G: The World's Smartest Animal

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

History, Science, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Society & Culture

4.6 • 44.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 2019

⏱️ 49 minutes

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Summary

This episode begins with a rant. This rant, in particular, comes from Dan Engber - a science writer who loves animals but despises animal intelligence research. Dan told us that so much of the way we study animals involves tests that we think show a human is smart ... not the animals we intend to study. Dan’s rant got us thinking: What is the smartest animal in the world? And if we threw out our human intelligence rubric, is there a fair way to figure it out? Obviously, there is. And it’s a live game show, judged by Jad, Robert … and a dog. For the last episode of G, Radiolab’s miniseries on intelligence, we’re sharing that game show with you. It was recorded as a live show back in May 2019 at the Greene Space in New York City. We invited two science writers, Dan Engber and Laurel Braitman, and two comedians, Tracy Clayton and Jordan Mendoza, to compete against one another to find the world’s smartest animal. What resulted were a series of funny, delightful stories about unexpectedly smart animals and a shift in the way we think about intelligence across all the animals - including us. Check out the video of our live event here! This episode was produced by Rachael Cusick and Pat Walters, with help from Nora Keller and Suzie Lechtenberg. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Dorie Chevlin. Special thanks to Bill Berloni and Macy (the dog) and everyone at The Greene Space. Radiolab’s “G” is supported in part by Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative dedicated to engaging everyone with the process of science. Support Radiolab today at Radiolab.org/donate.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wait, you're listening.
0:03.1	Okay.
0:04.4	All right.
0:05.6	Okay.
0:07.0	All right.
0:08.5	You're listening to Radio Lab.
0:11.4	Radio Lab.
0:11.9	From W. N. Y.
0:13.9	C.
0:14.8	See?
0:15.1	Yeah.
0:22.7	Hey. This is Pat Walters.
0:29.4	Coming at you today with the final episode of our Radio Lab miniseries on Intelligence, G.
0:34.4	And so for this last episode, we wanted to shift the mood a little bit.
0:38.2	Because as we're putting this series together, we did lots of stories on human intelligence, but we also found ourselves thinking about intelligence in other animals.
0:44.6	And so to get into that, we decided to host an event all about animal intelligence. And today,
0:49.8	we're going to share that event with you. Just a quick warning, there are some curse words in the show,
0:55.9	so bear that in mind. So, and the reason that we're doing this is because a couple of months ago,
1:01.6	I ended up on the phone with the science writer I really love named Dan Engber. And Dan went on a rant
1:07.8	about how messed up it is that we only seem able to talk about animal intelligence in terms of our own intelligence.
1:14.8	He said so much of animal intelligence research is built on making animals do stuff that we feel like humans would be good at doing instead of considering their intelligence on their own terms.
1:27.6	And so tonight we decided we would do an episode about animal intelligence that shifts the focus
	...

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