At a family get-together, I went for a walk with my brother-in-law, a surgeon, and his dog, “Quizzie. Quizzie stayed about 30 or 40 feet in front of us, with her nose to the pavement in front of her. She was the most evident topic of conversation, and Geoff and I fell to talking about the evolutionary episode that brought dogs and humans together.
The conventional wisdom here, I think, is that dogs predisposed to human contact vastly increased their chances for survival and that the “domesticated gene got selected in. I think it is probably true that the human communities predisposed to canine contact also increased their chances of survival. While we were selecting them, they were selecting us. They are hard wired to like us. We are hard wired to like them. The relationship is a shared genetic endowment. We might say its a mutual genetic endowment.
But as we talked, a larger possibility occurred to us: that dogs may have allowed the human species to engage in a certain “farming out of the evolutionary process. Once dogs were a dependable part of the human community, they gave us extraordinary powers of sight and smell we no longer needed to supply for ourselves. This freed us to use the evolutionary episode to master other abilities, chiefly higher cognitive ones. (I dont know the physiology here, but I expect having a chemical laboratory in your nose takes up quite a lot of skull space.) And we could now use these cognitive abilities undistracted by the “Wait, was that a sound? Whoa, what sound was that? vigilance that is the dogs life. In the immortal words of Michael O’Donoghue, you can listen good or you can think good, and if you have to choose, its better to think good.
So, anyhow, yesterday, I got an email a friend in the capital markets who specializes in the tech sector and he asked me to comment on satellite radio, an emerging sector about which he has some doubts. Heres what I said to him in the return email:
I think satellite radio adds value by disintermediating the consumer’s access to good music. Without this delivery system, I have to find, evaluate and chose the music I like. Then I have to buy, digitize and manage this music.
Satellite radio gives me “just in time” delivery across a large spectrum of musical taste. To this extent, it seems to make good on the promise that Larry Ellison was pushing for software a few years ago: that we should only have dumb terminals with all of our software and files residing somewhere on line.
What satellite radio lacks, perhaps permanently, is the ability for me to push a button and identify a particular song I want to add to my personal rotation.
For a consumer taste point of view, it’s as if we are moving in two directions: towards much more novelty (lots more new music and more kinds of music) AND towards more repetition. Satellite works for the first but not the second. Hope this helps.
It seems to be that what satellite radio does for music, Google does for information. “Just in time access is the coming thing. Once technology releases us from having to find, sort, choose, embrace, and remember our music (or knowledge), does it also open up another “farming out of the evolutionary process. We have already seen that faster, easier access to cultural materials has encouraged and enabled the construction of larger and more complicated personal identities. What difference will it make to the way we think?
No, really, Im asking. Or, as we sometimes say in the tri-state area, “Im asking here.
That is one hell of a good question.
I’m finding myself “farming out” my memory to Google and IMDB a lot more recently; it’s just so much easier to just find out instead of racking my aging brain! As to the overall evolutionary impact of this behavior, I’m uncertain. But I do know it frees me from a lot of thinking that often felt pointless; I mean, after all that, it turns out the name of the movie was “Laura,” just like the song. How much more effective and efficient just go to Google and type in “movie song laura” than to waste hours trying to remember if it really was something else.
It’s an interesting idea. But humans haven’t had any evolutionary steps for hunderds of thousands of years. Evolution is an exceptionally slow proces and humans haven’t really “evolved” anything since the time they befriended dogs, or the comming of the computer. Still it is an interesting idea indeed.
We already are sharing our cookies, table scraps and symbiotic relationships, and now we are farming out our evolution… I wonder if dogs evolve more quicky in Asia because of the selective pressures of dog stew (also known as yon-yang-tang or po-shin-tang). Teach a dog to stew and you feed someone for a day. Teach a dog to surf the Internet and the possibilities are fetchingly endless….
apnews.excite.com/article/20050413/D89EPV580.html
New Cookies Let Dogs Share With Owners
Not an evolutionary process, but a cultural one.
I can google the information needed to accomplish my job, in most cases far quicker than I can look them up in my own technical document set. This is a force multiplier (to use military cant) – I’m faster and better than if I were to rely on our internal docs only.
This is a good thing, in a dymanic culture like ours.
How’s the quality of Satellite Radio? I’m a big fan of novelty – which is why I love radio and why I’m frustrated to see playlists shrink. My worry is that Satellite Radio will be the cable TV of radio – 100 channels with nothing on, each of which are using a fairly narrow definition of consumer taste, none of which are doing anything quirky or experimental. The blanding and dumbing down of consumer offerings. Recently I discovered Radio Paradise on the internet. When in my car I listen to the one college station with eclectic programming. But in general, I’m starved.
How’s the quality of Satellite Radio? I’m a big fan of novelty – which is why I love radio and why I’m frustrated to see playlists shrink. My worry is that Satellite Radio will be the cable TV of radio – 100 channels with nothing on, each of which are using a fairly narrow definition of consumer taste, none of which are doing anything quirky or experimental. The blanding and dumbing down of consumer offerings. Recently I discovered Radio Paradise on the internet. When in my car I listen to the one college station with eclectic programming. But in general, I’m starved.
Aldo:
Actually, there is some evidence that humans gave up some cranial capacity when we teamed up with dogs. Neanderthal humans had larger brains than modern humans, but they apparently never teamed up with dogs. Modern humans did (and it may have been a looong time ago) and they might very well have leg go of some capacity that was farmed out to dogs.
Interestingly, dogs may have done the same thing. Dog’s brains are smaller than wolves’ brains and the speculation is that they farmed out some of their needs to humans.
This subject is discussed in some length in Temple Grandin’s book Animals in Translation.
If humans and machines become symbiotic for an evolutionary time period, I expect something similar to happen.
Rob, splendid, thanks, Grant
I have XM radio, and while I enjoy the non-music channels quite a bit, I can’t agree that they provide access to “good” music. Most of the music they play is the bottom of the musical gene pool. They have “decade” stations – one that plays 40’s music, one that plays 50’s music, etc. They don’t play the hits so much. More like the misses.
And a morning commute listening to the 60’s or 70’s stations is enough to convince you those decades had really, really poor taste.
The Panasonic XM receiver in my truck has a button that enables me to display the channel I’m listening to, the artist, and the song being played. I’ve bought numerous CDs by having this feature available by looking up the artist/song on the All Music Guide (the musical equivalent of the Internet Movie Database). Also, I politely disagree with the other John Hawkins on the quality of the music programming on XM: I listen to the Jazz, American Songbook, Blues, and traditional country channels and I find the selections varied and eminently listenable. Programming that includes my favorite jazz guitarists, Chuck Loeb and Larry Carlton, in frequent rotation is my idea of “can’t miss” radio. Of course, your mileage may vary in finding music that appeals to your personal taste.