Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday. Time to go into the Vault for an older episode of the show. This was originally from February. This is an older episode than most of the Vault episodes we've been doing recently, but this was an episode that our previous co host, Christian Saga, and I did where we talked about the work of the Dutch American primatologist Friends to Vall We I think we talked about his book Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? All right, let's jump right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Christian Saga and I'm Joe McCormick, and our regular host Robert Lamb is not with us today. Where is he? He is on the beach somewhere, a beach. I don't know which beach, but he just referred to it Stephen King's Beach World. I think it might be the beach from that Leonardo DiCaprio movie where he punches the shark in the face. Did you ever read that book. I didn't read the book, but I like, Um, what's the guy who wrote that? Alex Garland. Yeah, Alex wrote twenty days later I think he did. Yeah, and he also just worked on x Makina, that movie that came out it's a good one, and directed it. Yeah. Okay, so we're already off on a tangent. But what are we going to be talking about today? Well, this is going to be the first part of a two part episode on animal cognition, animal intelligence exactly how smart are all the beasts that occupied this planet? Yeah? So, uh, Joe and I both have dogs, and sometimes our dogs get together and play. We have plain aids. Joe's dog is named Charlie, and my dogs are Winchester and see Blue. And we like our dogs a lot. I think it's fair to say we love our dogs. I hate my dog. I know I love my dog, and my dog loves your dog. So if you this is a thing you should know out there. If Christian loans me a book and I bring the book into my house and I'm sitting on the couch reading it, my dog Charlie will come sit next to me. Then he will get a crazy look in his eye and begin to sniff the book vigorously and sniff all over it. And what we figured out is that probably it's that this book has been in Christian's house and it smells like Christian's dogs Charlie's friend. Yeah. So right there, just in a very personal anecdote situation between the two of us, we have a example of animal emotion and or intelligence it could be. And so whenever you see an animal behavior, there's always gonna be questions about how that behavior is brought about. Is the animal acting purely on instinct? Is the animal having thoughts? Is it putting things together in its head and a conscious way? And in a lot of cases, it's difficult for us to know, right Like, we always want to know what the minds of our pets are like, but it can it can be a black box to us. Sometimes we we just perceive behaviors and we can't see inside the box to know what's triggering the behaviors. Yeah. So that leads us to our main expert that we're going to be consulting for these episodes, and he's a guy named and this is how I'm going to pronounce it for this episode, Franz Davol. He's a Dutch primatologist and pathologist, but he refers to himself, as we're going to discuss through this episode, as a researcher of evolutionary cognition. And he's actually based here in Atlanta at Emory University. He's also a director at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, which is also based out of here, uh and he studies primate social behavior. Now we're gonna be talking about Dr Duvall's work in today's episode and then the next episode, but we're also going to be bringing him on the show to chat with us in the next episode, so be sure to come back for that next time. So the reason why we're talking about devolve specifically and his his work but also his survey of the history of animal intelligence is because he came out with a book last year called Are We Smart Enough To Know? How Smart Animals Are? So not the catchiest title in the world, but it's a really good title because it very well encapsulates the core question of the book. Um, it's not just how smart animals are, though that is a primary concern of of the book and and his research, but it's also about if they are smart how would we know it. Would we be clever enough to figure out ways to detect complex intelligence and cognition in animals or are we so limited by our own narrow worldview that we are unable to find the ways to see the intelligence in these other creatures? Right? And he says right upfront, probably in the like first five page, is the answer is yes, but there are some qualifiers, right, which is basically, uh, that we're getting there, We're working on we're getting better at it. Um. Now, some background on him. He got his doctorate in biology in ninety seven, and he's most known for his research on empathy and primates, which is something we're gonna be covering in the episode after this. Uh. He published fifteen books and has over a dozen articles. Guy's I think it's fair to say prolific uh. And his focus has been on research related to primate alliance, formation, reconciliation, and quote the roots of moral behavior in the most political of animals meaning us. Right. So yeah, Well, one of one of his early books was, for example, about Machiavellian behavior in chimpanzees, which is uh, which is great like the idea of looking at the politics of chimpanzee behavior through the eyes of jockeying for position and forming alliances, trying to gain power, seeing the will to power in our in our closest ape cousins. So have you heard another anecdote? Have you heard this anecdote about Daval and Jimmy Carter and New Gingrich. No, I've heard about uh. I think that New Gingrich put one of Duval's books on a reading list for his uh for I don't know who, for people, for people in Congress, or for somebody. Yeah, it might have just been his staff, I'm not sure. But the story, the way that I read it through Daval in an interview, was essentially, I can't remember which books were which, but Carter read one of his books and Gingrich read one of his books, and both of them liked it. And Daval was basically like, I really wish that they had swapped the books, because I think they both would have gotten something else. Oh, so, like one is about jockeying for power among primates and another one is about empathy among primates. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, So it's kind of fun, like little anecdote, And he said he met with Jimmy Carter actually I wonder if he told him that when he out with him. But uh, so I need to go to the dark side Garter, I don't. That's not the impression that I get from him, actually, and we're not going to talk about it a ton, uh in these episodes applying his work to modern politics. But he that is something he does with his work. Um, what we're more going to focus on is this book and how it summarizes between case studies and a history of the discipline. I guess i'll call it of looking at animal intelligence, uh specifically how it is coming to defy the notion that humans are alone as moral in thinking animals. Yeah, I think one of the central things we want to talk about, and I'll revisit this later in this episode, I'm sure is the idea of claims of uniqueness about humans that that's central to this book, and an idea that is the Devol attacks with two swords in each hand. I would say he's a handed its actor. Yeah, nice, I like that. I think I've read that. Actually, if you hold swords in each hand, it's not actually an advantage in battle, Like you can't balance well. By D and D rules, you get a negative two to one hand attack. Something along those lines. I did not know that unless you have a special feat. Okay, well let's go back to We started with the idea of our pets. You know, we want to get in their minds, but sometimes they can feel like a black box. Um. So when you see an animal perform of behavior, an animal does something, I'd say that there are three main explanations you can go to, and it's not like the explanation is just one or the other. Usually complex behaviors might be explained by combinations of the following, but they're they're basically three wells you can draw from to explain behaviors. One is instinct responding to instinct. An instinct is a hardwired behavior. It's an activity that we imagine being done automatically and programmed by your genes. It's without much adaptive flexibility or applicability to solving new problems. So birds fly south for the winter. There are just natural triggers that hit their brains in a certain way. When those triggers hit their brains, they fly south. When I think of instinct in my human brain, when I think about my brain and how it reacts, it's like that my my brain has that certain wiring, right, and that those pathways are aligned to respond a certain way, to react a certain way to things. But you can theoretically train those pathways to change right, right, And that's the second thing that would be conditioning. So first, you've got instinct that's inborn, it's determined by your genes. But you've also had conditioning, which is learned behaviors. You've had experiences. Some experiences turned out good, some turned out bad. You can think of those results as rewards and punishments. And thus conditioning also leads us to cause new behaviors. If you've done something that has gotten you a reward in the past, you'll become conditioned to do that behavior more in the future. Now, I wouldn't say that these things are like one to one in an analogy, but it's sort of the nature nurture argument, right, No, I think it totally is. Yeah, So instinct is nature, Uh, conditioning is nurture. It's your environment, it's what you've been conditioned to do. But then there's a third explanation you can talk about. And the third explanation is more complex than the other two. It's cognition. Right, So humans do things all the time that are not easily explicable, or at least we would say some some you know, behaviorist or somebody might disagree with us, but at least I would say, are not easily explicable as either instinct or conditioned uh conditioned responses. They're complex behaviors that seem to emerge from patterns of thinking. Right, right, So before we get like way too far down the rabbit hole here, let's like stop and define what we mean here when we're talking about intelligence and cognition. What are at least And let's keep in mind too, we're keeping this within Duvol's framework. So maybe, um, you're out there listening and you've got experience in psychology or in biology and some other uh part of the discipline, and you might disagree that we would love to hear from you on that, But we're specifically we're not saying this is the absolute truth. We're saying this is Duval's UH schema that he presents us with in this book. Right, sure, So cognition, well, it's basically information processing, right His direct quote is it's the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and the flexible application of this knowledge. So that would be sort of like, um, I think for example of a multi use tool. Okay, an example of cognition might be, uh, you pick up a tool like a hammer, and you figure out that with a hammer, you can drive nails, you can crack nuts, you can smash windows if you want to, you could maybe uh, you can maybe throw the hammer at somebody and get a laugh out of your buddies. Depending on the hammer, you can pull nails out right, Yeah, certainly if it's a claw, hummer, claw hammer, that's a good word. It's great one word or a phrase. I don't know, maybe too anyway, But this is this is flexible application of knowledge. You you take some knowledge about your environment, in this case about the uses of a tool. You understand the affordances of this tool, the different things it can do, and then you can apply it to new situations that you've never been presented before. That would probably be an example of cognition. So then we get to intelligence. And I've already used some D and D analogies and here you know, out there listeners, if you're you know, you've been around in our audience for a while, we kind of throw that stuff out there. Intelligence and D and D is basically like your your aptitude at certain things, how much knowledge you have in your head? Right. Uh here, what we mean by intelligence is processing that information from cognition successfully. So you're intelligent if you can successfully process that information, right, it's doing cognition good. Yeah. I like that. That's the quote of the episode one of I called the episode that do cognition good? Do cognition good? I'd say, we do cognition okay? Uh no. I. So there are a lot of different definitions of intelligence. One that I think goes pretty much along with this, but that I really like is that intelligent. And Robert and I just talked about this in another episode we did. I like, the definition is of intelligence as uh, the tendency of a system to accelerate the solution of problems. So like when you solve problems better than chance, when you start to do better than random behavior, that is degrees of intelligence. Yeah. Um. But I think I think the key to understanding this idea of cognition, and the key in this book is flexibility. Right. Okay, So animals can, as we've said, performed tasks that seem very complex, but they are still acting on coded instinct. Cognition happens when animals show the flexible application of knowledge, and that's what to keep in mind. The animal knows something and is able to put that knowledge to use in a novel way. So an example of this would be the episode that Robert and I just published previous to this about Pomp Pomp crabs or the Boxer Crab. Do you know about this, well, I've seen you guys talking about it a little bit. Yeah, So the we have just discovered, and we did a whole episode on it that these crabs um they use c anemonies as weapons and tools in their claws. And not only that, but if they only have one of them, because they like to dual wield, they will take the other one and they will very purposely rip it in half so that it causes it to regenerate into two different anemonies again, so they're forcing reproduction upon the as anemonies. That is theoretically an example of animal intelligence, because not only are they tool using animals, but they know how to exactly rip apart another living being to turn them into like a tool. Now we're brought back to the initial problem here, the black box problem, because I could look at that and say, that's very impressive behavior that almost makes me want to think, Wow, maybe crabs are much smarter than we thought. But then again, on the other hand, I'm like, well, I mean, that's an invertebrate. It doesn't have much brain to speak of. Uh, So is that really cognition or is that just some kind of weird application of an instinctual, hard coded behavior that we're not understanding, some kind of like u um uh symbiotic relationship between these two species that's just developed, instinctually, fully evolved, and that it's not like the crab has to think it through uh And I I don't know. I mean, it's hard to tell there. The fact that the crab has such a simple nervous system would tend to make me want to assume that that it's more likely to be instinctual, But I don't know. That's what we're We're in the black boxes exactly where we land with this current like area of the discipline. It's like, you see a study like that, we don't exactly know how to approach it in terms of saying is that animal intelligent or not? Right? And that gets us to one of the ideas that I think is underpinning the discussion of this book. So, when we talk about animal cognition and a scientific context, I want to ask a question of you Christ Yes, this is something I think we should consider throughout both of these episodes. What is the correct position of a scientific skeptic on the subject. Like, so, if you are being skeptical of new claims, what is the default assumption before any tests are done about animal cognition? Uh So back up and give some context. Default assumptions. We use them all the time, generally our default assumption, and there are things that seem most in line with what we'd expect given the rest of nature and natural law. It's what you'd think was true if you hadn't done any experiments yet. Okay, yeah, but see, it's interesting that you're using the term skeptic because duvol uses that term um and it's more along the lines that how I think of it, based on his book, is that these skeptics are looking for evidence in laboratory and experimental settings exactly that that's what a skeptic would do. I'm saying, like, what's the skeptical starting assumption? You don't have any evidence yet, which would you just assume is true. Would you assume that animals do have cognition or would you just assume that they don't. Uh So, Obviously, if somebody, if somebody publishes a study zoology papers saying we found a Siberian freshwater fish that can die and then spontaneously come back to life twelve days later, you're going to be resistant to that idea, even if it's published in a good journ all right, You're gonna be like, I don't know, I you know, I want to understand more about this. I'm skeptical of the findings. You'd want to see it replicated. Just one person's first hand testimony is probably not going to be good enough. Likewise, if you had other crazy stuff, you know, I found a tree frog in the rainforest that poop's weapons grade plutonium, you would just think like, I don't quite believe that. I'd want really really good evidence before I believe that's right. Yeah. Um, you definitely have to click through the headline, like, that's not one way you can just read the headline and Facebook and just trust it, right. Uh And so that's because a joke everybody you should click on everything. Oh, I don't know well, you should click on everything you're interested in. That's what I mean. You should slick on all the melts. You shouldn't just read headlines and assume that they're true. Yeah. Also side note, if you're going to argue with an article, read the article first. Don't argue with the headline. In fact, we're gonna get to that later on. But the ball has strong feelings about that. Right. But so there's the question. You you've got this standard skeptical assumption, the starting place, the default assumption. Which way should it go with the idea of animal cognition. Should we just assume that animals are stimulus response machines without anything going on inside unless somebody proves otherwise. Or should we assume that they process information and have interiority just like us and arrive at new ideas unless somebody proves otherwise. Um, So they're actually historically totally different ways to go on this. So one way that I think is much more in line with Devols thinking is the famously skeptical eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume. Right, he brings Hume up in this book. Yeah, and so Hume says the natural starting position is animals do think, it's obvious. And what Hume says is, um quote, no truth appears to me more evident than that beasts are endowed with thought and reason as well as man. So I think it's important to note here that Hume, let's repeat that again, he's an eighteenth century Scottish philosopher. Right, so there's this understanding at least, this is what I got from Duval's book, that this kind of thinking was actually common leading up to in a little bit after Darwin. Um yeah, well, I mean this kind of thinking I think was there with Darwin. Darwin believe Darwin did too. Yeah, But then we got into a mode, I would say, uh, in the second half of the nineteenth century that leaned more toward the idea what we were going to be referring to as behaviorism here, Uh yeah, or um well, just denying animal cognition in general. But it's often associated with the behavior at school of psychology. Right, So what's the reasoning behind Hume's default assumption than animals think. He says this quote tis from the resemblance of the external actions of animals to those we ourselves perform. So because animals behave like humans, behave that we judge their internal likewise to resemble ours, and the same principle of reasoning, carried one step farther, will make us conclude that, since our internal actions resemble each other, the causes from which they're derived must also be resembling. When any hypothesis therefore is advanced to explain a mental operation which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both. So there he's saying, like, Okay, humans have cognition, they have behavior. Animals have behavior that seems parallel to human behavior, so we just extend back and say they probably have cognition too. And I would say that's like generally before like researching for this episode where I sort of landed on these lines, right, Like, I I see my dogs every day, I interact with other animals in my life. That's how I feel about them. Surely they must be thinking and having emotions because it resembles my own experience. Yeah, that's totally my default, my intuitive assumption. Then again, I think our our intuitions we should be strongly suspicious of. We we want to feel certain ways. We like our pets, we want to think they're like us. So we should be open to the opposite idea too. But I think that's also my natural starting place is that I don't know where animals we think other animals, and even if in some rudimentary way, probably do in some sense kind of think. And that could have something to do with where you and I fall in terms of like where we live in history. Yeah, you know, I mean like if if we were recording this podcast in the late nineteenth century, I don't know how we do, that would be like a crank and a policy. But but anyways, somebody taking really crappy dictation exactly we would we would probably have different assumptions based on cultural expectations. Sure, and this idea has been It wasn't just you know, later after jar when it wasn't just like people in the behavior at school that didn't like this idea of animal cognition. For example, you go way back to the philosopher Renee de cart Descartes Decartes. He were so he thinks, well, I think, therefore I am, but animals don't think. He regarded animals as automata or machines. Actually, there's some scholarly back and forth. I tried to find what's the best interpretation of what Decartes's position was. Did he deny them all possible interiority of any kind. It's not exactly clear, but in any case, he did not think that animals could think. This is interesting to me because, like, you know, I got the like very general philosophy one oh one approach to Deckart when I was an undergraduate. You know, Deckard had that that theory that he thought hard on about whether or not he was just a brain in a jar that like a demon was torturing by like providing him like a matrix like sort of virtual reality that he thought was the real world. It was his total doubt about empiricism is that I can't believe anything of my senses because it could be the case that some magical being is is just giving me illusions. Yeah, but he would not think the same thing as possible for a dog or a chimpanzee that maybe they're because they're not even perceiving and he's part of their imagination. Right. He wouldn't even consider that. And that goes right back to the heart of all of this, which Duval comes back to a lot, which is human centrism. Yeah, anthropocentrism. Uh. He talks a lot in the book about anthropocentrism, the idea of of humans being the you know, the center of the universe, or humans being totally unique, humans being the one thing that's different than everything else. Uh. And and I think we can talk about that a little more towards the very end of this episode. But we should come back to this, uh, this behaviorism ethology and and and cognition divide. All right, let's take a quick break and when we get back, we'll talk more about animals and devoll. So the way that duvol defines it, as he says, you know, up until I don't know, like what would you say, maybe thirty years ago in the discipline even shorter, possibly that we've really been living in a behaviorist influenced societ id when it comes to thinking about animal intelligence or emotion. So the basic split that he defines here in thinking about human to animal cognition comes from the move from a hunter gatherer society to an agricultural one. This is interesting because we're well into agricultural society by the time, you know, behavioral thinking comes right, right, but have been for what years? Yeah, But he says this is why science hast thought of animals as being subservient rather than us having an empathy for a view of the world from their perspective in the way that we used to have to when we would run around in the woods and either try to hunt them down or avoid being their prey. That's really interesting because so if you're a hunter, an animal is almost like an enemy. It's like a thing that you have to you have to empathize with, you have to understand its mode of thinking, and it's a very active agent that you're in competition with, whereas an agricultural animal is a tool. It's the thing you use. Yeah, exactly. So the two dominant states of thought that have we've really viewed animals with during this time have been either like Joe mentioned that their stimulus response machines or and this is Devol's wording, that they're quote robots that are endowed with instincts. He doesn't actually think they're mechanical robots. He means robots in sort of the metaphorical sense. Right. Uh. And anyone who thought about animal emotions at all was just deemed unscientific and kind of blacklisted almost, right, And so skeptics for instance, believe that animals are trapped in the present right, that they don't make plans for the future. One example he gives is that they couldn't possibly say goodbye to each other. But Duval argues otherwise, and he provides examples in this book, especially from his own experience working with primates. Right, he comes across this idea of or not comes across. I'd say he coins this term. I believe the term anthropo denial, yeah, which I found is a very interesting principle and I wanted to stop and linger on that for a second. That's cool with you. So it's related to the idea of anthropomorphism, which is this concept that we often employee in a really accusatory way. You know, I'm saying, uh, if you think your dog thinks like a human, if you think your dog loves you, you're being anthropomorphic. You're you're turning the dog into a human in your mind, and that's that's bad behavior. That's being irrational. The dog is not like a human. Yeah, it would even be like it's seen as like the personification of an inanimate object in some sense, right, like when when you get mad at your computer, my microphone I've named my microphone Jimmy, and Jimmy doesn't like it when I get too close and breathe into him like this, right, something like that. They would go, oh, like, why would you possibly think about a dog or an ape like that? But that's not like a human at all, because humans love it when you breathe into them. They do. That's how I expressed my love the human. What else is CPR for? That's recreational, right, yeah, uh no. But so a lot of times the charge of anthropomorphism, I think is a fair one. Like a lot of times people do draw unjustified parallels between humans and something that isn't human. One example would be if you have some fish in a bowl and you see the fish touching their mouths together, and you characterize that as kissing, you're probably anthropomorphizing, right, because the similarity of the action to our human mouth touching behavior. It's incidental. Like, it's not that the fish are having an emotional connection and they're sharing a passionate kiss to show how much they love each other. It's just a behavior that involves mouth touching that's unrelated to our behavior that involves mouth touching, and fish don't use tongue like they're not familiar with the French method, but according to duvol Binobo's do indeed the French kiss. Yeah. On the other hand, of all says that you can practice the opposite of anthropomorphism, or maybe not the opposite, the inverse, which is anthropo denial. It's an unjustified ape a priori rejection of analogies between humans and non human animals when those analogies are in fact apt. It's just being prejudiced against comparing human and animal behaviors, even in situations where those comparisons probably are in some sense justified. The example here would be apes kissing. And this is not like fish kissing, No, not at all. And Duval has both experience with ape kissing and anthropo denial right like, he through much of his career and the work that he's done, has had people say to him, this is clearly not real science, like the things that you're saying about these animals. And yet let's let's look at one of his case studies with these apes. What you mean like tickling, well, tickling and kissing. Yeah, yeah, kissing is one. Tickling is another one. So when you when you say, uh so a young ape gets tickled. Right, you got a chimpanzee baby, you tickle it and it makes rapid in and out breathing noises. Should you call that laughter? Uh? If you did, some people might scold you as being anthropomorphic, saying, how can you know that this ape is laughing? Uh? Maybe you don't know, But it does seem like a fair analogy because humans in chimpanzees or phylogenetically extremely close and humans exhibit this behavior pretty much in the same context being tickled, and so it just sort of does make sense that you could say this is pretty much laughter. Right. It might not be laughter in exactly the same way as human laughter. There might be very important differences, but it's also a close enough analogy that the human comparison does make biological sense. Right. And then his other example was the kissing that we've referred to, And if I remember correctly, it was something along the lines of, Uh, there was a researcher observing this practice between their banobo's right, and then themselves sort of said, well, let's see what this is like. I'll show some affection to this and I'll kiss this eight uh, and then got a mouthful a tongue because it was just it was a powerful kisser. The benobos have a different kissing culture. The benobos used more tongue than the chimpanzees doing. Apparently, this is this is what we've learned, So we haven't always thought like this though, Like I mentioned earlier, Darwin himself wrote about animal emotions, for instance, and Aristotle actually classified animals in his Scala not try. I think that's terrible Greek, but I think that's what it was. It was like his great chain of being. Yeah, it was his simple way of measuring like animals by human standards. The implication, though, until recently, has been that we study animal cognition only so we can better understand ourselves. Why would we possibly want to know what's going inside going on inside the minds of fish? Right? Uh So Duval lays the blame for this kind of thinking on the rise of behavioral psychology. So he provides us with an example here, specifically looking at these birds called kittie wakes. Right. So these are birds in the gull family, and he talks about how these birds nest on narrow cliffs, and they're different than a lot of other birds because a lot of like gulls other seabirds might nest in open areas where their nests are open to invasion and predation and stuff like that. So these nests are like really high up right, yeah. Yeah, And so the the other seabirds might need to keep a close eye on their offspring and make sure others don't try to come into the nest. The kitty wakes don't. The kitty wakes, you can, you can put a strange young ling in their nests, and they don't seem they'll treat it just like it's one of their own. They don't recognize that it's an invader. And this seems to be because the kitty wakes leave live on these little narrow cliffs where there's just not really much opportunity for something else to get into the nest. Yeah, So why would they have developed the capacity to recognize the difference between they're young and somebody else is young? Yeah, so, he says. For the behaviorist though, such findings like this are thoroughly puzzling. Too, similar birds differing so starkly and what they learn makes no sense because learning is supposedly universal, right, So, from the behaviorist perspective of the kitty wake should be the same as any other bird, right, Right. So the behaviorist idea is that behavior is explained by these universal principles of reward and punishment, reinforcement. It's all conditioning based on what has rewarded you or punished you in the past. Yeah. So he draws the line and he says, the difference between behaviorism and then this other school of thought called ethology that we're going to get into has always been one of human controlled versus natural behavior. Uh. And the tenant here is that comparative psychologists had animals perform arbitrary tasks unrelated to the problems that they actually face in their natural environment. And this was how we gathered and tested their intelligence. So, using the kitty wake example, we weren't you know, if you took them out of their natural environment and you noticed that they didn't happen to understand the difference. Betwe mean they're young and somebody else's young, some other birds young. Then you would go, what's wrong with this bird? Right? But when you understand the context that the bird lives within, it makes more sense. This is a big theme of dvl's book is the idea of understanding. Uh. It's a it's a term that's known as an animal's oom velt, and the oom velt is the idea of it's an animal's world view from its natural place in the world. So each animal has its own niche has its own way of interacting with its environment the things it naturally has to do. And sometimes we might be totally unable to appreciate why an animal behaves the way it does if we don't appreciate what its role within its natural environment is, what does it normally have to do to survive? And those are the things that define that animal's mentality. It would also be things like that animals particular types of heightened senses. Its peak specialization in the environment is the animal's oom velt. And if you don't understand that, you're probably going to be testing the animal in ways that are not appropriate for that animal. Yeah, And he gets this term from a guy named Ya cub Funks Cull. This is a tough name for me to pronounce, man, if you look at all the consonants in front of me here. But umvelt translates into surviving world and it's essentially describing an animal sensory context. Of all calls this in his book, he refers to it as the magic well of the life of animals, right, and each each species has its own magic well. The magic well is another really interesting idea that he draws on in the book repeatedly. That's a it's a metaphor for the idea of a well that the more you draw out of it, the more it produces a well that never goes dry. Right, It's like the well wouldn't be like the golden goose because if you keep if you try to get the gold out of the goose, it dies. This would be the opposite of that. This would be like the more you kill the goose and pull the gold out, the more gold is in it. I didn't know that the golden goose died if you just kept taking gold out of it. Is that the myth? Well, No, I think it's that the goose lays golden eggs and then somebody wants to get the gold out of the middle of it. They kill it, and then there's no gold inside and realize that. Yeah, that's the story. It's to punish you for being greedy and not being happy with what you have. But but the analogy is the golden egg once a day and you want, okay, right, and so I stretched this analogy to a really torture rack position. But this would be the goose that you kill it and you open it up and it just keeps producing more and more gold from the inside. It is a magically re replenishing source. And the idea here would be a magically replenishing source of new ideas and information. Interesting things to learn about an animal. One example would be the b But with many species, you can find their magic well. And once you have found their magic well, you know they're sort of area of specialization you can you continue to find more and more surprising and interesting things about them. Yeah. The way he says it is that animals are driven to learn based on their context. So once we immerse ourselves within that, there's a whole magic well of things to learn about that animal and their intelligence. Uh. He gives one example here, I like as like bringing it back to the behaviorism versus ethology sort of schism. He says, one can train goldfish to play soccer and bears to dance. I knew about the dancing. I didn't know you could train gold fish to play soccer. But it sounds right, he says, it sounds like one of those good studies, but does anyone believe that this tells us much about the skills of human soccer stars or dancers. Makes a good point there, right, you know, like, yeah, through conditioning, you can get a fish to do this, or you can get a bear to do this. But what does that say about the human condition? Not a whole lot. And what does that say about bears or fish Benga, Probably not much about them either. Yeah, So I think, as we mentioned at the top, he is a director at the Yurkey's Center, which is here in Atlanta. That's a primate study facility, and he says that in the nineteen fifties, actually the center was found it in Florida, and so there was a lot of tension there between their staff and the behaviorists who came in and worked there, because the behaviorists wanted to starve the chimpanzees that they were testing so that they would be more likely to respond to reward based conditioning. Uh. And he said the rumor was that the staff would sabotage the lab by feeding the animals at night, and the behaviorists just basically we're totally disgusted and threw their hands up. We're like we can't do anything with this. It's fascinating. You won't properly starve you know what. It reminds me of. Have you seen any of the current batch of the Planet of the Apes movies? Oh? Yeah, I have, like the first one with James Franco. I thought that movie was bad until all the human actors left and it just became about the apes. And once it was about the apes, it was great. Yeah. Yeah, I kind of like them. I haven't seen the second one yet. I think I think the third one is coming out soon. I don't know the second one. I thought the second one was kind of good. Yeah, okay, well I need to check it out. But that this is what was comping up in my head as I was reading. I can't totally vouch for scientific accuracy. Yeah I don't. We'll have to ask what he thinks about it's a good ape storytelling. So all right, I'm gonna take us on a tangent here for a second, because many of you may hear behaviorism or operating conditioning and the first thing that pops into your head is B. F. Skinner, because he's the guy we're all taught about in high school. Basic, basic, psychology usually involves some kind of Skinner research. Right. The Skinner was massively influential in twentieth century psychology. Now, I've got a weird example here about Skinner's thought process, but it's also related to my own education. Okay, so you were put in a box with electric shocks. Yes, but that doesn't have anything to do with this. No. Uh. I had heard this whole story from my psychology teacher in high school that Skinner put one of his children in a Skinner box. Explaining this, hold on, you gotta explain the concept of a Skinner box. I'm going to I remember I remember being like really, like that's allowed, Like I couldn't believe it, And here it is and it isn't and I'll explain why. So, but I'm using this as an example. It's a little bit of a diversion, but it shows you the kind of thought processes that Skinner had when he was testing. Okay, so uh, there's confusion about Skinner boxes. The ones we typically recognize are the metal boxes that he invented to test rats by giving them rewards for training and operating conditioning in which any behavior could be trained using variable reinforcement. Right, teaching a bear how to dance, teaching a fish how to play soccer, teaching a rat to you know, I don't know what they were doing, like pushing panels and stuff like that. Skinner also invented something called the air crib, which is also sometimes referred to as a skinner box or a baby tender. It sound like a chicken tender clothes. He put his daughter in it. It's true, he did put his daughter in this thing, but it was not anything like what were we commonly think of as skinner boxes. So this is where my my high school teacher got confused. Uh. It was a spacious compartment that was mounted on a wheeled table, and it had a window in it and temperature and air control, and you would put these babies inside it and the baby could move freely around within it while it's mother was within visual context. So say like the mother needed to go cook in the kitchen or something like that, and she couldn't constantly, you know, be holding the baby while she was cooking. She put it inside the baby tender, wheel the baby tender over near the kitchen and she'd cook and kind of keep one eye on the baby. Uh. This was Skinner's like solution. It was specifically because his wife was like, they had a second child, and his wife was like, oh my god, it's so difficult to do all these things for the first year of the baby's life. Okay, so other people actually used this device. I think it was commercially available, but it didn't really take off per se um. There are a lot of critics of it though, and they said that babies would be socially starved by being put in these boxes. Skinner himself argued, that's not true. The baby receives the same amount of attention, if not more, inside of my baby tender slash aircrib. Wow. Yeah, So another trivia question about Skinner. Do you know Skinner wrote like a utopian novel. Yeah, it's called Walden too. I didn't know about this in LA I have heard about that reading about this for the episode, and apparently it has been the inspiration for some real like planned communities, something that Peter Teal would be into. I don't know about him. But no, actually no, I think it is not a It's not a rapture libertarian right. Uh. No, it's more like utopia. It is more like a thing where you have it's essentially I think behaviorism put into practice, so it's like top down control of culture in a way that is maximizing people's you know, good tendencies or something like that. I don't know that much about it, so I can't speak about it. But he did write a utopian novel, and as people going to this planned community is sort of like a novel of ideas and people like debate about things. Well, he was certainly a renaissance man. I think we can say that about B. F. Skinner Um. But just to clarify, hear all these rumors about him putting his daughter in a skinner box, They're not true. In fact, there were the rumors turned into urban myths about him doing experiments on her and that she eventually committed suicide because of her lack of social conditioning. None of that is true. She went on to lead a life and lived in London, I believe, Um. But yeah, I learned this in a p psych in high school. You know, we we learned the basics of operat conditioning, and then my teacher just told us that story, like, oh yeah, he even put his kit inside a skinner box. And I was like, anyways, uh, he's get back to devolved. Yeah, let's come back from this diversion. That was me just sort of showing you the methodology of behavioral thinking. Yeah, but so yeah, so we are. We're back to this idea that the behaviorists, according to Daval, you know, he made this charge that they treated all animals kind of the same. They didn't want to think about instincts so much. They didn't want to think about what was natural for this animal in their environment, and it was all just conditioning. You could apply the standing animal and that that's not what Dvol is down with, right, and he especially hates it to sort of the opposite side of this when people use the term non human animals when they're doing current research, and you're grinning. I think you know where I'm going with this here at how stuff works when we write scripts for videos or sometimes for podcasts, uh talking about animal research. I don't know about you, but some of our colleagues use the term non human animals. I use the term and uh, man, do we get negative feedback about that? Like in the comments and stuff. People really get rubbed the wrong way? And apparently Devol also hates it. But I think for different reasons. Yeah, I mean the idea. When I mean I use that term, I'm just using it to say, like animals other than humans. I think. I think his problem with it is that in some ways that it's used, it implies that it's like, well, there's humans and then there's all these other animals and they're all fundamentally different. I'm just trying to use it pragmatically. When I use it, I think to say like research on non human animals, meaning research on animals that aren't Homo sapiens. Yeah, I tend to agree. He says it implies an absence of humanity within the animal kingdom, which he's you know, he firmly wants to ground ground us in thinking of ourselves as being animals and being part of the animal kingdom. Uh. And so this leads us to actually the naming of his other field, which we're gonna get into later. But he says, really, what we're talking about here now is evolutionary cognition, and this is where we look at the world from the animal's viewpoint the velt so we can appreciate their intelligence. And this is where he comes up with that rule for research that I was telling you about. Earlier and probably would apply this as well to your criticism of articles that you read online or maybe on Facebook or something like that. Okay, so he calls it to know thy animal rule, and he says, anyone who wishes to stress an alternative claim about an animal's cognitive capacities either needs to familiarize him or herself with the species in question or make a genuine effort to back his or her counterclaim with data. And then he says, anyone who intends to conduct experiments on animal cognitions should first spend a couple thousand hours observing the spontaneous behavior of the species in question. Now, this is interesting because a lot of people would say, like, wait a minute, why do I need to study that? I mean, in many cases, what you'd want is somebody who dispassionately observes an animal, uh with you know, with as little baggage as possible, to just come in and strictly observed behaviors in the test environment. And there's some truth to that. I mean, you don't want to let your biases and your feelings about an animal guide what kind of observations you make in a test. But at the same time, when you're designing a test of animal intelligence, if you don't totally understand that animal and how it naturally behaves, you're very likely overlooking something absolutely crucial that could change the way your tests should work or how to interpret your results. Going back to the bird example, knowing that these birds live in such a high, out of reach places, why would they possibly care if another bird of the same species fell into their nest? Right? Yeah, And this is another theme that comes up, the idea of observing animals in their natural behaviors, in their natural habitats um. This comes up I think in the the idea of like, okay, so how should we do science respect to the idea of anecdotes? This is a disgust a lot in the book. It's another conflict between two different desiderata in in getting the best scientific view of an animal. So one thing would be that we don't want to just have our scientific ideas about animals completely informed by anecdotes where somebody says, hey, one time I saw a chimpanzee, do x R right? Well, And that that's going back to our example from the beginning of the episode. You and I have experienced anecdotal experiences with our dogs right, but they're not under laboratory conditions, right, So you have anecdotal experiences. But then again, on the other side, you could have this mentality that says, well, I'm not interested in anecdotes about what animals have done in the wild. You know, you may have been observing chimpanzees in the wild and you think you saw them do something once that indicates a certain type of cognition. You may have seen them do something that you think indicates that they understand how other minds work, or something like that. But that's just a story you have that's not like something that we have repeatedly tested. There's validity to that point of view, but only to a certain extent. And duval Uh doesn't think that anecdotes should comprise our scientific knowledge, but he does strongly think that they should inspire our scientific exploration. Yeah, he sees value to them. Yeah, So you start with an anecdote. You observe animals, for example, in their wild behavior, and you see one do something interesting, and that observation of one doing something unexpected or interesting forms the basis of a controlled test. You say, Okay, now I wonder if we can isolate the variables here and get them to do the same thing. So let's bring that around to one of my favorite lines in the book. This is this is I laughed out loud at this. Okay, he said, would anyone test the memory of human children by throwing them into a swimming pool to see if they could remember where to get out? And he's using this example because this is actually how many rats are t did with what is called Morris's water maze, right to see if the rats can figure it out? So would we? I mean I immediately was like, this is like a perfect example of humor at work, right, Like the idea of taking something as taboo is just throwing a child into a pool. But then it's it's along the lines of, well, we're doing it for research, right, and the babies somehow kind of figure out how to climb out of the pool. It's the same kind of thing he says about the rats. Well, like, how many situations would these rats be in where they just get thrown into a pool? Let's see, I could think of lots of scenes in movies where they're like surging currents of water with rats in them. Yeah, there's like one in the Indiana Jones in the last crusade, there's like a rat flood in there, and that's not really their natural habitat though. Right. Another thing he says to keep in mind about most labs, and I didn't know this, is that most labs keep their test animals at eighty five percent of their typical body weight. And this is so that they'll be more motivated by food as a reward. Yeah, but this could also go the other way. I mean, it could also be causing problems for test results, because what if animals don't behave the way they normally would if they're hungry. Yeah. It was criticized by the well known primatologist Harry Harlowe actually, and he argued that animals learn from curiosity and free exploration. Uh, and that would be stifled by making them fixated on food. Yeah. So, but basically, what we're looking at is a variation on intelligence. We're not looking at different topics of intelligence. So Duval argues that if we fail to find cognitive capacity in a species, well there's something wrong in our approach as human beings, not with the actual species itself. Right, So, going back to the crab example, you know, uh, we haven't come up with an approach yet to quite understand what's going on with the crabs that are ripping these anemones apart and using them as a two handed weapons. You know, I don't know what that approach would be. I need to spend a couple of thousand hours with these crabs before I could do that. I guess it could be. I mean, a way of testing what kind of thing leads to this would be trying to put them in situations where they could, uh, where they could create new advantages of tool use that might be similar but wouldn't necessarily play on the same instincts if it is instinct driven uh. And then he says the challenge is to find tests that fit an animals temperament, their interests, anatomy, and sensory capacities. Faced with negative outcomes, we need to pay close attention to differences in motivation and attention. He's referring to the animals here. All right, we need to take a quick break and when we come back there will be more on animal intelligence and cognition. Okay, So count or to this behaviorist mode of thinking that has really dominated our thought about animal intelligence for at least a century or more. Uh, Duval talks about the discipline of ethology. Yeah, ethology the study of animal behavior, but specifically, uh, sort of instinctual animal behavior that is common to all of the members of a species. Yeah. He he refers to it as being about spontaneous behavior. So going back to our examples from the beginning, right, it's more instinctual. Um. So, I have a question for you and and maybe for del I'm a little confused here. Did this spin out of evolutionary theory from Darwin? Uh? Well, yeah, I would think so. I mean, it seemed like it, but I couldn't draw a direct line. I mean, all all modern biological theories are in some way rooted in in the modern synthesis of evolution. But you, I guess you could say that this is very specifically base Ston thinking about how behaviors are evolved traits, because I guess with behaviorism you would say that the capacity to learn is an evolved trade. But that can just be applied to anything, because you know, evolutionary theory predicts cognitive similarities based on the relations between a species in their habitat. It sounds like velt to me. Uh So, okay, yeah, we're we're shaped by our environments and so yeah, our behaviors are shaped by our environments. Well, ethology actually started in the eighteenth century, and that it was started by French researchers. And they used the term ethos, which you've probably heard me throw around on the show a lot because of my background in rhetorical theory. But ethos is the Greek word for character, and they used that to describe species, typical characteristics. Now, William Morton Wheeler is the guy who made it popular in English speaking study. This was in nineteen o two and he called it a study habits and instincts. Uh. So ethology, you know, without diving too deep into this, well, it has its own language to talk about instincts, stereotypical behaviors, stimuli that illicit specific behaviors, et cetera, similar things to behaviorism. Now, the two people that that Devol really mentions heavily in his book and I Gather are inspirations for his own work our Lorenz and tin Berken, uh. And they were partners within this discipline. They were actually separated by opposite sides during World War Two. Just fascinating. One of them was like a medic for Nazi Germany. And the other one was where was he in the Netherlands. I don't think he was in the Netherlands anyways. It is fascinating they knew each other before this, they were separated by the war, and then afterwards they got over their differences and worked together again. It's really fascinating. He this is a great part of the book where he just goes into this history between these two guys and kind of how they've inspired an entire generation of people who study animal intelligence. Yeah. Now, he says, mythologists are usually zoologists, while behaviorists are usually psychologists. That makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, if you're an athologist and you're trying to understand an animal's role in its environment, you're thinking about the animal itself and how that informs potential behavior, and thinking if you're if you are a behaviorist, like the animal is almost incidental. You're just thinking about the animal is a substrate for behavior, and any animal really could be a substrate for behavior. And I wonder if, uh, you know, as we're moving along towards a sort of chronological history of this of this discipline, if as they're coming together more, if we're seeing a blend of zoology and psychology. You know, yeah, I think so. I mean this division, as you'll, as ud All talks about in the book, is it's less of a division today, it's more of a synthesis. So both ethology and behaviorism were actually a reaction to what we're folk explanation of animals, right, just kind of I guess what we would call urban myths today, right, or even people who you know might have been thought of as scientists of the time, but we're sort of being scientists by anecdote, like not super rigorous scientists saying like I once saw you know, bird do this, This is what birds can do well. Actually he gives a very good example of this. Uh. And he blames it all on the guy who followed Darwin, who Darwin chose to be like his successor in this theory of evolution. Uh. A lot of misinformation came out of scientific anecdotes, like you're talking about. The guy's name was George Romanez. I believe it is how you pronounce it, uh, And he was a perpetrator of this. Here are two things that he said. He said that rats would form supply lines to hand down stolen eggs from like a you know, either like a farm or like just a chicken's nest, that they would pass these eggs down to their holes. This sounds like a Disney cartoon to me, like the idea of them, like they're in a little like assembly line, right, and they're just passing the egg back and forth, singing a song or something. Uh. And then the other one, this one's nuts. Uh. He told the story about a monkey that was hit by a hunter's bullet and then the monkey smeared the blood on its hand and held that hand, the bloody hand, up to the hunter to make the hunter feel guilty. Now, even as somebody who is uh sympathetic to the idea of complex animal cognition, that seems like a stretch. How do you know, even if that's really what happened, how do you know the ape was trying to make the hunter feel guilty. That seems a little crazy, right, yeah? Um So. Ramanez subsequently led to a guy named Lloyd Morgan, and Morgan had an interpretation that animals are mainly stimulus response machine. So that's basically how we got to that behaviorist thinking. Because of this this one guy who kind of just went rogue and then there was a response within the discipline to him. Another example is a great story and I had heard this story before reading the book, but it's a wonderful story. The story of Clever Hans. Right, the horse, Clever Hans who could do he was a math genius. Yes to the idea here was that apparently Hans would literally be trotted out to crowds and his owner would ask it to perform math problems and it would get that the answer right, every clumpets hoof, I think that's how to count off a number. That would be the answer, and everybody's like, Wow, this horse, it's got an amazing brain. It can do square roots. Can a horse do that? Yeah? Exactly. And they figured out that it was actually through conditioning right that the horse was probably What they think happened was the horse was responding to cue from its owner, so it would start clamping a number, and then the when owner got to the when it got to the right one, he would be like ah, yes, yeah. The owner would show like either positive body language or I think he They said something about a hat with a big brim. Yes, he would. He had a hat with a brim that he would be looking down at the horse's hoof while the hoof was tapping, and then when it got to the right number, he would stop looking at the hoof and lift his head up, so the horse would subsequently stop. That was what was going on, basically to the point where when this was revealed, it wasn't like the owner was duplicitous and like trying to trick everybody. He himself thought that this horse was able to do this. Yeah, and but this serves as a great cautionary tale about about these kind of anecdotes where we attribute to were too credulous. We attribute too much cognition too readily to animals without being scientifically rigorous. This actually led us to using blind studies with animals because they because of the whole Clever Hans incident, Duvall actually argues, he says, you know, it's interesting, though we don't do the same thing when we test the cognition of human children. Though there's a whole section about this in the book, uh Improper analogies between they're all these tests that try to say, oh, is a chimpanzee smarter than a three year old child? Is a chimpanzee smarter than a five year old child in different domains of knowledge. Um, but a very common problem with this is that the chimpanzee and the child, the human child are just not on an equal playing field in terms of test environments. Children are surrounded by members of their own species. They're probably much more at ease and comfortable, maybe with their parents in the room. Uh, They're just all kinds of ways in which these testing scenarios are not equivalent, and yet they're the results are being treated as if they're done across an even playing field. Like his example is in the same way that we wouldn't have clever Hans being a room with his owner and his brimmed hat, we shouldn't necessarily have these children being this ame room as their mother's, Like they're literally testing these children while they're in their mother's laps. So it's interesting he points out the contradiction there. Now these two schools finally come together, and I think this is where we're gonna cap off this episode. But basically, behaviorists and mythologists started working together in nineteen fifty three, and this is when Daniel Lerman and Tim berg and started a friendship and it started ongoing criticism not of each other's camps, but within each camp of its own tenants, and I think each each camp obviously had legitimate things to say about the other one, right, I mean today, if you would try to if you try to be a chauvinist about you know, it's it's all instinct or it's all learned behavior. I mean, I think either of those positions is silly today. I mean, obviously animal behaviors or combinations of instincts and learned behaviors. As we outlined at the beginning, it's like saying that it's only nature, it's only nurture. Try to use a little bit of both, right. But then also this lead is the question, even even if you're you're talking about an acknowledgement of the influence of both these things, there is still the question, what's the role of complex cognition, what's the role of thinking? Well, let's get to that in our next episode. We've basically covered the gamut of where the discipline of looking at animal intelligence was, but we're gonna look forward in another episode to talking about where it is and where it's going. Now, my question for you out there you're listening to this, maybe you have pets, maybe you've interacted with animals and various capacities cows. Maybe we had a lot of people right into us recently about our butter episode with the cow with the window in it. Yeah, exactly, the cow with the window in it, because I mentioned that in the episode and a lot of people had worked with them before. So have you seen, uh, your own versions of this play out with animals? Have you seen what you think of as only instinctual responses with these animals, or maybe have you seen examples of them learning from conditioning, like giving them treats, for instance, to make your dogs sit down, which is something I'm working on with my dogs right now. Let us know, there's a lot of different ways to get in touch with us. We're on social media all over the place. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler. We are also on Instagram, although I don't know that that's the best way to ask questions. But you can look at very pretty pictures of us, uh and what about stuff to blow your mind? Dot com? Well, of course that's our website where you can find blog posts, articles, videos, other past podcasts, and our vast archive with some more pretty pictures. Probably, Yeah, there are lots of pretty pictures. You know what, Robert Lamb isn't in the room with us right now, so let's just honor him by saying, Robert Lamb has a singular talent for finding the best possible image to go along with the podcast episode. I am yeah, he's so good at it. I'm always surprised at the images that he's able to pull together. But of course, also you can always email us if you want to let us now feedback on this episode or any other, or to give us ideas for future episodes that blow the mind at how stuff Works dot com for more illness and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff Works dot com by Believe the bo