Many animals have some level of social intelligence, allowing them to coexist and cooperate with other members of their species. Wolves, for example—the probable ancestors of dogs—live in packs that hunt together and have a complex hierarchy. But dogs have evolved an extraordinarily rich social intelligence as they've adapted to life with us. All the things we love about our dogs—the joy they seem to take in our presence, the many ways they integrate themselves into our lives—spring from those social skills. Hare Brian, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, and others are trying to figure out how the intimate coexistence of humans and dogs has shaped the animal's remarkable abilities. Hare suspects that the evolutionary pressures that turned suspicious wolves into outgoing dogs were similar to the ones that turned combative apes into cooperative humans. "Humans are unique. But how did that uniqueness evolve?" asks Hare. "That's where dogs are important." The first rule for scientists studying dogs is, don't trust your hunches . Just because a dog looks as if it can count or understand words doesn't mean it can. "We say to owners, look, you may have intuitions about your dog that are valuable," says Marc Hauser, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University. "But they might be wrong." Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist at Barnard College, and other scientists are now running experiments to determine what a behavior, like a kiss, really means. In some cases, their research suggests that our pets are manipulating us rather than welling up with human-like feeling. "They could be the ultimate charlatans ," says Hauser. We've all seen guilty dogs slinking away with lowered tails, for example. Horowitz wondered if they behave this way because they truly recognize they' ve done something wrong, so she devised an experiment. First she observed how dogs behaved when they did something they weren't supposed to do and were scolded by their owners. Then she tricked the owners into believing the dogs had misbehaved when they hadn't. When the humans scolded the dogs, the dogs were just as likely to look guilty, even though they were innocent of any misbehavior. What's at play here, she concluded, is not some inner sense of right and wrong but a learned ability to act submissive when an owner gets angry. "It's a white-flag response," Horowitz says. While this kind of manipulation may be unsettling to us, it reveals how carefully dogs pay attention to humans and learn from what they observe. That same attentiveness also gives dogs—or at least certain dogs—a skill with words that seems eerily human.

单选题 The author mentions wolves to show that______.

单选题 Why does Brian want to know how suspicious wolves became friendly dogs?

单选题 The word "hunches" (Para. 3) probably refers to______.

单选题 Hauser calls dogs "the ultimate charlatans" (Para. 4) because______.

单选题 When scolded, dogs______.