Cruftsgate
Nick, Peter and Fraser discuss what Cuftsgate tells us about classification and categorisation.
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast, where we look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making.
Speaker A:I'm Fraser McGrewer.
Speaker A:I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights.
Speaker A:And this week we're discussing Crufts Gate or Alsatian Gate, which is referring to the fact that recently at Crufts Best of Breed winner for Alsatians, we was.
Speaker A:I don't know if I can pronounce this.
Speaker A:Cruhair or Cruaghair Kattaria, which was an Alsatian dog which caused an uproar amongst the media because Adam massively sloping back because of potentially excessive inbreeding.
Speaker A:Okay, so Craftgate Alsatian gate.
Speaker A:Who's going to start us off, Peter or Nick?
Speaker B:So the domestication of animals and the selective breeding of animals is a very interesting study in human history.
Speaker B:If you think of domesticated animals as technologies, we referred to social technologies before, but they're specific technologies which humans have developed to answer certain needs.
Speaker B:So we eat some animals and we use other animals for other things.
Speaker B:Now, dogs, I think, were domesticated, I think around 15,000 BC.
Speaker B:The cats started to be domesticated in neolithic periods, around 10,000 BC.
Speaker B:So they're old technologies.
Speaker B:We've had them for a very long time.
Speaker B:Now.
Speaker B:There's a debate as to whether or not the phenotypes of dogs and cats have greater variation, but I think they have different uses and maybe dogs are more varied because dogs are just generally more useful animals.
Speaker B:They can provide more different functions because they're pack animals.
Speaker B:They behave differently as a sort of social crowd.
Speaker B:Whereas cats are solitary and tend to look after themselves.
Speaker B:So the fact that they've been around longer and they have more uses potentially means that they have more different types of breeds.
Speaker B:And I think it's a recent evolution that they've stopped being useful technologies and now they're bred and the phenotypes are exaggerated for purely aesthetic reasons.
Speaker A:So essentially, I've never heard of a dog referred to as being a technology before, but I like that.
Speaker A:That's good.
Speaker A:So it sounds like this is fairly widespread accepted view.
Speaker A:The reason why dogs look so different to one another, why there's so much variation within the species as compared to, say, cats is what you've just said is because they've been bred for different uses.
Speaker A:And that's why is that pretty much everyone kind of agrees with that.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker B:I think that's fairly well accepted, yeah.
Speaker B:I mean, cats.
Speaker B:Cats are useful for catching vermin and keeping vermin away from.
Speaker B:From your.
Speaker B:Your food stores and not much else.
Speaker B:Whereas dogs can do lots of other jobs.
Speaker B:They can ferreting, they can fetch, they can guard against wolves.
Speaker B:But it's recent that the technology has shifted to providing sort of comfort and another part of the family set and the aesthetics, pursuit of making dogs look a certain way, because that looks good.
Speaker C:I've got a qu.
Speaker C:I mean, I have probably worth saying that none of us are remotely experts on canine or feline genetics, but I just.
Speaker C:Peter, is it the case that if we really wanted to make a cat that had, you know, really long legs or, you know, huge teeth or something that could we do that?
Speaker C:Could we breed cats to be as different as dogs?
Speaker C:You know, the difference between a Chihuahua and a Great Dane?
Speaker C:Could we get that in cat form if we.
Speaker C:If we tried?
Speaker B:I believe so.
Speaker B:I mean, because domestic cats were bred from wild cats which were bigger.
Speaker B:They had bigger teeth, they had bigger claws.
Speaker B:You know, they were wild animals that.
Speaker B:They weren't the lions, they weren't bred from lions, but they were bred from smaller wild cats.
Speaker B:So I suspect.
Speaker B:I mean, I'm not a geneticist, but I suspect that those.
Speaker B:The genes which gave them those older properties of big teeth and big claws probably still exist and they could be accentuated back out of the species.
Speaker C:So we could turn a cat back into a lion if we wanted, within.
Speaker A:A couple of years, just with a chainsaw and a bit of blue sack.
Speaker C:The interesting thing for me is sort of the question of how we know that it's a dog.
Speaker C:How do we know that a Chihuahua is a dog and a Great Dane is a dog.
Speaker C:They're very different.
Speaker C:Right?
Speaker C:So.
Speaker C:And of course, the answer is this, is that they're both the same species, which means they can.
Speaker C:They can mate.
Speaker C:They can.
Speaker C:Apparently Chihuahuas can mate with Great Danes.
Speaker C:I mean, I think.
Speaker C:I think with some difficulty, but they can in theory get, you know, get.
Speaker C:Get pregnant from each other and that the.
Speaker C:So we kind of think it's.
Speaker C:There's actually, it's quite interesting the way that species which we think of as a single, quite definitive thing are apparently not always very clearly defined.
Speaker C:There's an example in one of Richard Dawkins books, the Ancestors Tale of the Encatina newt, or it's a salamander, rather, in California, which is what's called apparently a ring species, where there are different types of salamanders living all around this.
Speaker C:The edge of this valley.
Speaker C:And each salamander can kind of mate with the ones slightly to the north and slightly to the south of it.
Speaker C:But when you get to the ends of the valley, you have salamanders that can't mate with each other.
Speaker C:So that's called the ring species.
Speaker C:And it seems that, you know, actually being a species is sometimes fuzzy, not always clearly defined, but the, the, the whole question of, you know, how we, how we decide that actually what makes you a dog is, is because you can mate with other dogs.
Speaker C:Reminds me of the way that scientific concepts change over time.
Speaker C:And you know, so in bile in the biological sphere, one example was, you know, the decision that whales weren't fish.
Speaker C:Now why did our division go that way?
Speaker C:Why did we sort of say actually it makes more sense to have the concept of a fish that excludes whales?
Speaker C:Because whales, you know, biologically, obviously, clearly mammals, you know, they're much more like a whale is much more like a horse than it is like a fish.
Speaker C:And so, you know, it sort of makes sense for us to change our concept of fish from something which is about swimming in the sea to something else which is to do with, you know, your biological lineage and your, you know, features, the biological features that you have.
Speaker C:And then of course that has graduated, given way to something, to a definition in terms of genetics.
Speaker C:So what makes you a mammal is actually because you're descended from other mammals, but broadly.
Speaker C:And you know, even if a whale were to evolve into a fish, it would, if a whale had evolved the exact characteristics of a fish, we would still want to say it was a mammal and not a fish.
Speaker C:Which, you know, it's interesting the way that our concepts get changed and get more precisely defined over time.
Speaker A:I mean, are we essentially here, we're just talking about taxonomy, right?
Speaker A:And I mean, is again, is this.
Speaker A:I mean, sometimes we sort of drift into areas in which we're not experts.
Speaker C:All areas, no expertise on anything.
Speaker A:I mean, are we saying, I mean, is there anything.
Speaker A:What I'm trying to think about is that I'm sure, you know, this might be a well trodden area of exploration for taxonomists, let's say.
Speaker A:Okay, is there anything we can add to that, given that we're thinking about analysis and decision making?
Speaker C:Yeah, very much so.
Speaker A:Well, definitely from Nick.
Speaker A:But Peter, is there anything you want to sort of bring in here?
Speaker B:Well, I think there's an interesting.
Speaker B:These taxonomies and these classification systems are largely arbitrary.
Speaker B:The things that we have imposed on these populations to make them more legible, make them more easy to understand and as a sort of framework for study.
Speaker B:If those species which were out competed, still existed, then there would be a sort of gray scale between all species.
Speaker B:And the concept of separating species out into tight groups would make less sense.
Speaker B:There's parallels with the way much analysis is about clustering and classification to provide a.
Speaker B:A basis for considering the likelihood of certain things happening or the class that things belong to.
Speaker B:And effective taxonomy design is crucial in that analysts, I think, are often required to be taxonomists and design these information structures.
Speaker B:And I think that's a science, that's a skill that can be developed deliberately.
Speaker A:Okay, yeah.
Speaker A:Nick, is there anything you want to add at this point?
Speaker A:I mean, I've got a question, but is there anything you want to add at this stage?
Speaker C:Well, actually, I mean, I think this touches on a really fundamental distinction between types of debate, which is something that was clearly identified by logical positivists, the sort of philosophical movement in the early part of the 20th century, which is this distinction between arguments about definition and arguments about fact, arguments about what's true about the world compared to arguments about, you know, whether we're exactly with how we should define things.
Speaker C:I mean, you look at the reclassification of Pluto, for example.
Speaker C:You know, we decided that it wasn't really a planet, it was a dwarf planet or something.
Speaker C:You know, it doesn't belong in the planet club with all of the familiar ones like Mars and Jupiter.
Speaker C:What have we didn't discover something new about Pluto.
Speaker C:So what was that debate all about?
Speaker C:I mean, you know, it was really about a discussion about what the most sensible definition of planet was, you know, and we came up with a definition, you know, to distinguish planets from, you know, from moons or, you know, which happens to exclude Pluto.
Speaker C:But nothing.
Speaker C:Our understanding of the world didn't change.
Speaker C:But our.
Speaker A:Well, no, our understanding of the world did change, but the world itself didn't change.
Speaker C:Well, I mean, that's the issue really.
Speaker C:If we were having an argument, It's a very different type of argument.
Speaker C:If I say, no, no, Pluto is actually much smaller than we thought, Turns out it's only half the size as we previously thought, therefore it's not a planet.
Speaker C:Then the type of argument which says, well, I think we should have a definition of planet, which is, you know, that they're of a sufficient size, that they're spherical, you know, within a certain tolerance.
Speaker C:And that happens to exclude Pluto.
Speaker C:Completely different.
Speaker C:And the logical positivists sought to separate those two types of debate, and it's incredibly useful distinction to have to hand when you're thinking about problems is to say look, actually, am I.
Speaker C:Is this a question about how we define this or is this a question about the facts?
Speaker A:So I'm not sure how we managed to do it, but we've gone from Alsatians with curiously sloping backs all the way to the definitions of planets and Pluto and so on.
Speaker A:But yeah, is there any way we can sort of wrap this up and sort of tie this all together with.
Speaker A:Yeah, I mean, what, I mean, what does that mean?
Speaker A:So can you sum it up in one sentence for me from how we get this sort of this furore over this Alsatian with the sloping back and incredibly deformed and what that means for analysis and decision making?
Speaker A:Can you sum that up for me in a sentence or two?
Speaker C:No, I can't say, can't say any more than what we've already said.
Speaker C:I think the.
Speaker C:But I, but no, I mean, I think it does, it does come down to.
Speaker C:It's the same question really.
Speaker C:You know, it's sort of why, why do we allow this, this dog to be a contender for this prize?
Speaker C:Or, you know, should this dog somehow be excluded?
Speaker C:You know, should, should we not allow dogs that look like that?
Speaker C:Actually then is a similar kind of debate to the one about should Pluto be a dwarf planet?
Speaker C:You know, are there characteristics of dogs which should mean that they're not allowed to win prizes, but because of their, you know, because their backs are too slopey?
Speaker A:I see it in a different way.
Speaker A:I see it in terms of mission creep.
Speaker A:That's how I see this.
Speaker A:It makes me think of my mother's spaghetti bolognese.
Speaker A: , in: Speaker A:And she thought, okay, well this is great.
Speaker A:So this will, you know, keep my hungry 15 years.
Speaker C:We should say that other pasta sauces.
Speaker B:Are available,.
Speaker A:But what happened was over a six month period is just, is just that the dish morphed into something else.
Speaker A:So for a start, it used to sort of triple treble in size and then things like she would put in, start putting in peppers until peppers became the norm or.
Speaker A:And actually I don't think even my mother was that adventurous.
Speaker A:But somehow it just changed and sort of became a very condensed version of itself.
Speaker A:And that was the new norm.
Speaker A:And when I look at this, you know, I'm different from you guys.
Speaker A:What I see from this, I just see, okay, that's something that has become more and more, you know, that gets so accentuated that that's what becomes normal.
Speaker A:That's the lesson I take from this.
Speaker A:And actually, when everyone stands back and there's an Emperor's New Clothes moment where everyone goes, that's not an Alsatian.
Speaker A:Alsatians don't look like that.
Speaker A:And yet it wins Best of breed.
Speaker A:That's what I take from this.
Speaker A:But we're not talking about what I take from this.
Speaker A:We're talking about.
Speaker A:So, Peter, anything you want to add there?
Speaker B:Well, other than.
Speaker B:I think there are interesting neurological and psychological processes that make humans very good at classifying stuff.
Speaker B:It seems to be, if not fundamental to the way we understand the world, a very useful way that we go about understanding the world, where we're very quickly, on very sparse data, able to sort of say, oh, that's a person, that's a cup, that's a table.
Speaker B:Which then provides us with a way of accessing models for how people, cups and tables behave.
Speaker B:And therefore we can predict with fairly good certainty.
Speaker B:If I put that cup on that table, it's probably not going to go anywhere because that table is, look, shares properties with other tables I've seen before.
Speaker B:I can just rely on the fact it's a table.
Speaker B:I think it's a sort of.
Speaker B:That's an evolutionary process gone on and developed this sort of classification mechanism in our brains, which provides a useful shortcut.
Speaker B:It means that we don't have to see every single table, every single cup as unique individual items and have to model how they will behave in interaction.
Speaker B:We can say, well, that's a table, that's a cup.
Speaker B:They will behave this way when we put them together.
Speaker A:I want to finish there, Nick.
Speaker A:Anything you want to, Nick?
Speaker C:Well, yeah, I mean, I think actually that it is so fundamental, classification is so fundamental to the way that we think that it's probably worth mentioning because otherwise philosophers will be shouting at the podcast at this point that the response to that logical positivist distinction between definition and matters of fact was made by Willard Van Ulman Quine, you know, good.
Speaker C:A few decades later, where he said, actually, sometimes it's hard to tell whether you're talking about a matter of definition or a matter of fact that actually is a gray.
Speaker C:There is a gray area, you know, that often with the debate, you're sometimes not sure because categorising things, definitions are so fundamental to the way we think.
Speaker C:Sometimes it is hard to separate, well, are we talking about a category or are we talking about some fact about the thing?
Speaker C:So, yeah, I mean, it's.
Speaker C:It's a really, you know, it's a very profound topic really?
Speaker C:When we.
Speaker C:When we think about how analysis works, how thinking works.
Speaker A:Okay, so there we go.
Speaker A:From Alsatian gate to the profundities of logical positivism.
Speaker A:We'll wrap it up there.
Speaker A:Thank you once again to our listeners.
Speaker A:To listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast.
Speaker A:I'm Fraser McGrewer.
Speaker A:We've been here with Nick Hare and with Peter Coghill at Aleph Insights.
Speaker A:Thank you for listening.
Speaker A:Don't forget to check out what we've got on the blog.
Speaker A:Okay, thank you and goodbye.
Speaker B:Pluto was a dog as well, of course.
Speaker C:Yeah, we should have mentioned that.
Speaker C:Why didn't you say that?
Speaker A:We've got it.
Speaker A:We've got it.
Speaker C:Well, is he, though?
Speaker C:I mean, is Pluto the one that walks around?
Speaker B:No, that's Goku.
Speaker C:No, they were the one that.
Speaker C:The one that walks.
Speaker B:Mickey's dog.
Speaker C:Who was the one?
Speaker C:Goofy.
Speaker A:Goofy.
Speaker A:Goofy's the actual.
Speaker C:He's a Goofy.
Speaker A:That's where you've got Pluto.
Speaker A:Who's the dog?
Speaker A:Who's a human or who walks around like a human?
Speaker C:No, that's Goofy.
Speaker A:No, Goofy.
Speaker B:Goofy.
Speaker A:So Pluto is the dog, isn't he?
Speaker A:Oh, okay.
Speaker B:And he's very dog like.
Speaker B:He doesn't speak.
Speaker B:He looks like a dog, behaves like.
Speaker C:A dog, whereas Goofy's Goofy, a dog.
Speaker A:I don't know.
Speaker C:What is Goofy?
Speaker A:He's a dog.
Speaker C:Like.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker C:Goofy challenges our concept of doghood, I think, in a way that's quite profound.
