Has living with the human race affected how canine intelligence has evolved?

The canine and human species have lived side by side successfully for millennia, and our evolution side by side is inextricably linked together as a result.

What started as a relationship of convenience to enhance both species’ chances of ultimate survival has today moved far beyond the realms of logistical necessity, into a symbiotic relationship of mutual companionship and appreciation that has endured far beyond its term of necessity for either species.

Close contact and association with humans has had a direct and sometimes deliberate and acute influence on the canine species as a whole; and in some breeds in particular, like the French bulldog and English bulldog. The flat faces and large heads of both breeds results from deliberate selective breeding on the part of humans; to the point that around 80% of all dogs of both breeds need to deliver young by caesarean section, and some dogs of these breeds require assistance to mate too.

This means that certain dog breeds like these would be highly unlikely to survive in the wild today if humans were eradicated entirely; and even the very concept of dog breeds and selective breeding is a human creation itself!

The impact and influence that humanity has had over the evolution of dogs and dog breeds goes much further than just the physical, however, and from an evolutionary perspective, the influence that living with humans has had on canine intelligence is truly fascinating in and of itself.

Dogs are one of the most commonly used species in research and study into mental processes like cognition, awareness, memory, perception, and the ability to learn, and dogs have been hugely integral in many studies that are today, accepted and taught worldwide as the basis of our understanding the psyche; like those now-famous Pavlovian dogs!

However, whilst most research into the mind that used dogs as its test subjects was designed to return results that could be applied to humans, a number of interesting results that pertain exclusively or particularly to dogs have occurred along the way – some of which were a huge surprise to the researchers undertaking the studies in question, and which may well be a surprise to you too!

With this in mind, this article will look at a couple of the ways in which living side by side with people has directly impacted upon canine intelligence, and how canine intelligence has evolved as a result of this. Read on to learn more.

Social-cognitive development

Social cognitive abilities are the abilities a species demonstrates and learns to understand social interactions; the norms or acceptable behaviours, and the ability to understand, interpret, and get on with others that they are in regular contact with. Usually this applies to others of the same species; but may apply to other species too that are a regular part of their social interactions, as is the case with dogs and humans.

If you’ve ever watched wildlife programs narrated to explain how social groups of animals communicate and interact together, you have already seen this in action, and programs of this type that feature different ape species are some of the most popular of all.

You might fairly assume that the social-cognitive development of the various great ape species are those most similar to us as humans, for obvious reasons – and yet domestic dogs have been found to demonstrate a specific number of social-cognitive abilities shared with humans alone, and which neither other canine species, nor our own close human relatives like the great apes possess!

These specific social-cognitive skills are most similar to those developed by human children than any other species, and we’re not quite sure how far this applies or what it means.

But one school of thought is that this is a demonstration of convergent evolution, which is the term used when two unrelated species evolve with a similar skill, trait or physical change as a result of facing a similar problem.

One example of this is webbed feet – as seen on ducks and other waterfowl, amphibious reptiles – and some canine species with an affinity for water, like the Newfoundland dog.

In terms of the social-cognitive development of dogs, their shared traits with us but with neither respective species’ closest genetic relatives could be an example of psychological convergence.

Lost intelligence

As mentioned earlier on, some of today’s domestic dog breeds would find it virtually impossible to survive in the wild, or in a world without humans, as a result of the way humans have impacted upon their physical traits and inadvertently compromised their evolutionary fitness.

However, living in close quarters with humans for millennia may well also have resulted in other and more subtle changes in how this might affect domestic dogs in the wild – and over time, some of their historical cognitive skills may have become eroded as a result of living with and alongside of humans for so long.

This is an evolutionary process that sees traits that a species no longer needs or benefits from gradually being eroded over millennia – and is why humans have tailbones, but no tails!

When it comes to dogs, they have certainly gained some additional skills and intelligence along the course of their exposure to us, like the social-cognitive skills mentioned above, but they’ve also lost out in some respects too.

The Dingo, for instance – a wild canine species, Canis dingo in contrast to the domestic dog’s Canis lupus familairis – is better at problem solving and working things through alone than our own pet dogs are when you remove them from a social setting. When it comes to working out social problems, domestic dogs beat dingoes.

Additional studies also showed the difference between wolves and dogs in terms of the type of problem-solving abilities they display and their reliance on humans. Both species were trained to solve a simple task, then presented with an apparently identical task that was rigged to be impossible to complete.

The dogs in the experiment looked to the people nearly for direction and help, whilst the wolves, of course, did not! This indicates that the dog relies upon humans to fix things, resolve issues and ultimately, provide solutions for them, and expects humans to have all the answers – whilst wolves would not even thing of doing this, nor imagine that humans might be either able or willing to help them.

Dogs still retain their survival instincts

In terms of the standalone chances of a species’ survival in an evolutionary sense, being as reliant on humans as dogs are is not a good thing. That looking to humans for solutions, inability of some domestic dog species to survive and thrive without humans, and better communication skills with people than with other closely related species are all in many ways a bad thing for dogs in terms of the species’ standalone ability to care for itself alone in the wild.

However, even given this fact, a 2014 genome study to identify the differences between dogs and wolves on a DNA level indicated that dogs and wolves have just as acute theoretical fear responses – a vital trait for evolutionary survival – but that dogs also showed a greater level of synaptic plasticity.

Synaptic plasticity, put simply, is thought to be the physical cellular expression of the process of learning and retaining memories, and indicates that dogs are more adaptive in this respect than wolves, and that as a species, they can mentally adapt faster in evolutionary terms than their other close relatives.

However, the fact that dogs diverge from wolves in terms of synaptic plasticity at all indicates that the ability dogs have to learn and remember things itself has irrevocably changed and evolved as a direct result of their relationships with humans.