| | This interesting TIME article compares the thought-processes of dogs, wolves, chimps, and humans.
The following paragraphs from the article,
(summarizing how humans created dogs out of wolves, then discussing how human babies, dogs, and wolves approach a particular cognitive task)
may particularly interest those who think about psycho-epistemology and the origins of social metaphysics:
"As humans became better at hunting, they left scraps around their gathering spots. When they departed, the ancestors of dogs could move in. At first, when humans and wolves came into contact, many of the animals ran away. Others lashed out and were killed. Only the affable animals had the temperament to become camp followers, and their new supply of food let them produce affable puppies. "They selected themselves," says [cognitive scientist Alexandra] Horowitz.
"Once dogs became comfortable in our company, humans began to speed up dogs' social evolution. They may have started by giving extra food to helpful dogs--ones that barked to warn of danger, say. Dogs that paid close attention to humans got more rewards and eventually became partners with humans, helping with hunts or herding other animals. Along the way, the dogs' social intelligence became eerily like ours, and not just in their ability to follow a pointed finger. Indeed, they even started to make very human mistakes.
"A team led by cognitive scientist Josef Topál of the Research Institute for Psychology in Hungary recently ran an experiment to study how 10-month-old babies pay attention to people. The scientists put a toy under one of two cups and then let the children choose which cup to pick up. The children, of course, picked the right cup--no surprise since they saw the toy being hidden. Topál and his colleagues repeated the trial several times, always hiding the toy under the same cup, until finally they hid it under the other one. Despite the evidence of their eyes, the kids picked the original cup--the one that had hidden the toy before but did not now.
"To investigate why the kids made this counterintuitive mistake, the scientists rigged the cups to wires and then lowered them over the toy. Without the distraction of a human being, the babies were far more likely to pick the right cup. Small children, it seems, are hardwired to pay such close attention to people that they disregard their other observations. Topál and his colleagues ran the same experiment on dogs--and the results were the same. When they administered the test to wolves, however, the animals did not make the mistake the babies and dogs did. They relied on their own observations rather than focusing on a human."
/1/
If "small children ... are hardwired" for social metaphysics, what implications does this have for Objectivism?
/2/
If -- as this experiment suggests -- one psychological (or psycho-epistemological) difference between a dog and a wolf is the presence or absence of some form of social metaphysics
(the wolves "relied on their own observations" -- the dogs and the babies didn't, when they had a human to follow instead),
does this mean that a wolf is in some sense a "first-hander" while a dog is a "second-hander" because humans have bred the dog into that state?
/3/
If humans have managed (over generations) to change an entire species (dogs) from first-handers into second-handers
(by accidentally -- then intentionally --
creating conditions which encouraged the second-handers, but not the first-handers, to flourish and to reproduce their kind),
could it have happened (over generations) that humans have changed *each* other* from first-handers into second-handers (as with dogs: by accidentally and/or intentionally creating social conditions which made it easy for a second-hander to prosper, but hard for a first-hander to do so?)
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