Crows seem to be intelligent animals, capable -- according to laboratory tests, as well as significant empirical observation -- of abstract reasoning. Our last common ancestor was before the evolution of dinosaurs, and our brain structures are totally different.
What can that tell us about the way intelligence comes to be?
Octopuses are pretty smart, too. Some people think anything that uses either language or fine manipulation suitable for tools starts to get smart, those being two classic examples of skills that confer an advantage if combined with cognitive prowess.
ReplyDeleteDefine 'Intelligence'. The article doesn't and I'd be interested to see if the researchers do anywhere. I somehow doubt it. I'm usually skeptical of studies like this, as I usualy find that their assumptions are generally pretty weak. They give the example of doing an experiment that has the crows choose 'same' or 'not same', saying it's an abstract. Really? The word and the concept of sameness as we use it may have abstraction in it, but if a crow sees two plants with berries, and one is not poisonous, it's good to know that the other is 'same' and therefore safe to eat- or 'not same' and unsafe to eat. The actual state of 'sameness' or 'not sameness' is not abstract, and even with images, one can describe them in purely rational factual terms to make the determination- no abstraction necessary.
ReplyDeleteI realized I should fly by and crap on this thread......!
ReplyDelete