Journal of Cell Biology Study Proves Researchers are Dumber Than Dogs...Again

Check out the picture above of my two dogs, one old and....one young. Can you 'read' their emotions? Would you like a treat?

Science has an uncanny way of finding what it's looking for. Take the results of the study just released at the journal of Cell Biology concluding that "dogs can tell happy faces from angry ones". Adding, "This is the first time solid evidence has been found to prove an animal can read the expressions of a totally different species."

How?

The researchers in Vienna trained [means treats of some sort] 11 dogs by showing them only the upper half or the lower half of a person’s face [then giving the treat if 'correct'] The undoubtedly sincere scientists concluded "that the dogs used their memories of real emotional human faces to accomplish the discrimination task."

IMO, what they proved is that they are dumber than the dogs.

Fortunately the journalist who wrote it up added one common sense bit at the end: "But anyone who has had a dog will tell you, they often know if you’re sad regardless of the expression on your face." .

i love dogs, and i know they can read the emotions of those around them far better than i can, they can also remember how to get treats and how to keep them coming. Dogs know just as much, or more, about 'training' than humans do. Dogs read a bigger part of the whole picture, body language, facial cues, tone of voice and inner/outer vibe. Dogs also happen to have one of the highest ratios of mirror neurons among all the creatures tested so far.

Science far to often eliminates the any broader focus by using a bias conditioned by endless babble about our human exceptionality. If anything is exceptional, everything is exceptional. Fortunately that means there's hope for humans because we have mirror neurons too. We're clever animals maybe, buy we're not exceptional, we share with our cousins the innate quality of animal altruism. Being open to the reality of altruism in animals can teach us much about ourselves far beyond what reductionist scientific reasoning can allow.