“Why can't dogs dance?” This was the question that cognitive biology professor W. Tecumseh Fitch asked in 2006. the scientific community. At that time, in the scientific field there was no evidence that any animal, apart from humans, was capable of dancing, dancing being understood as the ability to synchronize motor movements with the rhythm of music. This presented a paradox. Why is a phenomenon that seems so simple, so rare in nature?
The production of rhythmic sounds and movements is common among animals. We see it when crickets stridulate by rubbing their wings, when silverback gorillas beat their chests with their fists, or when indri lemurs vocalize to communicate with your group. It has also been possible to train rats and monkeys to press a lever to the rhythm of a metronome. But from there to being able to identify the rhythm in complex music, in which no instrument has to mark it, and to move voluntarily in tune, there is a way.
There is something that is evident: to be able to dance to the rhythm of a melody, you need melodies with rhythm. And for there to be melodies with rhythm, humans are needed. In our species, music can be something individual, but above all, it is a collective activity. We need there to be a rhythm. It is very difficult to coordinate an entire orchestra, a rock group, or a choir if there is no continuous pulse to follow. Nobody expects to go through the jungle and find a group of monkeys dancing, and to begin with, in the jungle there are no complex melodies that follow a rhythm.
However, there are domestic animals such as dogs, cats, sheep or cows, which have been living for thousands of years in environments with music and have never moved their bones. We can play music and encourage our pets to move with us, or make video montages, but what scientific evidence seems to indicate at the moment is that dogs do not dance. Hence Fitch's question.
Also in 2006, another scientist named Aniruddh D. Patel suggested an explanation: to be able to dance it is necessary to have vocal learning. This is the ability to imitate new sounds that we hear in our environment with the vocal tract. Although humans do it very easily, this is a rare trait that has emerged in a few groups of animals, such as songbirds, parrots or cetaceans. Not even our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, have complex vocal learning.
What led Patel to propose this hypothesis? In a previous experiment, had proven that humans are much better at moving to the rhythm of an auditory stimulus than a visual stimulus. AND other studies had shown that, when we listen to music, motor areas in our brain are activated, even if we are not moving. This suggested that rhythm perception must involve specialized cognitive processing that integrated auditory and motor information.
Among the different evolutionary forces that could promote this integration, vocal learning seemed to Patel to be a good candidate, since it requires listening to a sound and reproducing it with our vocal apparatus. Therefore, his hypothesis predicted that only species that had developed vocal learning could dance to music.
Just a year after Patel raised his hypothesis, a cockatoo named Snowball became world famous for appearing in a YouTube video dancing to the rhythm of Another one bites the dust, from Queen. Through an experiment, Patel and his research team at the San Diego Neuroscience Institute, United States, demonstrated that Snowball indeed synchronized his movements with music. When they manipulated the timing of the song, the cockatoo automatically adjusted the rhythm of its movements. Since cockatoos have vocal learning, this finding supported their hypothesis.
But in 2013, Ronan, a sea lion, arrived. questioned Patel's ideas. Ronan was trained by a team at the University of Santa Cruz in California to synchronize his head movements to a musical rhythm. In the study, the authors concluded that since sea lions do not have very flexible vocal learning, Patel's hypothesis was refuted, and that the ability shown by Ronan may be more widespread in the animal world.
This discovery opened a debate. Is Ronan really proof that vocal learning and dancing are unrelated? Patel denies this. Ronan was subjected to very intensive training when he was still very young. He probably couldn't have done it as an adult without training. Furthermore, sea lions, although they may not reach the level of parrots or humans, do have vocal learning; in fact, to what extent is still unknown.
One aspect that has led Patel to revise his hypothesis is that there are animals like songbirds that, despite having vocal learning, do not seem to be able to dance. In a review published in 2021, proposes that perhaps only those species with a higher degree of vocal learning can do so. This is not a characteristic that animals have or do not have, but rather a trait that is expressed to a greater or lesser extent. For example, chimpanzees are considered to have some vocal learning, although very limited, because they are capable of slightly modifying their innate vocalizations. At the other extreme are humans and parrots (a group to which cockatoos belong), who show great vocal plasticity.
It is possible that only we and parrots have brain connections between motor and auditory areas strong enough to be able to dance. Vocal learning could be a preadaptation, that is, an evolutionary change that appears with a specific function, but also ends up enabling a different one, in this case, dancing. A classic example of preadaptation is bird feathers, which appeared in dinosaurs with a thermoregulatory function long before they were used for flight.
If science continues to advance and Patel is definitively proven right, we will know why dogs can't keep up with a song. Of course, it seems incredible that in order to carry out an activity as seemingly simple as dancing, animals have first had to learn to speak.
You can follow SUBJECT in Facebook, x and instagramor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
#Talking #dancing #can39t #dogs