see anything like this in

(11:45):
other animals. There are signals and calls and basic communications,
but nothing that we've detected yet. That's like human language.
That's a whole another episode that could be something that
we could do as well. But yeah, the the definition
of language in human communication when you then apply it
to various animals, there are certain ground rules essentially that

(12:08):
they have yet to show us that they've achieved. But
I think we should learn from all of these other
examples of things. We used to say we're definitely unique
to humans, and then we found out maybe not so much.
We should be cautious about saying this about language. We
might find out differently. Yeah, I agree, And and the
other thing I would say here too is that you
know Devol would say, I think I don't want to

(12:30):
put words in his mouth, but would probably say, yes,
humans are unique, but so are every other species. That's
sort of right, the point of his approach to the discipline. Right,
it's almost like, why would you say non human animals
and saying uh instead of saying non octopus animals? Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah,
that like, each species brings its own unique umveld yeah,

(12:55):
umvelt the context to the situation, and therefore we have
something different to learn from all of them. That's what
he refers to as the magic. Well. Yeah, so there's
one quote I want to read from the book that
I think sort of encapsulates the thinking behind this big idea.
In the book of Going Against Human Uniqueness, claims the
idea that humans are you know, elite or a gap

(13:16):
above all other animals and uh. And the section goes
like this quote, if cognitions basic features derived from gradual
descent with modification, So he's saying, if we evolved our brains,
the notions of leaps, bounds, and sparks are out of order.
Instead of a gap, we face a gently sloping beach

(13:37):
created by the steady pounding of millions of waves. Even
if human intellect is higher up on the beach, it
was shaped by the same forces battering the same shore.
I found that passage both beautiful and I think I
I very much agree with it. I mean, it may
be true that we're much higher up on the shore.

(13:57):
I guess it's up for debate how much higher along
the shore we're on, but it's not the case that
we're on a different land mass, right you know? Yeah, yeah,
I agree. Okay, let's take a quick break and when
we get back, we're gonna look at some examples of
these animals using intelligence and cognition. Okay, so we're back,

(14:21):
So what are some really good examples. We already talked
about the combination of mental time travel and chimpanzees having
the ability to say goodbye, But what else? What else
have we seen? Well? I mean, so mental time travel
is something that you tend to assume is only a
human trait, right uh. It you think of animals as

(14:43):
existing in terms of what's in front of them, what's
going on right now? What are my needs right now?
And a dog can beg for a treat in anticipation
of a treat, So that is some future oriented behavior,
but it's begging because it's hungry now right to a
dog plan for something it wanted to do tomorrow. That's

(15:05):
the question. Can can dogs think about the future in
a distant way and make plans that are not related
to their current needs, not just dogs, obviously, any animals,
And can they remember episodes from their past that are
not currently relevant to what's going on to them. This
is completely anecdotal, and I don't know whether or not
it backs up anything. But here's what I think of

(15:27):
when you say that one of my dogs is a
rescue and we had a little bit of difficulty potty
training her, getting her to go outside, because in her
you know, whatever situation she was in before we had her,
she was clearly going to the bathroom, either on concrete
or indoors um. And so, uh, it's interesting when I
let her outside and I you know, she's she's gotten

(15:49):
to the point now or she knows going outside means
going to the bathroom. Get my business sense so that
when I'm inside, I don't have to worry about that, right.
But I see her sometimes, especially at night, right before
we go to bed, she knows she's going to be
in the house for an extended period of time. I
see what I think. What I think is her making

(16:10):
a choice and saying, do I really need to go
to the bathroom that bad? Right? Now or do I
want to just stay inside and I'll deal with it tomorrow. Yeah,
I don't know. Is that I feel like I see
Charlie doing that same thing. Now that may just be
me the dog on or projecting yea, um, but yeah,
I see like sometimes I feel like he's working out

(16:31):
the pros and cons of future behavior. Yeah, exactly right.
She's like, do I want to be inside and warm
right now and in my bed or do I want
to go outside and and you know, walk around in
the dark for five minutes and go to the bathroom?
Do I have to go that bad? Now? That's what
it seems like to me. Who knows what's actually going
on inside your head? Now, maybe you could actually come

(16:53):
up with some kind of test condition to try to
tug it these variables and see if you could isolate
it is possible. I don't know. This is what a
lot of these scientists do, you know, evolutionary uh, people
working in evolutionary cognition whatever the title for that is, UM.
They you know, they have to come up with experiments

(17:14):
to try to isolate these situations and see what can
what can we bring out, what can we tug on? Uh?
And so one interesting example. They get cited in the book.
There are tons of examples, and you know, we we
can't cover everything in the book, right we also we
want to read the book. Yeah, and in fact, there's
so many examples in them there's no way that we
could do it justice without just reading the book out loud,

(17:36):
do you right? But here's one really interesting one dealing
with episodic memory and animals. So dev all sites research
by people NICKI Clayton and Anthony Dickinson doing experiments with
western scrub jays. These are birds, Okay, now, Robert and
I actually in the past, I've already done an episode
on bird intelligence, Corvid's in particular. Actually, many birds, but

(17:58):
especially birds like corvids and satasta forms have displayed some
very very interesting apparent higher order intelligence. Yeah. I thought
of you guys as I was reading the book, because
he talks about, uh, that example with I want to
say it was crows where they would put masks on
various people to see if the crows would recognize the

(18:19):
masks rather than the actual human face. Yeah, yeah, I
don't know if that was crows. There's definitely some kind
of corvid So members of the Corvid family um a
family or group members of the Corvid group of animals,
including like crows, ravens, magpies, jay's um the these animals

(18:41):
are they often display very strikingly intelligent behavior, stuff that
we would not expect at all. And I want to
talk more about one with regard to tool use, for example.
But yeah, so scrub jays. There seems to be evidence
based on this research that they are able to remember
what items they have put where and at what time.

(19:02):
So not just you can imagine instinctual behavior just leading
a jay to hide a piece of food somewhere and
then come back to it later, but can they make
decisions based on how long that piece of food has
been there and what type of piece of food it was.
This this study does seem to indicate that might possibly

(19:22):
be happening. So they got to hide different food items,
peanuts and waxworms. The jay's love waxworms. The waxworms are
much preferred to the peanuts. So four hours after hiding
this stuff, they went back to find the food and
they look for the worms first. That makes sense. They
like their they like this food better, so the worms

(19:43):
probably go bad quicker than peanuts too. What do you
know this is actually what the study plays on. So
four hours after hiding, they go back for the worms first,
but five days later, if they get to go back
and look for these pieces of food they hid, they
look for the nuts first, presumably in the understanding that
worms spoil over the course of several days. Now, there

(20:04):
could be other stuff going on that, because you know,
it's not total proof, but that's a very interesting result.
That's crazy the case. And uh and they determined them
not even like good enough at that. I go into
the fridge and my bread's got mold on it. Oh yeah, yeah,
I have to make it. I bargained with myself whether
or not it's right. I can't remember when we ordered

(20:25):
this Chinese food, right, yeah, exactly. But these corvids, man,
they've got a leg up on us. But so, another
thing that the Devil reports is that apparently odor was
not a factor in this. They didn't just sniff it
out because the food had actually been removed. They're looking
where they remembered putting the nuts. Uh So, I don't know.
That's really interesting. And there are plenty of other studies

(20:45):
he talks about with different types of mental apparent mental
time travel going on in animals. One of the examples
that Devol talks about in his book is the idea
of a of a primate taking a bunch of straw
from its in door enclosure to the outside at a
time when it didn't have to be outside. It was

(21:06):
planning ahead of time. The straw can keep it warm,
it can make a little straw nest outside, but it
wasn't it didn't need it at that moment. It's the
equivalent of like knowing that you would need to be
in the bedroom, you know, in the future tomorrow or
something like that, and taking a blanket in there and
leaving it there for when you come back. And if

(21:27):
I remember correctly, I think it should be noted that
this primate had a baby, didn't it, And that was
part of it. Yeah, And so it was planning ahead
of time, not just for itself but for it's young. Yeah.
So that's just a couple of interesting examples of mental
time travel. Their tons more sided in the book, Um
and that that are evidence of both episodic memory and

(21:48):
animals and animal remembering what happened where and at what
time in the past, and animals planning for the future
in some kind of interesting or complex way. Another obvious
one that people you to say, you know what what
is man? Man is the tool using animal animals that no, no,

(22:10):
doctors as did not have that much respect for man.
Man is a brute? What did he say? Dr z
is or is exactly what's going through my head? Right? Um?
So yeah. So another one would be tool use. So
it used to be assumed that, well, one thing that's
really unique about humans is that they make tools. This

(22:33):
is just this is exploded now. Well, just this episode
episode I pointed out that we've got crabs that use
an m andies as tools. We have a whole episode
about it. Yeah, yeah, so it's crazy. Like this is
one of those where I don't think it's debatable. It's
not like some people might argue with the mental time
travel results and say I don't know about these that

(22:53):
you might be interpreting them wrong. Okay maybe, Uh not
so with tool use, I mean, animals obviously used tools.
Chimpanzees use stones to crack nuts to get into nuts
they couldn't otherwise use. Uh. Sometimes they show very complex
behaviors with regard to how they gather these stones and nuts.
Like there's one anecdote in the book about a chimpanzee

(23:16):
in the wild. I believe it was either chimpanzee or binobo,
but I think it was a chimpanzee who was carrying
a large stone across a great distance and like routed,
went on a route to pick up some nuts on
the way while carrying the stone to the place where
the big flat stone was where you could pound the
nuts with the stone she was carrying. I mean, that

(23:39):
just sounds like obvious uh tool used to me. Yeah,
he has a really good example of this in the book.
Gibbons were apparently originally thought of as being unintelligent because
they wouldn't use tools like sticks when they were placed
on the floor. Now, this is where the velt the
context of a gibbons life comes into play. Right, We'll
get Ben's hands are different from other primates that have

(24:02):
really long fingers because they swing from branches and other objects.
It's called brackyation. They they're they're not they're not manipulators
to the same extent that like chimpanzees and humans are
there their swingers. Yeah, exactly. So what they found was
sure if you put the sticks on the ground, they
won't pick them up because their hands aren't made to

(24:24):
pick things up off the ground, but if you suspend
the sticks, they will easily grab them and use them.
So it's just a matter of knowing about the species
before you start conducting these experiments. Yeah, it's the m
belt again. It's the it's the idea that if you
don't understand the animal, you're very likely missing something crucial

(24:44):
when you're testing it's intelligence. Likewise, they did the same
thing with elephants. They put sticks on the ground when
they wanted to see if elephants would use these sticks.
It turned out the elephants wouldn't use sticks as tools
because they pick things up with their trunk and when
they're picking up these sticks and sticks are big enough
that they're blocking their nasal passages. So of course they
wouldn't want to use that because their nasal passage is

(25:05):
hugely important to them and surviving in the context that
they live in. Uh. There's another really interesting thing about
corvids again in tool use. I mean, Robert and I
talked about this in our episode about bird intelligence, but
corvids have been seen not just to use tools, so crows,
you know, corvids, they will not just get a hook
and use it use the hook to retrieve a piece

(25:28):
of meat in a bucket out of a tube. But
they will do that, but they'll also make a hook.
So they take a straight piece of wire and bend
the end of it into a hook shape. Which that
that's a type of meta tool use. That's a metacognition
of understanding what type of tool you need to use
and then building the tool. Now, unlike imagining this horror

(25:51):
movie of corvids using hooks to kill people, like like
maybe that's what what is it, bird demic? Maybe that's
birdmic or something like that. But but like you remember
that like the old like urban myth, I guess it
is the hook. That's like often used as like a
story to begin horror stories with the idea that like

(26:13):
there's a prisoner on the loose and you got a
hook for a hand. And like the couples like making
out in a car or something, they hear this on
the radio and the mail goes out looking to see
about a noise, and then when the female exits the car,
all she sees as a hook hanging like scraping against
the top of the car, hanging over the car. Right,
I think you may more of it the whole time, Frankenstein,

(26:36):
that together from some parts of different thing. But my version,
my version is going to be that it was actually
birds the whole time. There was a cord hook. Yeah, well,
I mean to me, that is very interesting type of intelligence.
I think that was Betty the crow who did that,
Betty the crow bend in the hooks. But another interesting

(26:57):
one is the picture experiments. You remember about these where
there would be like a picture of water and a
piece of food floating in it. Oh. Yeah. Do animals
understand that they can displace water by dropping stones into
the water to float the food up to where they
can reach it. Uh, And so there have been some
experiments where crows did show this they could displace water.

(27:19):
But Devol does add a little caveat to that. He says,
you know, they had some kinds of pre training and
like the tools were right there available to them. He's
even more proud of chimpanzees in water displacement tasks where
there's something floating that they need to get in a
narrow container and they add water to the container to
float it up to where they can reach it. He
even mentions that one female chimpanzee when uh, that he

(27:43):
was working with when trying to do this this picture experiment,
tried to pee into the tube. Well, you know, I
guess whatever works works. Uh. You know. The other thing
about elephants is that people scientists at first thought that
they couldn't recognize themselves and mirrors. And you know why
because they're giving them a little teeny tiny human handheld

(28:05):
mirrors to try to recognize themselves in uh, and so
the elephants could like basically all they would see, if
they could even see into it at all, was like
their leg right, like the entire side of their leg.
So scientists thought, well, clearly they can't recognize themselves. Then then, actually,
one of I think is one of Duval's students came

(28:26):
up with this idea. He put like, I think they're
eight foot by eight foot mirrors in a an enclosure
with an elephant. Bigger mirrors, Yeah, bigger mirrors for bigger animals.
Duh and bingo. The elephants like demonstrated the ability to
recognize themselves. This is yet another one of these things
that cited in the book as an example of something
people used to say, only humans can, you know, have

(28:47):
self awareness. They can recognize themselves and mirrors. Now there
are more studies seeming to show and some of the results,
again you might question them. You might say, I'm not
sure what's really going on here. That's fair to question them.
But there are plenty of results appearing to show animals
recognize themselves in mirrors. Now that's limited to a smaller
subset of animals, but like it's only some of the

(29:09):
great apes and maybe the magpie Eurasian magpie um. But
but they are very interesting. It's like where you will
put a mark on a place on the animal where
the animal can't see it themselves, and then let them
look at themselves in the mirror. Do they do they
try to investigate this mark or are they just uninterested?
Do they get that's them they're looking at in the mirror.

(29:30):
And there's actually a much simpler version of this experiment.
It's not even an experiment, it's just something people observed about,
for example, chimpanzees and elements in the presence of mirrors,
is they look at their mouths. They like open their
mouths and look inside it in the mirror. I mean
that that's almost like you don't even have to do
the experiment. You can tell that they they know that

(29:52):
the mirror is giving them visual access to something they
could never see otherwise. And in fact, I haven't read
this study, but I believe leave Duval won an egg
Nobel Prize for a study like this. Yeah, he does
involve chimpanzees looking at their own behinds with a mirror. Well,
he did talk about chimpanzees looking at their own behinds

(30:14):
in mirrors, But I think the study was actually about
chimpanzees recognizing one another or some type of I think
it was chimpanzees, but it was some type of primate
could recognize one another from their butts. Yeah, okay, So anyways,
as many of you out there, no, we cover the
ig Nobels every year and there's a you know, usually
a good dozen or so funny but illuminating studies that

(30:37):
are represented there, and this was one of them. From
is when I think he got the award. Yeah. Other
big things he talks about in the book that that
maybe we won't even address now, but their ideas about
theory of mind can animals um can animals take the
perspective of another animal, and there's tons of interesting research
on that. The answer seems to me, I'm fairly convinced

(31:00):
many animals. Yes, they can. They can take the perspective
of another. They can imagine what somebody else is thinking,
understand what they see. Uh, social organization. There's all kinds
of stuff about primate hierarchies, things about moral behavior. This
is a big one. Yeah. Actually, why don't we take
a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about

(31:22):
examples of animal morality. Okay, we're back. So this is
actually a lot of the case studies that we presented before.
We're from other researchers. Devolves main area is looking at
animal morality, like animal empathy. Yeah, and so his own

(31:44):
work looks at this a lot with chimpanzees, and for instance,
his work looks at how they reconcile with one another
after conflict. Apparently bonobo's actually value their relationships with one
another and they see reconciliation as something that they need
to do to maintain those relationships, he defines, and we
we hinted at this at the beginning of the episode.

(32:05):
Actually we should just mention he has a really good
in succinct ted talk about this. You can check out
if you want. Yeah, it's wonderful. Um, but he he
basically looks at the essential pillars of morality as they
stand with us as human beings. Right, and he defines it. Uh,
there's a drawing of literally creek creek pillars. One is

(32:26):
reciprocity and fairness and the other is empathy and compassion. Right,
And so he's not saying that all of what morality
is is defined by these two pillars, but I think
he's saying that these two pillars are essential. It's building blocks.
So fairness and compassion or reciprocity and empathy, he used
them sort of interchangeably. Um, they're not all of what

(32:50):
morality is. There's more to morality, but they're the necessary
components of a morality. You can't have a morality without them.
So an example that he uses is he says that
they showed chimps that even if one chimp wasn't hungry
but another one was hungry, they would work together to

(33:11):
help each other get the food. Yeah, this is a
classic the rope pulling in tandem tests exactly. Yeah, And basically,
like he shows a video of this that like the
one chimp that isn't that hungry, we'll kind of stop
halfway through, and the hungry chimp will pat it on
the back, kind of getting its attention. But we should
describe the test a little bit. So there's two chimps
behind bars prisoners. Yeah uh, And there they have access

(33:34):
to ropes, and these ropes are attached to a box
that is too heavy for one chimp to pull by themselves.
But two chimps together can move the box. And the
box has some food sitting on it, so obviously they
want to get it closer to the bars so they
can get the food. Now, if they work together, they
can they can get the box there. And if they're
both hungry, there's no problem here. They'll cooperate, they'll get

(33:55):
the thing there, and they'll both take their food from
the box. But as you were saying, what if one
of the chimps isn't hungry, what if it just eight
to its fill, will it still help? The answer is
it doesn't necessarily naturally, but if the other chimp sort
of encourages it to help, it will. Yeah, pats it
on the back and basically says, hey, give me a

(34:16):
hand here, it'll help pull pull the box forward. And
even in the example, the hungry chimp eats all of
the food. Yeah, I think the I think the full
chimp took like one little piece. Yeah. So in these examples,
Devol defines empathy as having two channels. There's the body channel,

(34:37):
and that's where we or animals maybe adopt the body
language of another person's emotions. And he says, this is
why we keep mammals in our homes, right, this is
why we love cats and dogs as pets because they
have this kind of empathy. Right, if you're happy your doggie,
I don't know about you, but my dog gets you
know what looks like a smile on his face, will

(34:58):
start panting and jumping around on something like that. Right.
Yawn contagion is a really good example of this, like
my yawn, Joe, my yawn, or me even saying yawning,
or like we actually did a whole episode about yawning
and dogs on our other show, Brain Stuff. I think
they do. I feel like Charlie catches my yawns. Yeah,

(35:19):
I think it's a totally possible. Dogs yawn for a
lot of reasons. So not just contagion, but yeah, um,
so that's an example that we, you know, pick up
on visual cues from other human beings, but also animals
pick them up from us or other animals as well,
and that's part of their empathy. The second channel is
the cognitive channel, and this is where you can take

(35:41):
the perspective of somebody else, right, you imagine what it's
like to be them. So there's another study that he
did on altruism with chimpanzees, and basically the question they're
getting at here was do these chips care about the
welfare of other chimpanzees. Well, they go out of their
way to and not all that far out of their way.
Well they do something to make sure another chimpanzee gets

(36:04):
a piece of food if it has no impact on them. Yeah.
The way that they did this was they they put
tokens in the cage with the chimpanzees, and I think
like red red token is the selfish token and a
green token is the pro social token. Right, So if
you give the caretaker a red token, you get a
piece of food for yourself. If you give them a
green token, you get a piece of food and another

(36:25):
chimp gets a piece of food. Exactly either way you
get the food. But if you do the green token,
everybody gets food. They found that the chimps choose the
pro social token more often unless there's a situation between
them that involves reciprocity. If there's like, if they they
have some sort of situation they've got to be a
fight earlier or something like that, then they'll they'll choose

(36:49):
the selfish tokens. This is pretty interesting. Uh. They also
conducted a fairness study where they created inequity between monkeys
by giving some cucumbers and some grapes. Now, what we
need to define here is uh Daval actually says he
just thinks of cucumbers as being mostly water. Obviously, the
monkeys like the grapes way more than the cucumbers. But

(37:12):
they're perfectly fine getting a cucumber as a reward as
long as it's equal. But if they're in cages next
to one another, you get one monkey and you only
give it cucumbers. And if you get start giving grapes
to the other monkey, the cucumber monkey gets upset. They
freak out. Yeah, and he he, you know, throw the cucumber,
the cucumber back at the handler. I guess right, demanding

(37:37):
a grape. Uh. And Duval says this is basically the
primate version of the Wall Street protests. I think this
talk was in two thousand twelve. Uh, and he describes
going back to the conflict that we described in the
previous episode. This is a study that they received a
lot of flak four trying to put lie the idea

(37:57):
of fairness to primates really angered a lot of scholars
in various disciplines, including economics. Yeah, well, well, I mean,
I think the idea is that in economics there's this
idea of rationality. You know that people rationally maximize their
own benefit. Um, you know that they will naturally go
for the option that makes the most sense and the

(38:19):
most benefit to them. And it doesn't make sense to
refuse a small reward. Even if you just get a cucumber,
you should accept it. You shouldn't throw it in the
face of the person who gave it to you because
you didn't get the thing that somebody else got. But
that's just not what monkeys are. Like, I gotta say,
after reading his work and watching these videos and just
being kind of immersed in this stuff, it's interesting how

(38:42):
much of primate behavior I'm noticing in myself and in
other human beings around me, Like as I'm just going
about my day to day. Now, Christian, here's the crucial question,
are you more of a chimpanzee or more of a banobo.
I'm probably more of a binobo. And I'll tell you why,

(39:04):
because I think Binobo's play better into devolved idea of
what he calls evolved morality. Okay, and this is something
you know what, I'm gonna just say it. I'd like
to see a little bit more often from my fellow
human being. Uh So, he says this is a combination
of empathy and consolation, pro social tendencies and reciprocity and fairness.

(39:29):
And he says morality is obviously more than what he's
talking about here, but it would be impossible without these ingredients,
these just very basic ingredients, is what leads us to
our quote unquote morality that we use to sort of
lead our everyday social lives. And disconnected from the main
book we've been talking about in these two episodes and

(39:50):
this Ted talk and the stuff we've addressed, he's written
whole books on animal morality. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Alright, So
that wraps up our discussion. But we got a chance
to talk to Dr duval Um and so this is
our conversation with him. So Dr duval could you introduce yourself, Well,

(40:16):
let us know who you are and uh, and a
little bit about your background. I'm a biologist, but I
teach at Emory University in the psychology department. I also
work at the Yorkies Primate Center, which is a very
big primate channel that we have here in Atlanta. And
my origin is I'm from the Netherlands, but I came

(40:36):
already more than thirty years ago. I'm a legal immigrant
one or thirty years ago to the US. And uh,
I live and work here. I saw that you actually
you just got your citizenship a couple of years ago. Yeah, congratulations,
thank you. Uh So in the episode, Christian and I
already discussed a few examples of animal cognitive capacities that

(41:00):
you cite in the book. For example, we talked a
little bit about the cooperative rope pulling experiments. Uh and
for example about some apparent examples of mental time travel.
But I thought one good way to start off our
conversation might be to just ask you for your subjective
impression of some of the most striking examples of a
paramid of apparent animal cognition that you've witnessed over the years.

(41:23):
What sticks out in your mind the most. Yeah, I
think there's many discoveries recently. For example, the tool used
by crows is a very remarkable and it's not just
that they use tool. The crows make tools, so they
transform things to make it more suitable as a tool.
You have the studies of mirror self recognition, which I

(41:44):
always find fascinating. You have the studies of thinking forward
and thinking backwards. So they do experiments with apes, for example,
where you you give them a tool that they cannot
use immediately. They can only use it the next morning
to get food. And so then you wonder will they
going onto the tool, will they keep it with them
because they know that they're going to use it the

(42:04):
next day. So they're kind of planning studies that are
being done, and and that kind of things is also
being done in the field with field workers following apes
around and see if they collect their tools long before
they start using them, which they actually do. And and
so I think there's an enormous range of studies that
have to do with planning and self awareness and so

(42:25):
on and and and some of these studies they get
actually quite close to what you could call consciousness, even
though no one knows exactly what consciousness is. Um. Uh.
There's a lot of things that that the animals do
that we cannot do without being conscious of it, and
so we wonder if maybe the animals are conscious. Also
interesting is so is a follow up from that? Um?

(42:47):
Do you think that consciousness is likely to be closely
associated with the idea of mental time travel, that if
you don't just exist in the here and now, but
you're able to think about the future and think about
the past. Do you think that that's crucial to the
idea of consciousness. I think it's one way it can
manifest itself. So, for example, they do studies here. Also

(43:10):
at Emory, we do studies on meta cognition. Do you
know what you know? So you can set up an
experiment with monkeys, for example, where they can choose one
option that they have learned a solution to and another
option where they are not sure if they know the solution,
and so you can see do they know what kind
of knowledge they have acquired. It's called meta cognition, and

(43:33):
we humans, we really cannot do that without being conscious
of the whole process and of our knowledge. And so
then people wonder is a monkey capable because the monkeys
are capable of doing this, Are they capable of doing
that without consciousness? Or they do it in exactly the
same way as we. And so that's the sort of
the issues that people address. And it's not just in

(43:53):
relation to time travel. I think it's in relation to
all sorts of capacities. Interesting, So the idea you're talking
about there would be that, like, if you're able to
judge your own confidence in how well you know something,
that shows that you must be able to think about
your own thoughts. Yeah. So for example, if I if
I ask in my class here at Emory, who knows

(44:16):
who knows the answer to this? And and there's five
hands going up, So there's going to be five people
who have some confidence that they know the answer to
a question, which means that they have knowledge of their
own knowledge. And um, yeah, us that's very hard to
do without being unconscious of the process. And so we
think that some animals have that capacity too. Interesting. So

(44:40):
one more thing I wanted to ask you about was
um In the book, you discuss how we keep finding
interesting clues of intelligent cognition in animals that are more
and more separate from us. Pholow genetically they're separated from
us by more and more years of divergent evolution. And
then you make a prediction, you say in the book
quote every car native capacity that we discover is going

(45:02):
to be older and more widespread than we initially thought.
Can you explain a little bit about what this prediction
means and what what justifies your thinking on this subject. Well,
this is something that that has happened all the time,
and so and so. For example of the tool use,
it's maybe the clearest example is that we initially started

(45:23):
testing tools with the apes, and the apes are very
good with the tools, and since we are we humans
are very good with tools. Also, we're very impressed, most
impressed by capacities that relate to what we can do.
And so the apes they not only make tools, they
plant tools and so on. But then very soon thereafter

(45:43):
we've got these studies on other species, like the birds,
so so so, first came the monkeys. The monkeys are
different from from apes. As you may know, monkeys have
tails and are smaller. So putting monkeys in the can,
put in monkeys in the field. They were using stones
to crack nuts, which no one had expected them to do,
but they were doing that, and they have been tested

(46:05):
in captivity also. And then came the new Caledonian crows
who who modify branches to make them more suitable to
extract groups from travises. And so they are not just
use tools. These crows, they make tools. And they started
testing the crows and all sorts of other things in
the lab and and the crows have a lot of

(46:26):
the same capacities as the apes do. Then we got
to use in the octopus as octopus movies. If you
look them up, you see them using coconut shells to
help hide in We got recently a finding of alligators
using tools. So the alligators they live near heron colonies,

(46:47):
and the herons for their nests they need branches and
they scoop up these branches and sometimes a branch maybe
sitting on an alligator and that's the moment that the
alligator can maybe grab the heron and eat it. And
so but they found is that some alligators they were
bringing branches from distances to the pump um, probably in

(47:09):
order to lure inherents close to them. And so so
now we have tool us in so many different species.
And so this has happened all the time. It has
happened with mirror self recognition has happened with these time
travel studies that we talked about. Um, it's almost anything
you can think of. It's first usually discovered in the apes,

(47:30):
and then we moved to the dogs, and to the
dolphins and to the birds, and it turns out that
the capacity is probably present in many of them. So
I have a follow up on this from a recent
study that we actually did an episode on, And I'm
curious if you've heard about this the Pom Pom crab
or the boxer crab and how it uses c N

(47:51):
mns as tools. Have you heard about this this study?
So it's it's a sort of cheerleading type Yeah, exactly, so,
so real quick summary of it. They hold anemonies in
each of their claws, and they're able to use the
anemonies to scoop up food and bring the food to

(48:12):
their mouths. But the most recent study, and this is
where it gets really crazy, is that if they only
have one anemony, they will rip it in half in
just the right way to cause it to reproduce and
clone itself, so they have two of them. So we
did a whole episode on this study, and I was

(48:32):
just curious. You know, maybe you don't have, you know,
a strong opinion on it since you just heard about it.
But do you think it's possible that this is a
case of cognitive tool use or do you think maybe
it's just like an invertebrate instinct that these crabs are
performing with these anemonies. No, it's it sounds like two
use of course, miss tools. We usually say that an
animal uses an inanimate object to do something, right, in

(48:56):
this case, they're using another animal to do something this
but it is an extension of the body and that's
in the sense of tool us. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's
pretty fascinating. I recommend you check it out. Um, So
I have a question, just like pulling out and and
let's look at the sort of broad discipline in academics
of these studies. How do you think we're going to

(49:19):
look back on studies of animal intelligence in a hundred
and fifty years. Are we going to regard today's methodologies
with the same sort of predominant view that we currently
look at past research or do you think that we've
come to a point where current research is now going
to be a stepping stone towards a better understanding of
animal intelligence. Yeah, I think a hund of six years

(49:41):
from now we probably know a lot more about the
neuroscience behind all of this. So at the moment, the neuroscientists,
they have still very simplistic views of animals, and they
test animals in very simplistic ways like activity levels or
do they do behavior or behavior b um. And so
the neuro scientists need to learn more about animal intelligence

(50:04):
and animal behavior and then they can maybe help us
solve the issue of what what what makes the crows
used tools in the same way as that the apes
use tools is do they have similar areas in the
brain that are similarly specialized or do they have ways
of solving this problem in a totally different way than

(50:24):
the apes do, And so we don't know that actually,
so we usually assume that if related species, like let's
say you use a tool and I use a tool
and the schimpanzee uses the tool, we assume that we
are using the brain in the same way to do
these to solve these issues. But when it comes to
birds or other species, we don't know that. And so

(50:44):
I think the neuroscientists are going to help us clarify
what is going on in the brain when when these
problems are being solved, and yes, we will then look
at a hundred fifty years from now, we will look
at what we do now as interesting pioneering stuff, but
without knowing the mechanisms behind it. Really so, so we

(51:05):
are in a different phase now because in the last CeNSE,
where we were not even allowed to talk about animal
intelligence and animal cognition, we can only talk about instincts
or simple learning processes. We were not allowed to use
the word cognition for animals, and so that has all
changed that we now have a whole new generation of
scientists who are much less reluctant than who uses this

(51:28):
kind of terminology. Yeah, we might have some questions for
you about the influence of ethology and behaviorism in a
little bit, but I wanted to ask a question first.
So you talk in the book, and I really like
this point you made about our tendency to want to
look at an animal behavior and then say what does
that mean for us? What does that mean about what
it's like to be human? And I think you sort

(51:49):
of discourage that view, but I I am sorry, I
do want to ask a question about that anyway. So, um,
I wonder what you think about the legitimacy of drawing
conclusions about human evolution by studying the behavior of existing
other primates today. For example, just one thing that I've
read about is the work of a couple of primatologists

(52:11):
who study savannah chimpanzees in Senegal and specifically how these
chimpanzees behave in the presence of wildfire, like how how
much they seem to understand fire and to predict its movements.
And in this particular case, I guess the question would be,
can we use these observations about savannah chimpanzees to generate

(52:32):
anything useful for theories about how our ancestors might have
behaved in the presence of fire before we were before
we were able to use fire as a tool. Or
is this a misapplication of these observations about other primates? Well,
it's an interesting example if you give because I remember
a book by an anthropologist of maybe thirty years ago

(52:54):
who claimed that fire and our control over fire is
what made as human and where everything got started. And
other animals are afraid of fire or they get burned
in the fire, but we brought it under control. And
look at how important that was and then of course
we had we had here in Atlanta, we had Consi

(53:15):
the bonobo who would roast marshmallows in the fire and
would poke the fire and was not afraid of fire
at all, which was the first indicator that actually, fear
of fire is not necessarily inborn and can be overcome.
And now we have these observations of chimps using fire
for their own advantages. They're not making a fire, and

(53:36):
they're not having a fireplace or something, but they wait
for a spontaneous fire, and they're not afraid of it,
and they use it for their own purposes, and they
know how to step around it and so on. And
I think, what what It is interesting to see that
kind of things because it debunks certain arguments, as always,
these claims of human uniqueness that are always going around.

(53:56):
Only humans can do this, only humans can do that,
And we primatologist, we're always happy to show that these
claims are wrong, because we feel that we are primates
and we are not fundamentally different from other primates, and
and this confirms that kind of I D so I
have a question for you. Uh that it's a it's
slightly political, and after reading some some interviews with you previously,

(54:20):
I've gotten the impression that you have applied your previous
work to politics. So your research has mainly focused on
empathy and animal cognition, and I'd love to hear your
perspective on how empathy, morality, and reciprocity are playing out
on a larger scale with human beings and our current

(54:41):
climate in the United States. Now you've mentioned before that
a lot of human politics mirror primate politics. I'm specifically
thinking of what you call the cognitive channel of empathy
and how are how are we currently at taking the
perspective of somebody else. Yeah, I think empathy remains a
very important capacity, even though we now have certain scientists

(55:03):
who say empathy is not what's going to solve the
problems in the world, which is probably true. But for example,
the abolishment of slavery in this country was was partly
an act of empathy. Lincoln literally said that he was
bothered by seeing slaves in chains and and so that's
an empathic reaction. And I think empathy is always sort

(55:25):
of in the background of all the debates, the political debates,
the debate about healthcare, for example, do we care about
the health of others, even people who cannot really pay
for the healthcare that we need to provide. Um, that's
that's a question of empathy also, so and and and
for example, the reaction now to the immigration crisis is
also we empathize with people who want to come in

(55:47):
and so on. So there's always empathy is always in
the background of these debates. They're not going to provide
the final solution necessarily on on how we should handle
these things. It's not necessarily the only thing that we
need to consider, obviously, but it's almost part of the debates.
And I think there's plenty of empathy to go around.
I've always felt that in two thousand and eight, when

(56:09):
we had the financial crisis, that all of a sudden,
empathy became a more important topic. It was almost as
if after two thousand and eight, we realized that completely
unfet up market mechanism is not gonna provide a solution
to a society. Society is much more than than market mechanisms,

(56:30):
and I think we started to realize that very clearly
after two thousand eight, and and empathy became a major
issue in Obama made it a major word that he
would use on occasion and I think since that time
also science got involved, and there's now a lot of
neuroscience on empathy, and there's my kind of observations of
empathy and animals and so on, and I think also

(56:50):
the scientists got interested in the topic. Yeah, I have
a lot of sympathy for that view, and I think
I can definitely see how what you call for spective
taking is kind of crucial to being able to live
as a moral being. You know, you have to understand
the suffering of others in order to try to prevent it.
But I think you alluded to this in your answer.

(57:12):
I was interested to ask you about these scientists you
you I think alluded to who are coming out against empathy.
The one I know about, for example, is the Yale
psychologist Paul Bloom, who is arguing that empathy is in
fact not the best basis for morality, that it can
I think he says it can impair rational thinking because
it forces you to sort of be emotional about single cases,

(57:35):
where in fact there are sort of large, abstract problems
that actually hurt more people, but they're harder to empathize
with because you can't picture a single person being hurt
by them. In in such an easy way. Um. I
was just wondering what you thought about that. Yeah, I think,
um uh, it is true that empathy is biased. So

(57:56):
empathy is more for and if its that are close
to you and your family members. But you know, we
absolutely need that. If let's say I would I would
empathize equally with everyone in the world. First of all,
I would have no life. It would be a very
hard life to have. But also I might neglect my
own children, so to speak, which no one wants me

(58:18):
to do. And so the fact that empathy is biased
is not a bad thing. That's what evolution designed it for,
is as a biased system. And what Paul Bloom is
sort of doing is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
I think we need absolutely empathy and compassion, and our
whole moral system is based on empathy, but it expands it.

(58:38):
That's true. That's in that sense, it is correct. You
need to expand it. You cannot just stay with that
very biased and very parochial mechanism that evolution designed for us.
You need to go beyond it. And I think we're
trying to do that in our moral systems. Absolutely, maybe
we need empathy plus sort of the Yeah, so for
a couple, we empathize with animals, and so example, the

(59:00):
agricultural industry, the way they treat animals, I'm very unhappy
about that. And um, that's also an empathy reaction where
we say, well, what they're doing is wrong. Um, And
that's based on on my empathy for animals. And so
we we have this kind of expanded capacity which is
not just for our family members and friends, and we're

(59:20):
capable of empathizing this individuals who are quite different from
us or even different species. So you you mentioned about
our treatment of animals. One thing I wonder is if
you think that uh study of animal cognition has moral implications,
like do we have more moral responsibilities toward animals that

(59:41):
show more evidence of cognition or does that not really
change the picture of how we should treat animals. I
think I think it has done that. If you look
at how we now, for example, how we look at
the killer wheels in captivity, or dolphins in captivity, or
elephants and circuses, how do cert are closing as a
result of this? Um? And I think this is all

(01:00:05):
under the influence of the sort of signs that we
do on animal cognition. And in my own career, for example,
I worked on symplonzies and the symplcies are not being
used in biomedical studies anymore, and i H has declared
them off limits for that kind of research, which is
partly based on the sort of research that we do.
And so yes, it does have moral implications. It's going

(01:00:26):
to affect even more, I think the way we treat animals.
And in the end, the big elephant in the room
is I think, farm animals, because the numbers of animals
that are that are used for food are much bigger
than all the other numbers taken together. So the farm
animals are going to be next. And I think, and

(01:00:47):
that's also happening. People are getting more worried about how
we treat them and what we do with them. Along
these lines, I'm curious. You know, your most recent book
is all about the discipline of science and how it
understands animal intelligence, and I'm curious where you think that's
currently at you you describe the two schools of thought

(01:01:07):
in your book that have dominated the last century and more,
the influence of behaviorism and ethology. But I'm curious have
they totally given way to evolutionary cognition as you describe it,
or is there are there some remnants left, No, they
are integrated into it. So the behaviorists is basically skin arians.

(01:01:30):
It was a very dominant school here in the US,
which basically says that everything animals do is learned by
simple rewards and punishment and conditioning, and a lot of
animal behavior, of course is they were not wrong on that,
a lot of animal behavior is learned, but they tried
to reduce everything, and so they didn't allow us to
speak of emotions or of cognition. They didn't like anything

(01:01:54):
that related to the inner life of animals. And then
you have the eatologists. I'm trained, there's an intologist. Ethologies
were more interested in naturalistic behavior, and so that was
more like the instinct side of animals. I was very
strongly developed in Europe. And what we have now in
this new field of animal cognition or evolutionary cognition. But

(01:02:15):
we have now in that field is a sort of
combination of these two. So we use the experimental techniques
of the behaviorists and the skin arians, we use the
observational techniques of the ecologists and the concepts from both
of them, and we combine that, but we combine that
with a much more open spirit about what animals can
do and how they mentally operate. And we're not so

(01:02:38):
we're looked at anymore to speak of the emotions of
animals or the cognition of animals as we used to be.
And so these these two schools have not disappeared. They
have sort of been eaten up by the new field
and they integrated into it. So one subject that you
talked about in the book that I found very interesting
was this idea. I think I think you phrased it

(01:02:58):
as critical anthropomopal orphism. Uh. And I was wondering if
you could explain a little bit about this concept, why
you prefer it to maybe what you might call, I
don't know more gullible or credulous anthropomorphism. And then this
opposite position that you call entropo denial. So anthropomorphism is

(01:03:19):
usually what gets thrown at us if we say that
animals are, for example, jealous, or they want this, or
they want that, and because intentions and emotions were taboo,
and so then people would say, well, you're very anthropomorphic
about these animals. Uh. And I don't necessarily agree with that,
especially not with the great apes because they are literally

(01:03:41):
anthropomorphic in the sense that they are like humans. And
and so to use the same terminology for when chimp's
kiss and kiss and embrace, it sort of have to
a fight to call that a reconciliation as I as
I have done, people would say, you have to call
that a mouse to mouse kiss, post conflict kiss or something.
So they didn't like the anthropomorphic terminology, even though my

(01:04:04):
assumption is that if if Jim's do something similar to
us on the similar circumstances, you have to give it
the same label. So I'm not so afraid of anthropomorphism.
But it is true that some people who don't know
animals very well, they throw labels at them that that
we who work with these animals are are a bit
scared of. And so if, for example, you let's say

(01:04:29):
you go to a show with your dog and your
dog wins the show and you say, my dog is proud,
I'm sort of skeptical about that. I'm not sure that
the dog has a concept of the show and has
a concept of what what we're looking for in the
show and why he gets the ribbon. I'm not sure
that the dog knows all these things. The dog may
know that you're giving attention and you're giving goodies. Well,

(01:04:52):
that's something that a dog can understand. So we shouldn't
exaggerate in our interpretations of animal behavior, and people often
do the but we should certainly be able to use
certain concepts, especially things that we have quantified and observed
frequently and maybe done some experiments on, like reconciliation or

(01:05:12):
cooperation or jealousy or whatever things that we can test.
We certainly should be able to use a kind of terminology.
I'd like to hear your perspective on the differences between
writing for an academic audience versus writing for a popular one.
Especially love that you choose to do your own illustrations

(01:05:32):
and your books. Uh, and you seem to enjoy writing
for both audiences. So I'm curious how you balance that
both professionally and creatively. Yeah, you do need to balance it.
I knew. For example, I still know Desmond Morris, who
was a very popular writer in biology and um he

(01:05:53):
used to be a scientist. He has a PhD in
all of this, and then he became a popular author,
and very soon thereafter, like five years later, people didn't
take him seriously anymore. They would say, Oh, he's just
a popular wizer. We don't need to pay attention to him.
He's a vulgarizer, and so and so I've learned a

(01:06:13):
lesson from that is that if you're gonna popularize, you
still need to keep doing your signs, otherwise people are
not going to take you seriously anymore. And so I've
always had a sort of two track career. I did
my signs, and I've written many scientific articles, and I
did my popular books, which I do usually in the
evenings and in the weekends, which is quite separate from

(01:06:35):
our work, although all our work is in there basically,
So so I always done these things sort of separately.
And I find writing books is a lot of fun
because I'm more free to say what I want to
say than in a scientific article, where you're very constrained
and you stay as close as possible to the data
that you have collected. And in the booking you can

(01:06:58):
you can dwell to lot of you can talk about
other topics. You can talk about the politics in Washington
if you want, or you can talk about morality or religion,
and so you can you can go far beyond the
sort of data that you have collected. At the risk
of buttering you up too much, I really really enjoyed
your writing style in this book. I think you have
a great talent for popular writing, and so I hope

(01:07:20):
you continue doing it. Yeah. I I write, of course,
not in my native language, and I think that in
a way, it's it's a disadvantage because I'm sometimes really
jealous if I read let's say, Robert Sapolsky, who is
a primatologist and American primatology, and I think, well, if
I could write like this, well, I'm very impressed by.
On the other hand, by being not a native speaker,

(01:07:43):
I simplify things and so so I don't make very convoluted,
very complex sentences with a lot of alternative words and
it's and synonyms and stuff like that, because my knowledge
is more limited. And that makes it maybe for the
readers easier because I have shorter sentences and and easier sentences.
I just appreciate how clear everything is in the book,

(01:08:03):
how clear it is what you think, how clear the
examples you describe are. So I think you're doing great
work on that front. Okay, thanks, Um, I've got another question,
So if this maybe has a follow up that's more
specific too. But if there's one specific misconception about animal
intelligence that you think is very common and that you

(01:08:26):
could instantly snap your fingers incorrect in everybody's minds, what
what would it be? What does everybody get wrong? Well,
one common one is that people think that animals live
in the present purely. And we have now a lot
of evidence that they think ahead, and not just the apes,
but does rap studies on these kind of things also

(01:08:46):
that they can think ahead and that they can sink
back to specific events in the past. So that's one
misconception I think that people have. Another one that they
have is that everything in nature is cut throat and
it's harsh, and they have this view of nature as
dog eat dog, which which is not completely untrue of course.

(01:09:10):
I mean, I'm looking here, I'm sitting at Emory Campus,
and I see the hawks flying by, the red tailed
hawks who are hunting for squirrels, and so yeah, that
is dog eat dog is right there in front of me. Um.
But there's also a lot of cooperation in the animal kingdom.
There's lots of animals who survived by cooperating, and so
they have empathy for each other's They help each other.

(01:09:32):
They altruistic, sometimes they get things back for it. It's
not you know, it's just as a human society, we
are often kind to each other. But it's not as
if that doesn't pay itself. So so that's how we
are set up as a system, and that's how many
animals are set up. As I follow up to this,
your answer to the specific might be the same as

(01:09:53):
your answer to the general. But what do you also
think is the most common and pernicious misunderstanding people have
about the great apes like chimpanzees and bonobo's. Yeah, I
think people often don't know how close we are to them,
so they they you know, the first time apes came

(01:10:14):
to the London Zoo, which was in in in the
nineteenth century, people were shocked. They were totally shocked they
saw these apes, and so they had this feeling, if
this is an animal, what what am I? So by
seeing the apes, they all of a sudden realized how
close they were to them. And we have now so

(01:10:34):
this has worn off now and people are sort of
maintaining their distance. And when they go to see the
gorillas at the zoo in Atlanta, they may laugh at
the gorillas. Um as as if they're funny, but so
so they sort of tried to laugh off that close
connection that we immediately see. But people don't fully realize
how close we are to the apes. So, for example,

(01:10:57):
the distance between me and a chimpanzee in genetic terms,
is very similar to the distance between an African and
an Asian elephant. African and Asian elephants are quite different
the both We call them both elephants, So why don't
we call both me and the ape apes? But we
don't do that, so so for we make a sort

(01:11:18):
of exception for ourselves, but we are genetically extremely close
to the apes were basically apes. It's it's funny. I
have to say, you know, researching your work for the
last couple of days, the after effect that I took
away was how much more I'm noticing primate behavior now
in human beings? Uh? Yeah, you you comment in the

(01:11:41):
book uh several times about the way that humans are
so often scandalized by realizing how close they are to
the other apes. Like, there's a story I think you
tell about. It might be apocryphal, but the story about
the apes in the London Zoo being very civilized when
they consumed tea and this this made the crowds very uncomfortable. Yeah,

(01:12:03):
because for for the Brits, of course, drinking tea is
the peak of civilization, right and and so when the
apes at the London Zoo got very good at drinking
tea and holding the cups and all of that, people
sort of felt threatened by it. And that's why the
London Zoo retained the apes. They retrained them to make
lots of errors and throw the cups around and bring

(01:12:25):
them and stuff like that, because that's what people actually
wanted to see. They want to they want to to
keep their distance going. Well, this is my last question
for you. Every year on the show, we we cover
the Ignoble Prizes on the podcast. You are our first
guest who has actually won the award and I would
love to know what the experience was like. Well, do

(01:12:49):
you want to know why I got it for? Well,
we know what you got it for. We and we
did mention it on the podcast, but you should you
should go ahead and say that yourself. Yeah. Yeah, we
we did a study. We we've done many st this
on face recognition and simple seas. So you show you
show them on a computer screen you show them faces,
and can they recognize them? And can they connect one
face with another and some one? And in the process

(01:13:10):
of that, we we also throw in some behinds of
simple seas and we found that actually they're very good
with behinds as well. And so then we um we
had these screens with butts on them and faces on them,
and we demonstrated that simple seas recognize each other by
the butt uh. And they can only do this this

(01:13:31):
task with schims that they know. If you do if
you show them, if you show them faces and butts
of chims that they have never seen before, they cannot
connected to. But with the one that they know, they
connect to the face with the behind. And and so
we wrote a paper and the title of us Faces
and Behinds. And I got an Ignoble Price and went
to Harvard to get the award, which was really it

(01:13:55):
is like a circus there, as we've seen video in
the ceremony on a yeah, and and and it's actually
actual Nobel Prize winners who hand out the Ignoble price.
And that's also where I met I met some fellow
our these and these were people who had gotten the

(01:14:16):
price because they had demonstrated brain activity in a dead fish.
I thought this was so great. They had they had
put a dead fish in the brain scanner and with
the usual calculations that they made the demonstrate it there
was brain activity, which of course is an impossibility. So
they showed that that what we usually do when we
calculate activity in the brain, that was actually wrong. So

(01:14:37):
it was a very important paper in a way. But
they told me how much trouble they had publishing it
because there was a lot of resistance to it. I
think we've actually discussed that paper on the podcast before.
I think it was a dead salmon and the Yeah,
it sort of was a reductive out of surdom of
some of the fmr I techniques. Yeah, well, thank you
so much for participating. And yeah, like we said, we

(01:14:59):
we really loved your book and we recommend that all
of you out there listening now go pick up a
copy if you can, because I think it's it's great
science writing and it's really fascinating. Okay, thank you. So
that ends our two part series here on animal intelligence

(01:15:23):
and the possibility of morality, empathy, maybe ethics and animals
and are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?
And like we said at the beginning, the answer seems
to be yes. Maybe, So let us know what you think.
What kind of examples have you seen of animal morality

(01:15:44):
or just evolved cognition within the animals in your everyday life?
Do you have examples that you could give us that
maybe it could be experiments in the future. Or do
you think animals are automata or do you think humans
are automata? Oh, that that's needing. We should we really
need to delve into that. That's a good one. Am
I a robot? I don't know. I mean, I'm not conscious.

(01:16:07):
Where can you tell us these things? Well, we're all
over social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram.
Instagram is a great place to see pictures of us
and determine whether or not where robots or not? Uh?
The other really wouldn't be able to tell. Maybe not. Yeah,
it depends on if our flesh had been pulled away
from our skin Tyrrell Corp. Yeah, there you go. Uh. Also,

(01:16:28):
you could always visit stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
which is a great place to check up on all
the latest blog posts, podcast episodes. Go check out our
podcast archive to get all the old episodes videos. There's
probably some other stuff on their weird Robert does great
posts about space, music, monsters, all that. Everything we do
is there, And of course, if you want to get

(01:16:49):
in touch with us directly to give us feedback about
this episode or any other, or to request topics for
the future, or just to say hi, you can email
us as always at blow the Mind at how stuff
works dot com for more on this and thousands of

(01:17:12):
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com. They
believe very