Dr Rosalind Arden is an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics. She received her PhD from King’s College London in 2010. Her research explores human variation with an emphasis on intelligence. Why are some people smarter than others? What are the consequences of being more, or less bright? She probes these questions using genetically-informative data so that genetic and environmental contributions to human variation can be assessed. She is guided by an evolutionary framework because our cognitive abilities evolved in settings typical for our species (neither underwater, nor in treetops). Her interests have led her to investigate intelligence in other species, beginning with dogs. She wondered whether dogs that are good at one task tend to be good at other, different, cognitive tasks – suggesting that there is a general factor of intelligence – as has been found among people. Since dogs and people have shared their environments for thousands of years, she views them as excellent partners for exploring cognitive abilities and their consequences.