Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the topics that we've talked about frequently on the podcast is the nature of intelligence, especially, of course, because we're thinking these days about artificial intelligence. Is that a good label? At what point are AI programs counting as intelligence?

But even when you put that aside, just thinking about human intelligence and other

intelligences in the natural world, there are certainly senses in which human beings as a species

are different than other species.

We're the only species that has podcasts and invented calculus and things like that. But is that a single fundamental difference between human beings and other species? Or is it an accumulation of many things? Or is it just something that we got there first in some sense?

Different aspects of humanity have been suggested as the origin of our differences,

tool use, language use, maybe even how we speak in the shape of our throats and esophaguses,

sheer brain power, number of neurons, social organization,

but none of it seems to be quite the thing that tells the difference. So obviously one attack, one is strategy to think about this question is to better understand

animals and what they can do, how they are similar to human beings,

how they are different than human beings, et cetera. And not just in intelligence, because

intelligence is not just one thing. There's different ways to be intelligent, different

skills you can have. And also, there are other aspects of social life that are related to intelligence, but not exactly the same thing.

Today's guest, Erica Cartmill, is an anthropologist, cognitive scientist, and also animal behavior scientist, an interdisciplinary person.

And she studies different aspects of animal behavior and intelligence.

In particular, the idea of animals playing with each other, animals teasing each other, animals having a sense of humor.

This might seem like a kind of simple and trivial thing at first, but when you think about it, the idea of telling a joke, as we do for human

beings, is a pretty sophisticated idea. It's a social construct in some ways, because when

you tell a joke, you're setting things up, which gives people your listeners, your audience,

expectations, and then you subvert the expectations at the end.

So that's actually a kind of a subtle move for an intelligent creature to make.

Certainly dogs and cats and things like that play with us, you know, they play fetch or whatever.

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