Let me begin with something I've been meaning to post in regard to
corvid predation - you'll remember my watching a raven snag a
Brewer's blackbird in SE OR a couple of weeks ago.

In the Willamette Week this past week (PDX weekly rag), in their
"bizarre questions/answers" column a reader reported seeing a
crow snag a live robin, and wondered if such predation was common...

>In a brilliant solution that probably is beyond many human's problem
>solving abilities, the bird dropped pebbles into the water until the water
>was displaced enough for it to reach!

Other than hating to think humans couldn't perform this task (and
at the same time wondering if it's a screening test for politicians,
with only those failing allowed to practice), didn't I read something
similar in Aesop?

><gray parrot>: but could identify abstract
>objects on flash cards like "blue circle" and "red triangle."

I've read of this, too, but forget where. SciAm? New Scientist?
Geraldo?

>but I have also
>heard that pidgeons have exceeded humans on some tests where they were
>trained to identify complex abstract designs transformed though reflection,
>rotation, etc.

Complex patterns like spelling, I wonder? ("pidgeons" ???)

I have a karma-destroying, working relationship with pigeons each
fall when banding hawks, and for pattern and puzzle solving creatures
they are amazingly stupid.

I think there are a couple of conclusions one can draw from animal
intellegence studies in general:

1. A bunch of animals have complex processing capabilities beyond
our intuitive assumptions of their abilities.

2. Such capabilities don't necessarily add up to "intellegence".

3. Animal research really points out that various tasks we take to be
signs of intellegence are really just computational, and can be
executed in a brain which has evolved the capability without
evolving Einsteinian capabilities in other areas.

This makes the notion of a single number which can measure
intellegence in humans suspicious, as the existence of
such a number implies various abilities in humans are
linked, with relatively little variation.

Of course, the notion of IQ is viewed suspicously by some
researchers but outside the field an almost blind faith is placed
on this number ("g", or one's IQ). That blind faith coupled with
really bad statistics leads to acceptance of trash like
"The Bell Curve". (The really bad statistics would invalidate
that book's claims regardless, or at least the book's supposed
proofs of them).

4. Our long-held conceit that only humans are self-aware is
hard to hold on to when one reads of work done with animals,
particularly of course higher primates.


- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>