Brain evolution and behavioral adaptations in primates and canids

Erin Hecht’s lab studies brain evolution. Her research compares human brains to our closest primate relatives (chimpanzees) in order to understand what makes us unique.

Another area of research looks at different breeds of dogs as a natural experiment on how brains evolved new behaviors. For example, Erin Hecht tries to understand what makes Border Collie brains good at herding and Beagle brains good at following a scent.

She also studies experimentally domesticated foxes, which are a model of how wolves evolved into dogs and also to understand how humans became more socially tolerant in our own evolutionary history (“self domestication”).

Perhaps the most important adaptation in a human brain is that it’s wired in a way that allows us to watch what someone else is doing, reproduce that behavior, and then make incremental improvements on it. This is what’s called cumulative culture. And it’s what allowed us to go from making stone tool technology to spacecraft technology in an evolutionary eye blink, just a few thousand years. And for comparison, chimpanzee technology has remained basically frozen during that same time period. The evolutionary implications of this are profound. It means that we can inherit patterns of perception, cognition, and behavior not just through biological evolution like other animals, through our genes, but also through cultural transmission of words and ideas.