ANIMALS: They're Smarter Than You Think
At the Next Big Idea Club, we review hundreds of books per month, and recently we have discovered a fascinating series of new books on the topic of animal intelligence. In this week's episode, we explore what we can learn from our fellow living creatures and?introduce you to a new member of The Next Big Idea Club, our producer Caleb’s dog Cisco! Here’s Caleb to tell you a little bit more about his journey from dog skeptic to dog enthusiast, and how a series of recent Book Bite inspired his newfound admiration for animals. — Rufus Griscom
CALEB: Am I a dog guy? If you had asked me that question a few years ago, my answer would have certainly been: “No!” Barking, shedding, rolling around in dead stuff — not my cup of tea. But this canine apathy of mine started to cause real problems when I moved in with a bona fide dog lover. At least once a week, she’d say: “You know, Caleb, I’d love to have a dog one day.” And I’d deflect. “Oh, well, you know, it’d be hard with our jobs, and we don’t really have room anyway.”
But then came the pandemic. We found ourselves working from home in a dog-friendly apartment, and when she reminded me of her desire to cohabitate with a barky, sheddy, rolly-around-in-dead-stuff creature, I knew there was nothing I could do to stop her. So on May 14th, 2020 — which happens to be my girlfriend’s birthday — we rescued a dog and named her Cisco.
She’d been found wandering around in the high desert in Southern California. The folks at the adoption agency thought she was probably about six months old. So there I was, about to go from being someone who basically had no interest in dogs to the nervous owner of a new puppy. At least, I thought she was a puppy...
ALEXANDRA HOROWITZ: If you have a dog between six months and two years old, you don’t have, as commonly assumed, a puppy. You, my friend, have a teenager, an adolescent in a mature 30-year-old body.
Alexandra Horowitz is a dog savant. She runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College. One of her previous books, Inside of a Dog, spent 65 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, which is 15 dog years. And as I listened to her Book Bite she made for her latest book, The Year of the Puppy, I had this strange feeling that somehow she’d snuck into my apartment and observed our first few weeks learning to live with Cisco.
ALEXANDRA: Just like the human teenagers, sometimes erratic behavior, distant and argumentative. One moment, really sweet the next. Teenage dogs can be disobedient, seem to seek conflict, and also be clingy and stick by your side.?
Teenagers, whether they have two legs or four, are sailing through a hormone storm. In the long term, those hormones lead to sexual maturity. But in the short term—
ALEXANDRA: Their brains are being rewired, especially in areas regulating emotions and making judgements. But if an adolescent dog suddenly refuses to come when called, people are disposed to say, oh, you’re a bad dog. Not correctly. Oh, you’re going through a phase. This is a problem because a primary reason for returning or giving up a dog is their behavior. They jump, bite, escape, soil, the house. With the uptick of these behaviors in adolescence, there’s a severe uptick of relinquishments.
Oh, how I? wish I had known that when we rescued Cisco. We never considered relinquishing her, but I’d be lying if I said there weren't moments, like when she ate all four corners off a rug, that I regretted getting her. Raising a teenager is exhausting. Who knew! My girlfriend and I kept asking each other, “Will she ever chill out?” We should have been asking Alexandra Horowitz that question.
ALEXANDRA: It is only a phase. And it’s hard for them too. It’s been likened to being like waking up in a tent in a hurricane. Realize that and it’s easier to release your vice grip and worry about this mischievous scamp in your midst.
We’ve now had Cisco for almost three years. And, unsurprisingly, Alexandra, was 100 percent right. The teenage naughtiness was only a phase. Cisco eventually became less of a rascal, less exasperating. And as that happened, my apathy toward dogs? Well, here’s the embarrassing anecdote my girlfriend, Kirkley, chose to share on this week’s episode of The Next Big Idea podcast:
KIRKLEY: Sometimes I'll hear Caleb say, “How's your day going?,” and I'll wander in to answer, but I find him lying on the floor whispering into Cisco's ear, wondering how her day is, and giving her sweet kisses—and I realize that he's not wondering about my day at all.?
At age 30, I discovered what dog lovers have known for millennia. Dogs are an endless source of affection and humor and companionship. And now that I’ve fallen head over heels for my dog, I find myself increasingly interested in animals of all stripes.
We know that animals are vital to the environment. We know they’re vital to the economy, too — by one estimate, pollination from honey bees delivers half-a-trillion dollars to the global economy each year. And we know that if we can’t figure out how to put climate change in check, a third of all animal species could be extinct by the end of the century.
What I didn’t know until I listened to a few recent Book Bites — that’s what we call the 12-minute book summaries top non-fiction authors make exclusively for our Next Big Idea app — what I didn't know until I listened to them is that animals don’t just need our protection: they deserve our respect. Because animals are brilliant.?
And so today on the show, I picked a few excerpts from those Book Bites and played them for Rufus. Listen along, and you’ll meet slime mold that can outwit the best human engineers, a cognitive scientist who makes the case that thinking like an animal is the key to living a good life, and a wildlife filmmaker whose near-death encounter with a 30-ton whale led him to the scientists building Google Translate for animal languages.
Alexandra Horowitz is a professor at Barnard College and Columbia University, where she teaches seminars in canine cognition. As Senior Research Fellow, she heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College.
Your “puppy” is probably a teenager.
If you have a dog between six months and two years old, you do not have a “puppy.” You have a teenager. Though we think of dogs as either puppies or adults, they also go through a stage of adolescence. Just like the human teenager’s sometimes erratic behavior, teenaged dogs can be disobedient, appear to seek conflict, and then suddenly cling and stick by your side.
“Their brains are being re-wired, especially in areas that regulate emotions and make judgements.”
This phase in dogs is driven by hormones. Those hormones lead to sexual maturity that have other consequences, like increased sensitivity to touch and less self-control. Their brains are being re-wired, especially in areas that regulate emotions and make judgements. That is why you might see more challenges to your authority.
If an adolescent dog suddenly refuses to come when called, people are disposed to say they are a bad dog. This is a problem, because a primary reason for returning a dog is their behavior. They may jump, bite, escape, and soil the house. With the uptick of these behaviors in adolescence, there is a severe uptick of relinquishments, which can lead to euthanizing.
It is only a phase, however—and it’s hard for them, too. It’s been likened to waking up in a tent in a hurricane. Once you realize that, it’s easier to release your vise-grip and worry less about the mischievous scamp in your midst.
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James Bridle is a writer, artist, and technologist whose writing has been featured in numerous publications, including?Wired,?The Atlantic, and the?Financial Times.
Everything is intelligent.
Humans are bad at recognizing intelligence because we tend to define intelligence as “what humans do.” But when we think about the world from the perspective of other beings, their abilities become clear. Consider the gibbon. Gibbons belong to the same class of large-brained mammals as chimpanzees, bonobos, and us, so we should expect them to be able to solve the same kinds of puzzles. But for years, gibbons have failed classic tests of intelligence: picking up cups to look for treats underneath, or using sticks and poles to reach food placed outside their cages.
In the eyes of science, they appeared dumb. It was only when scientists redesigned their experiments—for example, by hanging the sticks from the ceiling of the gibbons’ enclosure—that the gibbons sprang into life and grabbed their treats, becoming scientifically intelligent. Of course, they’d been smart all along, but gibbons are arboreal (they live in the treetops) and expect their tools to be found above their heads. They have an?arboreal?intelligence: a way of thinking in the world that matches their bodies and environment.
The more we think about how other beings live their lives, the more we find out how they do intelligence. This can take many forms: spiders store memories and plans in their webs, prairie dogs call out the species and appearance of different predators, and bees dance the location of new nesting sites before voting on them. Everything is intelligent.
“The more we think about how other beings live their lives, the more we find out how they do intelligence.”
Plants can hear and remember.
A few years ago, researchers recorded the sound of cabbage white caterpillars munching on the leaves of a cress plant. When they played the sound back to other cress plants, they found that the plants responded in exactly the same way that they did to the presence of actual caterpillars: they immediately flooded their leaves with chemical defenses to deter the predators. Crucially, they didn’t do this when they heard the sound of wind, or different insects. They heard and recognized a particular sound, and acted on it—and we don’t know how they do it.
Other experiments have shown that plants can learn from experience: mimosa plants, dropped a short distance, learn to ignore the shock, and react differently to future events. We’ve long thought of plants as insensitive and immobile, but they actively pay attention, process and store information, and behave based on their experiences. They’re doing all of the things that in animals we call “intelligent.”
We can never know what it is like to be a plant, but we can understand that we share the world with them: hearing the same sounds, feeling the same sun, and breathing the same air. We share a world, so we can think about building better worlds together.
Many creatures are smarter than us.
Slime molds are strange, unicellular creatures (a little like amoebae, a little like fungi) that grow on old logs and forest floors. But they have one particular ability: they are very good at route planning. A few years ago, researchers used slime mold to recreate the Greater Tokyo transit system. They made a map with oat flakes (a slime mold delicacy) representing city centers, and light and shadow marking rivers and mountains. Within 24 hours, the slime mold,?polycephalum physarum, had found the most efficient route between cities and around obstacles—a task that took decades for the best human engineers.
They can also solve harder conundrums, such as finding the shortest route between a number of cities while visiting each one only once. This is the kind of problem that people and computers find difficult because there are a huge number of possible solutions, and the problem gets harder every time you add a city. But slime molds solve the problem faster and more efficiently than either people or the most advanced supercomputers.
This problem is just not that hard for slime molds. It’s simply what they do, because they do intelligence differently from us. Imagine what other things we could learn from animals, plants, and whole ecosystems if we could imagine the intelligence they possess differently, and learn to ask them better questions.
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Justin Gregg is an animal cognition researcher. He is an Adjunct Professor at St. Francis Xavier University and a Senior Research Associate with the Dolphin Communication Project. His writing can be found in?The Wall Street Journal,?Scientific American,?BBC Focus, and?Slate, among others.
Knowing you are going to die isn’t that much fun.
Humans are likely the only species on the planet that truly understands our own mortality. Other animals do understand?something?about death—like a cat or a dog can learn the difference between a living creature and a formerly living creature that will never function again. But the human mind is unique in that we understand that there is a future in which our body and mind no longer exist. We have the ability to imagine this scenario, and we understand that this scenario is inevitable. We know that we will surely die someday.
On one hand, awareness of mortality is useful information. It helps us plan our behavior to both avoid dying and provide for those that are still around after we die—like life insurance, for example. But knowing that we are mortal generates a lot of misery. The only way we can function without dwelling on our own mortality is through the ability to ignore this fact most of the time, to live in a kind of denial. Humans’ constant battle against these thoughts is a major contributor to anxiety, depression, and suicide.
“Nietzsche is the poster child for how thinking too hard about existential questions leads to a life of misery.”
This death wisdom is unique to our species, and it isn’t really all that much fun. There’s a good argument to be made that humans are?not?better off with death wisdom—it’s an argument that made Nietzsche jealous of nonhuman animals. Nietzsche is the poster child for how thinking too hard about existential questions leads to a life of misery. A kind of misery that nonhuman animals don’t have to deal with.
Human morality is often less moral than animal normativity.
Animals live by a set of unspoken guidelines for how to behave—also known as?norms. Humans have them too. There’s a human norm, for example, that you can’t go up to a stranger in public and run your fingers through their hair. That would be weird. Yet, it’s a rule that parents don’t explicitly teach their children. It just automatically crops up in most cultures. This is similar to how norms work for animals. Chickens, for example, develop a pecking order that dictates who gets to eat first.
However, humans have the intellectual capacity to think deeply about norms and codify them in such a way that they become explicit. They are rules that we consider and evaluate. That’s how we end up with laws or religious and philosophical doctrines explaining what is allowed from an ethical perspective. We call these things?morals, and they are unique to humans.
The problem with morals is that we can use complicated reasoning to arrive at a moral position that is reprehensible. A government or a church can justify genocide on moral grounds. It has happened countless times in history. Animals don’t have the ability to transform their norms into explicit moral codes, which is exactly why animals do not commit atrocities like the Holocaust. This is why animal normativity is often better and less destructive than human morality.
You don’t need to know why things happen to make good decisions.
Humans are unique in our ability to ferret out cause and effect. We are curious as to?why?things happen—for example, why we hear thunder after seeing a lightning strike. That curiosity led humans to understand that lightning rapidly heats the air and that thunder is caused by the sudden compression of hot air.
“A dog doesn’t need causal inference to make a smart decision about hiding.”
Animals are far less interested in (and usually incapable of) these kinds of causal inferences—but that’s perfectly fine. Most of the time, all an animal needs to know is that one thing often follows or precedes another. Learned associations give animals knowledge of correlation, just not causation. A dog can learn through association that thunder follows lightning, so if it sees lightning it should take shelter under the couch. A dog doesn’t need causal inference to make a smart decision about hiding.
Animals have been around for billions of years using only learned associations to make decisions on how to behave. Don’t get me wrong—causal inference is great stuff. It’s how science was able to make discoveries, like vaccines or nuclear fission. But some of those things are quite dangerous. Nuclear fission produced the atom bomb, which is actually a potential issue for the survival of our species. Maybe causal inference is more of a curse than a blessing.
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Tom Mustill is a biologist turned filmmaker and writer, specializing in stories where people and nature meet. His film collaborations, many with Greta Thunberg and David Attenborough, have received numerous international awards, including two Webbys, a BAFTA, and an Emmy nomination.
What used to be anecdote is now data point.
In 2015, I was kayaking in Monterey Bay, California, when a 30-ton adult humpback whale breached out of the sea and down on to me and my friend Charlotte.
We had been on a whale-watching tour and were paddling back to shore when the whale erupted out of the ocean. It was shocking and incredible and beautiful, as if a living building grew out of the water. It crashed into the kayak and dragged us down. Somehow we escaped unharmed. For an animal the size of a truck to hurl itself out of the water, scientists have estimated it would release the energy equivalent of forty hand grenades. Other kayakers came to our aid and we paddled back to shore. Thrilled to be alive and processing the extraordinary experience we’d had, I didn’t realize we’d kayaked into a seismic change happening in biology.
As we’d paddled out that morning, Charlotte had asked me if I’d bring my two GoPros with me. No, I said, because everyone’s whale-watching videos looked the same. How wrong I was. And I was gutted because I didn’t think anyone would ever believe us. But others were filming on the water and our near death was captured on film and in close-up photographs by not one but three other people. The videos went viral and our lives were turned upside down.
Scientists who analyzed the recording told us that we had survived because the whale had seen us mid-flight and turned away. A citizen science platform called Happywhale used artificial intelligence to match the whale’s tail in new global databases, launched two weeks prior to our incident, and told us who the whale was, how old it was, who its mother was, and where it was born, and we have been able to follow its life ever since.
“Thrilled to be alive and processing the extraordinary experience we’d had, I didn’t realize we’d kayaked into a seismic change happening in biology.”
Another scientist played me the sounds of the humpbacks of Monterey Bay singing, recorded by a hydrophone recently placed on the seabed beneath where we’d almost died. He’d trained AIs to sort through years of recordings and identify different whale species by their calls. All of this was suddenly happening now. If the whale had leaped onto us a few years earlier, before cellphones with video cameras were everywhere, before fast internet was common, and before AIs had been trained to find patterns in whale lives, then my story would have ended as soon as it had begun—an exhilarating near-miss experience, unwitnessed and likely unbelieved. But instead, tens of millions of people watched a video of a whale that changed what they thought whales could do, and layers of meaning and connection could be followed from it to a much bigger story.
Machines are making biologists super-human, allowing us to record the lives of other species as never before.
After my chance encounter, I became obsessed. I spent the next four years attending conferences and interviewing scientists, traveling to see them deploying new tools. I watched as researchers placed exquisite tiny recording devices onto the backs of whales that gave us their points of view as they hunted, played, and suckled their young. I watched fleets of drones track the complex social interactions of hunting humpbacks, measuring them from above. I visited forests where small boxes sat at regular intervals, constantly listening for the sounds of the rare birds that lived there. I met autonomous sea vehicles, robots that navigated and powered themselves across entire oceans, listening all the while for life in the waves.
When Darwin set out on the HMS Beagle, he was limited by his own body. He could only perceive what his senses could perceive; he could only go where his body could go; he could only record in words what he had witnessed. Now you can buy an AI bird feeder that identifies the individual birds that visit your garden and uploads its sightings to the cloud. Your phone can tell you which of 10,000 plant species you are looking at just by pointing at them. The animal internet is arriving.
The upshot of this new machine help is that biology is transforming from being mostly the study of bodies to the study of the previously un-capturable: behaviors, movements, interactions, and communications. Machines have transformed the ability of biologists to perceive and record the living world. What they have seen has transformed our understanding of the lives of other animals, and this in turn has undermined our assumptions about what makes us humans special.
A Google Translate for animals.
A great hurdle for animal communication studies has always been the innate problem of the human observer. We cannot be watching all the time; we cannot record and remember everything; we cannot perceive patterns in their communications apart from very basic ones that relate to our own. Where we have failed to find evidence of complex communication, or figure out what it means, we have assumed it isn’t there and blamed the animals for failing our tests. And so we have decided that other animals don’t have something like language. But this seems hasty, and in the light of our track record on other things we used to think only humans did, foolish. Machines are changing all of this.
Google translate can switch between English and Urdu and Swahili without a bilingual dictionary. It works because AIs have discovered hidden deep patterns and relationships within human language that we could not perceive before and use these to translate without a Rosetta stone. Could these pattern-finding tools find patterns in the communications of other species? A Google translate for animals?
Several teams are already trying. Right now, off the waters of the island of Dominica, the seas are being rigged with the most sophisticated animal listening system ever devised to capture the entire vocal lives of the resident sperm whales. It is called project CETI. Hydrophones will float at 100 meter intervals. Soft robotic fish will swim among the whales recording their lives. The sperm whales themselves will carry recorders.
The team aims to gather the largest animal behavior dataset of all time. This is Big Animal Data. They are designing this dataset specifically to feed into their pattern-hunting AIs and attempt to crack the codes. By listening to the lives of the whales, including young whales learning to speak, they plan to piece together the rules of sperm whale speak. Then they hope to have a two-way conversation—they want to make contact. They are aiming to do this in a matter of years. And whales are just the start.
The power of empathy.
When I was born in 1983, we were slaughtering whales in the hundreds of thousands. If we had continued, the seas would likely no longer ring across the world with the whales’ beautiful calls. It was in the midst of the carnage of commercial whaling over half a century ago that Dr. Roger Payne was given a recording of these sounds from the waters of the Bahamas. He called them “rivers of sound.” By careful analysis, he realized that not only were they made by whales, but that, in his words, “By God they were repeating themselves.” They were made up of repeated patterns similar to notes, phrases and themes, refrains and choruses even rhythms and rhymes.
“As a conservationist, I know from experience that people are mainly motivated to protect those they can empathize with.”
When he proved that whales were singing, it made the front cover of?Science. When he released an album of the recordings it sent shockwaves through human culture. People reacted powerfully to these songs from the ocean, and they became a phenomenon—played on television, in concerts, and launched into space on the Voyager space probes. That whales were like us in how they used their voices triggered an explosion of empathy that propelled the campaign to cease their slaughter.
Largely thanks to this, whales today are largely safe from whaling, but face warming acidifying overfished, and polluted seas. They are run over by our boats, deafened by our sonar, and fatally tangled in our nets. Roger is one of the lead scientists of project CETI, one of the teams trying to translate whale communications. What all the teams have in common is the hope that by decoding whale-speak, and the communications of other species, we might trigger another great change of heart.
Our relationship with nature is in a bad state today. As a conservationist, I know from experience that people are mainly motivated to protect those they can empathize with. I am compelled by Roger’s logic. If we could understand what whales and other animals were communicating—if we could see vividly what they cared about, their joys and pains—wouldn’t it change us?
The ramifications are wider than conservation. We have long clung to our specialness; would we feel challenged by what we learned? How should we safeguard the power that this new knowledge would give us and not use it to manipulate and exploit? If you discovered what your cat really thought about you, would your relationship survive?
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Episode Notes
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