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There's so many questions that animals
help us understand about ourselves.
How does intelligence happen?
How does it evolve?
Why do some species solve problems one way
and other species solve problems another way?
If you wanna understand something that we do as a species,
that we're really curious, why do we do it?
Animals often have answers for us.
It might be because we share an ancestor,
it might be that animals can help us answer
why natural selection or evolution would have favored
the thing that we're interested in explaining.
Animals have something to say about all those questions.
Is a dolphin smarter than a chimpanzee?
Is a dog smarter than a cat?
Ryan Hare is an evolutionary anthropologist
at Duke University, coauthor of a new book called
The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think.
Good boy, Congo, come on.
This way.
Well probably the reason I study animal psychology
is 'cause of my pet dog growing up.
His name was Oreo, and just like every dog owner,
he'd look deeply into your eyes
and you look deeply in his eyes
and you'd wanna know what he was thinking.
This is my guy now, his name's Congo.
What's going on through his mind
and how does he think about us
and how does he solve problems?
That's what endlessly fascinates me.
Good boy.
Cognitive evolution is just like
any other type of evolution.
It means that there's changes in the brain
that lead to changes in how animals behave,
solve problems, interact with one another.
And the study of cognitive evolution is trying
to understand well why do those changes happen?
What are the forces that drive those changes?
So if we're talking about where we are
in the history of understanding cognitive evolution,
to the exclusion of humans, I would say we're in an infancy.
I think we know a lot about what is it that makes
human psychology different from animal psychology?
I think we've got a pretty good handle on that.
Where we know nothing is how psychology evolves,
how cognition involves in the animal world.
There's been so little attention and effort,
and the reason is because every university
has zero to one people who studies animal psychology.
So it's very hard if you're doing comparative cognition,
you're comparing different species to one another,
but you're the only person there.
Who are you gonna compare with?
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So we're gonna link up everybody all over the world,
so that we can work together and compare animals.
We're gonna make a community.
There are different forms of intelligence on this planet.
For me intelligence is solving problems
that are gonna help you survive and reproduce.
Almost certainly they involve your brain
that is representing, storing and processing
information you're taking in.
If it involves those things, it's intelligent to me.
There's been discovery after discovery,
where animals that people would not have thought
could do anything particularly interesting
have amazing types of intelligence,
and often challenge even our greatest abilities.
Elephants have ultrasonic frequencies of communication
that we can't hear.
There's ultraviolet perception in many animals.
We can't see it, but animals that are
pollinating those flowers do.
That's the first step, is define diverse range
of perceptual abilities that then problem solving
and flexibility is built on top of.
The best example, and I love to say this to people
when they, you know, how can you say that
an animal could be more intelligent than a human?
And I always say well how'd you do
on the echolocation test?
Obviously you'd be hopeless.
We don't have the ability to echolocate.
Echolocation has evolved multiple times in mammals.
Bats can echolocate, and so can cetaceans.
Why is it that that type of intelligence evolved
in those species and it did not evolve in our lineage?
Self control, it's vital to almost everything
that we do as humans or that animals do.
Whether it's a social decision, what should I say next?
What should I do next?
To what should I eat?
Where should I go?
All of those decisions involve self control.
The first time we brought a lot of people together
to work on a problem of cognitive evolution,
we were able to present 36 different species
with a problem that we thought would measure self control.
You have to resist making a response
that seems like the obvious solution to a problem.
What we found was that animals that have more complex diets,
so basically just eat different types of food,
were the species that did better on the self control task.
Species that had a much narrower diet,
like a panda eating bamboo, versus say a great ape,
all apes, humans included,
eat hundreds of different species.
And so the idea there is perhaps when you're
having to make decisions as you're foraging
about what to eat when.
And you have to sort of inhibit
oh well there's food here and I'm hungry,
but actually I'm not gonna get as much
out of the thing I'm sitting in front of,
I should move to the next source,
where I'm gonna actually get a bigger payoff.
And so you have to show some self control.
If you're just a panda and you're just always eating bamboo,
I mean there's always bamboo, you just eat the bamboo.
There's really no need for self control.
So that gave us a hint that really the force
that may be driving changes in self control
in evolution is diet, perhaps more than
the complexity in the political machinations
going on in animals' social lives.
Technically, chimpanzees and bonobos are more
closely related to us than they are to gorillas.
For all intents and purposes they look identical.
Chimpanzees are incredible at making tools
and using tools to get food that
they couldn't have access to.
It ends up that bonobos aren't that good at it.
Flip side is that bonobos are incredibly empathic,
they're very sensitive to the emotions of others
and get very upset when others are upset.
Chimpanzees tend to be more aggressive,
especially male chimpanzees.
They will murder each other.
Females can be coerced and beaten in horrible ways.
Bonobos really don't do any of those things.
So you have these two close relatives
where which one's more intelligent?
Is it a chimp or a bonobo you might ask me,
and what I would suggest is well that's the wrong question.
The question is what are these different species'
cognitive profiles?
And so I've spent a decade comparing chimpanzees
and bonobos trying to understand what is
the psychology that produces the different behavior?
And think what we found in bonobos is
that they are actually attracted to strangers,
they actually have a preference for strangers.
Whereas chimpanzees are very fearful of strangers,
and that really is the psychology that's leading
to a lot of these behavioral differences in aggression.
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Friendliness was not something that I had
on top of my mind as something that
drove cognitive evolution.
It certainly was the animals that taught me that.
We presented chimpanzees and bonobos
with a cooperative problem.
Okay one, two, three, go!
They had to pull a tray using ropes
to be able to eat food,
and while we've seen so much evidence
for cooperation in wild chimpanzees,
when we began studying cooperation in captive settings,
you're trying to use experimental approaches,
we had failed miserably to get chimpanzees to cooperate.
Well we finally realized, the reason we couldn't
get them to cooperate in captivity
was because it really mattered who they were with,
and if they were with somebody that they
would have a friendly relationship with,
boom, they could cooperate instantly.
But if there was somebody that they were intolerant of,
they could never cooperate.
And we could turn on and off their cooperative ability
just by rearranging them with different individuals.
Bonobos are far more tolerant than chimpanzees.
We gave them the same set of problems
but they'd never seen it before.
They didn't have any knowledge.
And it didn't matter who we paired them with,
they solved it spontaneously.
They were friends and they were tolerant
so they could do it together.
Yay, bonobo!
So it really is, when you put them in direct opposition,
knowledge versus tolerance in a cooperative task.
Tolerance wins every time.
In many ways, bonobos are sort of like
the domesticated dog of our ape family.
Chimpanzees would be more wolf-like.
And comparing everything from their morphology,
their behavior, their psychology, their physiology,
many of the differences we see between wolves and dogs
we see between bonobos and chimpanzees.
And why is that?
Why is it that you have these two
distantly related pair of species
that have become so similar in the way
that they've changed from one another.
What was the process that drove it?
We think it's the same evolutionary force,
and we think that force is selection for friendliness.
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If you were to ask me the species that
is most like a human infant in its ability
to communicate with us, it's not organisms
like a chimpanzee or bonobo that have much larger brains
and are obviously closer relatives to us.
It's the humble dog that is so good at this.
Speak.
(dog barking)
Hush, hush, hush, hush.
They share an evolutionary history with us
for the last 25 to 40,000 years.
Dogs evolved when interacting with hunter gatherers
and then you look at the effect
that selection for friendliness has,
it doesn't take much to then imagine that
as humans start living at higher density,
that what do we do amazingly well is create garbage,
and the garbage that we create
is a new ecological niche.
If you're a wolf they can sneak in and get close
and take advantage of the resources that humans
are producing as we start living at higher density.
Ooh, you no longer have to get kicked in the face
and chase whatever you eat, it's gonna be a reliable,
sustainable source of food.
The selection though that's gonna be acting on you
is you're no longer afraid of humans,
you're attracted to humans.
And so what we think happened is over many generations
there was this really strong selection
for attraction to humans and friendliness
and a lack of aggression.
All of those things put together,
understanding our evolution,
understanding the effect of domestication,
and the fact that they have jobs,
there are dogs that are helping detect endangered animals,
there are dogs that are helping people with
mental and physical disabilities,
there are dogs that are checking for bed bugs,
finding cancers.
Makes dogs really one of the most interesting
and important species to study.
In many ways dogs have converged and become
more like people, more like humans than wolves.
If you're a domesticated dog you're really good
at using human gestures.
Understanding gestures is this amazing thing.
It seems to develop extremely early in dogs.
Of course the reason we got interested in this
is because it's the skill that is so important
and early emerging in our own species as kids
start to learn culture and pick up language skills.
Using pointing gestures or using
the direction that we look to infer
what we want or where we want them to go,
it lasts throughout their lives,
it doesn't decline as other types of cognitive functions do.
It's kind of remarkable.
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It's often misreported as some dogs have been
trained to have a large vocabulary.
That's not the finding.
Chase.
Frisbee.
Take Frisbee.
The finding is that they, with one trial learning,
are able to label an object, a novel object,
and remember that label for a week or a month later.
But that's not the surprise.
If you were to show one of those dogs a picture
and say get this object in the picture,
they can go get it.
Now that may sound like no big deal,
but that is effectively symbolic representation.
It's one of the hallmarks of human language acquisition.
When they told me they were doing that I thought
there is no way a dog is gonna do that,
I can't even believe you're trying.
But yeah, go for it.
And not only did they do it, they did it really well.
Lessons from dogs.
Be nice.
(laughing)
Dont bite.
I mean I think the thing that everybody loves about dogs
is they're just always so optimistic
that now's gonna be the fun time,
and then just so forgiving and loving.
I hope I can be the person my dog thinks I am.
I think we'd all be better if we could manage it.
Good boy.
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I think the thing I'm most excited about
with this diverse intelligence grant is I think
we're gonna discover new types of intelligence.
I think there's species that have been ignored
or have never been studied in how they
interact with the world psychologically.
We're gonna find intelligence, flexibility,
sophistication, where we least expect it,
and the hope is that this effort will get us crawling,
and maybe even running if we're lucky.
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