The domestication of dogs and translation

This post, along with a few others I will try to gather into a coherent series, strongly suggest that animals' (including humans') perception and knowledge are essentially adaptive in nature. Basically this means we perceive and know what we need to perceive and know, and not much more. And this (believe it or not) is highly relevant for translation, as I will try to point out later.

First, Michael Tomasello (a cognitive scientist I greatly admire) does various experiments which seem to show that dogs have been "evolved" (domesticated) by humans in a relatively short period of time to cooperate with us in ways other even more closely related mammals (like chimpanzees) do not. Specifically, dogs seem to understand human pointing, while chimpanzees do not.

But Franz de Waal, another cognitive researcher for whom I have the utmost admiration, comes to what appear to be quite different conclusions on the basis of another study from Austria comparing dogs and wolves. While former researchers had concluded that dogs were the only animals able to follow a human gaze or pointing, this study shows that various rather intelligent species (apes, rooks, ravens, wolves) can follow a far gaze of a human rather easily, and even better than do dogs.

Furthermore, wolves seem to be indisputably better at various other problem-solving tasks than are dogs:

Yet even these refinements to earlier domestication theories need to be refined further. Dogs seem to be better that other animals at following human close eye gaze and pointing, and even can react to a human closing his or her eyes (see the video at the end of the first link above).

So, the bottom line appears to be that rather than being simply more or less intelligent than others, various animals' cognitive abilities have simply adapted to what they need to perceive and know. This of course includes humans, to whom we will return in another post (see below):

While this result may seem so obvious as to be banal, it is (at least in part) the foundation of a communication theory which is based on adaptation and interaction rather than (primarily) information exchange. Stay tuned...