The folks at Evolution News have been wondering, well, we’ll let their headline say it: “Can a Dog Be Bred to Be as Smart as a Human?” Well, that’s their wheelhouse, so that’s what keeps them up at night. Hearing the thought expressed, it may begin to keep the rest of us up as well. It may be a new idea to us, but as usual, Shakespeare got there first, as we’ll soon see.

Payton Pearson, an electrical engineer in Ohio, has written a paper suggesting that “humans could artificially select for canine intelligence to such a degree as to produce canines with human levels of intelligence within a relatively short amount of time — 600 years.”

But what will these dogs think of us after we create them? It’s the old question: Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but do blondes prefer gentlemen? Shakespeare used Caliban, in The Tempest, to examine the question. Caliban is the bestial son of Sycorax, an evil witch, who abandoned him on an island on which Prospero and his daughter Miranda were later shipwrecked. Prospero and Miranda took Caliban in and taught him language. Thus equipped, he turned on them, saying this:

Caliban: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse.”

Our vote is to let sleeping dogs lie.