On scientism: BioLogos‘s big meeting, in which Francis Collins embarrasses himself and the NIH

January 13, 2011 • 10:27 am

Commenter Michael Fugate brought this to my attention: the summary statement of BioLogo’s Theology of Celebration workshop.  The workshop, held last November 9-11, featured all the BioLogos regulars, including Uncle Karl Giberson, BioLogos’s current president Darrel Falk, and the former president and current National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins.  By signing on to the statement,  Collins—who was supposed to stop all this Jesus-testifying after assuming the reins of the NIH—has not only embarrassed himself and the NIH, but violated the terms of his “probation”.  Imagine the most powerful scientist in our country signing on to such a statement!

The statement, resembling those that must be sworn to by faculty at bible schools, immediately surrenders any credibility that BioLogos has as a “scientific” organization:

We affirm historic Christianity as articulated in the classic ecumenical creeds. Beyond the original creation, God continues to act in the natural world by sustaining it and by providentially guiding it toward the goal of a restored and consummated creation. In contrast to Deism, Biologos affirms God’s direct involvement in human history, including singular acts such as the incarnation and resurrection of Christ, as well as ongoing acts such as answers to prayer and acts of salvation and personal transformation.

I can’t imagine scientists affirming, without reservation, that Jesus came back from the dead. (Nevertheless, the next sentence of the statement is, “We also affirm the value of science, which eloquently describes the glory of God’s creation. We stand with a long tradition of Christians for whom faith and science are mutually hospitable.”)

It’s interesting that BioLogos is so anti-deism, affirming that God answers prayers and regularly intercedes in the world.

The worst bit, though, is this:

In contrast to scientism, we deny that the material world constitutes the whole of reality and that science is our only path to truth. For all its fruitfulness, science is not an all-inclusive source of knowledge; scientism fails to recognize its limitations in fully understanding reality, including such matters as beauty, history, love, justice, friendship, and indeed science itself.

I’m not going to belabor the stupidity of that statement; we’ve talked about scientism many times before.  I’m curious, though, why scientism can’t deal with history or with “science itself”.  History is surely subject to empirical investigation (which gives no support for the resurrection of Jesus), and as for “science itself,” well, it was the byproduct of a materially evolved brain that wanted to understand the world.

As for the rest of the phenomena, “beauty” (an evolved neural response), “love” (probably a neural and chemical condition evolved to facilitate bonding), “friendship” (ditto), and “justice” (a byproduct of morality, which we’re working on, and social organization), the statement fails to show why religion provides a “source of knowledge”, especially because different religions have different—and mutually exclusive—solutions.  All they can say is “God made them.”

Meh.

Some day I would love to see a list of questions that science can’t answer but other methods of inquiry can—especially religion. So far, despite loud and frequent denunciations of “scientism,” I’ve never seen anything resembling that list.

Jazz week: trumpet. Day 4, Miles Davis

January 13, 2011 • 7:09 am

For someone who heavily abused his body with drugs, trumpeter Miles Davis lived an extraordinarily long life (1926-1991).  His inclusion rounds out the four periods of jazz (early, swing, bebop, cool) that I wanted to cover. (Tomorrow is a surprise trumpeter.)  Commenters yesterday pointed out that while not as technically proficient as Gillespie, Davis was nonetheless at least as musically creative.  I must say, though, that I have little use for the later Davis with his strange getups and psychedelicized music.

Fronting several small groups, and producing, to my mind, three classic albums (Kind of Blue—the best selling jazz album of all time and the only jazz album I know of certified as a “national treasure” by Congress—Sketches of Spain, and Porgy and Bess), Davis pioneered the slower and less pyrotechnic, but equally satisfying, genre of “cool jazz”.  To me it’s best exemplified by this song, Boplicity, from his album Birth of the Cool (1957).  It was written with the help of arranger Gil Evans, who was largely responsible for the sound of cool jazz.

The music of Miles Davis is the only jazz I consider suitable as “make-out” music. It’s slow, often romantic, and tinged with sadness.  (The absolute best make-out album in jazz, however, is John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, a lovely collection of ballads for sax and vocal. Listen here and then buy it.)

The album Kind of Blue (1959) contained the track So What.  I couldn’t resist putting putting up the YouTube version in which Davis plays with John Coltrane.  Much early jazz was not captured on film, largely because it featured black people, but by this time there were more film clips showing the greats blowing.  The YouTube notes say this about the video:

Recorded by CBS producer Robert Herridge. Cannonball Adderley had a migraine  and was absent from the session. Wynton Kelly played piano–he was the regular band member at this time–but Bill Evans had played on the original recording of “So What” on March 2, 1959. The other musicians seen in the film were part of the Gil Evans Orchestra, who performed selections from “Miles Ahead.”  Jimmy Cobb on drums.

You can hear the original version from the album here.

In 1958 Davis released Porgy and Bess, an album of songs from Gershwin’s musical.  Also produced with Gil Evans, it’s one of my favorite albums, and achieved great commercial success.   Here’s the most famous cut from that album, Summertime:

Pigliucci calls out atheists again

January 12, 2011 • 11:12 am

Using the excuse of criticizing an advertisement by the American Atheists, Massimo Pigliucci goes after what he calls “in-your-face” atheists over at Rationally Speaking.  The ad, which has been criticized by others, including Rebecca Watson,  is indeed unfortunate: it’s ugly and probably not very effective:

Like Watson, Massimo properly calls out the AA organization for not doing a better job here.  But, in the process, he can’t resist being disagreeable and taking a swipe at atheists in general.

And he faults the AA for lying:

First, the ad is simply making a preposterous claim that cannot possibly be backed up by factual evidence, which means that, technically, it is lying. Not a good virtue for self-righteous critical thinkers.

Well, one can debate what “scam” means here.  Certainly some purveyors of religion are being knowingly dishonest: witness the nonbelieving preachers in the Dennett and LaScola study, who still preached the gospel despite their creeping atheism.  In a reply just published at Rationally Speaking, though, former AA President Ed Buckner takes issue with the word “scam”:

The meaning of “scams” is also quite relevant, of course. Massimo declares that “an intentional fraud” is what one is claiming when one says “scam” and there are certainly elements of that intentionality implied at some level. But if one Googles “scam definition,” the very first things that pop up are:
1. Victimize: deprive of by deceit; “He swindled me out of my inheritance”; “She defrauded the customers who trusted her”; “the cashier gypped me when he gave me too little change”; a fraudulent business scheme.
2. A confidence trick or confidence game (also known as a bunko, con, flim flam, gaffle, grift, hustle, scam, scheme, swindle or bamboozle) is an attempt to defraud a person or group by gaining their confidence.

Given such definitions, it is reasonable to argue that someone can be victimized by a scam even when the immediate agent for victimization is wholly unaware of the fraudulent nature of the transaction.

Well, this semantic quibble is what we Jews (SECULAR Jews!) call pilpul: intense argument about trivial issues.  Personally, I read “scam” in Buckner’s sense.  But never mind.  What irritated me more was Pigliucci’s haughty and supercilious criticism of atheists.  Granted, at first he imputes these sins to only “some” atheists, but eventually that “some” becomes “many.”  Arguments about a group from personal experience, without documentation (why don’t people ever name or link to the “dicks”?), aren’t terribly effective.

If only a few of us are guilty of these sins, what’s the big deal?  There are some professional philosophers who don’t argue very well, either, but we don’t indict the whole profession for a few miscreants.

And, according to Pigliucci, here are the sins of in-your-face atheists:

1. We’re inconsistent and arrogant.

Then again, in my dealings with the skeptic, humanist and atheists communities over the years I have noticed a peculiar lack of critical thinking among some atheists. Atheists are not necessarily skeptics (and vice versa), though they typically pride themselves in being smarter and more honest than religious people.

It’s odd that Pigliucci, at least, berates “some” atheists for saying they’re smarter and more honest than religious people, for if you’ve read his columns regularly, you know that that lack of humility is his own besetting fault.  I thought he’d decided to be less arrogant, but that’s not obvious in this latest column.  For example, he lectures atheists again because

2.  We’re philosophically ignorant and afflicted with scientism.

Yet, several atheists I have encountered have no problem endorsing all sorts of woo-woo stuff, from quasi-new age creeds to “alternative” medicine, to fantapolitics. This is partly because many of them seem to be ignorant of the epistemic limits of science (in which they have almost unbounded faith) and reason (ditto). At the very least it seems that we ought to treat factual evidence with due respect, and claiming that religions are scams flies in the face of the available factual evidence. Hence, it is a bad idea that damages our reputation as an evidence-oriented community.

Oh dear, we’re back to that again, except that “some” atheists have become “several” and “many.”  Yes, I decry those atheists who approve of things like homeopathy, but really, I find them quite rare.  If anything, the situation is the reverse: skeptics tend to go after stuff like homeopathy and astrology and, for tactical reasons, keep their mitts off religion.  And I maybe I am ignorant, because I’m not sure where the epistemic limits of reason really lie—at least in understanding the universe around me.

Really, what is this “unbounded faith” that we have in science?  That sounds like something a creationist or faitheist would say.  We don’t have “faith” in science and reason any more than we have “faith” in evolution or atoms.  We have confidence in using science and reason because they’ve been shown to work.

3.  We’re angry.

Pigliucci says:

I get it, a lot of atheists are recovering from religious indoctrination, often of the harshest fundamentalist kind, and they are therefore angry about all the time they have wasted and all the emotional suffering they have endured. I went through my own short anger phase in atheism after I moved to Tennessee (where religion was as in your face as it could possibly get, the place priding itself in being the buckle of the Bible Belt). Anger is good as a transitory psychological state, because it gives us the energy to reexamine broad aspects of our lives, laying the ground for a more thoughtful future self. But if it stays in our system it quickly becomes both corrosive at the personal level and undermines our overall goals as a community.

(Note that “some” atheists have become “a lot of atheists”.)  Once again, Massimo has managed to transcend the limitations that he sees as afflicting everyone else.

What a condescending and invidious thing to say!  The accusation here is that angry atheism springs largely from being psychologically damaged by faith.  But no, Massimo, most of us, even including those who used to be religious, have legitimate reasons—beyond religious indoctrination—to be angry.

And our anger is a good thing.

[Note: at the bottom I’ve added links to two earlier posts by Greta Christina on why atheist anger is good.]

I, for one, was never indoctrinated, and nevertheless I’m angry. I’m angry that these scams (that’s what I’ll call them) have such horrible effects on the world.  I’m angry that millions of Catholic kids get permanently traumatized with visions of hell, and permanently riddled with guilt about “sins” like masturbation.  I’m angry that priests, under cover of their own superior wisdom and spirituality, sexually victimize their flocks.  I’m angry that mullahs are calling for their followers to kill innocent people, while other more “liberal” mullahs refrain from calls for murder but don’t decry those murders when they occur.  I’m angry that thousands of Africans will die because the Pope and his priests won’t sanction condoms for their flock.   I’m angry that many religions see, and treat, women as second-class citizens, stoning them, swathing them in burkas, or making them sit behind screens in the synagogue and purify themselves in ritual baths during menstruation.  I’m angry at the stupid dogmatism that’s behind creationism, and behind the idea that even if evolution might have happened, God did it all. I’m angry at the faithful who dispute global warming, or environmental depredation, because they think God gave us stewardship over the earth.  I’m angry at those people who oppose abortion or stem-cell research because of the absolutely stupid idea that a ball of cells is equivalent to a sentient person.  I’m angry at the faithful who, on religious grounds, prevent suffering and terminally ill people from deciding to end their own lives. I’m angry that one of the greatest pleasures of being human, the act of sex, is subject to insane restrictions and prohibitions by many faiths—especially when it’s between two people of the same gender.

And I’m angry that religious people try to suppress freedom of speech when it deals with religion, trying to prevent us from calling attention to all this damage.

What is the proper response to all this religiously-inspired nonsense?  Anger, of course.  No, you don’t have to be a red-faced, sputtering jerk when confronting the faithful, but controlled anger is without doubt the right response to a form of superstition that wreaks uncountable harms on humanity.  And not “transitory” anger, either—permanent anger.

Nor need anger turn you into a sour, embittered, and ineffective person.  I’ve met the Big Four atheists—Dennett, Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens—and they’re all delightful people, with not a trace of bitterness.  They turn on the anger only when it’s appropriate.  I’d rather have a beer with any of them than with a “non-angry” accommodationist like Chris Mooney.  Really, in the end it’s the accommodationists who are angry—at us!  They pretend to be oh-so-nice people, but underneath are deeply angry and aggressive because we’re not listening to them.

Again, the proper response to religious stupidity, as it was to segregation in the South, is anger—persistent anger.  Anger that remains until the kind of religion that forces its tenets and superstitions down humanity’s throat vanishes for good.

Finally, since Massimo sees fit to lecture us about how the way we should behave to get our message across, let me reciprocate.  Massimo, you’re a smart guy, and could be a real asset to atheism. But don’t you see how you look to many of us with your arrogance and your constant lectures on how we’re not as smart, insightful, or philosophically sophisticated as you?  Many of your posts virtually drip with the overtones of “I AM SMARTER THAN YOU ARE.”  I guess you really believe that (though, really, some of us actually do know philosophy), but perhaps you could refrain from saying it so often?  It really does undercut your message.

_______

UPDATE:  I knew that Greta Christina did an awesome post a while back about why atheists should be angry.  I couldn’t find the link, but she just sent it to me.  She actually did two posts on the topic:

Atheists and Anger

and, the response to the many comments she got on that one:

Atheists and Anger: A reply to the hurricane

Jazz week: trumpet. Day 3, Dizzy Gillespie

January 12, 2011 • 6:45 am

Oh, dear, I just dropped my favorite coffee cup, breaking it and spilling latte everywhere.  Due to the exigencies of cleanup, and the frustration of losing my favorite latte mug, today’s version of Trumpet Wizards will be brief.

Up this morning is the great Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993), pathbreaking bebopper, patron saint and mentor of many modern jazzmen, owner of the famous “angled trumpet,” and, of course, of those hugely distended cheeks.

Along with his early partner, Charlier Parker, Gillespie inaugurated a new era of jazz: bebop.  And we can pinpoint precisely when it happened: with the release of this record, “Ko-Ko,” which was recorded on November 26, 1945.  Nobody had heard anything like this before: neither the style of playing, which was very fast (I’m told Ko-Ko has 300 beats per minute) and dependent on tremendous virtuosity on the instrument as well as pervasive improvisation.

Ko-Ko is a riff on an older song, “Cherokee,” which was a popular jazz standard.  It was Parker who revised it into what you’re about to hear.  His playing dominates the song, but Dizzy keeps up.  It’s impossible to underestimate how important this song was in the history of jazz.   I have to admit that it’s not “beautiful” in the conventional sense, and not a song I’d listen to twice in a row, but it’s astounding and rewarding nonetheless.

While Diz plays second fiddle here, I did want to put this up since “saxophone week” will be a while coming; and other YouTube clips demonstrating Dizzy’s contribution to early bebop are few.  (For a decent one, see the YouTube clip in which Gillespie plays Salt Peanuts, his solo begins at 1:45 there).

Ko-Ko (click on line that says ” watch on YouTube”):

Here’s Parker playing the song, Cherokee, from which Ko-Ko was derived.  See if you can see the resemblance between this recording (1943) and Ko-Ko, recorded two years later.  And note the difference, which is the difference between late swing and bebop.

Back to Diz.  It’s hard to choose another song to show Gillespie’s versatility since YouTube videos are thin on the ground.  One of my favorites is this one, Night in Tunisia, written by Gillespie in 1942.  It’s been played by many, many jazzmen (my favorite version is Bud Powell’s piano piece from 1951; by all means get it if you can). Here’s Gillespie, older now, playing it:

And oh, about those cheeks.  Everyone was astonished at how Dizzy’s cheeks stretched when he played.  He looked like a chipmunk whose pouches are full of seeds, or a calling chorus frog:

What’s going on here?  Combing the medical literature to explain this anomaly (the things I do for my readers!), I finally found this note, a discussion of a different paper on Satchmo’s Syndrome (“Satchmo” was another nickname for Louis Armstrong, supposedly a shortening of “Satchel Mouth”):

(Kaye, Bernard I. [1982]  Discussion of Rupture of the Orbicularis Oris in Trumpet Players (Satchmo’s Syndrome). Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 69: 692-693.)

Satchmo’s syndrome involves a rupture of the orbicularis orbis, the sphincter muscle around the mouth.  This rupture happens in some trumpet players, damaging their embouchure and the ability to blow high notes. Here’s the muscle:

Dizzy did not have this.  In a discussion of Planas’s paper, Kaye surmises that Gillespie Cheeks (note: this is not “Gillespie’s Syndrome”, as some people call it on the internet: that’s a different and more serious disease) is caused by a weakening of the buccinator muscles in the cheeks (note the playful writing, rare in medical literature):

Finally, the condition described in this paper is to be differentiated from weakness of buccinators shown by certain trumpet players, particularly Dizzie Gillespie. When the Diz blows, his cheeks puff out like a blowfish. One can justifiably postulate attenuation and stretching of the buccinator fibers so severe that only the physical tensile strength of his cheek contains the pressure he needs to vibrate his lips.  In his case it is obvious that his rather odd blowing technique is more than adequate to produce his delightful music.

Here’s that muscle, in red:

I guess that wasn’t so brief . . .

Kitteh contest entry: Millie and Huxley

January 11, 2011 • 11:26 am

Whew, I feel dirty after that last dog post!  Time to clean up with some awesome kittehs.

We have a handsome pair this time:  Millie and Huxley (who, I’m, told, is named after Thomas Henry Huxley).  This is the entry of reader Gayle Ferguson.

Pictured are Millie (left) and her step-brother Huxley.  Millie purrs like a little machine and displays the slanted eyes of contentment.  She’s supposedly the progeny of a pure-bred Abyssinian mother and a wandering stray (whoops! somebody left the door open!) though I see nothing but Abyssinian in both her appearance and personality. Sharp and inquisitive, with much to say, Millie is an extremely accomplished hunter of birds, mice, rats and skinks, which she brings to my bed as frequent offerings. She loves her step-brother and cleans his filthy self at every available opportunity, though only half his size.  One of Millie’s many quirks is to growl at any visitor who approaches my front door; another is that she refuses to drink the water beside her food bowl, instead preferring to take her water from an identical bowl placed at the plug end of the bath.

Huxley is the worrier of the pair.  Coming from a ‘disadvantaged’ kitten-hood, he is timid and has love only for his mother (me!), the arrival of any other person sparking a state of panic.  Like a true Mummy’s-boy, Huxley loves his cuddles and is the most passive and malleable cat I have ever come across, being happy to lie in any position you put him in!  Not a hunter, perhaps as a consequence of his generous lower end, Huxley once presented me with a cicada on a stick.  One of his quirks is that he will only acknowledge his love for me when within the house — in the garden I am a stranger to him, and a stranger to be feared.  Recently we have began to increase the number of zones within the garden where he can love me.  Patience and time.  Not liking to wait for his breakfast, Huxley will punch me awake in the mornings, with his little accomplice sitting neatly behind him.  Though both well over a year old now,  M and H still play chase in the garden every evening and love to stalk each other in the house too!

I think they deserve to win because they’re so damn pretty!

Dogs are smarter than you think

January 11, 2011 • 9:09 am

. . . well, at least one dog: Chaser, a female border collie born in 2004.  Because of their marked inferiority to felids (the King of Pets), I don’t usually feature goggies on this website.  But this bit of research, published in Behavioural Processes, was too good to pass up.

When I lived in Scotland, the one television show I never missed was the BBC’s “One Man and His Dog,” in which border collies and their owners would vie for a prize in sheepherding. Despite my indifference to dogs, I was fascinated at the skill with which these dogs herded errant packs of sheep using commands from their owners.  I was sad to hear that the show was canceled, though Wikipedia says it’s still alive. (UK readers: is it?)

Border collies are clearly alert and intelligent beasts, and this new paper demonstrates it, showing that they have a stunning ability to learn and (supposedly) to combine nouns and commands, an ability to recognize that objects have names, and a talent for distinguishing different commands about how to deal with those objects.

The paper, bearing the turgid title of “Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents” (free online, and you can see a summary/press release here), is by John Pilley and Alliston Reid, two psychologists at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.  I don’t want to produce a long summary, for the paper is well written and easily comprehensible to laypeople. Further, you can read the press release for a shorter take.  I’ll just discuss the salient points here.  Do consult the paper if you’re worried about controls, etc., since the experiments did seem well controlled.

Also, the link to the paper will take you to four videos (on the right) that you can play to see Chaser’s talents for yourself.

Fig. 1.  Chaser, the erudite border collie

Over a period of three years, Pilley and Reid trained Chaser to recognize various objects: toys, stuffed animals, plastic items, etc., by telling the dog to “go to” that item and fetch it. (They eliminated the “clever Hans” effect by having the owner give orders when out of sight of the dog.)  Once Chaser had learned to fetch a number of these items, they did further experiments. There were four in total.

  • First, the learning of names.  Chaser’s ability here was astounding: at the end of the training period, she had learned the names of 1,022 objects, and was able to reproduce them faithfully, almost without error.   In one series of tests, for example, a group of 20 of the 1022 objects would be dispersed randomly on the floor.  Chaser was then asked to select one item out of the 20.   Then he would be asked to select another without replacement (order random, of course), and then another, until all 20 were gone.  This was done in more than 50 successive trials, until all 1000-odd objects had been used.  This meta-test often took many hours.

Amazingly, in no test—and there were many of them—did Chaser make more than two mistakes (in other words, she always got at least 18 objects correct). And she retained this ability to remember names for at least two years after training, as shown by retesting when she was five.

Here are some of the objects Chaser learned, with their names on the left (click to enlarge):

  • Second, understanding new combinations of different words. What seems to be the Big Result of the paper, but one that doesn’t completely convince me, is the authors’ contention that Chaser “understood the separate meanings of proper-noun names and commands.”  What they did was first train Chaser to perform three actions, apparently using objects that were not part of her previously-learned repertoire. These commands were “take” (i.e., fetch), “paw,” and “nose.”  Then, once the commands were learned, Chaser was given combination commands using only three of the 1,022 objects combined with a requested action.  For example, “take lamb,” or “nose lips” (this was an object resembling human lips), or “paw ABC” (a cloth cube with those letters on it).  Note that the dog had learned the commands and the objects separately, and had never been given a directive that combined them.  This was her first exposure to the two-word commands.

There were 14 trials (see Table 1 of the paper), and Chaser did the right thing all 14 times.  The cumulative probability that this would happen by chance alone is 0.000000000000044.  It would have been nice to do this with all 1,022 objects to get a better judgment on Chaser’s “combinatorial” abilities, but this is still telling. Chaser was obviously able to combine an action command with a noun command, demonstrating (to the authors) that she has “combinatorial understanding.”  As the authors say, “She responded as though the commands and the proper-noun names were independent entities or morphemes Thus, in effect, Chaser treated phrases like ‘fetch sock’ as though the ‘sock was a sock and not a ‘fetch sock’—indicting [sic?] that her nouns referred to objects.”

This does demonstrate combinatorial abilities, which is pretty remarkable.  My only quibble is whether Chaser understood the term “sock” as a noun by itself, or rather as a combination noun, “go to [i.e., “fetch”] sock”, which is the way she learned “sock”; and that this combination-noun was overriden by a third term, like “nose,” that preceded the object. In other words, while I’m convinced of Chaser’s combinatorial abilities, I’m not convinced that she learned that the objects really were nouns that weren’t attached to verb commands.

  • Third, learning different noun categories.  Chaser was trained to recognize not just the 1,022 names of objects, but also their classification under the rubric “toys.”  She was also taught to distinguish these from a large number of other objects that she had not been allowed to play with.  After training, 8 toys and 8 non-toys were strewn about and, with the investigator hidden, Chaser was asked to “fetch a toy.”   She was then asked again, and the objects were not replaced after being fetched.  She performed perfectly.

Beyond this broad category, Chaser was also trained to recognize those 116 objects that were balls under the name of “ball.”  She was likewise trained to recognize 26 of her disk-like toys under the name of “frisbee.”  She was again tested with 8 balls and 8 “non-balls”, and also with 8 frisbees and 8 “non-frisbees” (i.e., “fetch a frisbee”).   In both cases she performed perfectly, even though she knew each of those objects not only as “ball” of “frisbee”, but also by their unique name and the general name of “toy.”  Here is a sample trial showing 8 frisbees and 8 non-frisbees:

  • Fourth, learning words by exclusion.  In the last experiment, Chaser was asked to retrieve novel objects with novel names.  There were 64 of these novelties, which differed from the 1022 objects whose names she had already learned.  One of the novelties was placed with seven familiar objects.  In the first two commands, Chaser was asked to fetch a familiar object. In the third, she was asked to bring a novel object with a novel name, one she hadn’t heard before.  This forced her to discriminate by exclusion.  She was successful eight times out of eight.  Remarkable! However, this ability to remember novelty decayed quicky: in other tests, conducted immediately after the successful novelty trial, then ten minutes later, then 24 hours later, she was often unable to pick the novel named item out of a group of four novel and four familiar items.  After 24 hours, her memory for the novel ones had decayed completely.

I think even caninophiles would be surprised by Chaser’s talents, which, of course, could probably be seen in other border collies—though not necessarily other dog breeds.  Her abilities far exceeded anything necessary or useful in ancestral canids—dogs, after all, don’t have to remember names in the wild, though they certainly do have to recognize different conspecific individuals (but not 1022 of them!).  Part of her performance is probably due to a co-option of brainpower used for other things (just like humans can learn to read music using neurons evolved for other reasons), and part to the fact that border collies are trained to recognize different commands.  I’m not an expert on dogs, and I bet there are border-collie owners among the readers, so by all means recount your experiences or theories about the dogs.

Of course, any random cat could do exactly what Chaser did—and much more.  It just wouldn’t want to!

_______

h/t: Matthew Cobb

Pilley, J. W., and A. K. Reid. 201o.  Border collie comprehends object names as verbal referents.  Behavioural Processes, in press. doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2010.11.007