Ep3 "Could animals learn to speak human?"

how the brain works and how we experience life. On today's episode, we're going to explore the future not just for humans, but for other species as well. The other day, my kids were in the car while I was pumping gas, and I was thinking about the future for them, and specifically what my kids would look back on in twenty years or thirty years or fifty years and think, wow,

I can't believe we did that. So California has new legislation that all new cars will have to be electric by twenty thirty five, and so I was realizing that when my kids are the age I am now, they'll look back in moments like this and think, wow, I remember when dad used to pump fossil fuel into his car, and they'll see this as a surprising feature of their

childhoods and not something that exists for them anymore. It's analogous to the way that I look back on black and white televisions, or pay phones, or cassette tapes or walkman's or any of the other things from my childhood that we just don't have anymore. So when I got back in the car, I asked them to brainstorm about things that would be different for them when they're adults,

and they brought up more things than I expected. We were on a road trip and we were passing a ranch where we saw thousands of cows grazing, and what we ended up talking about was whether they might look back strangely in thirty years on raising animals to kill them for meat, because we looked at those cows and we understood that they would all be dead soon and

on plates around tables. Now that might change, and not necessarily because society drifts towards vegetarianism, and not even necessarily because companies develop better and better plant based alternatives to burgers.

Our bodies, after all, have been clearly carved by evolution to eat meat, So I think the more likely scenario will be the move toward lab grown meat will pop a single cell off a cow and reproducing the lab dish to grow the burger or the steak directly from that cell, rather than raise the entire animal and feed it for years and then slice its throat and process it and ship the meat, so we could eat meat free of cruelty and with a lot less ranching effort.

And as time goes on, we'll get better and better at growing the proper ratios of fat for marbling and blood vessels to carry in the right kinds of nutrition, and you'll be able to grow a filet mignon without actually having to have thousands of acres and raise and slaughter a living being that seems to care about it's young and tries to avoid pain and presumably has a

whole range of emotions. So there are several companies working on this already, and with time we'll be able to do this at a price that competes with traditional meat, and eventually that's far cheaper because you won't have to raise the cows and feed them and tend to them and shelter them for years. You won't drive your gas powered vehicle along the highway and look at these thousands

of cows waiting for their own murder. And once we can grow burgers from single cells, we can enjoy barbecues with lion burgers or tiger burgers or elephant burgers or whatever, because we're just reproducing cells. Anyhow, as we talked, we got into the future of genetic editing, and there are

tools like crisper Cast nine. This is a molecular tool that allows scientists to splice out a well defined section of a genome, in other words, a particular sequence of a's and seas and teas and geese, and replace that sequence with a different sequence that they want, so maybe it's one that doesn't have a particular genetic mutation or

that causes a disease or a disorder. Now, this is a technology, crisper Cast nine, that started to come into dim focus in the mid nineteen nineties, but using it to edit genomes in alien cells that wasn't demonstrated until twenty twelve, and suddenly the technology blew up and it's

an every lab around the planet. Now. Now, the idea of using that kind of technology on the human germline has been an area of really heated ethical debate, and it appears to have been used on humans illegally by a doctor in China in twenty eighteen, and it's an open question where this all goes from here. All countries have said this is illegal for human use, but it's just a matter of time probably before more examples hit

the news. And by the way, nowadays, instead of cutting and replacing whole chunks of DNA like Crisper does, there are methods to change just a single base pair. Molecular biologists from MIT and Harvard made a gene editing technique that rewrites individual as and seas and teas and g's in the genetic code. This is called base editing. But

what difference would it make if we could edit genomes? Well, the thing that interests me today is whether we could leverage these advances in genetic engineering to someday allow us to boost human intelligence. Now, there are several things to unpack about that prospect. The first is that every few years in the neuroscience community there's buzz about the possibility that someone discovered a noatropic drug, and that just means one that's going to boost memory or recall or some

other cognitive function. But despite the occasional buzz, there's really nothing that has changed our cognitive function beyond just drinking a cup of coffee. But instead of a drug, could we improve intelligence by tweaking the genome? Now, one possibility is that nature has already optimized our intelligence and there's not too much room to improve it. So let me

explain that by an analogy. Take life span. There's been a lot of research on how to increase human lifespan, but the length of a human's lifespan actually has not really changed. When we look back to a time before modern medicine, we see that people in history we're capable of living long lives. Take Benjamin Franklin, who is born in seventeen oh six and he died in seventeen ninety at age eighty four. That's a very ripe old age, especially for a man. So it's not that people couldn't

live that long. What has changed is the average lifespan, which is known as life expectancy. So when researchers talk about the massive improvements in human life expectancy, they're talking about the average human lifespan. So as we've developed medicine and antibiotics and methods for reducing child mortality and even reducing from simple things like getting gang green when you get a cut. That means that on average, people don't

die in their childhood or young adult lives anymore. It turns out that some of the most important steps in reducing mortality where the basic medications introduced last century to control diarrhea and vomiting. These were massively important in reducing death tolls. So people make it down the road of possibility to live until they're old age. So what's been

improved upon is the average age of death. The point I want to draw here is that it's not as though any of our researchers said, oh, I got it, here's how to make somebody live until they're two hundred years old. And this is because the human body, at least at this point doesn't appear to be set up to live more than about a century. So by analogy, it could be the case that human intelligence has been carefully shaped by evolutionary pressures and is essentially maxed out.

In other words, if you tweaked the brain circuitry, you might not be able to squeeze much more juice out of the lemon. Nonetheless, even if this is the case, we could in theory improve the intelligence expectancy of the population by pushing everyone up towards the ceiling. So everyone is essentially operating at the level of the best brains like Albert Einstein or Tony Morrison, or all the people who are super talented and domains like math or music

or language. Those people are massive outliers from the average. So that tells us the possibility that on average, most people could get a bit smarter. However we define intelligence now. I'll come back to genetic editing in just a moment, but first I need to lay another brick in the foundation by addressing the issue of what is intelligence? The main challenge we have with understanding it. We don't have

a precise definition for it. The interest in this concept of intelligence goes back to at least the time of Plato, but just over a century ago people started working on how to quantify this, and by nineteen oh four, the English psychologist Charles Spearman found that people who scored well on one sort of task like verbal skills, also tended to perform well on other sorts of tasks like spatial skills, so that led Spearman to conclude that intelligence could be

generalized across tasks, and other researchers then found that this seemed to be true. In other words, tasks of different abilities tended to have high positive correlations. So what that means is a person with a high general intelligence score tends to do better at language and memory and tackling new sorts of problems and real life activities and so on.

And in nine twenty three a researcher wrote a famous paper in which he concluded tests tested by which he meant that whatever the heck intelligence is, there are ways to put a number to it. Now, I'll just mention this has been an area of debate where people point out that there can be cross cultural issues with testing intelligence.

But that's not the point I'm making here. I'm talking about if you have a hundred people from the same culture in the same place and they all sit down for the test, you'll get a spectrum of scores, and these scores generally correlate with success in many domains, including how they do later in life. So with these early researchers noted is that something is getting captured. But what

exactly is intelligence. Well, it's proven difficult to nail down with a single definition because it's not one thing, and it's certainly not defined by any single area in the brain. So what do we know about it? Well, first we

know it's not defined by brain's size. At the end of the eighteen nineties, the Spanish neuroscientist Ramoni ca Hall was blown away by the fact that an elephant's brain, let's say, is so much larger than a mouse's brain, and yet they're both equally capable of strategies and clever moves and finding mates and so on. So a bigger brain is not necessarily any smarter. Or take somebody like

Andre the Giant. He probably wasn't eight times smarter than you, even though his brain may have had eight times the volume of yours. So Ramoni ca Hall said, think about it like the giant clock tower of Big Ben compared to a wristwatch. They both keep time with the same accuracy. And so it goes with brains big and small. It's not the amount of stuff, but the al rhythms that

are running on it. It may be that what we call intelligence is about how many things you could hold in your short term memory at one time, or maybe it's the idea that you can store stronger associations between facts, or maybe it's the ability to resolve cognitive conflict, or

maybe it's about being able to better squelch distractors. So all these things have been suggested as the basis of intelligence, but it's going to involve all of these in some degree or another, and probably a bunch of other things, like whether you can better structure the information that you've stored, or do more parallel processing, or i'll talk about this

in the future episode, whether you're better at simulating possible futures. Okay, So all this is to say that intelligence doesn't represent a simple single thing that we can point to in the brain. Instead, in eligence is one of those words that carries a lot of semantic weight, meaning there are all kinds of things that are being lumped together in that one word. But whatever intelligence is, it sits at

the heart of what is special about Homo sapiens. Other species seem to come out more hardwired to solve particular problems, but we are more live wired, which means our brains adapt. So when we drop into the world, we can in our first several years learn all the most important things that our species has figured out before us, and then

we can springboard from there. And that means we can solve open ended problems, and that can be surviving in the Arctic Circle or surviving at the equator, whether that's figuring out quantum physics or how to distill nitrogen from the air for fertilizer or whatever. Other species do smart things, but none can even come close to our capacity to

tackle abstract, open ended problems. And all of this leads me to the main point of today's podcast, which is one of the most interesting possibilities for how the world could be different for our children. They've grown up with Homo sapiens being the only intelligent species that is doing

anything remarkable on this planet. And that's not to say other animals aren't intelligent in their own ways, but they are not as far as we know, building an internet, or vaccines or quantum computation, or certainly not building satellites and rocketships and getting off the planet. For example, did you know that at any given moment in time, there are approximately one million Homo sapiens up in the atmosphere

above the clouds, sitting in comfortable leather chairs. So we might argue about animal intelligence, but what's clear is that other animals are not building airplanes, or for that matter,

fleets of electric vehicles, or neutron bombs or smartphones. And it's an interesting question, right, why don't we find wolves constructing great libraries, or kangaroo's building hospital systems, or just universities where say, Koalas from all over the world come loping over and they spend four years to learn everything about Kowala history and the future and new technologies, and they study all night to take Koala qualifications to make them experts in law or medicine, or study their own

Koala brains. So what I want to consider is whether we will be able to leverage our growing knowledge of genetics to uplift other animal species. That means, to help them, presumably genetically, to have much higher levels of intelligence. The idea is that as we better understand genetics, will be

able to tweak the circuitry to optimize things. After all, the important part is that every single organism on the Earth is made of exactly the same letters ACTG, and there's something just slightly different about the way that our letters structure the human brain, so that we not only have bipedal walking in hairless faces and acne and really useful thumbs, but also we have this massive intelligence. Could we crack the code on that part and give intelligence

to our animal cousins. Now that might sound like pure fantasy, but in fact, there have been a growing number of experiments that make this easier to envision. For example, there's a gene called fox P two, which is thought to have something to do with the sudden explosion of speech

and language in humans. Now, the interpretation about fox P two is a bit controversial, but the thing I want to point out is that colleagues in mt took a version of this gene that was like the human gene, and they put it into mice and they were able to show that the mice could learn mazes faster than normal mice. Now, there's still a long way to go, and it won't just be this gene, but hundreds of other genes that will be required to make cells in the brain hook up in the right ways, and it

probably won't happen in our lifetime. But the point is, animal uplift is a possibility in the distant future, and It's something that's important to start thinking about now. As Charles Joy said in a recent Scientific American blog, if we cannot find aliens in the stars, we might create alien intelligences on Earth. Imagine our children looking back on this time and saying, Wow, that was the time before dogs could get elected as senators, or crows ran certain

university courses, or zebras were winning the Nobel Prize. What a world we might be heading into now, as you might imagine these sorts of studies and the imagination that gets opened about animal uplift. This sparks massive debate among bioethicists and philosophers. The idea is, possibly we will get to the point where we can uplift in animal species, but should we The author David Brynn, who writes great science fiction, wrote a series of novels called the Uplift Series,

and he explores this idea. And in these books we come to live with all kinds of intelligent animals who live among us, and they're working parts of society. And in a interview, Brynn pointed out that he felt the benefits of animal uplift could be amazing and really change the planet. And in fact, others argue that it is

a moral imperative, meaning we're obligated to do this. We're like the first ones to get up the ladder onto the roof, and we need to extend our hands down and lift up all our cousin species who happen to be behind us. I think if it, like if my dog hurts her leg, I will use human discoveries to help her, like antibiotics in a cast, and if she gets cancer, I'm going to use imaging technology like MRI

and oncogenic drugs. My colleague George Davorski, who's a futurist and an ethicist, he said in an interview with The Boston Globe, quote, there are other creatures on this planet that may be in need or deserving of also getting these sorts of interventions. We should always be considering the larger family of sentient organisms on this planet, not just

human beings. And in fact, Dvorski argues that if you deny this future technology of making a brain better, if you deny this to an animal species, it's just as unethical as if you deny the education as some group of people based on their nationality or race or whatever.

In other words, we're morally obligated to help. Now. On the other side of the argument, philosophers argue that the problem is that our long line of experiments to make this happen in animals won't be instant because it never is, and this will lead to lots of suffering among the animal species while we try to uplift them but don't quite get it right, and especially if we make them smarter but we don't get the rest of the thing perfect right away, such that they have meant illness and

are smart enough to know it, or they have a ticking clock of a short lifespan and they're smart enough to know it, and this could get really terrible if we have to keep experimenting on them once they are cognitively enhanced like us. The difficulty is that uplift seems like an easy task. Perhaps we just make an animal's brain bigger, but it's going to be way harder than that. One quick example, in Sweden, some researchers tried to breed

bigger brains in guppies, these little fish. So they took the ones with the biggest brains and kept breeding them together for several generations, and they did the same with the smallest brains too. Now, this sort of artificial selection is what agriculturalists and dog breeders and horse breeders have been doing forever. So eventually they had two lines with a nine percent size difference in their brains, and they were able to show that the bigger brained guppies could

perform a little better on some simple cognitive tasks. So that seemed great, But it turned out the fish with the big brains were incapable of producing as many offspring, and they had smaller guts. So brains are massively energy hungry engines. And the conclusion the scienceists came to is that if you want bigger brains, the body needs to scale back somewhere else. In other words, big brains come

with a cost. Now, the study doesn't really tell us much about intelligence anyway, because we already saw that brain size is almost entirely uncorrelated with intelligence. So there are far better studies that need to be done on this. But I just want to make a single point here. Changes in biology never come by themselves. They're always tied to the rest of the functioning of the machinery. So if you make a heart bigger or legs longer, or

a head bigger than other. Things change as well, So when the con text of uplifting animals, it might mean that we need to figure out genetic changes not only to the brain, but to all kinds of aspects of their body, which could make the whole endeavor more challenging than we thought it was when we were just looking at the brain. And again, we know it won't just be about making brains bigger. For example, horses have brains

as big as humans, but they're not discovering mathematics. Presumably the issue is that they're not running the same algorithms in their forests of neurons, or if you look at the great apes are nearest neighbors, they seem to have everything that you would need, but they're not building the Internet and writing novels and doing molecular biology. Why not, Well, it's true their brains are a little smaller, but presumably

the issue is a more microscopic detail than that. It's almost certainly something in the algorithms that are getting run by the billions of neurons, So it's more than size. It's what programs are running, and there are decades of work ahead of us to even scratch the surface of that scientific problem. And there's another challenge here. Typically, when we think about animal uplift, we picture an animal speaking

English and having a conversation with us. But it's possible that it's going to be very difficult to do animal uplift because the intelligence of our species is so tied to other things like our opposable thumbs or our larynx, which allows us to do things like make podcasts and sing songs. And so the argument is, if you give a squirrel a better brain or the right algorithms to run,

it still won't be able to play a flute. And even if it can think of some new solution to quantum electrodynamics, it can't simply tell it to you because it doesn't have a larynx to produce language. So there are a whole series of things that may need to be put into place so that we can translate languages.

And I'm not talking about English to Chinese like I have on my Google Translate app, but human to dolphin or gopher to human, which takes into account the evolutionary history of the species and things that would have meaning to that animal. For example, a dolphin lives in a three dimensional world of movements and patterns, and so it's picking up on different things, and it presumably cares about

different things. And that's what Google Translate may look like a century from now, figuring out how to communicate the needs and desires and insights of one species to another. Now there's one other thing to consider, and this one we can't ignore. So I'm going to take a tangent

here for just a few moments. Many years ago, when the European Union was first getting put together, I wrote an article about the possible problems that such a union might confront in the future, and I quoted George Orwell, who wrote a deeply insightful essay about Adolf Hitler in nineteen forty and Orwell pointed out the following, and I quote, Hitler knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working hours, hygiene, birth control, and in general common sense,

they also, at least intermittently want struggle and self sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty parades. I used Orwell's quotation to illustrate something that could end up being the Achilles heel of the European Union, which is that eventually neighbors will fight one another, just as in America the North and South did in the Civil War. People don't just want peace. Sometimes they want to bang their drums and wave their flags. If you look at the

history of our species, this is the standard. It's very hard to get groups to form a union forever or even for very long, and that's because of identity politics and our desire to show that we are different from and usually better than our neighbors. So just look at the entire history of the twentieth century to see how easily groups will foamen genocide against other people they're living with.

Whether that's the Communists in the USSR or the Hutu in Rwanda, or Hitler telling the Germans that they deserve the entirety of Europe around them. It is shockingly easy to get groups to orient against other groups that they used to be fine with, they used to be neighbors with. Now I'm going to do another episode about empathy and how people view one another and why we as a

species so easily slip into war. But in today's context, you can guess my reason for mentioning all this will and uplifted animal species at some point want to beat its own drums and fly its own flags and have its own loyalty parades. In other words, what happens when we get our dogs to communicate with us and work with us? Are they always going to put up with us? Or do they at some point say, I don't want you to put me outside. I don't want you to hit me on the nose when I pee in the house.

I think that all of our problems stem from our historical relationship with you, and it's time for us to shed our callers and bear our fangs and bite you right in the juggular in the name of freedom and dignity. Now, this is similar to the situation that was portrayed in the New Planet of the Apes movies. Humans genetically engineer the apes to uplift them, and then things devolve into a war between the species. So this is one worry

about the future of animal uplift. If human intelligence is any guide, and it's really the only guide we have, then the introduction of intelligence will probably open the door to the horrors not of a civil war, but of a species war. And what's interesting is you could extrapolate from what happened in previous world wars where unlikely countries banded together, like in World War Two, where the United States banded with their unlikely bedfellow Stalin and the USSR,

or for that matter, Germany linked arms with Japan. Everyone collaborates where they see the most benefit in the political sphere. So just imagine what could happen when we enter not just a world war, but a multi species world war where humans have to fight against dolphins and camels and

hippos who have all linked up with one another. Or maybe in the more distant future, as the world gets used to having multiple species, things will get complex in the way they always do, where some dolphins collaborate with some humans and they ride the waves as a unit, and other dolphins and other humans are finding on the other side, So you have species that are split down

the middle, like families in a civil war. Or maybe, just maybe this all happens in a different way and they are smart enough or just different from us enough to bring us peace or at least lock us into non aggression. And we learn the meaning of humanity from non humans. So let's wrap up. When my children are my age and they're thinking about how they used to eat animals and pump gas. The way that we look back now on physicians promoting cigarettes or babies being in

the car without seat belts. My children might also look backward and think about the time when they were this single species on Earth, building durable knowledge and making discoveries about our cosmos. And maybe this will be our grandkids

or our great grandkids. But when I try to imagine what their experiences are like, I wonder if it'll be like the way we travel around and are always surprised and impressed with other cultures, Like when the Spaniards first stepped foot on the shores of what we now call North America and discovered entire empires built by the Aztec and the Inca and the Maya, complete with buildings and communities and zigarots and other forms of writing such as

tying knots and strings, and completely different religions with their own deities and stories of creation. I wonder whether it'll be like this when we stumble on animal communities that we've uplifted, let's say, gophers, and discovering entire mythologies that the gophers have written, and whole types of architecture and technologies we simply wouldn't have thought of because of differences

in our needs or imaginations. Just like different cultures invent different technologies based on their local needs, so will different species. In any case, someday after I'm long gone and my podcast exist on some medium that we can't even imagine, I hope that you, dear listener of the future, will really picture me pulling up to a gas station and having to buy gas to get from place to place.

And maybe, listener, you are a member of an animal species that in my day had very little cognitive power. So I dedicate this podcast to you, especially if you've joined our ranks as being fascinated by not only where we are, but you also simulate possible paths to where we could go, and then you leverage the scientific method to build pathways to get there. To find out more and to share your thoughts, head over to eagleman dot

com slash podcasts. I have links there for further reading about Animal Uplift, and I also have that incredible George Orwell essay about Hitler, and I recommend reading it as one of the most insightful political essays I know. Even after seven decades, it is as relevant as ever until next time, I'm David Eagleman and thank you for joining me in the inner cosmos.