Speaker 1: Why are some animals so much smarter than others? And
Speaker 1: in particular, what is it that makes humans so incredibly smart? Now?
Speaker 1: I love animals as much as anyone else, and yes,
Speaker 1: other animals do do things like use tools and communicate
Speaker 1: with each other, But humans are the only species we
Speaker 1: know of that uncomplicated research programs to try to understand
Speaker 1: at a deep level why some animal species are more
Speaker 1: intelligent than others and how would these differences come about.
Speaker 1: We humans ask questions like why is it that crows
Speaker 1: have learned how to fashion sticks into tools that they
Speaker 1: can use to grab tasty bugs out of the nooks
Speaker 1: and crannies of trees, But I can't get my dumb
Speaker 1: chickens to stop eating the paints on the side of
Speaker 1: the chicken coop? And what kind of conditions would you
Speaker 1: need to have on another planet in order to produce
Speaker 1: highly intelligent aliens? These kinds of questions keep me up
Speaker 1: and also seem to be keeping many of you up
Speaker 1: at night as well. Today, we're going to tackle three
Speaker 1: wonderful listener questions that we've received related to intelligence. Welcome
Speaker 1: to Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe.
Speaker 2: I'm Daniel, I'm a particle physicist, and I hope that
Speaker 2: humans are not the smartest folks in the galaxy.
Speaker 1: Hello, I'm Kelly Wiener Smith. I study parasites and space,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I guess I hope we're not the smartest.
Speaker 1: As long as they're nice and smart, that would be great.
Speaker 2: I don't even really need to put that caveat on it,
Speaker 2: Like if they're mean and smart, like, I'll take a
Speaker 2: little bit of meanness for some secrets of the universe.
Speaker 1: What if they think we're delicious and they're smart, I
Speaker 1: think that's a bad combo.
Speaker 2: I think I don't think I'm certainly very tasty, so
Speaker 2: I'm not worried that I'd be going to be like
Speaker 2: high on the list of humans to be consumed.
Speaker 1: What would make you less tasty than other humans?
Speaker 2: This is getting personal now?
Speaker 1: Is us this sprinkled with stinky sauce or something.
Speaker 2: I actually kind of am marbled through with the ribbons
Speaker 2: of fats, So maybe I would be quite tasty. I
Speaker 2: don't know. I try to stay fit.
Speaker 1: You know, Marbling is a delicacy.
Speaker 2: I think we just set a record for how quickly
Speaker 2: we started talking about aliens and consumption of human flesh.
Speaker 1: Glad to see if by the end of the episode
Speaker 1: we hit poop and then we'll have the trifecta. But
Speaker 1: we'll probably get there, all right.
Speaker 2: So my question for you today, Kelly, is do you
Speaker 2: think that we will ever crack the barrier to communicating
Speaker 2: with our fellow intelligent earthlings, Like somehow as AI or
Speaker 2: future linguistics can help us understand the chirpings of prairie
Speaker 2: dogs and the whistling of whales.
Speaker 1: Wow, all right, So I've recently read this really great
Speaker 1: book called Do Aliens Speak Physics?
Speaker 3: Ed?
Speaker 2: That is a great book.
Speaker 1: It's a fantastic book, and it kind of convinced me
Speaker 1: that unless you can have two way communication, it's really
Speaker 1: hard to get on the same page regarding language. You can,
Speaker 1: like work with dolphins to try to figure stuff out.
Speaker 1: Maybe we could get some very preliminary like you know,
Speaker 1: I say hello to you, you say hello to me.
Speaker 1: We're on the same page there, But like I guess
Speaker 1: I'm not super optimistic. What kind of communication do you need? Like, so,
Speaker 1: my dog is really cute but about as smart as
Speaker 1: a ton of bricks, and so I can't communicate too
Speaker 1: many complicated ideas to her. But you know, there are
Speaker 1: some border colligues that are brilliant. So how much communication
Speaker 1: do you feel like you need?
Speaker 2: I just kind of want to know what's going on
Speaker 2: in there. Like the whales are definitely talking to each other.
Speaker 2: What are they saying? The honeybees are wiggling to each other.
Speaker 2: This definitely in for me. I just want to translate
Speaker 2: that information somehow, to know what they think is interesting
Speaker 2: to talk about. And like you, I know that my
Speaker 2: dog understands a lot of stuff, Like he picks up
Speaker 2: on pretty subtle patterns, so he knows when he's getting
Speaker 2: a walk. You know, shoes on plus the leash means
Speaker 2: a walk, shoes on plus the backpack I means Daniel's
Speaker 2: going to work this kind of stuff. And he notices
Speaker 2: patterns through the day, like he's definitely paying attention to
Speaker 2: patterns and understanding stuff. But I wish we could talk.
Speaker 2: I wish we could commun in the game more. I
Speaker 2: wish I could tell him like, Hey, we're getting in
Speaker 2: the car and we're going to this thing, or we're
Speaker 2: not going to the vet. You know this information I
Speaker 2: wish we could share with him, Like my dog when
Speaker 2: we leave, he has no idea are we going on
Speaker 2: a three week trip? Are we going to be back
Speaker 2: in an hour? He's cool, and if I could talk
Speaker 2: to him, I could share that with him.
Speaker 1: So, first of all, I think it's very nice that
Speaker 1: you're worried about how your dog's going to feel about
Speaker 1: how long you're gone. I think that's very sweet. So
Speaker 1: bees do this waggle dance, and you can tell by
Speaker 1: the way that they're dancing, sort of like the direction
Speaker 1: and the distance that they're telling their nest mats. We're
Speaker 1: the great source of pollen or nectar is and so
Speaker 1: we can decipher that. But you know, I don't think
Speaker 1: that I could like dress up in a bee suit
Speaker 1: and shake my butt the right way and tell them like, hey,
Speaker 1: I just planted some flowers in the southern corner of
Speaker 1: the property. I mean, I think we can decode a
Speaker 1: lot of what animals say, but we have not yet
Speaker 1: figured out how to communicate back with them.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, part of that depends on what's going on
Speaker 2: inside those animals' minds and what intelligence really means and
Speaker 2: where it comes from. So let's dig into the episode today.
Speaker 2: I'm dying here what you had to tell us.
Speaker 1: I'm super excited about today's episode. But now I've got
Speaker 1: myself wondering, like, could you make a little electronic bee
Speaker 1: that was like a bee size and like do the
Speaker 1: waggle dance and maybe get the bees to go to
Speaker 1: like your source of nectar. Anyway, surely there's got to
Speaker 1: be funding for that. That sounds awesome. I find questions
Speaker 1: about animal intelligence to be absolutely fascinating, and this is
Speaker 1: actually a topic that we get a lot of questions
Speaker 1: from y'all about, And if you want to send us
Speaker 1: your questions, you can send us questions at questions at
Speaker 1: danieland Kelly dot org. So today we're going to tackle
Speaker 1: three of the questions that we've gotten from listeners about
Speaker 1: animal intelligence and they sort of build on one another,
Speaker 1: and so we're gonna, you know, do a bit of
Speaker 1: an overview on animal intelligence today.
Speaker 2: This is super cool. Second new kind of episode is
Speaker 2: like a listener questions themes episode, almost like these listeners
Speaker 2: are working together to send us questions that click together
Speaker 2: so nicely.
Speaker 1: That's right, Yeah, and these three click together very nicely.
Speaker 1: You know, we could have done something similar with our
Speaker 1: consciousness episode, but I think we got twenty questions about
Speaker 1: consciousness before we were like, all right, we get it,
Speaker 1: We're going to get an expert. Hopefully we answered everyone's
Speaker 1: questions with that one. But today we are going to
Speaker 1: start with a question from Tom. So let's go ahead
Speaker 1: and hear Tom's question.
Speaker 4: I'm reasonably confident that humans are the only Earth species
Speaker 4: that has ever built rockets and such. So why is
Speaker 4: this level of intelligence so rare? Life on Earth is
Speaker 4: incredibly diverse and the Earth has been teeming with it
Speaker 4: for billions of years? How does the species even develop
Speaker 4: rocket level intelligence? Is intelligence a biologically selectable property that
Speaker 4: improves the chances for a population to survive? Or is
Speaker 4: rocket level intelligence just dumb luck? After all, the fact
Speaker 4: that rocket level intelligence emerged on Earth has proved to
Speaker 4: be quite unlucky for many coexisting species and may yet
Speaker 4: still be unlucky for humans. Thanks.
Speaker 1: Wow. Okay, so that is a great question, but it's
Speaker 1: a very specific question. So why is a rocket level
Speaker 1: intelligence so rare? So we have an end of one.
Speaker 1: We know of one species that is able to build rockets,
Speaker 1: and with such a small sample size it can be
Speaker 1: really hard to know for sure. A bit of a
Speaker 1: spoiler here, we don't know. In general, science does not
Speaker 1: know exactly what it was that put humans on the
Speaker 1: trajectory that we went on to be able to build
Speaker 1: rockets and all the other amazing things that we can do.
Speaker 1: We will talk about some of the hypotheses today that
Speaker 1: we think were important, but first let's back up and
Speaker 1: ask the question why can't all species build rockets? Why
Speaker 1: is this kind of intelligence so rare?
Speaker 2: I mean, ants and termites can build impressive stuff, right,
Speaker 2: they definitely work together, and we see other species doing
Speaker 2: cool stuff. So why aren't they building rockets and getting
Speaker 2: off planet? What does that really require?
Speaker 1: So again, the rocket thing is very specific, and part
Speaker 1: of it is, you know, ants just might not have
Speaker 1: the right appendages to build a rocket. You know, maybe
Speaker 1: they've got rocket plans and if they just had hands,
Speaker 1: they'd be building rockets, but probably not.
Speaker 2: That's the kind of thing we could learn if we
Speaker 2: learned to speak ant and be you know, maybe they're
Speaker 2: desperate to fly into space and frustrated about their limitations.
Speaker 1: We should be bringing them with us just you know,
Speaker 1: they might.
Speaker 2: Appreciate that, or we should just have them on the
Speaker 2: podcast and ask them directly.
Speaker 1: Maybe in five or ten years. So if you ask yourself,
Speaker 1: why can't all species build rockets. You're essentially asking, well,
Speaker 1: why aren't all animals intelligent? What holds you back? And
Speaker 1: we think the answer has to do with how much
Speaker 1: energy it takes to be super smart. So our adult
Speaker 1: brains weigh about three pounds, so for a person who
Speaker 1: weighs one hundred and eighty pounds, that's about two percent
Speaker 1: of your body weight. But by measuring oxygen consumption rates
Speaker 1: in different parts of our body, we estimate that our
Speaker 1: brain uses about twenty percent of all of the energy
Speaker 1: that we burn every single day. So this very small
Speaker 1: organ is using an outsized amount of energy. So brains
Speaker 1: are just energetically expensive. So if you are a species
Speaker 1: that doesn't need a super big, smart brain, then there's
Speaker 1: probably not great selection pressure for you to be expending
Speaker 1: a bunch of energy on an energetically expensive organ that
Speaker 1: you are not using.
Speaker 2: So you're saying that this thing is expensive, right, that
Speaker 2: it costs us something, and then so if it doesn't
Speaker 2: pay for itself, it's definitely not going to survive because
Speaker 2: I've hung around and used up a bunch of energy
Speaker 2: and didn't provide tangible benefits. Then folks with big brains
Speaker 2: would die more often during famines and cold winters and
Speaker 2: stuff like that. That's the idea.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so this is more of a species level argument.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so species with big brains that didn't need
Speaker 1: them would have to spend more time foraging or get better,
Speaker 1: higher quality food because of their big brains. And if
Speaker 1: that's not happening, it's not worth having.
Speaker 2: I guess you could also imagine a population, right of
Speaker 2: a single species with smaller brains and bigger brains, And
Speaker 2: if the bigger brains aren't providing a benefit and they
Speaker 2: are providing a cost, then those big brain folks among
Speaker 2: us are not going to survive. There is a population
Speaker 2: level argument there also, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a population level argument. There's often more variables
Speaker 1: at play when you start thinking about a specific species. So,
Speaker 1: for example, when human brains, if they were to get
Speaker 1: too big, you would start to have trouble getting those
Speaker 1: giant heads through the birth canal. And so there's limits
Speaker 1: on how big brains can be. And in general, there's
Speaker 1: not a ton of variability between the sizes of brains
Speaker 1: of adults. And now we can get into this whole
Speaker 1: different debate about is it really about how big the
Speaker 1: brain is? So like blue whales have much bigger brains
Speaker 1: than we do, but they haven't created rockets to get
Speaker 1: them out of space. Maybe that's because it's just too
Speaker 1: expensive to send a giant blue whale to space. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so trying to figure out exactly what feature of the
Speaker 1: brain we should measure is difficult. But we know that
Speaker 1: brains are expensive energetically, right, And.
Speaker 2: I was actually reading a study about the size of
Speaker 2: the human brain that suggested that if you packed in
Speaker 2: the neurons more densely, you would add more noise. So
Speaker 2: making the neurons smaller and denser wouldn't actually improve your
Speaker 2: cognition because you'd be ending up adding noise. And so like,
Speaker 2: human brains are sort of at this sweet spot for
Speaker 2: how much you can squeeze them down to get cognition.
Speaker 1: I think maybe one of these days we should have
Speaker 1: a whole separate episode on exactly how you should measure
Speaker 1: brains to correlate it with intelligence, because I read a
Speaker 1: paper that was arguing that actually, the reason we're so
Speaker 1: great is because we have denser neurons, and that it's
Speaker 1: not brain size, it's neuron density that really unlocks intelligence.
Speaker 1: I think in general, the field has not figured out
Speaker 1: exactly what we need to be measuring.
Speaker 2: That's such a nice way of saying that these folks
Speaker 2: don't know what they're doing. Well, you gotta start is immature, Yes, well.
Speaker 1: Yes, brains are complicated man, Yes they are.
Speaker 2: No, you're totally right in great respect to folks who
Speaker 2: are studying the brain, because obviously it's important. And just
Speaker 2: because we don't understand everything doesn't mean that early studies
Speaker 2: are not valuable. They're the ones that lay the foundation
Speaker 2: for future progress. Yes, absolutely, and so we shouldn't mock them.
Speaker 2: We're grateful for their pioneering work.
Speaker 1: Yes, I studied a brain infecting parasite of fish and
Speaker 1: I started getting into neuroanatomy and neurochemistry and I was like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm sticking with parasitology. Brains are complicated, so anyway, but
Speaker 1: here we're jumping in anyway.
Speaker 2: I think also Tom's question has this fascinating flavor to it,
Speaker 2: which is like, you can make the evolutionary argument, and
Speaker 2: I think you're going to get into this later for
Speaker 2: why intelligence might be beneficial, right, it might even overcome
Speaker 2: the expense of the brain. But it's hard to understand
Speaker 2: why evolution would give us a brain that's capable of
Speaker 2: doing things that you didn't need to survive on the savannah, Right,
Speaker 2: You didn't need to be able to think about eleven
Speaker 2: dimensional mathematics and build rockets and all sorts of other
Speaker 2: easy stuff in order to survive evolutionarily. So why is
Speaker 2: it that evolution provided this tool which has this crazy
Speaker 2: capability clearly outstripping our needs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you could ask a similar question like why
Speaker 1: do peacocks have such big, showy tales? And I think
Speaker 1: that you know, natural selection doesn't just select for things
Speaker 1: that help us run faster to catch our food or
Speaker 1: help us garden more efficiently. It also selects for traits
Speaker 1: that make us more attractive mates in one way or another.
Speaker 1: So sometimes it makes you know, you bigger and more
Speaker 1: muscly if that's what the females want. But you know,
Speaker 1: there's also variability in what females of a species want,
Speaker 1: And some of us want super smart partners, our partners
Speaker 1: with musical abilities. And I think humans are kind of
Speaker 1: weird in this respect, that we really are interested in
Speaker 1: intellectual characteristics in addition to just physical characteristics. And I
Speaker 1: don't know exactly how that played into our evolution and
Speaker 1: made us unique. But you know, if you can do
Speaker 1: nine dimensional math, there's got to be a group of
Speaker 1: people who are into that.
Speaker 2: Since both of us are married to nerds, I think
Speaker 2: we may be an unrepresentative subset of humanity. But I
Speaker 2: totally agree with you. Big brains are hot.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's super hot, way more hot than muscles and
Speaker 1: being in good shape, I think. But could be biased. Okay,
Speaker 1: So the question was essentially about how do we get
Speaker 1: humans in particular, and the answer is, we don't know
Speaker 1: about how you get humans in particular, but we can
Speaker 1: get some hints by looking at other kinds of animals
Speaker 1: and trying to figure out what things selected for intelligence
Speaker 1: in other animals, and that might give us some insights
Speaker 1: into like maybe you know, we maxed out a particular
Speaker 1: you know, trait, or there was a particularly strong selective
Speaker 1: pressure for us. So we're going to start this conversation
Speaker 1: by talking about how we define intelligence outside of the
Speaker 1: ability to build rockets, and then some difficulties with measuring it,
Speaker 1: and towards the end of the episode, when we're answering
Speaker 1: other questions from other listeners, we'll talk about some of
Speaker 1: the leading hypotheses. So we're going to get to.
Speaker 2: Them, all right. I love when we start a hard
Speaker 2: conversation with let's define what we're talking about, because it
Speaker 2: makes me feel all philosophical and nerdy. But also it's
Speaker 2: really important. If somebody doesn't do that, then I feel
Speaker 2: like they're going to be sloppy with their arguments because
Speaker 2: they're not being precise with their words.
Speaker 1: Well, and I should say that while I was researching
Speaker 1: this topic, I came across a lot of different definitions,
Speaker 1: and I decided to try to go with something a
Speaker 1: little bit more general that feels pretty good to all
Speaker 1: of us. So here's what I came up with. It's
Speaker 1: just the ability to solve lots of different kinds of problems,
Speaker 1: because that's what they all seemed to narrow down to.
Speaker 1: But what do you think how would you define intelligence?
Speaker 2: I definitely think the ability to solve problems is a
Speaker 2: component of it. It feels to me like also there
Speaker 2: should be a learning aspect, right, discovering patterns generalizing from them,
Speaker 2: you know, in machine learning, that's a big factor. We
Speaker 2: want to develop networks that are not just capable of
Speaker 2: solving the problems we've taught them, but solving a general
Speaker 2: class of problems, including examples they haven't seen before, bringing
Speaker 2: together ideas, coming up with bigger picture solutions. So something
Speaker 2: about generalizing from the examples that you've learned feels to
Speaker 2: me like an important part of intelligence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that having the ability to solve
Speaker 1: lots of different kinds of problems does, to some extent
Speaker 1: imply the ability to learn, Okay, yeah, or at least
Speaker 1: to experiment with your environment to try new things, which
Speaker 1: I think is like learning. So I think we're pretty
Speaker 1: much on the same page. What do you think.
Speaker 2: I think that's a good working definition. Okay, So then
Speaker 2: how do we measure this? Are we like giving tests
Speaker 2: to cats and dogs to see can you do eleven
Speaker 2: dimensional string theory?
Speaker 1: We're not asking them about eleven dimensional string theory. We
Speaker 1: will talk about some experiments that we do, but first
Speaker 1: I wanted to tell a couple of stories about how
Speaker 1: we've thought we were measuring something but it turns out
Speaker 1: we're measuring something different. Just to highlight how difficult it is.
Speaker 2: Here comes wet Blanket Kelly.
Speaker 1: Come on, of course, we were going to get to
Speaker 1: wet Blanka Kelly. Okay, So clever Hans is horse in
Speaker 1: Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, and this
Speaker 1: horse became super famous because you could ask him questions
Speaker 1: about addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, including questions that involved fractions wow,
Speaker 1: and he would stomp out answers, so he would like
Speaker 1: stomp and then when he was done answering the question,
Speaker 1: so for the right numbers, like if the answer was five,
Speaker 1: he'd stop five times and then he'd sort of do
Speaker 1: like a little circle thing with his hoof to be
Speaker 1: like okay, I'm done.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: And then you could also ask Clever Hans questions like
Speaker 1: what is that woman holding in her hand? And using
Speaker 1: an alphabet that was on a board, each letter was
Speaker 1: separated into columns and rows, he could clamp out what
Speaker 1: letters he wanted to say, you know, umbrella or hot
Speaker 1: dog or something like that.
Speaker 2: That implies some ability to read, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah right. Some experts came in and they were like,
Speaker 1: oh my gosh, we totally agree because we can do
Speaker 1: the trick with Clever Hans too. We can ask clever
Speaker 1: Hans the same question, it's not just his owner, and
Speaker 1: he can answer it. So they decided that Clever Hans
Speaker 1: had the intelligence that was equivalent to about a thirteen
Speaker 1: year old child. But then another set of experimenters came
Speaker 1: in and they started walling clever Hans off from the
Speaker 1: room where the questioner was asking.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: It turns out that clever Hans could only answer questions
Speaker 1: correctly if the experimenter knew the answer ahead of time,
Speaker 1: and if Hans could see the experimenter.
Speaker 2: Oh, man, this is just like those experiments with the
Speaker 2: wiki boards, right, uh right.
Speaker 1: Like something else is sort of happening behind the scenes
Speaker 1: that's unintended. So it turned out clever Hans isn't smart
Speaker 1: in terms of the ability to do like division, but
Speaker 1: clever Hans was very smart at reading human body language.
Speaker 1: So even if you put a new person in that
Speaker 1: clever Hans had never encountered before, Clever Hans could tell
Speaker 1: that they were like holding their breath until he got
Speaker 1: to like the right number of stomps, and that then
Speaker 1: something about their body would change and then he'd know, okay,
Speaker 1: that was it. And so clever Hans was actually just
Speaker 1: queuing it on body language.
Speaker 2: Wow, So clever Hans could really read human emotion and
Speaker 2: like understand what humans wanted him to do and then
Speaker 2: would do it.
Speaker 1: Yes, right. But this points out one of the first
Speaker 1: difficult things about studying animals is that sometimes it can
Speaker 1: be really hard to figure out what you're measuring or
Speaker 1: what it is that they're actually learning, and it's not
Speaker 1: always what you think that they're learning. So you have
Speaker 1: to be very careful about how you design experiments, and
Speaker 1: you need to keep in mind that animals sense the
Speaker 1: world in different ways. So you know, some animals echo locate,
Speaker 1: some can see polarized light, some explore their universe using electricity,
Speaker 1: and so you need to make sure that you're asking
Speaker 1: questions that make sense with their sensory systems.
Speaker 2: And not just for animals, right, like humans. Also, it's
Speaker 2: very hard to measure intelligence among humans. A lot of
Speaker 2: these tests have cultural biases in them.
Speaker 1: For example, yep, yeah, absolutely, this is just really hard stuff.
Speaker 1: And then how do you compare you know, intelligence and
Speaker 1: a pigeon where maybe the amazing thing is their ability
Speaker 1: to like orient and travel great distances in their great
Speaker 1: spatial memory. And then compare that to you know, like
Speaker 1: a really smart crow that can whittle ass stick so
Speaker 1: that it can get at bugs in a tree, or like,
Speaker 1: how do you compare intelligence between those two different organisms.
Speaker 2: Right, it seems like it's obviously not a single number.
Speaker 2: It's a multi dimensional right, And anytime you try to
Speaker 2: boil something complex down to a single number, and you're
Speaker 2: going to lose a lot of nuance.
Speaker 1: Yes you are. And I want to tell one more
Speaker 1: quick story about when we thought that we had taught
Speaker 1: animals something and we had taught them something else. So
Speaker 1: there's this thing called perceptual categories, where essentially you're trying
Speaker 1: to figure out if animals can categorize things in ways
Speaker 1: similar to how humans can. So people showed pigeons a
Speaker 1: bunch of different pictures of things, and they trained the
Speaker 1: pigeons to peck a key and get a reward whenever
Speaker 1: a person was in the image, and so they actually
Speaker 1: got pretty good at this. Over time. They would pay
Speaker 1: the images, even if it was an image they had
Speaker 1: never seen before, if there was a person in it.
Speaker 1: And eventually they were able to get these pigeons to
Speaker 1: pick out pictures with bodies of water, pictures with trees,
Speaker 1: pictures with fish. So it turns out they were actually
Speaker 1: really good at coming up with these categories if you
Speaker 1: trained them. And then we did it with capuchin monkeys
Speaker 1: and we trained them on a bunch of different photos
Speaker 1: of people, and they were doing pretty well. But the
Speaker 1: experimenters did something really clever. They looked at the mistakes
Speaker 1: the monkeys were making and tried to see if there
Speaker 1: was anything informative in those mistakes. And one mistake the
Speaker 1: monkeys made was they did not count as a picture
Speaker 1: of a human anything that was torso and higher. So
Speaker 1: like you know, you think of your school pictures from
Speaker 1: when you were a kid, and it's like your torso
Speaker 1: and higher. The monkeys did not think that was a person.
Speaker 2: They're counting legs only or what.
Speaker 1: They didn't know exactly what they were counting, but they
Speaker 1: hadn't generalized a person. There was like a very particular
Speaker 1: all has to be there, So they hadn't learned exactly
Speaker 1: the category we had in mind. And they counted as
Speaker 1: a person an image of a jackal that was carrying
Speaker 1: a dead flamingo. And the reason they ended up thinking
Speaker 1: that the monkeys were categorizing that as a person is
Speaker 1: because that image had read in it, and the only
Speaker 1: other images in the training set that had read were
Speaker 1: three of the pictures of people, and so maybe they
Speaker 1: hadn't actually learned what humans were, but they had learned
Speaker 1: something about the image set, and we have problems with
Speaker 1: this with AI training sets.
Speaker 2: Also, Yeah, there's a famous example of trying to teach
Speaker 2: an AI to tell the difference between wolves and dogs,
Speaker 2: and it was doing really, really well, and then they
Speaker 2: discovered that the pictures of wolves have snow in the background,
Speaker 2: pictures of dogs don't. As it was like learning to
Speaker 2: tell the difference between grass and snow, which is not
Speaker 2: that hard.
Speaker 1: Right, right, And this was an experiment that was designed
Speaker 1: by humans who apparently had tried to think this stuff through.
Speaker 1: It's just really hard. So now that we have a
Speaker 1: sense of how difficult it is to ask these kinds
Speaker 1: of questions, let's take a break and when we come back,
Speaker 1: we'll move on to the next question, which will bring
Speaker 1: us to some of the hypotheses for what selects for intelligence.
Speaker 2: Okay, we're back, and we are tackling some very difficult
Speaker 2: but fascinating questions from listeners today about the nature of
Speaker 2: intelligence and YBS have not yet gone off planet, and
Speaker 2: we started with a really fun question from Tom about
Speaker 2: how you end up with rocket level intelligence, and Kelly
Speaker 2: shed some light on how hard it is to even
Speaker 2: define and measure intelligence and through a wet blanket. I'm
Speaker 2: basically the whole history of that field my day, and
Speaker 2: so slightly unusually, we're not going to give a complete
Speaker 2: and definite answer to Tom's question right now. We're going
Speaker 2: to keep digging into this by answering more questions from
Speaker 2: listeners and then hope at the end to come back
Speaker 2: and give you our best answer to all of your queries.
Speaker 1: All right, So let's go ahead then and jump into
Speaker 1: question two from.
Speaker 3: Mark, Hi, Daniel, and Kelly. My question has to do
Speaker 3: with evolution and predation. Do you think it's possible for
Speaker 3: complex intelligent life to evolve without predation? Or do we
Speaker 3: think that predation is necessary for beings with human level
Speaker 3: intelligence or higher intelligence to exist? If there are aliens
Speaker 3: capable of interstellar travel that have never known predation, I imagine
Speaker 3: they would find Earth to be a nightmare with billions
Speaker 3: of organisms being murdered and consumed by other organisms every day.
Speaker 3: Interested to know your thoughts.
Speaker 1: Thanks, okay, wow, all right? So when I first listened
Speaker 1: to this question, I was confused because I hadn't heard
Speaker 1: this hypothesis that predation is important for producing intelligent life.
Speaker 1: Had you heard this idea before Daniel.
Speaker 2: I hadn't thought about in terms of predation. I thought
Speaker 2: about in terms of like society and culture, that maybe
Speaker 2: an important component of intelligence is having a complex interaction
Speaker 2: between the individuals in the species more than just like
Speaker 2: solitary folks. So I'm not sure how that connects to
Speaker 2: predation or being preyed on, or preying on people, like
Speaker 2: how taking down a mammoth requires like ten to fifteen people.
Speaker 2: Is that the same sort of thing.
Speaker 1: So that's the social intelligence hypothesis, which we're going to
Speaker 1: get to next. But so the idea behind this predation
Speaker 1: hypothesis is that you end up with an arms race
Speaker 1: between predators in prey. So what happens here, So you've
Speaker 1: got a predator that needs to be able to see
Speaker 1: the prey so that it can find it in a
Speaker 1: tree or something. You know, if it's hiding in a tree,
Speaker 1: it kind of blends in, and so that selects for
Speaker 1: them to have better vision or a better memory for
Speaker 1: the kinds of behaviors that their prey typically engages in. So,
Speaker 1: for example, if a certain kind of prey that's extra
Speaker 1: super delicious is only active at dusk and dawn, then
Speaker 1: maybe you focus your predation efforts at dusk and dawn,
Speaker 1: because you've remembered that that's when the prey that's super
Speaker 1: tasty is active. And on the other hand, the prey
Speaker 1: might remember that when I smell cat urine, that means
Speaker 1: that there's a cat in the area, and so anywhere
Speaker 1: I smell cat urine, I'm just not going to hang
Speaker 1: out anymore. And so you end up with this competition
Speaker 1: for sensory systems and the ability to sort of like
Speaker 1: think through risks and benefits that over time results in
Speaker 1: smarter and smarter brains.
Speaker 2: So is the argument just that smarter predators are more
Speaker 2: successful and smarter prey and more successful that it's one
Speaker 2: element of success in this sort of predator versus prey environment.
Speaker 1: Yep, exactly.
Speaker 2: But there's lots of predator prey situations and a lot
Speaker 2: of times one or both of them are kind of
Speaker 2: dumb deer not that smart, for example, though they've been
Speaker 2: highly selected for because people like wolves been gobbling up
Speaker 2: deer for many years. Is this just one possible way
Speaker 2: evolution can go or is the argument that prey and
Speaker 2: predation always leads to intelligence.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, first I'll note that it wouldn't surprise me
Speaker 1: to find out that deer have gotten more stupid over
Speaker 1: time because there's not tons of hunters out there and
Speaker 1: we've killed most of their predators on this continent, so
Speaker 1: they are perhaps a little bit relieved from the pressure
Speaker 1: of this arms race, and maybe that explains their intelligence.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so I think to me, that's one of
Speaker 1: the issues with this hypothesis is that it's not as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, really clearer about which sets
Speaker 1: of predators in prey or which kinds of predators should
Speaker 1: end up, you know, maxing out being super smart and
Speaker 1: which prey should end up being super smart. But it's
Speaker 1: sort of more of a like, well, this is why
Speaker 1: you end up with complex thought at all, and then
Speaker 1: it just sort of depends on how much complex thought
Speaker 1: you need, depending on what kinds of races you find
Speaker 1: yourself in and with what kinds of organisms.
Speaker 2: Because it's not hard to think of other examples, you know,
Speaker 2: like spiders and flies, right, flies are very good evading spiders,
Speaker 2: but they're not using intelligence. They're just like have a
Speaker 2: crazy hair trigger and you can jump out of the
Speaker 2: way in a bil I.
Speaker 1: Mean that's pretty impressive as well, Like you know, those
Speaker 1: crazy hair triggers could be because you know, you've had
Speaker 1: selection for hairs that are particularly sensitive to you know,
Speaker 1: spider webs, or maybe their visual systems are particularly good
Speaker 1: at seeing the way light reflects off of a spider
Speaker 1: web with some dew on it. But yes, I don't
Speaker 1: think of flies as being particularly brilliant, although they outsmart
Speaker 1: me when I try to smack them, so maybe they're
Speaker 1: smarter than I give them credit for.
Speaker 2: They're definitely amazing biological engineering. I don't know if it
Speaker 2: counts as intelligence, but now we're back into that morass
Speaker 2: of what is smart anyway. But I wouldn't put flies
Speaker 2: near the top of the list.
Speaker 1: I haven't read a lot of papers where flies were
Speaker 1: like solving complex problems. Although I do think that they
Speaker 1: keep track of their social structures because they fight with
Speaker 1: each other, and I think who they fight with depends
Speaker 1: on you know, who they fought with in the past.
Speaker 1: So maybe there's a lot going on there that we
Speaker 1: can't see.
Speaker 2: All right, But you must have some fun examples of
Speaker 2: predator and prey who have developed some clever intelligence.
Speaker 1: I am particularly excited about chimps and New Caledonian crows
Speaker 1: who have managed to like pull stems off of trees
Speaker 1: and in some cases even like remove leaves and stuff
Speaker 1: to make particularly good tools for going inside of like trees,
Speaker 1: so that you can get bugs that are inside.
Speaker 2: That's tool use. That's clever. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you'll find stories about crows who will sometimes like
Speaker 1: if they have a metal implement, they'll bend it so
Speaker 1: that they can sort of hook something out. There have
Speaker 1: been stories of crows that are able to like drop
Speaker 1: rocks into containers of water so that the water can
Speaker 1: come up high enough so that they can drink it.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, Like they do some pretty incredible things. Thinking
Speaker 1: about prey, there are octopus that do things like use
Speaker 1: halves of coconut shells and instead of using them like
Speaker 1: in Monty Python to make the sound of a horse galloping. No,
Speaker 1: I know, I don't understand, they pick up the coconuts shells,
Speaker 1: clean them out, get inside of them, and then carry
Speaker 1: them with them from place to place so that they've
Speaker 1: got a shelter to hide from anything that might want
Speaker 1: to harass or try to eat them. Okay, so there
Speaker 1: are some amazing examples of animals that show a lot
Speaker 1: of intelligence to either avoid being eaten or get their food.
Speaker 2: Those are both definitely smarter than flies.
Speaker 1: Well, but again, you know you're biased by what sounds
Speaker 1: important to you and what you can understand. Well, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll give you that. I hate flies. Diptorids are the worst.
Speaker 1: My daughter knows I hate diptorans.
Speaker 2: What are diptorids?
Speaker 1: They're like flies? And mosquitoes.
Speaker 2: Oh god, mosquitos absolutely the worst. If I could delete
Speaker 2: mosquitos from the universe, I totally would do it. I
Speaker 2: mostly love living creatures, and I appreciate that everything contributes
Speaker 2: to the web of life. But mosquitoes, man, just delete those.
Speaker 1: I know you are telling us in another episode recently
Speaker 1: that you guys got some Chinese mosquitos that are now
Speaker 1: all over the place and that you really hate them,
Speaker 1: and I feel for you.
Speaker 2: Nothing against the Chinese, nothing, no, no, of.
Speaker 1: Course, of course, yep, nope. Didn't mean to apply that.
Speaker 1: But so another part of Mark's question was would aliens
Speaker 1: find our planet appalling because of all of the killings. So,
Speaker 1: if predation is important for intelligence, and predation is like
Speaker 1: all over the place, could you end up with an
Speaker 1: intelligent alien species where there wasn't any predation? Is there
Speaker 1: some other selection pressure that produces intelligent aliens and what
Speaker 1: would aliens think of all of the killing? And you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it might be appalling. There's an interesting
Speaker 1: book called The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, and I
Speaker 1: do not recommend this book to children. Maybe read the
Speaker 1: Wikipedia summary before you read it. It covers some intense topics,
Speaker 1: but it's an interesting look at how humans feel when
Speaker 1: they go to an alien civilization and see how they
Speaker 1: deal with their predator prey relationships. But would you tell
Speaker 1: us about Eric Kirschenbaum's book.
Speaker 2: Yeah. He's a biologist at Cambridge and he wrote this
Speaker 2: book called The Zoologist Guide to the Galaxy. What Animals
Speaker 2: on Earth reveal about aliens and ourselves. And I'll be honest,
Speaker 2: when I first saw this book, I thought, oh no,
Speaker 2: he scooped me because I was at the same time
Speaker 2: working on a book about what we can learn about
Speaker 2: aliens from examples here on Earth. But I was more
Speaker 2: focused on the side of it. And his book is
Speaker 2: really fascinating. It's essentially looking at examples of evolution on
Speaker 2: Earth and trying to draw conclusions about what might be
Speaker 2: universal and what might be local and unique to Earth. It's,
Speaker 2: of course impossible to know for sure, but you know,
Speaker 2: when you see things pop up over and over again,
Speaker 2: you can argue that they might be more common. And
Speaker 2: when you see something that only happened once on Earth,
Speaker 2: you can argue that maybe it's rare and therefore might
Speaker 2: not be everywhere in the universe. And something he talked
Speaker 2: a lot about was predation.
Speaker 1: And you provided me with a quote where he even
Speaker 1: says no ecosystem can exist for long without someone trying
Speaker 1: to take a bite out of somebody else.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. He thinks it's essentially inevitable because you'll develop mobility,
Speaker 2: and then you'll start to consume, and then you'll start
Speaker 2: to consume other folks, and then other folks will try
Speaker 2: to get away from you. And so when you get big,
Speaker 2: you get noisy, and people develop ears and then they
Speaker 2: use those to hunt, and so he thinks predation is
Speaker 2: totally inevitable. Directly like, do you think aliens eat each other?
Speaker 1: And he was like, oh, yeah, absolutely, okay, So at
Speaker 1: least that argues that if aliens visit Earth, they shouldn't
Speaker 1: find us too apart, although maybe they'd be shocked that
Speaker 1: we eat lobsters because gross.
Speaker 2: Lobsters are like just huge ocean conchroaches. I don't get it,
Speaker 2: Like they look really gross to me.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I'll pass. Sorry, I'm not into it. So
Speaker 1: to be honest, when I was researching hypotheses for why
Speaker 1: intelligence pops up from time to time, I didn't come
Speaker 1: across this predation hypothesis often. The hypothesis that I came
Speaker 1: across the most often is what's called the social intelligence hypothesis.
Speaker 1: This is what Daniel was talking about earlier, which is
Speaker 1: that group living selects for intelligence, and you need group
Speaker 1: living to do things like track members of a group.
Speaker 1: So remember, like, you know, when I was cooperating with Beth,
Speaker 1: you know, I pulled some ticks off her back, and
Speaker 1: the next day she pulled some ticks off my back.
Speaker 1: So that's great, I'll keep working with her. But I
Speaker 1: pulled some ticks off Frank's back, and that jerk never
Speaker 1: returned to the favor. So I'm not going to work
Speaker 1: again with Frank. And so it helps you like keep
Speaker 1: track of individuals in your group and how you should
Speaker 1: react with each of them differently.
Speaker 2: Essentially, politics is complicated and it takes real intelligence, and
Speaker 2: in a society, politics are important for survival. You have
Speaker 2: to build coalitions, you have to worry about your enemies,
Speaker 2: you have to worry about being betrayed by your allies.
Speaker 2: It's complicated stuff.
Speaker 1: Well, and you need to communicate with each other so
Speaker 1: that if you're you know, a bee, for example, you
Speaker 1: can waggle and tell everyone where the good food source is.
Speaker 1: Or you need to if your wolves coordinate so you
Speaker 1: can take down the moose so that you can feed everyone.
Speaker 1: So social behavior requires a lot of intelligence to work out.
Speaker 2: Have you ever read the books about the Wolves of Yellowstone?
Speaker 1: Oh? Have you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a fascinating series of books written by a
Speaker 2: guy who spent like forty years getting up at like
Speaker 2: three in the morning and just watching the wolves and
Speaker 2: each of a number, and he just got to know
Speaker 2: them all and wrote these books about their politics. And
Speaker 2: it's like a soap opera. You know, betrayals and arguments
Speaker 2: and you know, love affairs and all sorts of crazy
Speaker 2: stuff and wolve's going off to start their own packs
Speaker 2: and then coming back and fighting their parents and like
Speaker 2: it's dramatic stuff, and it leaves you with this sense
Speaker 2: of like, wow, this is a society. You know, these
Speaker 2: are intelligent creatures and they have all the same kind
Speaker 2: of politics that we do. It really is a soap opera.
Speaker 2: It's fascinating reading.
Speaker 1: Robert Sipolski wrote a book about baboons called a Primates Memoir,
Speaker 1: which is sort of the same. It's really becomes clear
Speaker 1: how they're a society that has a lot of similarities
Speaker 1: to how humans work. And also he's a fantastic writer.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed that memoir.
Speaker 2: So I really recommend these books there by Rick McIntyre,
Speaker 2: one of them has called, for example, the Rise of
Speaker 2: Wolf eight. They're fantastic books. Really couldn't recommend them higher anyway,
Speaker 2: Go ahead, tell us about other intelligent critters.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So in the nineteen nineties it was observed that
Speaker 1: there was this positive correlation between neo coortec side. So
Speaker 1: this is like the outer part of our brain that's
Speaker 1: close to our skull, and it's thought to be sort
Speaker 1: of like a more recent mammalian thing. And so monkeys
Speaker 1: and apes that had bigger neo cortexes were also thought
Speaker 1: to be smarter. And this part of the brain is
Speaker 1: used for things like language and sensory perception.
Speaker 2: Can I stop you right there and be a little skeptical.
Speaker 2: Anytimes somebody says something like that like this part of
Speaker 2: the brain is used for XYZ, I'm like, we don't
Speaker 2: understand the brain. Isn't this some like correlational study using
Speaker 2: fMRI And it's like, well, there's more blood flow here
Speaker 2: when we show them this picture of a baboon and
Speaker 2: so therefore, right, it's all pretty fuzzy. I feel like
Speaker 2: this should be a huge asterisk anytime somebody says this
Speaker 2: part of the brain does.
Speaker 1: X OMG, yes, yeah, no, I totally agree with you,
Speaker 1: and so we'll move this point up a little bit.
Speaker 1: One of the issues with this field is that to
Speaker 1: try to support the hypothesis, they'll do things like look
Speaker 1: at relative brain size and correlate that with things that
Speaker 1: are related to social things like if you are a
Speaker 1: species that tends to live in groups of five rather
Speaker 1: than you know, by yourself, they'll look to see, do
Speaker 1: you have a bigger brain if you live in groups
Speaker 1: of five, or if you're a species that lives in
Speaker 1: a group of just one. Does that make sense? And
Speaker 1: so there's a lot of these correlations, but there's a
Speaker 1: lot of argument about what you should be measuring in
Speaker 1: a brain to begin with, like, what is the relevant
Speaker 1: part of the brain you should be measuring. Is it
Speaker 1: the whole brain, is it the neocortex? Is it actually
Speaker 1: the density of neurons and a very particular part of
Speaker 1: the brain that matters. And additionally, you know, there are
Speaker 1: animals that can do similarly smart tasks that have very
Speaker 1: different kinds of brains. You know, how do you compare,
Speaker 1: for example, a primate brain and a bird brain. And
Speaker 1: so one of the big critiques in this field is
Speaker 1: that they do rely a lot on different measures of
Speaker 1: brains that have not necessarily been locked in as the
Speaker 1: correct thing to be measuring when you're interested in intelligence.
Speaker 2: Right, And we mentioned these as critiques of the field
Speaker 2: not because we think these folks don't know what they're doing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they're following a glorious tradition in science, which is like
Speaker 2: tackling and possibly hard question by doing the only things
Speaker 2: they know how to do. And often this leads to
Speaker 2: breakthroughs you didn't expect. It's better than just sitting on
Speaker 2: the couch and saying, well, it's impossible, let's not do it.
Speaker 2: But another glorious tradition in science is being open about
Speaker 2: the critiques of what we really do know and what
Speaker 2: we don't know, and being careful about drawing too broad
Speaker 2: a conclusion.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. There have been a lot of correlations where
Speaker 1: they have found that complicated social behaviors in insects and
Speaker 1: birds and mammals are correlated with either bigger brains or
Speaker 1: bigger brain parts. And that's at least suggestive. And again,
Speaker 1: it's really hard to compare between two different species. What
Speaker 1: is the right measurement for how intelligent they are? How
Speaker 1: do you rank them? You know, as you're sort of
Speaker 1: stumbling around in a dark room with no light on,
Speaker 1: you've got to start somewhere. And I feel like they
Speaker 1: have made some exciting progress and they're having these conversations
Speaker 1: about what is the right thing to be measuring, and
Speaker 1: you know, where do we go from here? And we
Speaker 1: found something tantalizing here, how do we follow up and
Speaker 1: get like a better answer based on this sort of
Speaker 1: tantalizing initial result. That's pretty much where we are right now.
Speaker 1: There's this interesting correlation, but we're still trying to figure
Speaker 1: out what to measure and how to measure it.
Speaker 2: So when you say correlation, you're saying there's a correlation
Speaker 2: between brain size and like social activity, and that suggests
Speaker 2: that bigger brains are smarter and social activities connected to
Speaker 2: being smarter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that if you've got a bigger brain, you are
Speaker 1: more able to, for example, live in a bigger social
Speaker 1: group where you presumably have more you know, sort of
Speaker 1: peers or conspecifics that you need to keep track of
Speaker 1: so that you can remember their prior behaviors and you
Speaker 1: can tell the difference between them. And so more complicated
Speaker 1: social systems tend to be correlated with bigger brains relative
Speaker 1: to body size or bigger brain parts. Sometimes this falls apart.
Speaker 1: For example, little owls, which is Athena noctua. It's a
Speaker 1: species of owl that is super cute. They are not
Speaker 1: social like at all, but they got real big four brains,
Speaker 1: and so it's kind of surprise that they're like, not
Speaker 1: super social, but they got big old breaks. Why we
Speaker 1: don't know.
Speaker 2: Maybe they're sitting there thinking about eleven dimensional string theory
Speaker 2: and maybe they know the answer.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, we have to learn to talk to
Speaker 1: the little owls.
Speaker 2: Tell me, little owl what is the nature of the universe?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 1: That should be a poem like that sounds like the
Speaker 1: kind of poem you sing to a kid when they're
Speaker 1: going to bed.
Speaker 2: All right, let's write that children's book.
Speaker 1: All right. Okay, So now we're going to take a break,
Speaker 1: and when we get back, we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: one of the other hypotheses for the evolution of intelligence
Speaker 1: as we answer our third listener question.
Speaker 2: Okay, we are back, and we're talking about smartness across
Speaker 2: the animal and alien kingdom? Is intelligence inevitable? What can
Speaker 2: we learn from life on Earth and the patterns of
Speaker 2: intelligence or deer and fly like dumbness on Earth? Is
Speaker 2: there something we can tell about why humans ended up
Speaker 2: so dang smart?
Speaker 5: We as humans have long looked to the stars with
Speaker 5: wonder and all trying to figure out exactly what the
Speaker 5: universe is, what is it made of, what is our
Speaker 5: place in it? And ultimately, I guess to try to
Speaker 5: answer the age old question are we alone in the universe?
Speaker 5: So if one of our Mars rovers or Europa Clipper
Speaker 5: found even microbial signs of life out there, it would
Speaker 5: of course be a game changer, a seismic event, to
Speaker 5: be sure. And while it would be scientifically exciting, I
Speaker 5: think it could also be somewhat disappointing because when most
Speaker 5: of us look to the stars in hopes of finding
Speaker 5: signs of life, I think we envision not just a
Speaker 5: bacterial colony, but an actual, functioning civilization. So my question
Speaker 5: to you is this, as you look at life here
Speaker 5: on Earth, is there any indication at all that intelligence
Speaker 5: is inevitable? I mean, given enough time for evolution to
Speaker 5: do its thing, do you believe sentient beings would be
Speaker 5: the ultimate result? And to put a finer point on that,
Speaker 5: imagine if the asteroids that wiped out the dinosaurs had
Speaker 5: narrowly missed the Earth and that extinction event never occurred.
Speaker 5: Let's say mammals remained as nothing more than small, furry,
Speaker 5: little rodent like creatures and did not lead to the
Speaker 5: rise of the human species. Under those circumstances, do you
Speaker 5: have any reason to believe that there might be an
Speaker 5: intelligent civilization developed by reptilian creatures instead of warm blooded
Speaker 5: things like us. Do you think dinosaurs could be running
Speaker 5: the show these days?
Speaker 2: Anyway?
Speaker 5: Thank you for your consideration in answering this, and I
Speaker 5: look forward to hearing what you say. Love the show,
Speaker 5: Keep up the good work.
Speaker 1: So Howard wanted to know if intelligence is inevitable and
Speaker 1: man I don't know the answer, and it probably depends
Speaker 1: on what the bar is for intelligence. But if you're
Speaker 1: asking about like human level intelligence, there's over two million
Speaker 1: described species on the planet, but only one human, and
Speaker 1: so apparently you can have a lot of organisms without
Speaker 1: getting us, you know, rocket level smart species. You only
Speaker 1: get that once out of two million. So what do
Speaker 1: you think Daniel would t Rex have been coming up
Speaker 1: with Shakespearean style pros if that asteroid mister Earth?
Speaker 2: Well, first, I want to quibble with your claim that
Speaker 2: there's only one intelligent species. Okay, right, I think that's
Speaker 2: a little bit definitional. Like we think, probably fifty thousand
Speaker 2: years ago, there were multiple intelligent species. We just like killed, raped,
Speaker 2: or ate the other ones, right, And so in some sense,
Speaker 2: and you get smart enough, you're likely, I think, to
Speaker 2: just kill off all the other intelligent competition un till
Speaker 2: it becomes part of your in group. So you might
Speaker 2: inevitably just get to one. But it seems like the
Speaker 2: evidence suggests that there were multiple strands at least of
Speaker 2: human life intelligence on Earth. Weren't there?
Speaker 1: So usually when a listener asked the question, they mean,
Speaker 1: like humans like as smart as us, you know, creating
Speaker 1: rockets nine dimensional math. I don't know that even our
Speaker 1: ancestors were that smart, you know, one hundred thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: and so I'm not quite sure that there was you know,
Speaker 1: songs were being sung by other species of humans. We
Speaker 1: might never know, but you're right, they probably were very
Speaker 1: smart relatively relative to other organisms on the planet.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you're right that we don't know biologically. Do they
Speaker 2: really have the same capacity and Neanderthals, for example, or
Speaker 2: other variations. It's hard to know. And maybe they had
Speaker 2: a different kind of smartness, right, maybe they would be like, hey,
Speaker 2: eleven dimension string theory, that's the wrong way to go, man,
Speaker 2: you should be doing loop quantum gravity.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right.
Speaker 2: But yeah, the really deep question is like, is intelligence
Speaker 2: inevitable in some creature? Are you likely to have it
Speaker 2: no matter what happens? If the afteroid hadn't hit or
Speaker 2: something else has gone different? On Earth, would you have
Speaker 2: superintelligent spiders or whales dominating the planet, or reptiles or something?
Speaker 2: And boy, I wish I knew the answer that, because
Speaker 2: that would tell us a lot about the nature of
Speaker 2: intelligence out there in the universe. Right, whether it's likely
Speaker 2: when we land on alien planets to just find a
Speaker 2: bunch of fun. Guy or something's going to be smart
Speaker 2: on those planets. And I think the answer that we
Speaker 2: really need a better understanding of how intelligence arose on Earth.
Speaker 2: And as you could tell from this whole episode, we
Speaker 2: don't know the answer to that either.
Speaker 1: That's true. And you mentioned super intelligent spiders. Have you
Speaker 1: read the Children of Time series?
Speaker 2: Of course I have, Yes, I love that book. Yeah, fantastic.
Speaker 2: We had Adrian Tchaikowsky on the Daniel and Jorge podcast,
Speaker 2: really fun conversations. You guys should check that out.
Speaker 1: Awesome. So, as you've pointed out, the other theories are
Speaker 1: not exactly ironclad that we've talked about yet. There is
Speaker 1: one additional hypothesis for why you get intelligence that we
Speaker 1: haven't talked about yet that I saved for now because
Speaker 1: it's possibly the one that's most relevant to space. It's
Speaker 1: a bit of a stretch, but you know, I try
Speaker 1: to have an answer for every question, no matter how
Speaker 1: confused I am, So all right, here's my best shot.
Speaker 1: So this hypothesis is called the cognitive buffer hypothesis, and
Speaker 1: the idea is that how variable your environment is determines
Speaker 1: whether or not you need to be intelligent to survive
Speaker 1: in it. So maybe more variable planets would be more
Speaker 1: likely to produce intelligent aliens. But so let's dig in
Speaker 1: for a second and revisit that idea at the end.
Speaker 1: So one of the ideas is that seasonality is important.
Speaker 1: So if you live in an area where sometimes it's
Speaker 1: really hot and sometimes it's really cold, maybe you need
Speaker 1: to be smart to survive that transition between temperatures. So,
Speaker 1: for example, migratory birds have two pretty smart solutions to
Speaker 1: this problem. Some of them migrate and have amazing long
Speaker 1: term spatial memory relative to non migratory ones, so they
Speaker 1: essentially figure out how to leave when it gets bad
Speaker 1: and then how to come back later, and that requires
Speaker 1: some incredible brain abilities. And then there are other birds
Speaker 1: that don't leave, but they have amazing memories for where
Speaker 1: they've cached food, so even when food is rare, they've
Speaker 1: hidden it when times are good, and they remember where
Speaker 1: they can go to find it when times are bad.
Speaker 1: And so the idea here is that living in a
Speaker 1: super variable environment requires you to become intelligen so that
Speaker 1: you can survive. There was a study looking at twelve
Speaker 1: hundred bird species that found that you get bigger brains
Speaker 1: and birds that live in environments that are more variable,
Speaker 1: So suggesting that if things change more, you got to
Speaker 1: be smarter to make it. What do you think, Daniel,
Speaker 1: Do you buy it?
Speaker 2: It makes some sense. It connects to the idea we
Speaker 2: were talking about earlier that intelligence is about generalization, like
Speaker 2: being able to solve new problems you hadn't seen before.
Speaker 2: So if your environment is changing around you, ice ages
Speaker 2: are ending, climate is changing something, you can't just rely
Speaker 2: on the techniques handed down to you by ancestors. You
Speaker 2: have to come up with new ideas to solve new problems,
Speaker 2: and that requires intelligence. So it makes sense to me
Speaker 2: that a climate with a lot of variation, or an
Speaker 2: environment with a lot of variability to it would require
Speaker 2: more intelligence in order to survive. On the other hand,
Speaker 2: I don't know that. I consider like geese that's smart.
Speaker 2: I mean, yes, they can do something amazing, which is
Speaker 2: like navigate the planet with their magnetic sense in their eyeballs.
Speaker 2: It's incredible. I couldn't do that. But I don't know
Speaker 2: if that makes them smart. They seem like hyper optimized
Speaker 2: to this one situation, like if for example, the planet
Speaker 2: change the magnetic field flipped or where they need to
Speaker 2: migrate to changed. Do you think geese would be able
Speaker 2: to adapt to that situation?
Speaker 1: So, the last time I was reading about birds and
Speaker 1: their ability to sense the magnetic fields, my understanding is
Speaker 1: that we don't actually understand that very well, and that
Speaker 1: a lot of animals that we suspect rely on magnetic
Speaker 1: fields also have other memory cues that they rely on
Speaker 1: to get to where they're going.
Speaker 2: Did you read that study about how whales might be
Speaker 2: looking at the stars and navigating by the stars. Oh amazing,
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Okay, we should talk about that in a future show
Speaker 1: because that's amazing. I'd love to read that.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess that goes back to the question how
Speaker 1: do you measure intelligence? And how do you make sure
Speaker 1: that you're not measuring intelligence in a too human centric way?
Speaker 1: Or maybe it doesn't matter because maybe if you're specifically
Speaker 1: interested in how did you get human intelligence? Then maybe
Speaker 1: focusing on human intelligence is fine. But I get lost,
Speaker 1: like going to the grocery store sometimes, Like I use
Speaker 1: my GPS in the town that I've been living in
Speaker 1: for half a decade all the time.
Speaker 2: And so GPS your goose positioning system.
Speaker 1: So I'm impressed in these long distance migrants no matter
Speaker 1: how they do it, because I would get lost. I'd
Speaker 1: be in a lake.
Speaker 2: Again the same way, like flies are impressive. They're very responsive.
Speaker 2: They're faster off the starting block than I am, or
Speaker 2: probably seen bolt is. But I don't know that. I
Speaker 2: call it smart and so, but maybe you're right, maybe
Speaker 2: I'm being too humanistic there. I'm looking for the kind
Speaker 2: of intelligence that I know the same way like I
Speaker 2: see in my dog, a lot of the kind of
Speaker 2: intelligence I see in people. And that's what impresses me.
Speaker 2: Sea patterns and respond to them and understand the world
Speaker 2: around him and adapt to it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and appear to be able to read like the
Speaker 1: emotions of people around them. Yeah, agreed. You've got this
Speaker 1: seasonality components, which is about like you know, escaping extreme
Speaker 1: temperatures and stuff. Another component of this idea is resource availability. So,
Speaker 1: for example, if you are a monkey species that eats fruits,
Speaker 1: fruits kind of ripen at different times, so they're available
Speaker 1: sometimes not at other times. You need to remember where
Speaker 1: the fruit trees are. And so there's some evidence that
Speaker 1: monkeys that rely on fruit are smarter than monkeys that
Speaker 1: can eat leaves because leaves are just always available, they're
Speaker 1: easy to find, they're just much more reliable. So the
Speaker 1: idea is that if seasons are changing your environment, or
Speaker 1: resources that you need, or sort of popping in and
Speaker 1: out of existence, either of those things are important for intelligence.
Speaker 1: But you know, when you read about any of these hypotheses,
Speaker 1: like the recent papers that I was reading, everybody's got
Speaker 1: like their favorite hypothesis, point out limitations of the other hypothesis,
Speaker 1: and at the end of the day, it could be
Speaker 1: some combination of things. You know, it could be if
Speaker 1: you're in a hyper variable environment and you've got a
Speaker 1: big social group, that's when you get the super smart individuals.
Speaker 1: Or maybe it's you know, the three things we've talked
Speaker 1: about today, those are all important, plus a fourth thing
Speaker 1: that nobody's thought about yet, and so at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, we don't really have the answer.
Speaker 2: So what I like to think about sometimes is like
Speaker 2: fantasy data, Like if you had infinite resources and you've
Speaker 2: asked me these kind of questions before you could go
Speaker 2: all the way around the galaxy, whatever, is there a
Speaker 2: way we could answer this question someone definitively with infinite
Speaker 2: scientific powers you know, do you think actually seeing aliens
Speaker 2: and surveying intelligence across the galaxy would answer this question
Speaker 2: or or did just make it murky again?
Speaker 1: Wouldn't surprise me that on a different planet there could
Speaker 1: be some different thing that selects for intelligence relative to
Speaker 1: what we find here on Earth. You'd think that if
Speaker 1: you could find enough alien civilizations that had enough like
Speaker 1: equivalents of New Caledonian crows and Homo sapiens, and you know,
Speaker 1: enough different kinds of intelligence and enough variability and intelligence,
Speaker 1: you'd be able to find some patterns. But in terms
Speaker 1: of what you could do here on Earth, I think
Speaker 1: we're doing what you can do here on Earth. Like
Speaker 1: I think we're doing the best we can right now.
Speaker 2: No, I think the alien question is the fascinating one,
Speaker 2: and I think a lot of people feel like, of
Speaker 2: course you do. If we could visit those planets and
Speaker 2: see those then we would know, and you know, we'd
Speaker 2: get some answers, like if we saw there's alien life,
Speaker 2: we could be like, Okay, very clearly life is not
Speaker 2: as rare, but for intelligence, it's so much harder to
Speaker 2: define that unless we find alien life and it's intelligent
Speaker 2: and exactly the same way we are, which would tell
Speaker 2: us like, Okay, this kind of intelligence is weirdly inevitable.
Speaker 2: That instead we're going to find like a huge variety
Speaker 2: of different kinds of intelligences and we're going to get
Speaker 2: stuck in the same question, just now on a bigger scale.
Speaker 2: And it might be this question doesn't really have an answer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it could be that there's no one answer.
Speaker 1: I do feel like if you had thirty planets that
Speaker 1: intelligence arose on all of them, you'd probably be able
Speaker 1: to say, like, Okay, in every case where there's seasons,
Speaker 1: you find some animals that are intelligent in this way.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's like they're better at remembering where the good
Speaker 1: food was or something. I imagine that we'd find some
Speaker 1: common threads. But would we ever answer all of our questions. No,
Speaker 1: probably not. Probably we'd get a lot more questions from
Speaker 1: those twenty or thirty planets, But that would be exciting too.
Speaker 2: I mean, we can't even agree on this podcast about
Speaker 2: whether flies are intelligent. So I feel like what we're
Speaker 2: really asking is when we find aliens, are they going
Speaker 2: to have culture the way we have? Are they going
Speaker 2: to develop technology? Are they going to be scientific? Are
Speaker 2: they going to be exploring the universe? Are they going
Speaker 2: to be like us? So in the end, I think,
Speaker 2: really what these questions, deep down or asking is is
Speaker 2: our experience universe. So so I think it really is a
Speaker 2: human like thing. We could find aliens that are really
Speaker 2: super duper smart, but so different from us that we
Speaker 2: don't call it intelligence. We call it something else, schmid
Speaker 2: intelligence or something. I think, really this is probing about
Speaker 2: human intelligence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So first I want to reiterate that I do
Speaker 1: feel like you should be in charge of naming new
Speaker 1: things in just about any fields shima in front of it,
Speaker 1: and I think that's great. Actually my first blog was
Speaker 1: Fungilius schmundolous because I think schma is a great thing
Speaker 1: to end in front of other words. But you know,
Speaker 1: we didn't even talk about all of the hypotheses today.
Speaker 1: So you mentioned culture. There's a cultural intelligence hypothesis that
Speaker 1: focuses in particular on learning and like learning in a
Speaker 1: cultural context and how that might be really important for
Speaker 1: things like humans, And so I agree with what you said.
Speaker 1: There's even more hypotheses we didn't get a chance to
Speaker 1: talk about today. So let's take a step back and
Speaker 1: see if we've answered all of the questions that we
Speaker 1: were asked today. And so, you know, Tom wanted to
Speaker 1: know what makes rocket level intelligence and I threw up
Speaker 1: my arms and trucks, I don't know. But Tom wanted
Speaker 1: to know if there's things that select for intelligence. And
Speaker 1: we've talked about a couple things that we think maybe
Speaker 1: select for intelligence. Yeah, and he pointed out that intelligence
Speaker 1: might yet be unlucky for us, and you know, maybe
Speaker 1: we will all blow up because of our nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1: I hope not.
Speaker 2: I don't know why I'm laughing at that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, sometimes you laugh or you cry. Laughing is better.
Speaker 1: And then we addressed Mark's question about whether or not
Speaker 1: predation is necessary. Some people think it's important, but you know,
Speaker 1: we don't know if it's the only thing. Then we
Speaker 1: looked at Howard's question about whether or not intelligence is inevitable,
Speaker 1: and I yet again threw up my arms and shrugs.
Speaker 1: But you know, we had fun imagining it.
Speaker 2: And I think that these are really fascinating questions. I
Speaker 2: love the folks ask them, even if we don't have answers.
Speaker 2: I think it's exciting to think about what efforts people
Speaker 2: are making and tackling these really big, really deep questions,
Speaker 2: because you know, those first steps are the hardest ones.
Speaker 2: Like when you look back what the Greeks did or
Speaker 2: what ancient civilizations have done to take the first steps
Speaker 2: towards science, they seem obvious in hindsight maybe, but it's
Speaker 2: difficult to take those first steps when you're up against
Speaker 2: the abyss of our ignorance about these deep questions.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and at the end of the day, I think
Speaker 1: it's amazing that there is a species on our planet
Speaker 1: that's asking these questions and are trying to buddle through.
Speaker 1: And you know, I, when I looked at the neuroanatomy textbook,
Speaker 1: threw up my hands and said, I'm studying something else.
Speaker 1: Thank goodness. There are people who are like, I'm going
Speaker 1: to spend my whole life banging my head against this
Speaker 1: problem and make a little bit a headway and move
Speaker 1: us all ahead. And so I lately feel like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons to be down on our species.
Speaker 1: But it is pretty cool that we do this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff, and I find the science that we do
Speaker 1: super inspirational.
Speaker 2: Yes, although I think we can agree that the smartest
Speaker 2: people on the planet are the folks who listen to
Speaker 2: this podcast.
Speaker 1: Right, agreed, and that is the perfect note to end on.
Speaker 2: And so before we sign off, we were curious did
Speaker 2: we answer Tom and Mark and Howard's questions. We sent
Speaker 2: this to them and hear what they had to say.
Speaker 6: Thanks Daniel and Kelly for answering this question. You know,
Speaker 6: one of the reasons I love your podcast so much
Speaker 6: is because no matter how complete your answers are, you
Speaker 6: always offer a more beautiful question at can't. And I
Speaker 6: guess one of the reasons I was focused on rockets
Speaker 6: is because aliens were more likely to kind of discover
Speaker 6: alien technology than we are. Aliens first, and I imagine
Speaker 6: that rockets are pretty important in getting off planet. I'm
Speaker 6: not aware of any other way to do that, but yeah,
Speaker 6: I mean, I very satisfied with your discussion, and I
Speaker 6: look forward to finding out what this field is discovering
Speaker 6: about intelligence and different kinds of intelligences and what we
Speaker 6: might expect to find out there in the universe.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Hi, Daniel Cally. Yes, you answered my question.
Speaker 3: And while I was hoping the answer would be that
Speaker 3: there could be some world out there where all the
Speaker 3: creatures hold hands or tentacles or whatever and sing Kumbaya
Speaker 3: and are cool to each other. It sounds like the
Speaker 3: real answer is wherever there's life, whether it's intelligent or not,
Speaker 3: something is gone, sooner or later get the idea to
Speaker 3: eat something else. So thanks for taking my question and
Speaker 3: thanks for the book suggestion. I will definitely check it out,
Speaker 3: and of course thanks for the wonderful show.
Speaker 5: Thank you Daniel and Kelly. This is Howard and I
Speaker 5: want to thank you for taking on my question. I
Speaker 5: know it can be challenging when the question has no
Speaker 5: definitive answer, but I kind of knew that going in.
Speaker 5: But what I really appreciated was listening to your thought processes,
Speaker 5: how you break it down, how you would approach it,
Speaker 5: what hilarities are there that might apply.
Speaker 2: To it, And that was invigorating. Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: I appreciate it. A quick non science announcement. May tenth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five is the Stamp Out Hunger Drive, organized
Speaker 2: in tandem with the US Postal Service. It's very easy
Speaker 2: to help fill up your local food banks. Just leave
Speaker 2: non perishable food at your mailbox and your carrier will
Speaker 2: collect it for you. That's all you have to do.
Speaker 2: Leave non perishable foods by your mailbox on May tenth,
Speaker 2: twenty twenty five to help stamp out hunger.
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