Rutz is unequivocal. Some birds, like the New Caledonian crows he studies – can do remarkable things. In a paper published earlier this year, he and his co-authors described how New Caledonians seek out a specific type of plant stem from which to make their hooked tools. Experiments showed that crows found the stems they desired even when they had been disguised with leaves from a different plant species. This suggested that the birds were selecting a kind of material for their tools that they knew was just right for the job. You wouldn’t use a spanner to hammer in a nail, would you? [...]
You might think that some animals are smarter than others – with humans at the top of the proverbial tree. Certainly, humans do rely excessively on intelligence to get by. But that doesn’t mean we’re the best at every mental task. Chimps, notes Dakota McCoy at Harvard University, have been shown to possess better short-term memories than humans. This might help them to memorise where food is located in the forest canopy, for example.
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. Intelligence is, first and foremost, a means towards specialisation. [...]
The crows McCoy studies have a natural curiosity, she says. They cheekily grab scientific equipment and fly off with it in the aviary. Young birds especially, she says, love to play. Humans are not so different, she argues: “We have these incredibly huge brains but we use them to do crossword puzzles – that’s not something that is evolutionarily selected for.”
No comments:
Post a Comment