Many Minds

What happens to animals when they get sick? If they’re pets or livestock, we probably call the vet. And the vet may give them drugs or perform a procedure. But what about wild animals? Do they just languish in misery? Well, not so much. It turns out that animals—from bees to butterflies, porcupines to primates—medicate themselves. They seek out bitter plants, they treat wounds, they amputate limbs, they eat clay—the list goes on. This all raises an obvious question: How do they know to do this? How do they know what they know about healing and medicine? It also invites a related question: How do we humans know what we know?   My guests today are Dr. Jaap De Roode and Dr. Michael Huffman. Jaap is a biologist at Emory University, and has studied animal medication in insects; he’s also the author of a forthcoming book about animal medication across the tree of life. Mike is a primatologist at the University of Nagasaki, and made some of the very first observations about animal self-medication in chimpanzees in the 1980s.   Here, Jaap, Mike, and I talk about how they found their way into this field, in both cases kind of by accident. We discuss what defines animal medication generally as well as what defines its more specific subtypes—social medication, allomedication, prophylactic medication, and others. We consider how animals know what they know about healing—whether these medicinal behaviors are mostly driven by innate tendencies, by individual experimentation, by social learning, or by some combination. We talk about the evidence that many of the medical insights that humans have had over the years actually began with observations of animals. Along the way, we touch on medicinal amputation and medicinal cannibalism, geophagy, leaf-folding in primates, animal quackery, bear medicine, why lemurs rub themselves with millipedes, and the anti-parasitic power of cigarette butts.   Alright, friends, this is a fun one. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.      Notes and links   3:00 – A paper describing how birds in Mexico City line their nests with cigarette butts. A follow-up experiment showing that they do so in response to increased presence of parasites.   7:30 – Dr. Huffman’s original study of self-medication by a chimpanzee, using Vernonia amygdalina in Tanzania.   15:00 – Dr. de Roode’s study on “transgenerational medicine” in monarch butterflies.   20:00 – For an overview of animal medication, including definitions and examples of its subtypes, see this recent primer by Dr. de Roode and Dr. Huffman.   25:00 – The recent study on “medicinal amputation” in ants. The recent study on “medicinal cannibalism” in ants.   30:00 –  For an overview of medication in insects, see this recent paper by Dr. de Roode and colleagues.   34:00 – The paper by Mascaro and colleagues showing that chimpanzees treat wounds (to the self and others) by applying insects.   38:00 – A recent review of geophagy—soil eating—in primates by Paula Pebsworth, Dr. Huffman, and colleagues.     43:00 – A paper by Dr. Huffman and colleagues on chimpanzee leaf-swallowing in the wild. Dr. Huffman later did a series of experimental studies on this behavior, investigating the role of social learning—see here and here.   46:00 – An article on how goats learn to eat what they eat.         52:00 – An article describing the medicinal properties of Vernonia amygdalina.   54:00 ­– A study showing that lemurs rub each other with millipedes in a possible case of animal medication.   57:00 – A paper by Dr. Huffman in which he describes the use of mulengelele by a sick porcupine. A recent review by Dr. Huffman of what traditional healers have learned from observations of animal medication.   1:01:00 – An article about propolis and its medicinal use in bees; an article about its medicinal potential in humans.       Recommendations Doctors by Nature, Jaap de Roode (forthcoming) Wild Health, Cindy Engel Nourishment, Fred Provenza ‘Five clever animals that treat and prevent their own illnesses,’ National Geographic     Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala.   Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].    For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

The machines are coming. Scratch that—they're already here: AIs that propose new combinations of ideas; chatbots that help us summarize texts or write code; algorithms that tell us who to friend or follow, what to watch or read. For a while the reach of intelligent machines may have seemed somewhat limited. But not anymore—or, at least, not for much longer. The presence of AI is growing, accelerating, and, for better or worse, human culture may never be the same.    My guest today is Dr. Iyad Rahwan. Iyad directs the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Iyad is a bit hard to categorize. He's equal parts computer scientist and artist; one magazine profile described him as "the Anthropologist of AI." Labels aside, his work explores the emerging relationships between AI, human behavior, and society. In a recent paper, Iyad and colleagues introduced a framework for understanding what they call "machine culture." The framework offers a way of thinking about the different routes through which AI may transform—is transforming—human culture.    Here, Iyad and I talk about his work as a painter and how he brings AI into the artistic process. We discuss whether AIs can make art by themselves and whether they may eventually develop good taste. We talk about how AIphaGoZero upended the world of Go and about how LLMs might be changing how we speak. We consider what AIs might do to cultural diversity. We discuss the field of cultural evolution and how it provides tools for thinking about this brave new age of machine culture. Finally, we discuss whether any spheres of human endeavor will remain untouched by AI influence.    Before we get to it, a humble request: If you're enjoying the show—and it seems that many of you are—we would be ever grateful if you could let the world know. You might do this by leaving a rating or review on Apple Podcasts, or maybe a comment on Spotify. You might do this by giving us a shout-out on the social media platform of your choice. Or, if you prefer less algorithmically mediated avenues, you might do this just by telling a friend about us face-to-face. We're hoping to grow the show and the best way to do that is through listener endorsements and word-of-mouth. Thanks in advance, friends.   Alright, on to my conversation with Dr. Iyad Rahwan. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:00 – Images from Dr. Rahwan's ‘Faces of Machine’ portrait series. One of the portraits from the series serves as our tile art for this episode. 11:30 – The “stochastic parrots” term comes from an influential paper by Emily Bender and colleagues. 18:30 – A popular article about DALL-E and the “avocado armchair.” 21:30 – Ted Chiang’s essay, “Why A.I. isn’t going to make art.” 24:00 – An interview with Boris Eldagsen, who won the Sony World Photography Awards in March 2023 with an image that was later revealed to be AI-generated.  28:30 – A description of the concept of “science fiction science.” 29:00 – Though widely attributed to different sources, Isaac Asimov appears to have developed the idea that good science fiction predicts not the automobile, but the traffic jam.  30:00 – The academic paper describing the Moral Machine experiment. You can judge the scenarios for yourself (or design your own scenarios) here. 30:30 – An article about the Nightmare Machine project; an article about the Deep Empathy project. 37:30 – An article by Cesar Hidalgo and colleagues about the relationship between television/radio and global celebrity. 41:30 – An article by Melanie Mitchell (former guest!) on AI and analogy. A popular piece about that work.   42:00 – A popular article describing the study of whether AIs can generate original research ideas. The preprint is here. 46:30 – For more on AlphaGo (and its successors, AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero), see here. 48:30 – The study finding that the novelty of human Go playing increased due to the influence of AlphaGo. 51:00 – A blogpost delving into the idea that ChatGPT overuses certain words, including “delve.” A recent preprint by Dr. Rahwan and colleagues, presenting evidence that “delve” (and other words overused by ChatGPT) are now being used more in human spoken communication.  55:00 – A paper using simulations to show how LLMs can “collapse” when trained on data that they themselves generated.  1:01:30 – A review of the literature on filter bubbles, echo chambers, and polarization. 1:02:00 – An influential study by Dr. Chris Bail and colleagues suggesting that exposure to opposing views might actually increase polarization.  1:04:30 – A book by Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen, who are often credited with developing the idea of “generalized Darwinism” in the social sciences.  1:12:00 – An article about Google’s NotebookLM podcast-like audio summaries. 1:17:3 0 – An essay by Ursula LeGuin on children’s literature and the Jungian “shadow.”    Recommendations The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich “Machine Behaviour,” Iyad Rahwan et al.   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

IQ is, to say the least, a fraught concept. Psychologists have studied IQ—or g for “general cognitive ability”—maybe more than any other psychological construct. And they’ve learned some interesting things about it. That it's remarkably stable over the lifespan. That it really is general: people who ace one test of intellectual ability tend to ace others. And that IQs have risen markedly over the last century. At the same time, IQ seems to be met with increasing squeamishness, if not outright disdain, in many circles. It's often seen as crude, misguided, reductive—maybe a whole lot worse. There's no question, after all, that IQ has been misused—that it still gets misused—for all kinds of racist, classist, colonialist purposes. As if this wasn't all thorny enough, the study of IQ is also intimately bound up with the study of genetics. It's right there in the roiling center of debates about how genes and environment make us who we are. So, yeah, what to make of all this? How should we be thinking about IQ? My guest today is Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Eric is Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He has studied intelligence and many other complex human traits for decades, and he's a major figure in the field of “behavior genetics.” Eric also has a new book out this fall—which I highly recommend—titled Understanding the Nature-Nurture Debate. In a field that has sometimes been accused of rampant optimism, Eric is—as you'll hear—a bit more measured. In this conversation, Eric and I focus on intelligence and its putatively genetic basis. We talk about why Eric doubts that we are anywhere close to an account of the biology of IQ. We discuss what makes intelligence such a formidable construct in psychology and why essentialist understandings of it are so intuitive. We talk about Francis Galton and the long shadow he’s cast on the study of human behavior. We discuss the classic era of Twin Studies—an era in which researchers started to derive quantitative estimates of the heritability of complex traits. We talk about how the main takeaway from that era was that genes are quite important indeed, and about how more genetic techniques suggest that takeaway may have been a bit simplistic. Along the way, Eric and I touch on spelling ability, child prodigies, the chemical composition of money, the shared quirks of twins reared apart, the Flynn Effect, the Reverse Flynn Effect, birth order, the genetics of height, the problem of missing heritability, whether we should still be using IQ scores, and the role of behavior genetics in the broader social sciences.  Alright folks, lots in here—let's just get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Eric Turkheimer. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 3:30 – The 1994 book The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein a Charles Murray, dealt largely with the putative social implications of IQ research. It was extremely controversial and widely discussed. For an overview of the book and controversy, see the Wikipedia article here. 6:00 – For discussion of the “all parents are environmentalists…” quip, see here. 12:00 – The notion of “multiple intelligences” was popularized by the psychologist Howard Gardner—see here for an overview. See here for an attempt to test the claims of the “multiple intelligences” framework using some of the methods of traditional IQ research. For work on EQ (or Emotional Intelligence) see here. 19:00 – Dr. Turkheimer has also laid out his spelling test analogy in a Substack post. 22:30 – Dr. Turkheimer’s 1998 paper, “Heritability and Biological Explanation.” 24:30 – For an in-passing treatment of the processing efficiency idea, see p. 195 of Daniel Nettle’s book Personality. See also Richard Haier’s book, The Neuroscience of Intelligence. 26:00 – The original study on the relationship between pupil size and intelligence. A more recent study that fails to replicate those findings. 31:00 – For an argument that child prodigies constitute an argument for “nature,” see here. For a memorable narrative account of one child prodigy, see here. 32:00 – A meta-analysis of the Flynn effect. We have previously discussed the Flynn Effect in an episode with Michael Muthukrishna. 37:00 – James Flynn’s book, What is Intelligence? On the reversal of the Flynn Effect, see here. 40:00 – The phrase “nature-nurture” originally comes from Shakespeare and was picked up by Francis Galton. In The Tempest, Prospero describes Caliban as “a born devil on whose nature/ Nurture can never stick.” 41:00 – For a biography of Galton, see here. For an article-length account of Galton’s role in the birth of eugenics, see here. 50:00 – For an account of R.A. Fisher’s 1918 paper and its continuing influence, see here. 55:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer’s paper on the “nonshared environment”—E in the ACE model. 57:00 – A study coming out of the Minnesota Study of Twins reared apart. A New York Times article recounting some of the interesting anecdata in the Minnesota Study. 1:00:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer’s 2000 paper on the “three laws of behavior genetics.” Note that this is not, in fact, Dr. Turkheimer’s most cited paper (though it is very well cited). 1:03:00 – For another view of the state of behavior genetics in the postgenomic era, see here. 1:11:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer’s work on poverty, heritability, and IQ, see here. 1:13:00 – A recent large-scale analysis of birth order effects on personality. 1:16:00 – For Dr. Turkheimer’s take on the missing heritability problem, see here and here.    1:19:00 – A recent study on the missing heritability problem in the case of height. 1:30:00 – On the dark side of IQ, see Chapter 9 of Dr. Turkheimer’s book. See also Radiolab’s series on g. 1:31:00 – See Dr. Turkheimer’s Substack, The Gloomy Prospect.   Recommendations The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden Intelligence, Stuart Ritchie Intelligence and How to Get It, Richard Nisbett ‘Why our IQ levels are higher than our grandparents’’ (Ted talk), James Flynn   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected]. For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).

Forests have always been magical places. But in the last couple decades, they seem to have gotten a little more magical. We've learned that trees are connected to each other through a vast underground network—an internet of roots and fungi often called the "wood wide web". We've learned that, through this network, trees share resources with each other. And we've learned that so-called mother trees look out for their own offspring, preferentially sharing resources with them. There's no question that this is all utterly fascinating. But what if it's also partly a fantasy? My guest today is Dr. Justine Karst. Justine is a forest ecologist at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on mycorrhizas—these are the symbioses formed between fungi and plant roots that are thought to be the basis of the "wood wide web." Last year, Justine and colleagues published a perspective piece in which they argued that some of the claims around the wood wide web have gotten out of hand. These new ideas about forests, they argued, have gotten decoupled from the actual on-the-ground—or under-the-ground—science. In reality, it’s a field still riddled with unknowns and mixed findings. Here, Justine and I do a bit of mycorrhiza 101—we talk about what mycorrhizas are, how they evolved, and what the structures actually look like. We discuss the original 1997 study that inspired the term "wood wide web." We consider why it's so hard to figure out what's actually going on, mechanistically, under the forest floor. We discuss the increasingly popular notion of plant intelligence and what it means to empirical researchers in this area like Justine. We talk about why people—both members of the public and scientists themselves—have found wood wide web ideas so charming. And, finally, we discuss the question of whether a little bit of hype is really so bad—particularly if it gets people excited about forests, about science, and about conservation. I got as excited about the "wood wide web" as anyone. The idea totally captured my imagination a couple of years ago. So I was intrigued—if also a little dismayed—to learn recently that these ideas were getting some pushback. And I knew immediately we should talk to one of the researchers leading that pushback. Alright friends, let's get to it. On to my conversation with Dr. Justine Karst. Enjoy!   A transcript of this episode is available here.   Notes and links 5:00 – Popular treatments sometimes mentioned as over-hyping the wood wide web (and associated ideas) include The Hidden Life of Trees, Finding the Mother Tree, and the novel The Overstory. 9:30 – The landmark 1997 paper by Simard et al. that kicked off interest in the so-called wood wide web. 11:00 – A study showing that fungi are more closely related to animals than to plants. 11:30 – For more on the new interest in “plant intelligence” see our previous episodes here and here. On the notion of “fungal intelligence,” see here. 18:00 – A 1975 paper presenting a hypothesis about the origins of land plants. 20:00 – The California “mushroom bible” mentioned. 23:00 – A brief post (and infographic) on the differences between arbuscular mycorrhizas and ectomycorrhizas. 23:30 – Richard Powers’ influential novel, The Overstory. Note that the novel doesn’t exclusively focus on the wood wide web; it covers ideas and findings about trees and forests, many of which are uncontroversial. 36:00 – Dr. Karst co-authored her perspective piece in Nature Ecology & Evolution with Dr. Melanie Jones and Dr. Jason Hoeksema. 50:00 – For more on aspens and how they constitute clonal organisms, see here. 52:00 – The “mother tree” idea was popularized in Dr. Suzanne Simard’s book, Finding the Mother Tree. 1:04:00 – Another recent critique of the wood wide web and mother tree idea is here. In it the authors write: “Reaching out to the general public to make people care about forests is certainly a praiseworthy goal, but not when it involves the dissemination of a distorted view of the plant world. In other words: the end does not justify the means.” 1:05:30 – Others influenced by The Overstory include Barack Obama and Bill Gates. 1:09:00 – A primer on myco-heterotrophic plants. 1:13:00 – See a recent presentation by Dr. Jared Farmer on trees and “chronodiversity” here.   Recommendations ‘Seeing plants anew,’ Stella Stanford ‘Mother trees and socialist forests: Is the ‘wood-wide web’ a fantasy?’, Daniel Immerwahr   Many Minds is a project of the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, which is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Indiana University. The show is hosted and produced by Kensy Cooperrider, with help from Assistant Producer Urte Laukaityte and with creative support from DISI Directors Erica Cartmill and Jacob Foster. Our artwork is by Ben Oldroyd. Our transcripts are created by Sarah Dopierala. Subscribe to Many Minds on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Google Play, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also now subscribe to the Many Minds newsletter here! We welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. Feel free to email us at: [email protected].  For updates about the show, visit our website or follow us on Twitter (@ManyMindsPod) or Bluesky (@manymindspod.bsky.social).