Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates
bbc.com
bbc.com
For some strange reason, he named all of his animals Jack, cats, dogs and now crows. So we'd go out in the morning and my grandfather would call out "Jack" and the Dog would come running down the yard, and then next thing you'd see the crow hopping down the yard after the dog. It would arrive and wait for him to pick it up with his hand and it would sit on his shoulder while he fed it nuts and seeds. Jack the dog and Jack the crow would also hang out together and play. It also would be very wary of other visitors and knew to leave the house if it was going to go to the toilet.
This went on for maybe a full year until it decided to just fly off, but throughout that time it really opened my eyes to how smart animals could actually be, and is a really fond memory of mine.
My partner used to volunteer at the local Wildcare and they had an injured crow resident that they couldn't release named Da Vinci. Da Vinci would always greet visitors with "Hello! How are you? How are you?"
I love crows, they have lots of character if you take time to observe them.
It's more likely to happen with parrots (since they can legally be kept as pets and interact with humans more closely), but crows have the brainpower for it.
Someone later gave the guy a mynah bird that had a 30 or so word vocabulary. The birds eventually taught each other the words and the cough.
It was pretty funny to walk past that house on a nice day and hear 3 cigarette coughs and hearing the mynah say happy halloween in a sort-of witch voice no matter the time of the year.
Tangent: this is a handy effect, if you could get it to work, but it’s a bit surprising if it did work: animals have different audible frequency ranges, and, obviously, they’ll only respond to a name they can hear. Dogs and crows might have similar audible ranges (this is suggestive anecdata to that effect!), but I know that the range for cats is slightly higher, such that a name like “jack” wouldn’t even register to them. (You need a name with a close/front vowel sound in it, since humans produce those with a high pitch. Thus why the word “kitty” is thought to exist—it evolved as an optimal call-name! Or you can just “pspsps”, since that also comes out high-enough that cats hear it quite clearly.)
From what you said, there was also a cat named “jack”—did it come when called? If so, did calling it require a second, higher-keyed calling of the name?
Cats are heavily into patterns. My family always had cats and you could see how they craved for everything to be in order. You come home at 5pm, you eat at 6, you watch TV at 7pm, you turn off the TV at 10:35pm, you brush your teeth at 10:40pm and on and on. Cats know and expect your routine to be the same and they seem to love that.
My elderly parents' cat puts my father to bed. Then she goes off to her favourite sleeping spot. My dad's brother comes to visit at 2pm and the cat gets ready for the visit by coming to sit by the chair before my uncle arrives.
My experience disagrees. I often have a back and forth "conversation" with my cat, and she clearly responds to my voice, which is not high pitched.
The cat may be responding to those discrete high frequency sounds, rather than your overall voice.
A subgroup of crows is called a manslaughter
My GF and I went to the beach about a month ago and took our dog.
The crows weren't frightened at ALL of our dog. They realized they could basically just 'float' up in the air when he came by using the breeze.
The fact that they were amazingly calm about it was really telling.
Second. We hid our stuff under a blanket. They realize it's still there as they have item persistence. So they lifted up the blanket, went into our bag, then started opening up everything.
They opened up lids. They went through my girlfriends purse. They took out all the items from her purse. They took the socks out of my shoes. They opened plastic containers.
They systematically went through all our belongings.
And BOY did they score. All our dogfood. All of our leftover lunch, etc.
And, damn, they're as good as human thieves at reading situations for opportunism.
Also, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think they would learn to insert a credit card into the machine given that they're good at manipulating sticks and stones and putting them into places.
Its actually true they do this. Two noted ornithologist's describes it in one of their books on crows:
As ornithologist John M. Marzluff and author Tony Angell noted in their 2005 book In the Company of Crows and Ravens, the calls these birds use "vary regionally, like human dialects that can vary from valley to valley." And there's more: If a crow changes its social group, the bird will try to fit in by talking like the popular guys. "When crows join a new flock," Marzluff and Angell wrote, "they learn the flock's dialect by mimicking the calls of dominant flock members."
I realized that they are probably aware of my lack of attention to my food and that their in-built modeling of other agents had given them an advantage in this situation. I thought it was pretty impressive.
It was a big parking lot outside the gift shop, and some visitor had parked his motorcycle there. Pannier bags on the back.
The raven was sitting on one bag, actively working the zipper open. About a foot of zipper.
Which is pretty impressive, but the more impressive thing was how.
It would worry it for a couple seconds, tugging it a bit farther open, then stop, lift its head, and evaluate its surroundings.
If it didn't see anyone nearby, again with the zipper.
... I gained a new level of respect for corvids that day.
Two of them held the "flap" open, and the third went in for fries. Once they'd made a decent pile on the ground outside the can, they all set in to feast.
Why do programmers talk about living beings in software terminology, it's so clinical and cold. Other species are sentient beings, but for many it helps combat cognitive bias by not thinking of them as such.
I've seen a one pull a closed brown lunch bag out of a freshly opened backpack, meaning the knew backpacks probably have food and brown bags are worth stealing and inspecting in detail elsewhere.
Clearly, gulls are the honey badger of the bird world!
They started a game of using McD's french fries as lures to get the beach gulls to swoop in on unsuspecting kids as they were playing... sometimes 20 or 30 gulls at a time.
Felt like dropping spotter rounds for airstrikes.
(No children were harmed, just many french fries tossed instead of consumed.)
Doorknobs are not ADA compliant any longer, but if you are on a private island with utah-raptors? knobs.
search for "seagull thief" videos.
Jackrabbits will be sitting safely in the grass on the side of the road, see you coming, watch until you're about to pass, have a panic attack, and sprint in front of your car just as you pass in order to "escape". I never slow down for crows. They know what they're doing. I slow down for my fellow mammals, jackrabbits, because they're nitwits. All I can say, looking at these birds and these rabbits, is: that asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and took out the competition sure was a lucky break for us.
Except for the crows and the rooks. I keep an eye on them, and keep a foot poised for braking, but I never have to. They stroll, as you describe it, quite nonchalantly out the way, sometimes leaving a walnut for my vehicle to please crush. And here's the thing: They happily stroll into the opposite lane, if - and only if - no cars are approaching from the opposite direction. Complete grasp of the traffic situation, and they hardly ever fail - during the last year, I have seen one dead crow at the roadside; I'm gessing he took cool one step to far.
I've seen a bird of prey try to dive and swoop low over the land to evade them. They'll follow, some diving down low after it and some at a distance to keep an eye on it, until it's gone.
We basically have a crow air force keeping all the other birds and little mammals safe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing_(animal_behavior)#In_b...
They understand where the perfect number of cars is gonna be.
How did you learn arithmetic?
Others just dropped them from high altitudes. I suspect the ones on the power lines were just showing off; as much fun as need.
Prey animals are wary and startle easily to reduce their chance of becoming lunch.
Running in almost any direction is an effective means of escape.
Cars are much wider than most predators, meaning many directions end up being bad choices.
Note: I generally do not advocate purposely messing with animals, but geese are evil! Also don't do this if there are young that might not be able to get out of the way in time.
Might have had some side effects though.
Are these crows inventing the method over and over again independently, like scientists finding the same thing at the same time in different parts of the world? Is this some very basic instinct that the crows evolved into? Are they teaching each other and now the Euro crows using Japanise tech? Fascinating creatures.
On a semi-related note, magpies are also doing really well in that race. End of last year I started leaving oatmeal in a bottle cap on my terrace and every morning a magpie came to eat it every single day over the course of 2 months. And every evening when I came back home I had a handful of sticks, stones and berries left somewhere. No idea what I was supposed to do with them but thanks magpie I guess...
There may well have been multiple independent discoveries, and passing the skill on between individuals and generations has probably made it near-ubiquitous now.
We start bombarding babies with information since a very early age. Parents, are incentivized to teach their babies how to talk, walk, read, write, do stuff, eat, sing, etc... The amount of cognitive exercise is insane. And a human will only be able to "say" something useful until he is 7-8 year old. He's kinda of a "retard" before that. That's 7-8 years of training just to get started.
Then humans get bombarded with education: Math, Physics, Language, Writing, Sports, etc... And they are a strict about going to school and performing well. That would take another 12-15 years of your life to, hopefully, learn something useful to society. Add to that 3-4 years of learning in the job, and a human is only able to bring food to the table after 25-26 years of learning and training.
That's a hell lot of time. No other animals in the wild are given this chance. Let alone their environments and their physical capacities are taken into consideration. We judge animal intelligence by comparing it to our self-architectured modern environment.
tl;dr: Humans might not be smart after all. It might be that we have been lucky that our ancestors have started the ball rolling and we have had enough time during our lifetime to make up for the initial investment of learning.
If by "bring food to the table" you mean "earn a good salary at a very specialised job", maybe -- although 21 years is more like it.
But for literally bringing food to the table, basic survival skills, you're talking more like 8-10 years.
My grandmother used to receive that of dead moles, freshly caught mice and what have you, invariably placed dead center on her pillow. She wasn't a fan of that cat before, and she didn't like it much better after. No idea why.
And I've had a fine afternoon tossing a rubber ball that would bounce all around the living and dining room in billiard-style angles, and have an hour or more of lazy returns and rethrows.
Growing up our family cat brought us a constant stream of rabbits, birds, and moles. It is actually a problem that nobody talks about, because cats are cute.
I guess they give presents to people the don't like also :)
This is called a murder of crows. I've always found that term odd, and it seems derogatory. I don't know the origin.
I recently heard this used in a podcast and I got distracted by the term and looked up all this nonsense. TIL multiple jellyfish are a "smack"!
In a word, yes.
> Marzluff and two students wore rubber masks. He designated a caveman mask as “dangerous” and, in a deliberate gesture of civic generosity, a Dick Cheney mask as “neutral.” Researchers in the dangerous mask then trapped and banded seven crows on the university’s campus in Seattle.
> In the months that followed, the researchers and volunteers donned the masks on campus, this time walking prescribed routes and not bothering crows.
> The crows had not forgotten. They scolded people in the dangerous mask significantly more than they did before they were trapped, even when the mask was disguised with a hat or worn upside down. The neutral mask provoked little reaction.
> The effect has not only persisted, but also multiplied over the past two years. Wearing the dangerous mask on one recent walk through campus, Marzluff said, he was scolded by 47 of the 53 crows he encountered, many more than had experienced or witnessed the initial trapping.
We're not sure they're exactly mourning but crows have "funerals" ... it might also be that they're trying to ascertain why they died to avoid a potential threat.
... could be both too.
Who know what other animal intelligence exists today, or in the past.
The current crop of species (us excepted) may not be the smartest to have existed, problem solving intelligence like the crow's could have existed 500 mya as easily as it can now. You don't need mammals, or even necessarily vertebrates.
The first thing I found fascinating in YNH's "Sapiens" was his "start of history" debate. When did people start really standing out from the faunal crowd. He puts this at just around 40 kya.
That is, people were walking around with modern sized & equipped brain hardware for hundreds of thousands of years. They were obviously extremely intelligent. They would have performed as well as us on such intelligence tests.
If sapiens had gone extinct before 40kya, they would have left no indication that their intelligence such potential that it did. They would have just been a smart animal.
In many environments, the extra intelligence wouldn't allow you to find enough extra food for the trait to be worthwhile.
I honestly wonder how they can find enough food, there are so many of them.
I don't think they would exist in such large numbers without us, basically.
What makes us special is persistent collective learning and abstract communication.
Unlike animals, generations of humans don't have to keep re-solving the same problems. As a species we have cumulative persistent memory for techniques and abstractions. That's the real game changer.
But it took a surprisingly long time - tens of thousands of years - for our brains to make this ability central to culture. And there's no guarantee that if we re-ran history we'd do it again on the same scale.
For example, the wild, untrained human still has the biological faculty of language.
That is, there is a reason why no animal other than a human has been shown to be able to learn a language. The reason is that they do not have the biological faculty of language.
You suggest that "generations of humans don't have to keep re-solving the same problems/" This is correct, but in many important ways it is not because of our culture or because we learn from our elders. But rather it is because of our genetics.
An example of this is that children who are not taught a language will spontaneously create their own. Normally this won't happen, because children can't survive without adults, and adults will teach the children language. But something very close has happened a few times, an example, in itself far from conclusive, but still illustrative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
_Groups_ of humans with no common means of communication will form pidgins ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin ) as an (essentially grammarless) means of communication; children then raised in an environment where they are exposed to this pidgin will transform it into a true language. Nicaraguan Sign Language has actually proven to be a fascinating example of this in action; many of the first speakers of the original pidgin are, now that successive generations have learned and adapted it, unable to competently produce utterances in the now-language.
That is after successfully having acquired a language already. What the critical period theory suggests is that if no language is acquired during that period, subsequent language acquisition is not possible.
It would be an aberration for a crow’s calls to be arbitrary
I can read Newton's Principia online, or take an undergrad physics course. His insights are still shaping our world view even though he's been dead for centuries now.
Only humans have worked out how to abstract the intelligence from individuals into lasting communications that don't require face-to-face transmission.
Unfortunately we've only done this about selective topics. Personal relationships and political and economic systems still work relatively badly because they don't have anything equivalent to the cumulative summary, insight, and abstraction processes at the core of science and technology.
Crows have an oral tradition, and so did humans in that time, therefore they're about as equally smart, back then?
That's such a misanthropic statement I don't even know where to begin.
Just sticking to the kinds of structures a human and a crow can build in the wild, it's still obvious to the untrained observer that the human is well beyond the crow in terms of intelligence.
We depend more on our collective intelligence and teachings than you think.
For an instructive example-- a crow's nest of sticks, leaves, etc. Especially if that human comes up happens to come upon a crow's nest in the wild. Notice that the human can probably scale that design to fit their own larger stature.
Now imagine a crow coming upon a little 1x1 dugout crawdad battle arena, or a little lattice-structure of sticks that encloses a caddisfly larva collection of a 9 year old. If you saw a crow observe and then build that you'd have quite a research paper on your hands.
But we're probably going to get stuck in physical differences so let's change the subject and just give both animals a stick.
One of them uses it to extract a morsel of food from a hard to reach area.
The other uses it to mark time according to either the moon cycle or possibly something else that lasts that long. I.e., this animal has created a calendar.
Using historical evidence please tell me which animal performed which feat?
The thing is-- I really do find the intelligence of crows fascinating! I just don't get the desire to pair that with the "human's aren't such hot shit" trope.
An untrained 'wild' human doesn't develop the language facility. Absent that, there's little to distinguish us from another large apex predator.
There have been a few humans raised away from their own kind, not many, but enough to make this observation.
No; passing on knowledge isn't quite sufficient. The key difference is our ability to manipulate objects with hands, and our ability to harness external sources of energy, starting with fire.
Cetaceans (in particular orcas and dolphins), chimps, crows, they all are known to develop & pass on language, culture, and knowledge like hunting tricks. Cetaceans, and also octopuses have relatively high intelligence. The former live in long-running packs (pods), and pass on their distinct cultures, language dialects, and hunting habits. The later live with little to no contact with their parents, and have to discover everything from grounds up. Both have been around for much longer than humans. Neither have progressed anywhere near close to having a technological civilization, and are on relatively similar level.
i/o is more important than calculation when it comes to getting things done.
Also, most smart animals have persistent knowledge that they pass from one generation to the other.
We are just smarter than those other animals. Tens of thousands of years ago, humans were already a force not to be messed with. Hell, a million years ago our ancestors were already on the business of extinguishing their predators.
It's sad, but they do exist.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
(thanks boatswain for providing the link in another comment)
We also don't have to spend 80-90% of our time in a struggle for survival against the elements during this crucial learning period.
Humans in developed countries are typically provided for, while doing the majority of their learning.
General intelligence, by itself, appears to be just one possible strategy for adapting to the environment, not inherently superior considering that many species get along just fine with survival tactics "hardwired" for their environment. But it sure gives faster adaptability and humans had expanded into very diverse environments deep in the stone age.
What eventually set the human brain apart is the old cliche distinction of opposable thumbs. Back to topic, few things illustrate the value of our hands better that watching a crow headbutt an object with its beak, stop to ponder the results, then headbutt again because what other option does it have?
- Cave art from 44kya https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/440000-year-old-cave-art-d...
- 'Venus' statues - some possibly as old as 300k years!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines
I agree that the fact intelligence has arisen in wildly separate parts of the 'tree of life' probably indicates something about the likelihood for intelligence to develop elsewhere. Like you said, it's not a fluke, but it's also not something that only arises under very specific progressive conditions.
I'm not sure whether it recedes or not - that's an interesting and slightly terrifying question
Very smart but obnoxious in a way.
Just found this on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Y0xwX5iOFok
But I have seen a cat trotting along a wire fence with a concrete base. On that base, which was about the cat's height there was a hooded crow happily scuttering behind the cat and grabbing at its tail from time to time.
The cat mostly ignored it but it was apparent that it judges the chances of catching the pesky bird.
Dolphins (including orca) do, primates do, the article says crows do. Cats and dogs do too.
It never stops being funny to me
Skiing down a roof: https://youtu.be/1WupH8oyrAo
My girlfriend's spirit animal: https://youtu.be/Qt-pB1R64mI
Teaming up to provoke a catfight: https://youtu.be/WQd9kuXpUYU
Nipping a sausage: https://youtu.be/Y0xwX5iOFok
[1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/scientists-investiga...
Shrike (A.K.A. butcher birds) are predatory but since they are song birds they don't have talons to rip apart prey into manageable bites. Instead they impale their pray on thorns or barbed wire so that they can tear off bits with their beaks. They also use this to store food and have been known to use this to wait until the poison in certain insects degrades. During mating season, the number of carcasses that a male shrike has hung up is used to demonstrate its fitness to females.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpRcc5jvRmQ
Killdeer nest on the ground, so when a predator approaches the nest the mother attempts to lead them away by pretending to have a broken wing.
[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hyperion+shrike&ia=images&iax=imag...
If you're interested in this topic a good book is "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?", by Frans de Waal.
A crow once sneaked quite far into my mechanic's shop without being seen, got up on a rolling toolbox and stole a bag of sunflower seeds without being noticed. I found this because I saw a crow and their other crow buddies were having a sunflower seed party in the alley, and one of the mechanics lost their snack.
Also, crows will remember if you help them for years. People make a point to make friends with them because they have been known to bring gifts and visit year after year. Probably better company than the in-laws too. There's a number of documentaries and personal videos on YouTube about this topic.
PS: Davis CA has zillions of crows. An apartment I rented had large trees at the street containing easily several thousand in a dozen trees where they bedded-down for the night. The sidewalks and streets were coated white with droppings like it was SF's Fisherman's Wharf. Needless to say, no one used those sidewalks. And you could hear when they came back, because it sounded like a crow cocktail party.
Living in Minneapolis with a home office overlooking the Mississippi River, I've noticed crows commuting in the darker, colder months. Hundreds of them at a time go up river in the morning, just as it's getting light, and then return down river before the sun sets. It's fun to watch.
[1] https://www.seattlemet.com/articles/2017/5/17/the-secret-lif...
This is exactly what they do. They roost communally, with well-defined and enforced social hierarchies even in flocks hundreds of birds strong.
Good eyesight tends to evolve first. In the case of jumping spiders, it was vital for safe landing. As a consequence, jumping spiders have the best eyesight among spiders. Anyway, initially brain gets a lot of extra information but is unable to take advantage of all of it. It's just for safe landing. Then those animals that find way to exploit the extra data become more effective.
Jumping spiders are devious, for example they can lure prey by mimicking gestures the insect uses.
Whenever someone came near they would move away from the bin and started looking around aimlessly, as if to say "there's nothing going on here".
Object permanence.
How many things can they keep in working memory?
How many steps can they work through linearly to an objective?
How many dependent elements of a puzzle can be branched off for a single step?
Can they understand symbols as being representative of objects? Of verbs? Adjectives?
Can they understand counting, grouping?
Can they extrapolate solutions from one puzzle to another? How dissimilar can they appear for them to still recognize patterns?
Are they creative? Are they social?
There are things that other animals can do which humans can't, such as an octopus communicating with a grouper fish, two entirely different species, by changing the color and patterns of their skin, to corral and trap a prey (as seen on a segment of BBC's Blue Planet.)
Are humans "dumber" if we use that objective criteria to compare intelligence?
We have advanced communication with our domesticated animals, especially dogs. Also have some communication with non domesticated animals like primates, dolphins, etc..
By the way, a while back I read that the tool-using crows of New Caledonia had their eyes more to the front than other crows, and someone used that to discover that another group of crows (on Hawaii I think) also used tools.
(edit: rephrased the last bit to make it more clear)
You're thinking of the New Caledonian crows.
https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/news/00000161-1f5...
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/09/this-cro...
Crows are clever beyond tools, but tool using isn't that exclusive and can even be found in fish. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KKjqXxxp-Q
Additionally, there was a thread on here some time ago[1] by a Dutch Startup[2] about trying to teach crows to exchange cigarette butts for treats inside a tiny device place in parks, I always thought that was a funny idea if you could get the crows to teach one another.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04
A crow swooped in, perched itself on the steering wheel of the golf cart, evaluated there was no food there but then took my wallet and flew away. I chased it for like 200 feet and it dropped my wallet ~5 feet from a large body of water, looked at me and flew away.
I'm pretty sure it did that out of spite for not feeding him.
I have tried different ways to train them to bring me hobby drones or their parts. I figured it would make for a cheap defense against random drone surveillance.
These are things not measured on intelligence tests and that don't fit well in to scientific experiments because they can't be "objectively" judged or quantified, but my intuition is that they do in fact have to do with intelligence -- just not the sort of intelligence that problem solving, planning, and tool use demonstrate. Though they may require problem solving, planning, or tool use to accomplish, there seems to be something else going on there.
I'm reminded of the Douglas Adams quote: "... on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much--the wheel, New York, wars and so on--whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man--for precisely the same reasons."
[1] - ...if such criteria could be applied to them -- we don't know, and that's part of the point. If we don't know how can we judge one animal who does one thing to be "smarter" than another who does something else?
[Citation Needed]
In other words, writing great poetry is a sign of intelligence, but not a requirement for intelligence.
Conversely, being good at problem solving, tool use, and planning might also be signs of intelligence, but maybe not requirements for intelligence either.
They would be considered less intelligent than humans that have developed speech, and later poetry and other refined forms of expression.
The same way humans that painted their caves are considered more intelligent than the humanoids that proceeded them, that weren't as able to express themselves.
Homo Erectus emerged 2 millions years ago, I'm not aware of anything that says speech couldn't have started during his reign.
Do you have any source for that 100,000 years figure?
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/could-neandert...
> Based on these results, most researchers agree Neanderthals were capable of emitting and hearing complex vocalizations. However, they disagree over the implications. While some consider the findings indicative of speech-based language in Neanderthals, others propose these features could have evolved for other reasons, like singing. Neanderthals may have lacked the cognitive abilities for language, but possessed the physical anatomy for musical calls to attract mates or sooth infants.
Seems to imply that speech was physically possible for neanderthals (and by extension, their common ancestor with homo sapiens), but there's no agreement among experts that it means that neanderthals did speak.
Because poetry had a more day to day use than that. The rhythm and the rhyming is a mnemonic device. It makes it much easier to remember a text than when spoken in prose.
I can't imagine even our early ancestors not making use of that. In fact the earliest literature was passed from generation to generation as an oral tradition.
Academics do, in fact, study recreation & play, language & song, and expressions of emotion like grief. They are considered indicators of some kind of intelligence worth studying. The book even devotes a chapter to each of those topics!
There are no Van Gogh's anymore just Pixar.
The problem of expressing yourself to a specific, deeper, degree than with mere talk? And/or (in olde times, when poems where meant to be accompanied by music/oration) creating something people can be entertained with and sing/dance too.
>Do you have to be intelligent to write a great poem?
Yes. Mind you, it doesn't mean it's technical intelligence, the kind that solves math problems etc. It's intelligence with words, wordplay, expression, feelings, ways of seeing, etc.
Consider when someone common argues politics, but their first inclination is to fall back to statistics. They have now canceled out the component sum of all other elements in the set of understanding, only to rely on numbers as the indicator of truth.
Boethius once wrote about the 10 properties of man, one being number, and the others being place, position, attributes...etc. Yet, most of these are rarely used when you really get down to it.
Ezra Pound once made a statement that poetry is language charged with meaning to the utmost.
And there really lies the connection I mean to give. Poetry is that which embraces Boethius' 10 properties including the numeric. Math in the most pure sense is focused only on quantity until it is applied to a context. (Physics, etc).
Language in itself is, discounting the vocal portions, a tool of symbolic manipulation. And from this one can generate a theory of linguistics, much like the Greeks, as that which binds symbols to images within a context, and the intended excitation of the senses.
Even math is explained and used as bound symbols within a context followed by a sort of kinesthetic sense.
Atop both of these, respectively, is grammar and the rules of mathematics.
Anyway, this is getting too long for a comment but this is my point.
- I think language and math are under a unified form of intelligence because the utilities used to perform them reach towards the same foundation.
- Poetry and writing is underappreciated not because it is technically inept, but for the reason that society has currently degraded it's understanding towards a single attribute (the numeric) and interprets anything that isn't a number as something which must originate from emotion.
- Emotion is hard to quantify so it is viewed as a isolated creative art that is not perceived as a criteria for what people mean when they think about intelligence.
- The author and the poet can and should be using their art with a technical foundation.
- Our current writers actually imply the state of society far greater than we think, which is ironic because they have the power to lead society.
- Intelligence tests as a metric imply an end result which is numeric. This is not a whole picture. Even if the number is representative of an abstract process used to indicate the success of solving a problem.
In other, other words, writing is viewed as a lesser art when it comes to quantifying intelligence because it is incompatible with such a motion in a world where the only viewpoint funnels into the numeric. It is also lesser because the quality of contemporary writing has a stark contrast to those works before us.
Nothing will teach you powerlessness like the friendly, loving malevolence of a corvid.
I highly recommend the book "The wonder of birds" by Jim Robbins. One of the earliest insights in the book is that birds are the dinosaurs that survived. They are amazingly adapted.
The unusual thing is that each chapter is full of intriguing information and each one is a different topic.
Like, how could birds possibly evolve wings? A wing is only useful if it's a working wing, and if a bird evolved half a wing it would be pointless, right? It turns out half a wing is useful. It speeds up running birds, especially up a slope.
Feathers actually grow outside first, and the stem last.
The amazing efficiency and optimization of their hearts and respiratory systems.
Bird guano used to be so valuable that Incas punished bird killers with death. Natural fertilizers are very important if you try to make the most of poor mountainous soil.
The crows know the score though. This acquiantance says the crows know to disappear if they see the bird clearers. What's "clever" is that they only take flight if it's one of the shooters. They recognise the veichle(s) despite them being all the same fleet. So if someone else is driving round to check something else, the birds completely ignore. If it's the "bird guy" then off they go with little encouragement.
Lots of other comments talking about crows using cars to crack nuts. In this talk, he traces the behaviour to a driving school on the or skirts of Tokyo. The behaviour then spread across Tokyo.
https://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_klein_a_thought_experiment_...
There can be a fair amount of complex behavior of groups. Ants and plants for example
http://web.stanford.edu/~dmgordon/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/09/26/the-intellige...
Anyhow, a week or two later, I heard all the crows in the back and heard a loud 'bang'. I thought the neighbour had grabbed a shotgun and shot a crow, so I went out back to investigate. After looking around I saw that a crow laid dead next to a power transformer up on a telephone pole.
At first there was one other crow cawing loudly. Then more and more crows showed up. They took turns flying up and pecking at the dead crow. Within an hour, there was probably 100 crows, in all the trees, powerlines and on apartment buildings nearby. It really impressed on me how social crows were, obviously the 'caw'ing was such that it called all the crows, and crows much have told other crows as well. You could almost say they were mourning the crow or perhaps learning how this one crow died.
It would be really interesting examining the communication patterns of crows, they have such control over their voice, they must be able to do some complex communication.
Maybe they just seem dumb because they're usually bored to death standing on the grass with nothing to do but eat?
I can't think of any reasonable way to compare the intelligence of a whale with the intelligence of a crow. It's hard enough to compare the intelligence of two humans when they have different personalities and interests.
First, I would just throw nuts for them (they liked cashews best). Then, I gradually shaped their behavior by only throwing nuts when they were standing on then fence, then eventually only when they were standing on a particular spot of the fence.
Took about 3 months, was pretty fun.
Then, they started cawing to ask for nuts. They were in the right spot, why wasn't I coming out onto the balcony to give nuts? Had to ignore them for a while to avoid reinforcing their habit of demanding. Crows have no concept of weekend mornings being sacred sleep-in time and I didn't want to piss off the neighbors.
I'd like to train crows again, but I'm not sure of a good way to avoid them becoming demanding again. Also, they were much more comfortable picking up nuts when I was stuck on balcony, they seem fairly wary when offered food on the same level as a human.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026
Searching for the story just now, I came across this: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/northwest/lawsuit-...
Apparently they were sued by neighbors for encouraging wild life or something.
What an odd pair of stories. One so uplifting; the other a downer from the opposite perspective. Zeitgeisty!
At the animal clinic, i learned it couldn’t fly because it was a baby, not due to an injury, so i offered to reunite it with its parents.
The minute i released the baby, the parents flew over and started barking. It seemed almost like they were trying to guide the baby away from me.
For the rest of the summer the crows would yell at my neighbor and I if they saw us.
That fall, I was walking my newborn outside and was dive bombed by one of the crows. I got the sense it was payback for kidnapping the baby crow.
They hold grudges.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/09/bird-brains-crows-re...
NOTE: I can't find confirmation in the article or in the referenced study, but I could've sworn when I initially heard this story years ago, the "threatening" mask worn was a Nixon mask. Perhaps that was a later embellishment.
Creates life hard for other human beings.
Whats survival in this man's world - "Learn what other human had created, because whole crowd is following."
wait a minute. Crows smarter than humans? Of course they are. They dont load bullshit in their head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
Elephants are intelligent but not that much per the number of cells. Raccons are probably more intelligent than cats and have more neurons, ok. And why are Capybaras surprisingly high on the list?
The same birds will fly up and drop nuts to crack them. What is notable is they will fly in diminishing lower arcs to drop the nuts. It’s a precise conservation of energy.
Remarkable stuff.
They seemed very smart to me. I wonder if they lose to crow only because they are less prevalent around most labs in the world...
https://www.amazon.com/Kea-Bird-Paradox-Evolution-Behavior/d...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOpFZYVpezI
It's quite incredible to me, the way it seems to understand the physics of the brick quite well.
I don't think intelligence is a linear scale or gradient, or even a cube, more like a cluster of multiple features/drivers/daemons operating at different strengths in different species, all shaped by the needs of their bodies.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/world...
For example, see this video of a crow tobogganing on a snowy roof.
orcas are almost always left out of intelligence of animals discussions, but they have a very refined intelligence that doesn’t require leaps of faith to say, woah, that is very high level cognition going on.
at least the article includes this quote:
> Ranking the intelligence of animals seems an increasingly pointless exercise when one considers the really important thing: how well that animal is adapted to its niche
"To a clever crow, a scarecrow is an opportunity" - Alan Scott
(but he in turn may have been quoting someone else)
Adam is the father of all humans according to Islamic beliefs and his son killed his brother.
tldr: study suggests crows recognize human faces
A lot of the time it's because you are getting too close to their nests during nesting season. Just take a different path in spring and let them look after their kids in peace.
The Anthropic Principle says this combination must have happened with probability 1, otherwise there would be noone to observe it not happening.