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Who's Encephalization Quotient?

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You and your closest friend rarely argue, except over one subject: Pet smarts. She knows a lot about cats and says they're smarter than dogs, but you as a pet parent with two dogs think she's wrong.

Who's right?

Scientists have recently designed certain techniques and measures that may give us the definitive answer. One of the measurements that animal psychologists and biologists have used to assess intelligence is called the Encephalization Quotient, and another is sociability.

In the late 1970s, psychologist Harry J. Jerison developed Encephalization Quotient or EQ. It's a mathematically sophisticated comparison of the actual brain weight of an animal compared to the expected brain mass for that animal's body size. Because this method accounts for the fact that larger …show more content…

By the standard of EQ, dogs come out slightly ahead of the intelligence game over cats. According to Wikipedia, there is only a 0.2 percent advantage to the dog. Such a minute difference may be the reason dog and cat parents argue about their favorite pets.

An Oxford University research team looked at how 500 species, both living and fossilized, have evolved over about 60 million years. The ones that lived in social groups had much larger brains, relative to body size, than those species that tend to be self-sufficient.

However, there is a real surprise that occurs in some recent data provided by two researchers at Oxford University. They wondered whether there had been evolutionary changes in the Encephalization Index over the years.

When we domesticate animals, especially a companion dog, we are placing new learning demands on it. Some of these demands are social in nature, such as understanding human communication, like words and gestures. So, dogs are really subjected to more pressure than cats. Therefore, over time it might be expected that dogs would show a greater rise in their EQ than

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