Diverse Intelligences Surprises with Dr. Frans de Waal & Dr. Michael Levin
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Welcome to Stories of Impact. I'm your host, writer Tavia Gilbert, and along with journalist Richard Sergei, every first and third Tuesday of the month, we share conversations about the art and science of human flourishing.

Last week, along with millions of Americans, I watched the eclipse from my front yard, marveling with my neighbors at the weirdness and the wonder of the remarkable solar phenomenon. In fact, the entire day had a surreality to it. When I walked my dogs around noon, hours before peak eclipse, the light already seemed strange. The birds were definitely very subdued. And

And it was surprising when, at almost noon, we noticed a granddaddy-sized fox across a pasture and up a residential hill, keeping pace with us for a long distance.

What exactly were the birds reacting to when they puffed up their feathers and ceased their bird song, I wondered. What was the fox thinking about or feeling as he loped parallel to our walking path? Why were my silly dogs, who usually bark at every squirrel and car they see, so strangely quiet? It even occurred to me to question if my long-thriving houseplant's leaves were newly curling because they were somehow affected by the strange sun.

I didn't have any answers, but I did know that my curiosity originated with this podcast. From writing stories over the last four years that explore the wonder of diverse intelligences.

In today's episode, we meet Dr. Frans de Waal and Dr. Michael Levin, two researchers whose life's work roots them deeply in the curiosity about the wonder of the natural world of animals, organisms, and plants that make up the diverse intelligences of the universe.

They've each spent decades asking questions about the minds of a variety of species and furthering the science of cognition. We'll start with Emory University and Utrecht University primatologist Dr. Franz de Waal, a trailblazer in the science of animal cognition. A best-selling author of multiple books that made scientific research about animal intelligence accessible to the layperson, Dr. de Waal's primary fascination was apes.

He explored the social interactions, the facial expressions, the relationships of chimpanzees, even their emotional lives. Sadly, Dr. DeWall passed away from stomach cancer this March at the age of 75. But the legacy of his more than 40-year career was research that didn't just shed light on the nature of primates, but on the nature of humans and humanity.

One of the things that set Dr. DeWall apart was that he recognized early on in his work that sophisticated intelligences across multiple species quite often exceeded that of humans.

Here's Dr. de Waal from an interview with Richard a few months before Dr. de Waal's passing. Diverse intelligence for me means what do the animals need in their environment. We humans, we are good at language and technology. And we have a few other intellectual capacities, obviously. But we are most impressed by those things.

And so if animals don't do these things, like for example, the octopus is wonderful at camouflage. They can blend in the environment, perceive it and then blend in. That's a cognitive feat. Or the bat has echolocation, which we don't have.

And the bat can, in a dark room with just one insect, the bat can catch the insect. It's just amazing that they can do that. And it's a very complex skill. You can ask any engineer who designs radar systems for airplanes how complex that is, but the bat can do that. It corrects for its own speed, corrects for the prey's speed. So we're not impressed by those things. People don't usually talk about echolocation as an important cognitive feat.

But we're most impressed by the things that we are good at. There are, for example, birds who stash food and they can remember 10,000 locations of food. They stash it in the fall. They find them back in the spring. It's just absolutely amazing. But that's a very special cognition skill that they have and that they need and that other animals probably don't need. I did some work with elephants.

They have like 40,000 muscles in their trunk. They can smell 100 times better than a dog, and a dog smells 100 times better than us. And so these are amazing animals where the senses are different. And for us, it's very hard to understand them. And so we misjudge the elephant because we think like humans and not like elephants.

Dr. de Waal's recognition and respect for the genius of diverse intelligences like apes, octopuses, bats, elephants and birds led him to think differently about the human species, including our communication skills. Our language is symbolic and learned, which is pretty unique, I would say. But once we dive into language and take it apart,

There are many elements there that other animals either can learn or use themselves. So references to things that are not here,

Bees do that. They have the waggle dance and they refer to flowers that are not present at the moment. So our organization, let's say classification of objects is possible. Learning symbols. There's many language studies on the apes where they have learned to use symbols. Referential communication. So there are many elements of language that we can find in other species. And if we were to analyze...

human language the same way we analyze, let's say, whale vocalizations or bird vocalizations by making spectrograms of our communication, we wouldn't see much difference with what other species do. So we are maybe 10 or 20 percent better than other species in many skills and that makes us a different entity intellectually. But these are gradual differences. That's what Darwin already said.

It's not different in... Our intelligence is not different in kind. It's different, incredibly, from the other species. How did Dr. de Waal differentiate between intelligence and cognition? Intelligence is solving novel problems. Yeah, cognition is a much broader term. And actually, most of us use that term much more than intelligence. All the animals have different things that they do and that they need.

With cognition, we say they have this capacity and they have that capacity. And so we usually prefer cognition. When his work first began, the restrictions, assumptions, and limitations in the field of cognition both frustrated and challenged him. Researchers were somewhat open-minded about the exploration of chimpanzee cognition, but, he said...

Chimpanzees were at the time the only species that you could talk about intelligence and strategies and emotions. People accepted that for chimpanzees. But if you would do the same thing about your dog or about goats or about fish, for that matter, people would laugh at you. And so chimpanzees were...

the pioneers of cognition research because people accepted things for them that they would never accept for a rat or any other animal. Why were Dr. DeWald's fellow researchers struggling to accept that species other than chimpanzees were intelligent? Because first of all, we had a very mechanistic view. Animals were like machines.

And the idea that they had emotions and could think was not present. Like when I was a student, people would laugh at it. Humans could understand, but not animals. So we had a big blockage was the Dark Ages of Animal Research.

Over the course of Dr. DeWald's career, scientists slowly expanded their perspective. What did moving out of the Dark Ages mean for him? For me, the main change was that we were allowed to talk

about the inner processes of animals, which as a student, I was not allowed. I think for me, that's the biggest change that I saw is that we moved from the mechanistic view of animals, which was big in the behaviorists and big in the ethologists. We moved from there to opening up about animal mental processes. And it has been an enormous struggle because

every step that we made, there was resistance and there was ridiculing and accusations of anthropomorphism and being a romantic or whatever, whatever the critic. And I actually invented it.

a term anthropo-denial to counter that because I think that animals that are very close to us like chimpanzees, of course we use human terminology and human concepts to explain their behavior because they're so similar to us. And so people who don't accept that, I said they were an anthropo-denial. They were denying the obvious connection that exists between humans and other species.

And then the second change was when we moved from looking at the primates as the prime example of intelligence. We moved to all these other species. So that was a revolution. I think it happened mostly in the 1990s and after that we opened up to all the other animals and started looking at the intelligence of fish.

and intelligence of elephants and intelligence of birds. And so we expanded enormously. And now I think we think there's all sorts of minds in the animal kingdom and we have different pinnacles of intelligence at different places. We don't look at it as a scala naturae anymore, like where humans are at the top and all the other animals are dumber than us. We are impressed actually at the moment

by the enormous amount of intelligence we see in other species. We have now a more evolutionary approach. We think more like what do the animals need in their environment? What are the skills that they need? And so we think much more biological. And I think that has been an enormous improvement. What did Dr. de Waal's experiments into chimpanzee cognition teach him? We underestimate what animals do. We think they hunt together and then they share the meat.

And that's all they do. And they have a certain tolerance level, of course, otherwise you cannot share. If we go out hunting, the two of us, and you take everything and I get nothing, that means that I need to get a different partner. Or I need to protest against you. I need to react to it. We found in the monkeys also that they were also sensitive to effort. The amount of effort that went into things.

And so I think that's much more sophisticated what they do than people had assumed until then. So humans tend to think that morality and the rules of society are sort of top-down process where a bunch of intellectuals decide this is a good thing for society and then everyone is going to do it. When we did our fairness experiments with monkeys and found that they are sensitive to getting less than somebody else,

and protest against it. I think people underestimate how many of these processes are bottom-up processes. They arise very early in life. The sense of fairness in children develops very early. You give one kid a big piece of pizza and another kid a small piece, you're going to notice what their reactions are, very similar to my monkey's reactions. We noticed that if one of them gets more food than the other, they became upset.

And so we started to test this out systematically. We would put two monkeys side by side and if you gave them both the same food for the same task, there was no problem. You can give them both grapes, fine. You can give them both cucumber, fine. But if you give one of them grapes and the other one cucumber, and grapes are much better than cucumber for them, they become very upset, the one who gets the cucumber at least. He's the one who gets upset.

Even at the end of his career, Dr. de Waal was still working to convince some skeptics that the inner lives of animals are complex and not dissimilar to the inner lives of humans. I often give lectures about intelligence and emotions in animals. And very often after the lecture, when I have explained all the complexity of the species I work with,

very often there is someone in the audience who says, "But what is then the difference between us and them?" And so they actually don't want to hear about the complexity of animals. They want to hear what is special about humans. And that's the only thing that really matters. And usually people want one thing. They say, "The one thing that makes us different," recently I read in a book, for example, "The one thing that makes us different is love. We have love for each other."

Which is a very strange idea because many animals have love and attachment, I think. How did Dr. De Waal's studies bring him to believe that, like humans, animals might have a cognitive capacity that could include emotional intelligence? At the Arnhem Zoo, where we have a big chimpanzee colony, there was a female who lost her fetus very late in the term. And the rest of the group, who normally didn't pay so much attention to that female,

The first couple of days they were extremely affectionate with her and groomed her and embraced her and kissed her. All of that right after the miscarriage. And even for a month afterwards they were extremely nice and gentle with her.

So we had the impression that first of all there is a grieving of course. We think that many animals, not just chimpanzees, many animals who have attachments, they feel the loss of someone who has died and they seem to understand what death means at least for others. They seem to understand it's irreversible and the individual is lost.

But also in this case there was a lot of empathy for that particular female who had lost her fetus. So yeah, that kind of manifestation of emotions we can constantly see in the animals. And again, this is not unique for the primates, I think. Many, many animals have that kind of emotions. The empathy of those apes seemed totally natural to Dr. de Waal.

I would say all the mammals have empathy. So I think if empathy is at the core, the fact that you're interested in others and that you resonate with others and you care about others, if that's the core, then we find that in all the mammals. Because in all the mammals, it starts with maternal care. If a young are cold or in danger or hungry, she needs to react immediately to that.

Recognizing the empathy and emotion of animals made for not only better science, said Dr. DeWall, it made for more open-minded and open-hearted scientists. He hoped that his research would help pave the way for a better future for all animals, including animals in relationship with the humans who are responsible for their well-being.

Once we start talking about the intelligence and the emotions of animals and accept that they have inner lives that are sometimes quite complex and the way we treat, for example, farm animals, which are the billions of animals that we keep, that is not an acceptable thing. But it has given us a different appreciation of animal life, for sure. We have to treat them better than what we do.

Because of the work of luminaries like Dr. de Waal, younger researchers across the globe are carrying on and expanding his pioneering research. One of them is Dr. Michael Levin, distinguished professor of biology at Tufts University and associate faculty member at Harvard's Wyss Institute. Dr. Levin is a leading researcher on the intelligence of the very smallest building blocks of life,

and how intelligence transfers from cells to cell collectives to complete living beings. Dr. Levin also leads the Levin Lab, which seeks to develop fundamental understanding of how minds of all kinds arise, scale, persist, and change. First, what is a mind? Here's Dr. Levin.

What I mean by mind is a kind of problem-solving intelligence that is able to operate in a particular problem space. And that doesn't mean the three-dimensional world, although many of the familiar minds we work with do navigate three-dimensional space via motion and things like that. But there are also all kinds of unconventional intelligences that navigate other spaces. I don't use the word mind too much. Intelligence I use a lot. So the spectrum of diverse capabilities

of getting your needs met and your goals accomplished, despite changing circumstances, novel scenarios you've never seen before, navigating, you know, some level of expertise in navigating your problem space. And it could be very, very modest, or it could be quite profound.

How does Dr. Levin define diverse intelligences? Diverse intelligence is a disciplinary field that tries to understand what is common to all intelligence, regardless of its implementation, meaning what it's made of, regardless of its origin story, meaning whether it was evolved or engineered or both. So it's the search for

intelligent behavior and cognition in unfamiliar substrates and things that are not the typical kind of brains that most people are familiar with.

What are the goals of Dr. Levin's studies? What we would love to have is a framework, and this is one of the things my lab works on, is developing a framework where you can simultaneously talk about and compare all kinds of agents ranging across minimal active matter, cells, tissues, organs, bioengineered constructs, hybrids, cyborgs, hybrids, aliens, artificial intelligences,

either software or hardware. You know, all of these things have something in common. To the extent that they have intelligence and agency, they have some profound things in common, and that's what we try to understand. So the ability to reach specific goals in some problem space with diverse degrees of ability to do that. And so in my lab, we deal a lot with the way that

collective intelligences of cells, so this is embryos and organs and so on, how the collective intelligence of cells is able to solve different problems, different barriers that are there to prevent them from reaching their anatomical goals and how they can still manage to reach those goals.

And the future of the Levin Labs research? To a place where, for any given system, whether it's biological or engineered or whatever, the answer to where it fits on that continuum is an empirical experimental question. And then the question of how much intelligence there is in any given system is not to be decided by philosophical debates about how things have to be, but actually by making hypotheses and doing experiments.

Dr. Levin says that defining intelligence is not only identifying complexity. You don't just get complexity, you get goal-directed behavior. You get self-repair, you get navigation of certain spaces, whether they be physiological, anatomical, behavioral, and so on. I think this is what the field of diverse intelligence is going to do. Really develop a science of being able to recognize, predict, and interact with, and then of course create as well,

multi-scale cognitive systems from competent components.

He's fascinated by the as-yet-unanswered questions inspired by the study of those multi-scale cognitive systems. We do not know how this works. It is very hard for us to know when a cognitive system is going to appear. So there are certain kinds of intelligent performance that require learning. There are other kinds of intelligence that don't require learning. But this is one of the many competencies that certain cognitive systems can have. They can modify intelligence.

future behavior in light of past experiences with different degrees, there's different kinds of learning, right? So there's this habituation and sensitization and anticipation and instrumental conditioning, the Pavlovian thing. It's not that hard to get a system that learns from experience. It's pretty ubiquitous in nature, including in the inorganic world.

While in his career Dr. de Waal had to convince his colleagues that cognition existed in animals, Dr. Levin readily embraces the possibility of cognition across the cosmos.

I literally think that certain kinds of cognition pervade the universe. From simple particles all the way up, you start to see things that are already the kinds of things we deal with in behavioral science. The exciting research program is to understand the scaling. So how do extremely modest, simple competencies of very simple things scale up to the high level, the large cognitive light cones of animals and human animals and so on.

Dr. Levin is excited by what his research may uncover next and how it will help us define our own place in the universe. Well, the questions that I think we are asking, although we certainly need to ask more of it, is to figure out the rules for the scaling of space.

So this idea that we are all, I think we are all collective intelligence. In fact, I think all intelligence is collective intelligence. And what we need to work out is how specifically the mechanisms by which independent competent subunits, be they molecular networks or cells or tissues or organs or whatever, how they scale up to have a centralized system.

I call it a self with a capital S, a novel self that operates in another space with new preferences and competencies that don't belong to any of the individuals.

This is what, in fact, I think neuroscience isn't about neurons at all. It's about the scaling of these competencies. And they just happen to focus on it in the nervous system and the brain. But we need to do this in all kinds of substrates. And I think we've been lulled into a false sense of security by the theory of evolution, because typically you have a collective intelligence of cells and they work really hard to build a particular structure. And if you try to deviate them, they will still find a way to build it and so on. And I think these kind of synthetic approaches making novel beings that have never been here before

really will let us go beyond our former very brittle categories of selves and cognition and intelligence, which were really very limited by our limitations of technology and imagination. So obviously it's great to look at beehives and ant colonies and octopus and whales and all these things, but go

go way beyond that and really look at creatures that have never been on earth before, that have never been directly in the stream of life, the evolutionary sort of cycle through that web of life and ask where did their goals and competencies come from?

Does Dr. Levin believe that there is nothing particularly unique about human intelligence? I'm not claiming that the human brain isn't unique and does certain things that nothing else does. That's absolutely true. However, just think about how we evolve. So all of our sense organs basically point outwards, and they operate in a very narrow spectrum of incoming signals at a very specific temporal rate and a very specific size scale. So that means that we are...

reasonably good, not great, by the way, but reasonably good at detecting intelligence in medium-sized systems operating at medium speeds in the physical world. So, you know, you see crows and primates and maybe an octopus and maybe a whale and some things like that, and we can kind of detect when they're doing interesting, intelligent things.

But things that are very large or very small or happen very quickly or very slowly or happen in other spaces, we are really bad at detecting those kinds of things.

And so I think we are absolutely looking at the world through a keyhole. And we're doing it in a way that's highly constrained by our own structure and our own scale and our own cognitive light cone. And that makes it hard for us to recognize unconventional intelligence all around us. And I think fundamentally, this is really key.

When we make statements about any given system, it might be an organoid that you've built, or it might be the universe, it might, you know, whatever. When you're making a statement about the intelligence level of a system like that, you are basically taking an IQ test yourself. Because all you're saying is, this is what I have figured out this system to be capable of. And you may have missed all the exciting aspects of it, and you might have missed the space in which it works.

Dr. Levin's research has convinced him that for humans to flourish, we must better understand and honor the diversity of intelligences on the planet we share.

So these collective intelligences through networks, whether they be networks of computers, financial networks, social structures, swarm robotics, we create these things constantly with very little understanding of what their goals and what their competencies are going to be. That's extremely dangerous. And I think human flourishing, if we're going to thrive as a mature species over the next decades and centuries and so on,

We have to improve this ability to understand what it is for new collective beings to come into the world and how we learn to predict and shape their goals and their preferences. And this idea that we can now clearly make new things that haven't been here before, which requires us to go beyond our really very primitive old habits.

these binary categories of is it a machine, is it a robot, is it a living organism, is it cognitive? And now we're finally able to have the theoretical tools and the body of data and the capabilities to take that seriously and to develop a completely new framework for how minds come into being in this world and how they scale up.

What is the future of diverse intelligences research? I want a worldview that helps you create the next thing from scratch. And I think that this is what the best philosophy does, is it helps us to have frames of looking at the world that help you make the next great thing. And so I'm really hopeful that some of these really fundamental ideas on what selves are, how you scale cognition, what it means for a system to have a

a first-person perspective and an eternal view of itself as well as the outside world. All of these things, we have pushed them into novel capabilities in regenerative medicine. I hope that these ideas can be pushed into very practical advances for improving embodied existence. If we can scale cognition, if we can create frameworks for better understanding diverse intelligences and applying their genius to the problems we face,

Dr. Levin believes that the benefits will be extraordinary. Pretty much every medical issue except for infectious disease would go away if we knew how to communicate to a group of cells what they should build. It all hinges on this idea from diverse intelligence of being able to recognize and communicate with unconventional minds in the world around us.

I honor Dr. DeWall's lifetime of work, sharing the inner lives and the unique brilliance of animals of all species, and the continuing work of scientists like Dr. Levin, to dive deeper into the field of research that shows how similar and interconnected all life forms are, whether we recognize it or not. My own life has been enriched by these many years of storytelling around diverse intelligences, and I can't wait for more.

So, we'll be back in two weeks with a second conversation into surprises in diverse intelligences research. In the meantime, if you enjoy the stories we share with you on the podcast, please follow us, give us a five-star rating, and share this podcast with a friend.

and be sure to sign up for the TWCF newsletter at templetonworldcharity.org. You can find the Stories of Impact podcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and at storiesofimpact.org.

This has been the Stories of Impact podcast with interviews by Richard Sergei. Written and produced by TalkBox Productions and Tavia Gilbert. Senior producer Katie Flood. Assistant producer Oscar Falk. Music by Alexander Filippiak. Mix and master by Kayla Elrod. Executive producer Michelle Cobb. The Stories of Impact podcast is generously supported by Templeton World Charity Foundation.