Author Topic: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?  (Read 101312 times)

Offline Corkboy

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How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« on: March 25, 2013, 05:48:00 pm »
The Brains of the Animal Kingdom

New research shows that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. Primatologist Frans de Waal on memory-champ chimps, tool-using elephants and rats capable of empathy.

Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares.

I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the "chimpion."

How do you give a chimp—or an elephant or an octopus or a horse—an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science today. Over the past decade, researchers on animal cognition have come up with some ingenious solutions to the testing problem. Their findings have started to upend a view of humankind's unique place in the universe that dates back at least to ancient Greece.

Aristotle's idea of the scala naturae, the ladder of nature, put all life-forms in rank order, from low to high, with humans closest to the angels. During the Enlightenment, the French philosopher René Descartes, a founder of modern science, declared that animals were soulless automatons. In the 20th century, the American psychologist B.F. Skinner and his followers took up the same theme, painting animals as little more than stimulus-response machines. Animals might be capable of learning, they argued, but surely not of thinking and feeling. The term"animal cognition" remained an oxymoron.

A growing body of evidence shows, however, that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. Can an octopus use tools? Do chimpanzees have a sense of fairness? Can birds guess what others know? Do rats feel empathy for their friends? Just a few decades ago we would have answered "no" to all such questions. Now we're not so sure.

Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species. Scientists are now finally meeting animals on their own terms instead of treating them like furry (or feathery) humans, and this shift is fundamentally reshaping our understanding.

Elephants are a perfect example. For years, scientists believed them incapable of using tools. At most, an elephant might pick up a stick to scratch its itchy behind. In earlier studies, the pachyderms were offered a long stick while food was placed outside their reach to see if they would use the stick to retrieve it. This setup worked well with primates, but elephants left the stick alone. From this, researchers concluded that the elephants didn't understand the problem. It occurred to no one that perhaps we, the investigators, didn't understand the elephants.

Think about the test from the animal's perspective. Unlike the primate hand, the elephant's grasping organ is also its nose. Elephants use their trunks not only to reach food but also to sniff and touch it. With their unparalleled sense of smell, the animals know exactly what they are going for. Vision is secondary.

But as soon as an elephant picks up a stick, its nasal passages are blocked. Even when the stick is close to the food, it impedes feeling and smelling. It is like sending a blindfolded child on an Easter egg hunt.

What sort of experiment, then, would do justice to the animal's special anatomy and abilities?

On a recent visit to the National Zoo in Washington, I met with Preston Foerder and Diana Reiss of Hunter College, who showed me what Kandula, a young elephant bull, can do if the problem is presented differently. The scientists hung fruit high up above the enclosure, just out of Kandula's reach. The elephant was given several sticks and a sturdy square box.

Kandula ignored the sticks but, after a while, began kicking the box with his foot. He kicked it many times in a straight line until it was right underneath the branch. He then stood on the box with his front legs, which enabled him to reach the food with his trunk. An elephant, it turns out, can use tools—if they are the right ones.

While Kandula munched his reward, the investigators explained how they had varied the setup, making life more difficult for the elephant. They had put the box in a different section of the yard, out of view, so that when Kandula looked up at the tempting food he would need to recall the solution and walk away from his goal to fetch the tool. Apart from a few large-brained species, such as humans, apes and dolphins, not many animals will do this, but Kandula did it without hesitation, fetching the box from great distances.

Another failed experiment with elephants involved the mirror test—a classic evaluation of whether an animal recognizes its own reflection. In the early going, scientists placed a mirror on the ground outside the elephant's cage, but the mirror was (unsurprisingly) much smaller than the largest of land animals. All that the elephant could possibly see was four legs behind two layers of bars (since the mirror doubled them). When the animal received a mark on its body visible only with the assistance of the mirror, it failed to notice or touch the mark. The verdict was that the species lacked self-awareness.

But Joshua Plotnik of the Think Elephant International Foundation modified the test. He gave the elephants access to an 8-by-8-foot mirror and allowed them to feel it, smell it and look behind it. With this larger mirror, they fared much better. One Asian elephant recognized herself. Standing in front of the mirror, she repeatedly rubbed a white cross on her forehead, an action that she could only have performed by connecting her reflected image with her own body.

A similar experimental problem was behind the mistaken belief, prevalent until two decades ago, that our species has a unique system of facial recognition, since we are so much better at identifying faces than any other primate. Other primates had been tested, but they had been tested on human faces—based on the assumption that ours are the easiest to tell apart.

When Lisa Parr, one of my co-workers at Emory University, tested chimpanzees on portraits of their own species, they excelled at it. Selecting portraits on a computer screen, they could even tell which juveniles were born to which females. Having been trained to detect similarities among images, the apes were shown a female's portrait and then given a choice between two other faces, one of which showed her offspring. They preferred the latter based purely on family resemblance since they did not know any of the depicted apes.

We also may need to rethink the physiology of intelligence. Take the octopus. In captivity, these animals recognize their caretakers and learn to open pill bottles protected by childproof caps—a task with which many humans struggle. Their brains are indeed the largest among invertebrates, but the explanation for their extraordinary skills may lie elsewhere. It seems that these animals think, literally, outside the box of the brain.

Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These "mini-brains" are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food.

Similarly, when an octopus changes skin color in self-defense, such as by mimicking a poisonous sea snake, the decision may come not from central command but from the skin itself. A 2010 study found gene sequences in the skin of cuttlefish similar to those in the eye's retina. Could it be: an organism with a seeing skin and eight thinking arms?

A note of caution, however: At times we also have overestimated the capacities of animals. About a century ago, a German horse named "Kluger Hans" (Clever Hans) was thought to be capable of addition and subtraction. His owner would ask him the product of multiplying four by three, and Hans would happily tap his hoof 12 times. People were flabbergasted, and Hans became an international sensation.

That is, until Oskar Pfungst, a psychologist, investigated the horse's abilities. Pfungst found that Hans was only successful if his owner knew the answer to the question and was visible to the horse. Apparently, the owner subtly shifted his position or straightened his back when Hans reached the correct number of taps. (The owner did so unknowingly, so there was no fraud involved.)

Some look at this historic revelation as a downgrading of Hans's intelligence, but I would argue that the horse was in fact very smart. His abilities at arithmetic may have been flawed, but his understanding of human body language was remarkable. And isn't that the skill a horse needs most?

Awareness of the "Clever Hans Effect," as it is now known, has greatly improved animal experimentation. Unfortunately, it is often ignored in comparable research with humans. Whereas every dog lab now tests the cognition of its animals while their human owners are blindfolded or asked to face away, young children are still presented with cognitive tasks while sitting on their mothers' laps. The assumption is that mothers are like furniture, but every mother wants her child to succeed, and nothing guarantees that her sighs, head turns and subtle changes in position don't serve as cues for the child.

This is especially relevant when we try to establish how smart apes are relative to children. To see how their cognitive skills compare, scientists present both species with identical problems, treating them exactly the same. At least this is the idea. But the children are held by their parents and talked to ("Watch this!" "Where is the bunny?"), and they are dealing with members of their own kind. The apes, by contrast, sit behind bars, don't benefit from language or a nearby parent who knows the answers, and are facing members of a different species. The odds are massively stacked against the apes, but if they fail to perform like the children, the invariable conclusion is that they lack the mental capacities under investigation.

A recent study, tracking the pupil movements of chimpanzees, found that they followed the gaze of members of their own species far better than that of humans. This simple finding has huge implications for tests in which chimpanzees need to pay attention to human experimenters. The species barrier they face may fully explain the difference in performance compared with children.

Underlying many of our mistaken beliefs about animal intelligence is the problem of negative evidence. If I walk through a forest in Georgia, where I live, and fail to see or hear the pileated woodpecker, am I permitted to conclude that the bird is absent? Of course not. We know how easily these splendid woodpeckers hop around tree trunks to stay out of sight. All I can say is that I lack evidence.

It is quite puzzling, therefore, why the field of animal cognition has such a long history of claims about the absence of capacities based on just a few strolls through the forest. Such conclusions contradict the famous dictum of experimental psychology according to which "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."

Take the question of whether we are the only species to care about the well-being of others. It is well known that apes in the wild offer spontaneous assistance to each other, defending against leopards, say, or consoling distressed companions with tender embraces. But for decades, these observations were ignored, and more attention was paid to experiments according to which the apes were entirely selfish. They had been tested with an apparatus to see if one chimpanzee was willing to push food toward another. But perhaps the apes failed to understand the apparatus. When we instead used a simple choice between tokens they could exchange for food—one kind of token rewarded only the chooser, the other kind rewarded both apes—lo and behold, they preferred outcomes that rewarded both of them.

Such generosity, moreover, may not be restricted to apes. In a recent study, rats freed a trapped companion even when a container with chocolate had been put right next to it. Many rats first liberated the other, after which both rodents happily shared the treat.

The one historical constant in my field is that each time a claim of human uniqueness bites the dust, other claims quickly take its place. Meanwhile, science keeps chipping away at the wall that separates us from the other animals. We have moved from viewing animals as instinct-driven stimulus-response machines to seeing them as sophisticated decision makers.

Aristotle's ladder of nature is not just being flattened; it is being transformed into a bush with many branches. This is no insult to human superiority. It is long-overdue recognition that intelligent life is not something for us to seek in the outer reaches of space but is abundant right here on earth, under our noses.

source

Offline Malaysian Kopite

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #1 on: March 25, 2013, 06:09:15 pm »
Thanks for posting this, it's an interesting read.
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Offline Bioluminescence

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #2 on: March 25, 2013, 06:23:11 pm »
Thanks for putting this up. I did animal cognition as part of my degree - it's a fascinating area of study, but I haven't kept up to date with it. I saw a programme with the chimps memorising the numbers - mind boggling.

Offline JohnHobbes

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #3 on: March 25, 2013, 06:26:19 pm »
Very good read. I always knew animals were smart, and have read numerous studies showing just how intelligent they are, but this is a nice piece on just how many studies failed to understand the basic principles of what they wanted to achieve before starting. Or even their arrogance in that the human way is the only way.

Offline Corkboy

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #4 on: March 25, 2013, 08:41:44 pm »
The octopus is a funny one. I read a piece a while back on reddit about how the octopus is the only invertebrate which is protected wildlife in the UK. Then some bloke commented on the piece, saying he was a marine researcher. So he said they had these tanks side by side, with an octopus in one and some fish in the other. Every morning when they came in, there was one fewer fish. He figured out that the octopus was accessing the other tank through a very narrow connecting pipe. When he discovered this, he actually caught the octopus "in the act" about half way through the transparent pipe. The amazing thing was that the octopus saw him, knew he'd been rumbled and reversed back into his own tank!

Offline JohnHobbes

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #5 on: March 25, 2013, 09:27:28 pm »
You've got to love the ingenuity they display and their intelligence. Was browsing for more examples and found this brilliant piece (including another example of their fish poaching skills):

--

"On Thursday morning, workers filing into the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium in California were surprised to find 200 gallons (750 liters) of seawater soaking into their spanking new, ecologically sensitive flooring. It turns out that a curious two-spotted octopus had disassembled a water recycling valve and directed a tube to spew out of the tank for about 10 hours, according to the Los Angeles Times.

"It found something loose and just pulled on it," the aquarium's education manager Tara Treiber told the Times. "They are very smart creatures."

What other indications are there that octopuses are intelligent?

Octopuses play, and play is something that intelligent animals do. At the Seattle Aquarium, my colleague Roland Anderson and I figured out a situation in which they might play: a boring situation. We gave them an empty tank and a floating pill bottle and waited to see what would happen. Nothing happened the first time, but, after the fourth time, a couple animals did something we call "play." The octopus blew a jet of water at the pill bottle and that caused it to go over a water jet in the tank and come back to the octopus. These two individual animals did it in a sequence over 20 times. That's just exactly the kind of thing we do when we bounce a ball. When you bounce a ball, you are not trying to get rid of the ball, you are trying to figure out what you can do with the ball.

Do octopuses often cause trouble in aquariums?

They are very strong, and it is practically impossible to keep an octopus in a tank unless you are very lucky. One of the early researchers said if you leave a floating thermometer in a tank, it will last about five minutes. Octopuses simply take things apart. I recall reading about someone who had built a robot submarine to putter around in a large aquarium tank. The octopus got a hold of it and took it apart piece by piece. There's a famous story from the Brighton Aquarium in England 100 years ago that an octopus there got out of its tank at night when no one was watching, went to the tank next door and ate one of the lumpfish and went back to his own tank and was sitting there the next morning. The aquarium lost several lumpfish before they figured out who was responsible."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-octopuses-smart

Offline flw

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #6 on: March 26, 2013, 04:51:48 am »
 
 I have recently had several emails showing videos of animals meeting people that cared for them when they were young and years later  after being released back into the wild  still remember them.


                                     http://www.wimp.com/christianlion/
                                                                                                                 

                                         http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTBENAU6i1Y

I certainly think animals are intelligent. 
             
« Last Edit: March 26, 2013, 04:56:05 am by flw »
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Offline Beav

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #7 on: March 26, 2013, 08:43:01 am »
Great article.

I love all the octopus stories, they are absolutely fascinating creatures.
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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #8 on: March 26, 2013, 08:53:48 am »
I hope cows aren’t. Oh, and pigs, I hope they aren’t. Come to think of it, I hope chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, lambs, deer, rabbits, pheasants, pigeons, guinea fowl, fish, how could I forget fish? I hope all of these have nothing more between their ears than mechanical functionality.

 >:(

Oh I’m getting out of this thread before the thing between my ears starts something I wont want to finish! 
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Offline Armchair expert

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #9 on: March 26, 2013, 09:29:17 am »
I hope cows aren’t. Oh, and pigs, I hope they aren’t. Come to think of it, I hope chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, lambs, deer, rabbits, pheasants, pigeons, guinea fowl, fish, how could I forget fish? I hope all of these have nothing more between their ears than mechanical functionality.

 >:(

Oh I’m getting out of this thread before the thing between my ears starts something I wont want to finish!

Come on let's be honest those animals are that thick they deserve to be eaten.....

Offline Malaysian Kopite

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #10 on: March 26, 2013, 09:31:12 am »
Great article.

I love all the octopus stories, they are absolutely fascinating creatures.
Tasty too if you believe the Asian Food Chanel.Especially if you eat them alive.

« Last Edit: March 26, 2013, 09:33:07 am by Malaysian Kopite »
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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #11 on: March 26, 2013, 09:37:25 am »
Paul the octopus was right every time!

For anyone interested here is a fantastic documentary on iplayer at the moment - Project Nim - about a chimpanzee who was taught sign language and raised as a human child. It's astonishing viewing.
I know you struggle with reading comprehension Carlitos, but do try to pay attention

Offline Armchair expert

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #12 on: March 26, 2013, 10:17:16 am »
Paul the octopus was right every time!

For anyone interested here is a fantastic documentary on iplayer at the moment - Project Nim - about a chimpanzee who was taught sign language and raised as a human child. It's astonishing viewing.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes did it much better....

Offline Corkboy

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #13 on: March 26, 2013, 12:33:15 pm »
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/GQwJXvlTWDw" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/GQwJXvlTWDw</a>

Offline Finn Solomon

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #14 on: March 26, 2013, 01:00:55 pm »
Octopuses are smart motherfuckers. My bet for the next dominant species on Earth when we all die through nuclear fire.
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Offline zero zero

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #15 on: March 26, 2013, 01:14:30 pm »
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/v/GQwJXvlTWDw" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">https://www.youtube.com/v/GQwJXvlTWDw</a>
Fascinating thread Corkboy

Offline LFCDad

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #16 on: March 26, 2013, 01:26:30 pm »
Octopuses are smart motherfuckers. My bet for the next dominant species on Earth when we all die through nuclear fire.
they'll probably die in that too
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Offline JohnHobbes

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #17 on: March 26, 2013, 01:35:00 pm »
Brilliant video showing they are capable of learning something complex and in just one showing, which is more than for a lot of humans I'd suspect. I do feel sorry for the poor crabs though!

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #18 on: March 26, 2013, 05:07:31 pm »
Great video Corkboy!
I know you struggle with reading comprehension Carlitos, but do try to pay attention

Offline Phil M

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #19 on: March 26, 2013, 05:14:13 pm »
That octopus is more intelligent that quite a few on here.
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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #20 on: March 26, 2013, 05:39:00 pm »
That octopus is more intelligent that quite a few on here.

Well demonstrated old chap, bravo!
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Offline Bioluminescence

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #21 on: March 26, 2013, 05:55:13 pm »
I hope cows aren’t. Oh, and pigs, I hope they aren’t. Come to think of it, I hope chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, lambs, deer, rabbits, pheasants, pigeons, guinea fowl, fish, how could I forget fish? I hope all of these have nothing more between their ears than mechanical functionality.

 >:(

Oh I’m getting out of this thread before the thing between my ears starts something I wont want to finish! 

Yeah, better stay out of this thread methinks. I've just quickly googled animal cognition and even cows appear to have advanced cognitive abilities, such as understanding cause-and-effect relationships. I knew pigs and fish were considered clever, but hadn't thought about the subject more.

Offline KiNki

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #22 on: March 26, 2013, 06:28:38 pm »
Fascinating stuff.  Watched the beeb doing something on jellyfish a while back.  How they could find there way through a maze even though they had no eyes or obvious senses. How they could acclimatise to heat and cold. Amazing creatures. 

Socialist rats.  Love it.

I think we could learn a thing or two from our animal cousins.

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #23 on: March 26, 2013, 06:44:26 pm »
Well demonstrated old chap, bravo!

My pleasure good sir.
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Offline JohnHobbes

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #24 on: March 26, 2013, 07:43:22 pm »
Birds are known to be clever than children too especially the members of the Corvids family. Some extracts from a long but very interesting article by Professor Nicky Clayton - Neurosciences/Cambridge University.

--

"The Aesop’s fable experiment was designed to see if corvids (the family of birds that includes crows, jays, ravens and jackdaws) have causal reasoning — the awareness that one event leads to another.

Not just a pretty face: The Raven was tested to see if Corvids, its family of birds, had 'causal reasoning' skills
In our study we placed a wax worm — the larva of the wax moth, and a favourite snack of corvids — on the surface of the water in a tube, just out of reach of the crows’ beaks.

When we presented the birds with the tube and a pile of stones, they put stones into the tube to raise the water level, until they could reach the worm. Later, we gave them just the tube and the wax worm — and they flew off in order to get their own stones.

In other experiments we gave two of our jays — the highly intelligent and charismatic Romero, and smarty pants bully-boy Hoy — a choice of two types of object: dense rubber ones that sink and foam ones that float.

After they’d had some time to play with the objects, they worked out that it was the rubber objects they needed to put into the tube to have the same effect as the stone. They did not make the right choice all of the time but they dropped the rubber objects in many more times than could be attributed to chance.

I don’t know whether the birds use the weight or the texture of the objects to decide which will raise the water level, but when we did a similar test with children aged four to ten, the younger ones didn’t work out the solution.

Yet another experiment has shown that birds have what is called ‘theory of mind’ — in short, the ability to see the world from another bird’s point of view.

Out in the wild, jays and other corvids will hide food in the ground. We experimented with them, hiding food in two types of tray — one full of pebbles which was noisy when disturbed, and another full of sand which was quiet.

If other birds couldn’t see them hiding the food because they were behind a screen, but could still hear them, the jays picked the sand and were as quiet as mice when they buried food. But if other birds were watching, or if they were on their own, they realised that it didn’t matter how noisy they were.

...

But there’s a second more striking example of their intelligence — one which instinct alone cannot explain.

If the birds were being watched when they hid their food, they rushed to move it to another hiding place as soon as the other watching birds were out of sight."

source
« Last Edit: March 26, 2013, 07:47:52 pm by JohnHobbes »

Offline Corkboy

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #25 on: March 26, 2013, 11:54:10 pm »
Birds, too, eh? Someone above said fish, I never heard anything about that. I have deep suspicions about whales, though. If there is one species where we look back and go, aw fuck, what were we doing, it'll be the whales. They may even have a culture, for fuck's sake. Dolphins get a lot of press because it's easy to catch and study them but whales are deep bastards. They have songs of astonishing length and variation, which other whales then repeat a thousand miles away or even groove on, which is effectively language. They have extended family and social structures, too, and act in concert. And we decided to butcher most of them for lamp oil. Aren't we just fucking super?

Offline RojoLeón

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #26 on: March 27, 2013, 01:47:29 am »
Well - they don't hunt whales for oil/food anymore. It is all in the interests of scientific research. This is one of the areas I know I am inconsistent about - I figure that Japan can go fuck itself regarding scientific whaling. But that Inuits get a bit of a by-ball in my eyes. Japan has clearly economically, culturally/socially and technologically got past the point where they need to kill any more whales. But they do it anyway. c*nts.

Is one of the oddities of the human race - we are all descended from stone cold killers. Each of us hold that potential, ruthless pragmatism about us, but we clearly have higher reasoning functions that allow us to describe 'intelligence' and experience an empathic recognition of having this in common with other non human life forms. 

Pigs are way smarter than dogs, but that pigs (unhappily for them) are quite high on the list of most commonly eaten by humans - whereas dogs are seen as being off limits for consumption.

I have this suspicion that the only religion that got any of this right were the Jains. All the other religions (maybe Hindu's get a B- ) get a great big fail when it comes to their realization of animal intelligence. If the Bible is the work of god, maybe he would have mentioned it in passing; you know, how he created all this shit and made it just so. But no mention that I remember (maybe it is talked about in the sections where god discusses all them dinosaurs he created :P ).

And they are horribly inconsistent about it: Kill only a certain way, but no shell fish. No red meat, fish only on Friday. Pork off limits, beef fine. Or, beef off limits, pork fine. God must have been very confusing on the day he told humans the dos/don't regarding sanctity of animal life. 

Regardless, we will all get what we want in the end. Those of us that want no more meat consumption will get their way when meat stocks collapse post oil depletion, and those of us that want to eat what they like will get those desires satiated to the point of catastrophic resource depletion. Win win.

So long, and thanks for all the fish?

Offline Big Red Richie

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #27 on: March 27, 2013, 04:27:43 pm »
One word.   Squirrels.


<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/DsuVLsDyln4?version=3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/DsuVLsDyln4?version=3</a>

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/k5HffZbeNGk?version=3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/k5HffZbeNGk?version=3</a>


I would say this shows compassion.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/8sOw3mCz4Oc?version=3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/8sOw3mCz4Oc?version=3</a>


And then there's this.  :D

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/0so5er4X3dc?version=3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/0so5er4X3dc?version=3</a>
« Last Edit: March 27, 2013, 04:29:24 pm by Big Red Richie »

Offline Corkboy

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #28 on: March 27, 2013, 04:54:00 pm »
That second video demonstrates an ability to visualise, which is basically proof that they can conceptualise things that aren't real or immediately real. Honeybees do the same thing, they "tell" their buddies where flowers are by doing a little dance, like drawing a map, which is also a feat of conceptualisation.

Offline kennedy81

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #29 on: March 27, 2013, 09:44:00 pm »
Birds are known to be clever than children too especially the members of the Corvids family. Some extracts from a long but very interesting article by Professor Nicky Clayton - Neurosciences/Cambridge University.


Yeah, I read something recently about how crows are thought to be one of the most intelligent creatures on the planet, more so than dogs and dolphins even, as they have the ability to problem solve and can 'think ahead'. Meaning they can work out how any particular action may lead to a variety of different outcomes and can therefore choose the best action to take, in a given situation.

I think it's a mistake to judge an animal's intelligence, purely by human standards.
Some people would say dogs are more intelligent than cats, because they can fetch a stick and bring it back, but I would argue it's the other way round.
A cat would simply judge such a task to be utterly pointless and a waste of energy, possibly even putting itself in a dangerously vulnerable position.
Hardly what you'd call bad reasoning.

There's also the somewhat conceited notion that humans are the most intelligent creatures if all.
If a person got lost 100 miles from home, and was able to find their way home without the aid of maps or other directional clues, we'd say they were pretty smart, but animals do this all the time.
We rather condescendingly put this down to 'instinct'.
I suppose some species are just better at some things than others, depending on their needs.
Does a cat really need to know how to use a computer, for example.

I suppose it comes down to how you define 'intelligence'.
If you define it as the ability to adapt, survive and reproduce effectively, then you could say sharks are very intelligent creatures, having been around in some form or another, for millions of years.
We've only been around for 200,000 years or so, and there's no guarantee we'll be around millions of years from now unless we get our act together.

From an animals point of view, humans are arguably very stupid.
We trash or own habitat, kill each other over abstract concepts (from an animals POV at least) like politics and religion, laugh at dumb stuff on Youtube, waste valuable resources like food and shelter.
Not very intelligent behaviour.
I don't know how many times I've looked into my cat's eyes and I just know he's sitting there thinking..."wow you are one dumb motherfucker, but as long as you keep feeding me and giving me shelter, we can be buds all the same".
There's a very ancient and profound intelligence in those eyes, and I suspect when the planet finally rids itself of humanity, it'll be the cats, birds and fish in the sea, who'll have the last laugh.


Offline Corkboy

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #30 on: March 27, 2013, 11:39:25 pm »
There's a very ancient and profound intelligence in those eyes, and I suspect when the planet finally rids itself of humanity, it'll be the cats, birds and fish in the sea, who'll have the last laugh.

I once read that 80% of all life on the planet, by mass, is microbial and mostly lives underground. My guess is those fuckers will around a long, long time after we're gone.

Offline Carlos: Very Kickable

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #31 on: March 27, 2013, 11:49:55 pm »
/snip/

Yeah totally man - cats are hipsters.
I know you struggle with reading comprehension Carlitos, but do try to pay attention

Offline Big Red Richie

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #32 on: March 28, 2013, 12:06:32 am »
There's loads of them on youtube.


<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/lrYPm6DD44M?version=3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/lrYPm6DD44M?version=3</a>

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/JY8-gP3Sw_8?version=3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/JY8-gP3Sw_8?version=3</a>

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/cF903aLOAng?version=3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/cF903aLOAng?version=3</a>

Offline -Willo-

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #33 on: March 28, 2013, 12:25:09 am »
Some animals are unbelievable, I remember watching these hornet* type things in a fight with little bees, didn't stand a chance but the same bees who suffered the same problem with these hornets* but in another country had an unbelievable technique to kill them, they'd kind of bait them in then all jump on it and use basically about 100/200 of 'em would rub on the hornet really quick to roast it alive :O, I mean how did they figure this out, its just baffling.

*I think they were hornets, watched it a few weeks ago, if anyone knows what I'm on about feel free to hop on and correct me.

Offline Big Red Richie

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #34 on: March 28, 2013, 12:35:33 am »
Some animals are unbelievable, I remember watching these hornet* type things in a fight with little bees, didn't stand a chance but the same bees who suffered the same problem with these hornets* but in another country had an unbelievable technique to kill them, they'd kind of bait them in then all jump on it and use basically about 100/200 of 'em would rub on the hornet really quick to roast it alive :O, I mean how did they figure this out, its just baffling.

*I think they were hornets, watched it a few weeks ago, if anyone knows what I'm on about feel free to hop on and correct me.
:wave


<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/K6m40W1s0Wc?version=3" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/K6m40W1s0Wc?version=3</a>

Offline Corkboy

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #35 on: March 28, 2013, 10:01:03 am »
Bees Buzz Each Other, but Not the Way You Think

 The electric fields that build up on honey bees as they fly, flutter their wings, or rub body parts together may allow the insects to talk to each other, a new study suggests. Tests show that the electric fields, which can be quite strong, deflect the bees' antennae, which, in turn, provide signals to the brain through specialized organs at their bases.

Scientists have long known that flying insects gain an electrical charge when they buzz around. That charge, typically positive, accumulates as the wings zip through the air—much as electrical charge accumulates on a person shuffling across a carpet. And because an insect's exoskeleton has a waxy surface that acts as an electrical insulator, that charge isn't easily dissipated, even when the insect lands on objects, says Randolf Menzel, a neurobiologist at the Free University of Berlin in Germany.

Although researchers have suspected for decades that such electrical fields aid pollination by helping the tiny grains stick to insects visiting a flower, only more recently have they investigated how insects sense and respond to such fields. Just last month, for example, a team reported that bumblebees may use electrical fields to identify flowers recently visited by other insects from those that may still hold lucrative stores of nectar and pollen. A flower that a bee had recently landed on might have an altered electrical field, the researchers speculated.

Now, in a series of lab tests, Menzel and colleagues have studied how honey bees respond to electrical fields. In experiments conducted in small chambers with conductive walls that isolated the bees from external electrical fields, the researchers showed that a small, electrically charged wand brought close to a honey bee can cause its antennae to bend. Other tests, using antennae removed from honey bees, indicated that electrically induced deflections triggered reactions in a group of sensory cells, called the Johnston's organ, located near the base of the antennae. In yet other experiments, honey bees learned that a sugary reward was available when they detected a particular pattern of electrical field.

 Altogether, these tests suggest that the electrical fields that build up on bees due to their flight or movement are stimuli that could be used in social communication, the researchers report online this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The team's findings "are very significant," says Fred Dyer, a behavioral biologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "I hadn't heard about the possibility that honey bees could use electrical fields."

One of the honey bees' forms of communication is the "waggle dance." When the insects have located a dense patch of flowers or a source of water, they skitter across the honeycomb in their hive in a pattern related to the direction of and the distance to the site. Fellow worker bees then take that information and forage accordingly. The biggest mystery about the dance, Dyer says, is which senses the bees use—often in the deep, dark recesses of their hive—to conduct their communication. "People have proposed a variety of methods: direct contact between bees, air currents from the buzzing of their wings, odors, even vibrations transmitted through the honeycomb itself," he says.

But the team's new findings introduce yet another mode of communication available to the insects, Dyer says. He notes that the group found that antenna deflections induced by an electrically charged honey bee wing are about 10 times the size of those that would be caused by airflow from the wing fluttering at the same distance—a sign that electrical fields could be an important signal.

"They show that the electrical fields are there and that they're within the range of what the animal can sense," Dyer says. "Their claim of evidence is quite compelling."

source

Offline El Monjo Boig

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #36 on: March 29, 2013, 03:16:23 pm »
When he learnt he had chosen Moyes, Mou was incredulous. He screamed: ‘But he’s won nothing!’

Offline macca888

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #37 on: March 29, 2013, 04:07:03 pm »
Here's one I remember a while back about Orangutans using ipads


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16354093


And it's has been expanded now to 12 zoos.


http://news.yahoo.com/apes-ipads-national-zoo-150122086.html


They need to be careful though. Ipads have been known to reverse evolutionary gains in teenagers, turning them from intelligent, talking homo sapiens almost back to Piltdown man levels of grunting    ;)
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Offline B0151?

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #38 on: March 30, 2013, 02:03:31 am »
One word.   Squirrels.





I would say this shows compassion.



And then there's this.  :D


Always loved this video

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/-HJTG6RRN4E" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" class="bbc_link bbc_flash_disabled new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/-HJTG6RRN4E</a>
« Last Edit: March 30, 2013, 02:06:12 am by Bakez0151 »

Offline kennedy81

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Re: How Intelligent Are Other Animals?
« Reply #39 on: March 30, 2013, 04:03:56 am »
Here's one I remember a while back about Orangutans using ipads


I met a Utd fan once, who could tie his own laces.