After fire, the dog was the first companion to man. Unlike fire, though, man did more than tame the dog; he invented the dog. Recent formal experiments have demonstrated that dogs can read human gestures in a way that their cousins—wolves—simply cannot. How is it that dogs seem to understand us so well? It seems likely that this talent is simply the result of thousands of years of behavior modification through breeding.
Who is to say that some perceptiveness has not been engineered into dogs with all this behavioral programming? Just as man has been watching fire for a hundred millennia, so the dog has been watching man.
If a species can be engineered to respond to human gestures, is it not being engineered to perceive human gestures at the same time? And what a creature can perceive, it can also feel. We, for instance, may be slaves to our behavior, but even if that is true, we are passionately engaged in that behavior. Are dogs so different from us that we imagine that they cannot feel what they perceive?
This is not to suggest that this perceptiveness is due to a human-like intelligence, or that we can ever understand or appreciate the feelings of another species, but we ought not suppose that no awareness is there.
The dog might be seen as a genetically-engineered mirror, tuned to reflect feelings that we are generally oblivious to. In this sense, we may have much to learn from the dog.
Can a more impressive technology be imagined?
In some cultures, the dog is elevated to a nearly human status. Ancient Iranians recognized the dog as a human species, and gave the dog a unique place in their burial rituals. It was thought by the Iranians that a dog could better distinguish between the living and the dead than a man could.
This ancient partnership has broken down among some cultures—take for example the Arabs, yet even the Arabs appear to have once had a close relationship with the dog.
1 Trackback to "Coevolution"