The Secret Intellect of Animals, Part 2

In the second of two episodes, Christian and Joe 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
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.

(00:23):
This is going to be part two of a two
part episode on animal intelligence and cognition, specifically with regard
to a book that we read by the primatologist and
evolutionary cognitian. Would that be the terms? Yeah, I was
trying to figure out how you would singularize that. Yeah,
cosmetologist no. Uh, Franz Duval who wrote this book. Um,

(00:46):
are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? Right? Yeah?
So 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 mainly used of All's
work to talk about the history of how science has
looked at animal intelligence. Uh. And in this episode, we

(01:09):
find ourselves 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 that, you know, the comparative psychologists or
the behaviorists, these were the people who emphasized learning and

(01:31):
conditioned responses. 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

(01:52):
even now going into evolutionary cognition as similar to ideology,
and specifically 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, and I don't believe that he came up

(02:13):
with these categories, but this is within the book that
there are three types of players within this argument. Okay
about animal cognition. Yeah, 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

(02:33):
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 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.

(02:56):
They're reserving judgment. They're saying, I'm not sure yet, give
me more research. Yeah, how about you do a study
showing the X, Y, and Z that kind of thing.
And Davol and I think most evolutionary cognitionists uh that
they would say the slayers are mostly gone nowadays, but
the skeptics and the proponents remain. And daval says he

(03:18):
really appreciates having the skeptics around because it makes for
better research. He himself is a proponent. He says, yeah,
I think we 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

(03:40):
in ethology or comparative psychology and ethology. And he sees
himself actually as being part of what he calls the
third generation of evolutionary cognition scientists. Yeah. So he says
that there were two generations before him. He's sort of,
you know, lucky that he he saw some one of
this this eological battle play out the wall, but that

(04:02):
it's mostly come down, uh, and that people are working
together now. So another one of the really interesting ideas
in this book is, uh, the way I would say
maybe it's one of the central claims of the book.
One of the central things that Devolve is driving at
is against claims of human uniqueness um and develop. For example,

(04:23):
one form of this, he uses this term, which is
gonna sound inflammatory to some people. 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

(04:47):
that stuff. It's the idea that 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 he woman's were created
in some recent time frame. I always thought it was
only a hundred years old. I mean, were you there, No,

(05:09):
I was there a hundred years ago. It was I
was a different life, right, I was actually Charles Darwin.
Oh you were Yeah, weird. Charles Darwin was not here
one hundred years ago. But it's a little 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 anither. Okay um? But yeah,

(05:30):
So what does he mean by neo creationism. Well, 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

(05:50):
the table, it rejects evolution as the mechanism for creating
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

(06:13):
have the kinds of mental capacities that humans do. They're
in a totally different, uh category. You know, here a
chimpanzee could never hope to come close to the mind
of a human. One example that 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

(06:33):
cognition than than between chimp and beetle cognition. Interesting, and
for d of all, that is a ridiculous statement. 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

(06:55):
once asked a question, will my pets go to heaven? Well,
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 as intelligent,
they don't have souls like we do. So this is

(07:15):
the Descartes point of view. Really, animals are automo. I
didn't know it then. I was probably like, I don't know,
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.
And when it came to just being active and organized religion. Well,

(07:40):
there are different theological viewpoints on this. This is I
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 I would be kind of animal insulment 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,

(08:03):
or even the mindset of many philosophers and scientists who
are operating supposedly under secular principles. There is still this
strong tendency to say, 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

(08:24):
sword in both hands at and so 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

(08:45):
as completely unique to humans. Examples 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
Devol and others define as sort of the pillars of morality. Right,

(09:09):
Oh yeah, this is one of those pillars. Will come
to that in ant Yeah. Yeah, they connect 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. Only humans can

(09:32):
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 animals. Yeah. One of the examples he gives in

(09:53):
the book, which i I slightly referenced in our previous episode,
was the idea that animals couldn't poss a lea 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 before they know when they know
they're leaving the like compound that they're in. Yeah, and

(10:16):
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, so we don't really know for sure
yet might be unique is language. Language might be the

(10:37):
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 other animals. There

(10:58):
are signals and call holes 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 they have yet

(11:21):
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, Devolve
would say, I think, I don't want to put words

(11:43):
in his mouth, but would probably say, yes, humans are unique,
but so are every other species. That's sort of 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,

(12:07):
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

(12:29):
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

(12:49):
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 or.
I found that passage both beautiful and I think I
very much agree with it. I mean, it may be
true that we're much higher up on the shore. I

(13:09):
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.

(13:33):
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 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

(13:55):
as existing in terms of what's in front of them,
what's going on right now? 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. Could a dog
plan for something it wanted to do tomorrow? That's the question.

(14:18):
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,

(14:38):
But here's what I think of 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

(15:00):
side and I you know, she's she's gotten to the
point now or she knows going outside means going to
the bathroom, get my business done 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

(15:20):
I think. What I think is her making 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. I
don't know, is that I feel like I see Charlie
doing that same thing. Now. That may just be me
the dog owner projecting to um, but yeah, I see

(15:41):
like sometimes I feel like he's working out 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

(16:01):
like to me. Who knows what's actually going on inside
your head? Now, maybe you could actually come up with
some kind of test condition to try to tug it
these variables and see if you could isolate it. This
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.

(16:24):
They you know, they have to come up with experiments
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 tons of examples, and you know 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

(16:44):
examples in them there's no way that we could do
it justice without just reading the book out loud, do
you right? But here's one really interesting one dealing with
episodic memory and animals. So div all sites research by
people Nicky Clayton and Anthony Dickinson doing experiments with west
stern scrub jays. These are birds, Okay, now, Robert and
I actually in the past I've already done an episode

(17:05):
on bird intelligence, Corvid's in particular. Actually, many birds, but
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

(17:28):
various people to see if the crows would recognize the
masks rather than the actual human face. Yeah, yeah, I
don't know if that was crows. There's definitely some kind
of Corvid uh so members of the Corvid family um
sort of family or group, members of the Corvid group
of animals, including like crows, ravens, magpies, jay's um. The

(17:52):
these animals are. They often display very strikingly intelligent behaviors,
stuff that we would not expect at all. And I
want to talk more about 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

(18:12):
what time. 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

(18:33):
that might possibly 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.

(18:54):
Soworms 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

(19:16):
there 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 I bargained with myself whether or
not it's right. But I can't remember when we ordered

(19:37):
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

(19:57):
he talks about with different types of mental apparent mental
time travel going on in animals. One of the examples
that Devall talks about in his book is the idea
of a of a primate taking a bunch of straw
from its indoor enclosure to the outside at a time
when it didn't have to be outside. Was planning ahead

(20:19):
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 I remember correctly,

(20:40):
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 episod tootic memory and animals and

(21:01):
animals 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 used to say, you know what is man? Man
is the tool using animal animals? No, No, doctors as

(21:23):
did not have that much respect for man. Man is
a brute. What did he say? Dr? Dr? That's exactly
what's going through my head right. Um so yeah, so
another one would be tool used. So it used to
be assumed that, well, one thing that's really unique about
humans is that they make tools. This is just this

(21:46):
is exploded now. Well just this episode episode I pointed
out that we've got crabs that use anemonies 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 a bait a bole. It's not like
some people might argue with the mental time travel results
and say I don't know about these that you might

(22:06):
be interpreting him 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 in

(22:29):
the wild. 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 just

(22:52):
sounds like obvious uh tool used to me. Yeah, he
has a really good example of this, uh. In the book,
Gibbons were apparently originally thought of as being unintelligent because
they wouldn't use tools like sticks when they are placed
on the floor. Now, this is where the velt the
context of a gibbons life comes into play. Well, gibbons

(23:12):
hands are different from other primates that have really long
fingers because they swing from branches and other objects. It's
called bracky ation. 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,

(23:32):
if you put the sticks on the ground, they won't
pick them up because their hands aren't made to 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. It's the m velt again. It's
the it's the idea that if you don't understand the animal,

(23:54):
you're very likely missing something crucial 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

(24:16):
their nasal passage is 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

(24:39):
to retrieve a piece 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 I'm

(25:01):
like imagining this horror movie of corvids using hooks to
kill people. So like like maybe that's what what is it,
bird demic, Maybe that's bird demic career 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

(25:24):
with the idea that like 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

(25:46):
of it the whole time, Frankenstein, 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

(26:06):
bend in the hooks. But uh, another interesting 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

(26:29):
show this they could displace water. But deval 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 a thing
floating that they need to get in a narrow container
and they add water to the container to float it

(26:50):
up to where they can reach it. Even mentions that
one female chimpanzee, when uh that he was working with,
when trying to do this this picture experiment, tried to
pee into the tube. Well, you know, I guess that
whatever works works, uh. You know. The other thing about
elephants is that people scientists at first thought that they

(27:10):
couldn't recognize themselves in mirrors. And you know why because
they were giving them a little teeny tiny human handheld
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

(27:34):
then actually, one of I think it's one of Duval's students,
came 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

(27:57):
of something people used to say, only humans can you know,
have self awareness? Uh, 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

(28:17):
to a smaller subset of animals, but like it's only
some of the 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

(28:38):
they just uninterested? Do they get that's them they're looking
at in the mirror. 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 mouth and look inside it in
the mirror. I mean that that's almost like you don't

(28:59):
even have to do the experiment. You can tell that
they they know that 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 Duval won
an egg Nobel Prize for a study like this. Yeah,
he did involved chimpanzees looking at their own behinds with

(29:22):
a mirror. Well, he did talk about chimpanzee is looking
at their own behinds 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,

(29:45):
usually a good dozen or so funny but illuminating studies
that 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
the maybe we won't even address now. But their idea
is about theory of mind. Can animals um? Can animals

(30:05):
take the perspective of another animal? And there's tons of
interesting research on that. The answer seems to me, I'm
fairly convinced 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.

(30:28):
This is a big one. Yeah. Actually, why don't we
take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk
about 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. Devolve's main area is

(30:52):
looking at animal morality, like animal empathy. Yeah, and so
his own 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,

(31:15):
and we we hinted at this at the beginning of episode.
Actually we should just mention he has a really good
insuccinct ted talk about this that you can check out
if it's 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 literal like Greek Creek pillars. One

(31:38):
is 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. H it's
building blocks. So fairness and compassion or reciprocity and empathy,
he used them sort of interchangeably. They're not all of

(32:02):
what 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 help each other get the food. Yeah, this

(32:25):
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

(32:46):
have access 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

(33:07):
get 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 pats it
on the back and basically says, hey, give me a

(33:28):
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. So in these examples,
Devol defines empathy as having two channels. There's the body channel,

(33:50):
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
doggle I don't know about you, but my dog gets
you know what looks like a smile in his face

(34:10):
will start panting and jumping around 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,

(34:31):
I think it's totally possible dogs yawned 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 the

(34:54):
perspective of somebody else, right, you imagine what it's like
to be them. So there's an another study that he
did on altruism with chimpanzees, and basically the question they're
getting at here was do these chimps care about the
welfare of other chimpanzees? Well they go out of their
way too, or even not all that far out of
their way. Well they do something to make sure another

(35:15):
chimpanzee gets 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
him a green token, you get a piece of food,

(35:36):
and another 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 n

(36:00):
they'll they'll choose 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,

(36:21):
the monkeys like the grapes way more than the cucumbers,
But 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

(36:43):
the cucumber back at the handler. I guess right, demanding
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

(37:06):
lot of flak four trying to put lie the idea
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

(37:26):
own benefit. Um, you know that they'll naturally go for
the option that makes the most sense and the 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,

(37:47):
after reading his work and watching these videos and just
being kind of immersed in this stuff, it's interesting how
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.

(38:08):
Are you more of a chimpanzee or more of a bobo.
I'm probably more of a Benobo. And I'll tell you why,
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

(38:30):
human beings. Uh So, he says this is a combination
of empathy and consolation, pro social tendencies, and reciprocity and fairness.
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

(38:53):
our quote unquote morality that we used to sort of
lead our everyday social lives and disconnected from the main
book we've been talking about in these two episodes and
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

(39:17):
our conversation with him. So Dr duval could you introduce yourself, Well,
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

(39:39):
work at the Yuki's Primate Center, which is a very
big primate centnel that we have here in Atlanta. And um,
my origin is I'm from the Netherlands, but I came
already more than thirty years ago. I'm a legal immigrant
one or thirty years ago to the US. And uh,
I live on work here. I saw that you actually

(40:00):
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
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.

(40:22):
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.
What sticks out in your mind the most. Yeah, I
think there's many discoveries recently. For example, the tool used

(40:43):
by crows is a very remarkable and it's not just
that they used tool. The crows make tools so to
transform things to make it more suitable as a tool.
You have the studies of mirror self recognition, which I
always find fascinating. You have the studies of thinking forward
and thinking backwards. So they do experiments with apes, for example,

(41:03):
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
hang onto the tool, Will they keep it with them
because they know that they're going to use it the
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

(41:24):
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
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.

(41:47):
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? Do
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

(42:08):
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
at Emory, we do studies on the meta cognition. Do
you know what you know. So you can set up
an experiment with monkeys, for example, where they can choose

(42:31):
one option that they have learned the 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 a quiet it's called
meta cognition, and 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

(42:54):
the monkeys are capable of doing this, are they capable
of doing that without consciousness? Or they do it in
the exactly the same way as we And so that's
the sort of the issues that people address. And it's
not just in 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

(43:17):
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 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

(43:40):
of their own knowledge. And UM, Yeah, for 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 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 and malls that are

(44:01):
more and more separate from us phylogenetically, 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 cognitive capacity that we discover is going to
be older and more widespread than we initially thought. Can
you explain a little bit about what this prediction means

(44:22):
and what what justifies your thinking on this subject. Well,
this is something that has happened all the time, and
so and so. For example of these tool use it's
maybe the clearest example is that we initially started 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

(44:44):
by capacities that relate to what we can do. And
so the apes they not only make tools, they plan
tools and so on. But then very soon thereafter 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

(45:06):
and are smaller monkeys in then 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 in captivity also.
And then came the new Caledonian crows, who who modify
branches to make them more suitable to extract grubs from travises.

(45:29):
And so they are not just use tools. These crows,
they make tools. And they started testing the crows on
all sorts of other things in the lab and and
the crows have a lot of 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

(45:50):
got recently a finding of alligators using tools. So the
alligators they live near heron colonies, and the herons for
their nests they need branches and they scoop up these
branches and sometimes a branch may be sitting on an
alligator and that's the moment that the alligator can maybe

(46:11):
grab the heron and eat it. And so but they
found is that some alligators they were bringing branches from
distances to the pond um, probably in order to lure
herons close to them. And so so now we have
tool used in so many different species. And so this
has happened all the time. It has happened with mirror

(46:33):
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, 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

(46:55):
actually did an episode on. And I'm curious if you've
heard about this the hom Pom crab or the boxer
crab and how it uses cnemones as tools. Have you
heard about this this study? So type yeah exactly so,
so real quick summary of it. They hold anemonies in

(47:18):
each of their claws, and they're able to use the
anemones to scoop up food and bring the food to
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

(47:41):
did a whole episode on this study, and I'm 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 us.

(48:02):
Of course, it's tools. We usually say that an animal
uses an inanimate object to do something, right, in 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 use. Yeah, h 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

(48:25):
at the sort of broad discipline in academics of these studies.
How do you think we're going to 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

(48:45):
point where current research is now going to be a
stepping stone towards a better understanding of animal intelligence? Yeah?
I think a hundred fifty years from now we probably
know a lot more about the neuroscience behind all of this.
So at a moment, the neuroscientists, they have still very
simplistic views of animals, and they test animals in very

(49:06):
simplistic ways like activity levels or do they do behavior
A or behavior b um, And so the neuroscientists need
to learn more about animal intelligence 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

(49:28):
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 the apes do? And
so we don't know that actually, so we usually assume
that I have related species, Like let's say you use
the tool and I use the tool, and and the
chimpanzee uses the tool. We assume that we are using

(49:49):
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 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 did do now as interesting pioneering stuff, but without

(50:14):
knowing the mechanisms behind it. Really so, so we are
in a different phase now because in the last century
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.
We now have a whole new generation of scientists who

(50:37):
are much less reluctant than who uses this 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?

(50:57):
What does that mean about what it's like to be human?
And I think you sort 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,

(51:20):
just one thing that I've read about is the work
of a couple of primatologists 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

(51:41):
observations about Savannah chimpanzees to generate 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 that you give, because I remember a book by

(52:03):
an anthropologist of maybe thirty years ago who claimed that
fire and our control over fire is what made us human,
and that how 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

(52:25):
had here in Atlanta, we had Consi the Bonobo, who
would roast marshmallows in a fire and would poke the
fire and was not afraid of fire at all, which
was the first indicator that actually a fear of fire
is not necessarily inborn and can be overcome. And now
we have these observations of chimps using fire for their

(52:45):
own advantages. They're not making a fire and 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 think what
it what? It is interesting to see that kind of
things because it's debunks certain arguments. There's always these claims

(53:06):
of human uniqueness that are always going around. Only humans
can do this, only humans can do that, and we
primate always just 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 idea. So I have
a question for you, uh that it's a it's slightly political,

(53:29):
and after reading some some interviews with you previously, 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

(53:50):
a larger scale with human beings and our current climate
in the United States. You've mentioned before that a lot
of human politics mirror primate politics. I'm typically 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,

(54:13):
even though we we now have certain scientists who say
empathy is not what's going to solve the problems in
the world, which is probably true. But um, for example,
the abolishment of slavery in this country was was partly
an act of empathy. A Lincoln literally said that he
was boughted by seeing slaves and chains and and so

(54:34):
that's an empathic reaction. And I think empathy is always
sort 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 a that's a question of empathy also, so and
and and for example, the reaction now to the immigration

(54:56):
crisis is also we empathize with people who want to
come in 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 always part
of the debates, and I think there's plenty of empathy

(55:17):
to go around. I've always felt that in two thousand
and eight, when 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

(55:39):
than uh than market mechanisms. And I think we started
to realize that very clearly after two thousand eight, and
an empathy became a major issue in Obama made it
a major word that he would use on occasion. And
I think since that time the also science got involved,
and there's now a lot of neuroscience on empathy, and
there's my kind of servaces of empathy and animals and

(56:01):
so on, and I think also 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 perspective 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

(56:23):
to this in your answer. 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

(56:45):
of be emotional about single cases, 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

(57:06):
true that empathy is biased. So empathy is more for
individuals 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, would be
a very hard life to have. But also I might

(57:27):
neglect my own children, so to speak, which no one
wants me to do. And so the fact that empathy
is biased, it's not a bad thing. That's what evolution
designed it for, is as a biased system. And what
Paul Blum is sort of doing is the throwing out
the baby with the bathwater. I think we need absolutely
empathy and compassion and and our whole moral system is

(57:47):
based on empathy, but it expands it. 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 example, we empathize

(58:10):
with animals. And so for example, the 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

(58:30):
family members and friends, and we're capable of empathizing this
individuals who are quite different from us or even different species.
So 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 show more evidence of cognition

(58:55):
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 the circuses
are closing as a result of this um and I

(59:16):
think this is all under the influence of the sort
of signs that we do on animal cognition. And in
my own career, for example, I worked on simpanzees, and
chimpanzees 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

(59:37):
moral implications. It's going to affect even more, I think
the way we treat animals um 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.

(59:59):
And I think, and that also happening people are getting
more worried about how we tweet 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 in your book that have dominated

(01:00:21):
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, but a very dominant

(01:00:43):
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
that they were not wrong on that a lot of
animal behavior is learned, but it's so we use everything,
and so they didn't allow us to speak of emotions

(01:01:04):
or of cognition. They didn't like anything that related to
the inner life of animals. And then you have the eatologists.
I'm trained as an eatologist. Ethologists were more interested in
naturalistic behavior and so that was more like the instinct
side of animals. It was very strongly developed in Europe.
And what we have now in this new field of

(01:01:24):
animal cognition or evolutionary cognition, but 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
etologists and the concepts from both of them, and we
combine that. But we combine that with a much more

(01:01:44):
open spirit about what animals can do and and and
how they mentally operate. And we're not so 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 fields and
the integrated into it. So one subject that you talk

(01:02:06):
about in the book that I found very interesting was
this idea I think I think you phrased it as
critical anthropomorphism, 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 nentropo denial. So anthropomorphism is usually what

(01:02:32):
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 anthropomorphic in the

(01:02:54):
sense that they are like humans. And and so to
use the same terminology for when Chim's kiss and kiss
and embrace each other 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 the
mouse kiss post conflict kiss or something. So they didn't
like the anthropomorphic terminology, even though my assumption is that

(01:03:17):
if if Jim's do something similar to us under 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,

(01:03:38):
for example, you let's say 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

(01:03:59):
all these things. The dog may know that you're giving
attention and you're giving goodies, Well, that's something that a
dog can understand. So we shouldn't exaggerate in our interpretations
of animal behavior, and people often do that. But we
should certainly be able to use certain concepts, especially things
that we have quantified and observed frequently and maybe done

(01:04:21):
some experiments on, like reconciliation or cooperation or jealousy or
whatever things that we can test. Maybe we certainly should
be able to use that 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

(01:04:42):
love that you choose to do your own illustrations in
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 this Matt Morris,
who was a very popular writer in biology and um

(01:05:05):
he 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 wiser. We don't need to pay attention to him.
He's a vulgarizer and so on. And so I've learned

(01:05:25):
a 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

(01:05:47):
from 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

(01:06:10):
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

(01:06:33):
you continue doing it. Yeah. I I write, of course,
not in my native language, and I always think that
in a way it's it's a disadvantage because I'm sometimes
really jealous if I read let's say, Robert Sapolski, who
is a primatologist and American primatology, and I think, well,
if I could write like this, I'm very impressed by.
But on the other hand, by being not a native speaker,

(01:06:55):
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
read us easier because I have shorter sentences and and
easier sentences. I just appreciate how clear everything is in
the book, how clear it is what you think, how

(01:07:17):
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

(01:07:38):
and that you 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

(01:07:58):
kind of things. Also, that they can think ahead, and
that they can think 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

(01:08:20):
completely untrue of course. 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

(01:08:43):
each other's they help each other, 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. Uh. As
I follow up to this, your answer to the specific

(01:09:05):
might be the same as 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 binobo's. Yeah, I think people often don't know
how close we are to them, so they they you know,

(01:09:25):
the first time apes came 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.

(01:09:46):
And we have now, so this has war enough 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 of that close connection that we immediately see. But
people don't fully realize how close we are to the apes. So,

(01:10:08):
for example, the distance between me and a chimpanzee in
genetic terms, is very similar to the distance between an
African and an Asian elephant. The African and Asian elephants
are quite different. They both we call them both elephants,
So why don't we call both me and the apes apes?

(01:10:28):
But we don't do that, so so for we make
a sort 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

(01:10:53):
the book uh several times about the way that humans
are so often scandalized by realizing how as 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

(01:11:13):
very uncomfortable. Yeah, because for for the Brits, of course,
drinking tea is the 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 and that's why the London Zoo retrained the apes.

(01:11:34):
They retrained them to make lots of errors and throw
the cups around and bring them and stuff like that,
because that's what people actually wanted to see. They want
to they want to to keep 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,

(01:11:56):
and I would love to know what the experience was like, Well,
do 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 studies on
face recognition and chimpanzees. So you should you show them
on a computer screen, you show them faces and can

(01:12:17):
they recognize them and can they connect one face with
another and someone? And in the process of that, we
we also throw in some behinds of chimpanzees 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 chimple seas recognize each other by the butt uh.

(01:12:42):
And they can only do this this task with chimps
that they know. If you do if you show them,
if you show them faces and butts of chimps that
they have never seen before, they cannot connected to. But
with the ones that they know, they connect the face
with the behind and and so we wrote a paper
and the title of us Face and Behind, and I
got an Ignoble Price and went to Harvard to get

(01:13:05):
the award, which was really it's like a circus there.
So we've seen video in the ceremony. Yeah, yeah, and
and and it's actually actual Nobel Prize winners who hand
out the Ignoble price. And and that's also where I
met I met some fellow our these and these were

(01:13:27):
people who had gotten the price because they had demonstrated
brain activity in a dead fish. I thought this was
so great. They had they had put the dead fish
in the brain scanner, and with the usual calculations that
they made, the demonstrated 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

(01:13:48):
that was actually wrong. So 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 was a dead
salmon and the it sort of was a reductio ad
absurdom of some of the f m R I techniques. Yeah, well,
thank you so much for participating. And uh yeah, like

(01:14:11):
we said, we 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

(01:14:33):
on animal intelligence in 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

(01:14:54):
seen of animal morality 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's fascinating.
We should we really need to delve into that. That's

(01:15:15):
a good one. Am I a robot? I don't know,
I mean, I'm not conscious. 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,
they really wouldn't be able to tell. Maybe not. Yeah,
it depends on if our flesh had been pulled away

(01:15:36):
from our skin Tyrrell Corp. Yeah, there you go. Uh. Also,
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 a
great post about space music, monsters, all that everything we

(01:15:59):
do is. And of course, if you want to get
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 in thousands of

(01:16:24):
other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com. Remember