Crows can perform as well as 7- to 10-year-olds on cause-and-effect tasks

I've always felt this was the case in my own mind. Language is the serialization format for abstract concepts.

This is why I'm very interested in constructed languages. I think it might help human cognition if we had a more efficient serialization format for internal concept transport.

How can this be??? If they didn't have the ability to keep track of which way was which, shouldn't they have failed 50% of the time, like the rats?

Speech uses the same part of the brain as thought apparently, so making someone say words prevents them from thinking during that time.

Brain-machine interface with weak AI (translation) could drastically alter the intelligence debate.

But the problem then is to get onto the road to eat the content of the nut without being run over.

Well, crows learned to drop the nuts at pedestrian crossings, and wait for read lights stopping all cars, to go collect the reward. Problem solved.

In short, survival skills are not a good metric for intelligence, you can have one without the other.

Maybe not a 10 year old, but a 12 year old in the Industrial Revolution would have been earning enough to cover his costs and contribute to the family. A 14 year old could also be doing just fine as a mother. It's not as if teenagers' poor life-skills are functions of their age, we just choose not to let them have the requisite experience until they are "old enough." Children are technically capable of much more than we give them credit for, we just would rather they spend time gaining the education to be knowledge workers instead of replaceable cogs in factories.

You couldn't just throw an average modern 10-year-old on the streets and expect him to be fine, but it's historical fact that it is possible for children not to be so helpless.

It goes without saying that a 7 yr old human can do a much wider variety of intellectual tasks an adult crow, however.

One response to this would be to conclude that it's not like the typical Harvard student is a fountain of smartness; it is not able to sustain its existence by itself, would starve or get killed through its own experience (true enough; the average Harvard student wouldn't survive a month lost alone in the jungle) - which makes little animals superior.

A more sensible response would be to notice that humans actually are smarter than birds (I'm prepared to revisit that conclusion if any crows or pigeons can post reasoned arguments to the contrary), but that you can prove anything is superior to anything else if you cherry-pick the test carefully enough.

The Jesuits put this a little more sinisterly: "Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man".