What Lies Behind A Dogs "Guilty" Look?

A nice little cautionary tale, this, about our human tendency to read things into animals' behaviour that are in fact a projection of our own emotions. It's called anthropomorphism. How many times have you come home to be greeted by a shifty, guilty- looking dog only to discover a chewed up wardrobe or other signs of devastation, or the remains of what was to be tonight's joint of lamb lying in a corner? Do dogs give the game away by the guilt on their faces? According to Alexandra Horowitz, a professor from Barnard College, New York, this is not always the case. She set up and experiment where owners were asked to leave a room after ordering their dogs to leave a treat alone. On return, some owners were told their dogs had eaten the treat, when they had not, others were told their dog had been as good as gold. It turned out that the perceived guilty demeanor of the dog had little or nothing to do with whether or not it had eaten the treat. In fact, innocent dogs, admonished by their owners, behaved more "guiltily" than miscreants. Thus, says physorg "the dog's guilty look is a response to their owner's behaviour and not necessarily appreciative of its own misdeeds."

This ability to anthropomorhpize animals' behaviour extends from dog owners to cognitive psychologists - and is the bane of the trade. If there is some superficial apparent similarity in behaviour it is easy to assume that it is safe to interpret the animals' actions in human terms, attributing high-order emotions like guilt, remorse or embarrassment to them and assuming common neurobiological mechanisms underpinning these displays of emotions. Psychologists beware!

Is Cancer The Price For Our Big Brains?

In the last chapter of "Not A Chimp" I suggest that mental illness, in the form of bipolar illness or schizophrenia, may be the price we pay for dramatic brain expansion in human ancestors and ourselves. The idea is that many of the very genes that are thought to predispose us to mental illness have been heavily selected for, uniquely, in the hominid line. Why? Many of them are involved with either building the long-distance circuits that link parts of the brain together, or the energetics of running countless signals across this vast network. The brain may be running at full evolutionary capacity - therefore anything that reduces this flat-out efficiency could result in the symptoms of mental illness.

Now, in this interesting piece in Livescience, comes the suggestion that cancer might be another downside to human brain expansion. It has been noted that many of the genes that have been positively selected for in the human brain are involved in delaying apoptosis - programmed cell death - perhaps to maximize neuron number and density in these enhanced human networks. Since one feature of cancers is cells' invulnerability to switching themselves off, perhaps an evolutionary foundation to greater neuron number has left us open to runaway malignancies?

Genetic Architecture Of Tameness

In the penultimate chapter of "Not A Chimp" - called "The Ape That Domesticated Itself" I describe how a young researcher from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Frank Albert, had begun research using multiple crosses of rats selected either for tameness or ferality which had been obtained from Belyaev's Institute in Novosibirsk. He's on the search for the genetic foundations for tameness or domestication. His hope is to find this "genetic architecture" in his rat model and discover that the same, or similar genes, are involved in the distinction between bonobos and chimps, other domesticated animals, even us. He's just let me know that his group has made some headway. As the above abstract explains, they have identified two significant QTLs (quantitative trait loci that are areas of a particular chromosome that associate with tameness. The key genes will be within these QTLs). These loci, he says, overlap with a QTL for adrenal gland weight - suggesting a link with corticosteroid hormones associated with fight and flight - and a QTL for anxiety-related traits. All very encouraging....

Siberian Jays Use Complex Alarm Calls

Scientists from Uppsala University, studying Siberian jays, have discovered that they have evolved a complex system of alarm calls every bit as sophisticated as those of primates and meerkats. When mobbing a predator they utter calls that vary according to both the level of risk the predator poses and whether or not the species concerned is a strong predator on jays. For instance, they have calls specific to hawks and owls, two main jay predators. Their calls also vary dependent on the social constitution of the mobbing jays. Family group calls are different to calls when the jays are unrelated, for instance. This is yet another aspect of the complex cognition we have come to associate with the corvid family of birds.

Knife Gangs And The "Warrior Gene".

In the penultimate chapter of "Not A Chimp" I discuss the likely role of genetic variants of four key neurotransmitter and neurohormone chemicals in the brain in underpinning the range of temperaments and personality types we see in human society. They are the four legs, as I see it, to a comprehensive "bio-social" theory of human society. One of those substances, called monoamine oxidase (MAO), is involved in the regulation of two key neurotransmitters - dopamine and serotonin - and abnormalities in MAO have long been linked to violence and aggression. Now a team of American scientists lead by Kevin Beaver, a biosocial criminologist of Florida State University, has suggested that carriers of the low activity "short repeat" variant of the MAOA gene are more likely than others to join gangs and sport weapons. In fact, the presence of this gene variant in young males actually predicts gang membership. And within gangs, carriers of this short repeat were "markedly more likely to behave violently and use weapons". Previous research has shown that carriers of this short repeat are prone to violence, especially where alcohol and provocation are involved, while, in New Zealand, a large longitudinal study of children maltreated when young showed that carriers of the short repeat variant of MAOA were more likely to develop into violent, anti-social individuals later in life, whereas carriers of the alternative "long repeat" variant were much more likely to be able to endure the vicissitudes - the slings and arrows of life - without going seriously off the rails. Not for nothing has this short variant been dubbed "the warrior gene".