The book is interesting and goes into how humans need to set up experiments properly to actually test non-human animals in ways that make sense (rather than just in some biased human way).
One quick example was testing tool use, the original experimenters left branches on the ground for the monkeys to use, but the monkeys can’t pick stuff up that’s flat on the ground since they’re normally in trees (their hands don’t have thumbs that move that way). When he redid the experiment with the tool raised they were able to grab and use it.
A dog I live with, not technically mine, can count to at least three. She hates waiting in her harness before we go on walks, and has learned that I am ready to go after taking three poop bags. If I only pull two bags, she won’t come downstairs and wait by the door. If I pull the third bag, she immediately walks down the stairs. I noticed it the other day because I had two bags on me; so, she only heard me pull one bag and refused to walk downstairs. Then I pulled a second one, still nothing. Finally, I pulled the third one and she immediately trotted on down. Now that I’m aware of it, I’ve been paying attention and yep... she only ever comes down after hearing a third bag. I’ve been pretty shocked by it to be honest (in a good way)...
There was this horse named Clever Hans whose trick was that you could give him a math problem and he would tap out the answer with his hoof. Of course, his powers were fake, but the way he actually did it is brilliant.
When the number of taps approached the correct answer, his trainer became excited. Hans picked up on this and stopped right when the trainer's excitement reached its peak. The trainer had no idea this was happening. He was fooled by a horse.
And there’s that famous computer vision story of a model that was supposed to detect tanks in images but actually just detected whether or not it was sunny (all the tank pictures in the training set were sunny, non tanks overcast).
Children will make similar classification errors when learning too.
None of this means that it’s not possible they can also learn counting, but just that scientists need to be clever about experimental design. The book goes into that.
This is the new bit, if you've already read about the basics of animal counting:
> The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a single dot than they did with images of two, three or four dots. Recordings of the crows’ brain activity during these tasks revealed that neurons in a region of their brain called the pallium represent zero as a quantity alongside other numerosities, just as is found in the primate prefrontal cortex.
(I'm a little disgruntled about skimming a longish article to find this 2/3 of the way down.)
> Some researchers, for example, propose that while humans have a “true” understanding of numerical concepts, animals only appear to be discriminating between groups of objects based on quantity when they’re instead relying on less abstract characteristics, like size or color.
It's a cognitive bias. People have this because their model of the world is ego centric with themselves as hero and Number 1, and animals far below.
How do we know this isn't another dead fish result?[1] I'm not trying to be dismissive, it's a real question that needs to be asked for any brain scan.
I highly doubt this is the result of a scan, fMRI doesn't have high enough resolution to detect neurons that prefer absence versus a particular number. It's also rare to see fMRI used at all on animal models, maybe a little on monkeys but very uncommon on anything smaller. I would be absolutely shocked if they were trying to scan crows.
That said, I don't find the interpretation of the results very convincing. I'm going only on the Quanta article, perhaps the original research tells a more compelling story. But with the details provided so far I don't see how the physiology can rule out the idea that crows have a concept of "none" but don't consider "none" as a potential number like "two".
I don't see how mixing up a blank screen more often with one dot than with multiple dots indicates they think of "none" as a number. The more things there are the easier it is to detect at least one, so it seems completely plausible that something with a concept of "none" but without a concept of "zero" would also mix up no items with one more often than it would with two or three.
Hopefully the original research addressed this, but it felt like the Quanta article was reporting the results in a way completely disconnected with the material it had just introduced.
If we know the animals arrange quantities like a number line, why is there no report on where the animals place an empty set in that experiment? If we know that some young children don't understand the empty set can be a number, then why aren't results from young children on these tasks compared?
There are some interesting results described, but I wasn't convinced at all by the argument about zero specifically, which they make a big deal of in the intro and discussion.
To be honest I think Quanta is a bit overrated on HN in general, but that's another issue.
I agree. I have read it all to really learn not that much (animal cognition is a pet peeve of mine) until this paragraph.
I don't know anymore if we should salute the efforts of the author to contextualize the news, to the detriment of the news itself, or I'd we should blame them for lengthening artificially the article...
Probably a bit of both, as always.
That being said, thanks for the summary of the article, great tl;dr; ;)
Saying "thank you" and upvoting is encouraging, and makes communities stronger.
Blaming people is discouraging, and divides communities. Criticise the article, not the author, and thank the author for what they got right (a good topic for discussion) so they'll create more in future.
We can also increase trust in the community using links. Mentioning names in a good way is particularly helpful, like academic citations.
Thank you for finishing with the "great tl;dr", xcambar, you're asking the right questions :)
The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it.
I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that there is food inside these shiny bags. When let that sink in, I was thoroughly impressed. I knew seagulls are very opportunistic eaters, but I did not know they were capable of this degree of intelligence and planning.
I wonder how much more there is discover, and how that might affect how we view and more importantly treat animals. We might have to rethink our relationship with them.
Seagulls eat clams. They break the shells by dropping them onto rocks from a height. They're able to learn to steal food from other birds when they see a chance, and conversely, to regulate from which height to drop clams of different sizes.
All of these require planning and risk assessment abilities. Being able to take a bag of potato chips away from human-infested buildings and opening it is not really that far outside the scope of their adaptations.
A few years back I was walking along the SF bay down in the marina with a friend when suddenly I heard a "clunk" and felt a splash of water on my legs. Initially I thought some drunk idiot threw a beer bottle out the window of their car, but a few seconds later a Seagull swooped down, grabbed a clam it had dropped from who knows how high up, and fly off with lunch. I had no idea they did that, I just stood there dumbfounded for a few seconds.
I once watched several seagulls peck at a closed clamshell container containing pizza crusts for over half an hour. Clearly there is an upper bound to their intelligence.
I watched a crack head at the park look for something on the ground for an hour once. Clearly there is an upper bound for human intelligence as well /s
It's been reported that younger gulls initially try to open clams (the animal clams, not plastic containers) by pecking. I believe they learn the dropping-from-a-height tactic from observation, and suspect that the pecking at a plastic container is merely due to them not having seen it being open by a gull before. Also, worth considering that in their natural habitat, the only transparent things around (jellyfish) are squishy and stingy.
I once spent ten minutes frantically looking for my wristwatch. It was very stressful, because I had to go to school, and I did not have much time left to catch the bus. So after a while (like I said, about ten minutes), I looked at my wristwatch to see how much time I had left. It took another 30 seconds for me to realize that I had been wearing my wristwatch the whole time.
Being smart does not save you (and not me, either!) from being dumb. And there have been times in my life when I was able to substitute inventiveness with stubbornness.
So there are upper bounds to everyone's intelligence, human or animal[0], genius or idiot. Given the variety we can observe in our fellow humans, I think it's fair to assume birds have their "village idiots", too.
[0] Except for barnacles, of course, but they are very discreet about it.
> The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it.
It goes both ways, in the past we had Clever Hans[1]. People believed Hans could perform simple math, when his cleverness was actually watching his owners expression for small changes. So any observed intelligence ends up under suspicion of them acting on information gained from a much simpler side channel.
The thing about animal intelligence is that it is probably significantly different from ours. In studying it, we must avoid antromorphization of animals.
Mammals are somewhat close to us, but we have diverged from birds over a hundred million years ago and we still struggle to understand how a tiny and smooth brain such as corvids have can produce such an observably intelligent behavior.
"The more I learn about animal intelligence, the more I suspect we grossly underestimate it."
An example of something that might surprise many people: animals can use medicine.
Here is a fascinating podcast that discuss the subject with researchers and experts.
Podcast description:
> Listener Andrew Chen got in touch to ask whether animals use any kind of medicine themselves. After all, our own drugs largely come from the plants and minerals found in wild habitats. So perhaps animals themselves are using medicines they find in nature.
> We think of medicine as a human invention - but it turns out that we’ve learnt a lot of what we know from copying the birds, bugs and beasts.
This podcast is highly recommended - I guarantee you'll come away amazed and humbled by the intelligence of animals.
Blue Planet II depicts a group of Dolphins visiting a certain kind of coral that emits a substance that allegedly helps them fight off parasites.
Earlier BBC documentaries show animals (birds and fish) seek the "service" of certain types of fish to clean them from parasites.
So the idea of animals using medicine is kind of presenting itself. It's not totally in your face, but it's no more out there than prehistoric humans discovering the medicinal properties of certain plants.
I never fully understood why some cultures assume humans must be fundamentally different - it’s not a universal notion.
Some hypothesizes and argues that our ancestors extinguished every other species that showed intelligence by eating them, which I think is a bit too wild of a theory. But maybe the fact that it’s often small birds that shows intelligence is also interesting. They’re among hardest to hunt.
Descartes considered animals to be little better than automata and given his high social position and intellectual achievements, and the convenience of this argument for his co-religionists, it stuck. Even today (and right here on HN), any sort of conjecture on the inner life of animals tends to bring out a few finger-waggers condemning 'athropmorphism.'
> some cultures assume humans must be fundamentally different - it’s not a universal notion.
Are you referring to hunter gatherers doing a mystical bear or eagle dance? Reincarnation as an ant? in those cases, it is belief in a non-corporeal spirit-being that underpins the other belief. Do you believe in non-corporeal spirit-beings, and if you do, aren't you more mystified by people who don't believe in them; or vice versa?
Otherwise, I'm skeptical and would love citations?
That's a bit of hyperbole, isn't it? You never understood why some [most] cultures assume humans must be fundamentally different [than other animals]?? Well, smelting iron ore, and a long, long list of other unique accomplishments never replicated by any other species on the planet [or known universe for that matter] tends to crystalize the observation that there is something fundamentally different about this singular species. That animals are smarter than human cultures have ever generally given them credit for doesn't bridge this enormous gulf. Humans generally think less of (underestimate) anything not relevant to their immediate existence, including other humans (from other cultures, time periods, political parties, etc). Same reason my dog is uniquely intelligent, and can even understand English, but dogs in general are not intelligent. Maybe this tendency to denigrate is an evolved survival skill. Nonetheless, call me when the seagulls start splitting atoms.
> I never fully understood why some cultures assume humans must be fundamentally different - it’s not a universal notion.
Well, riddle me this. In this thread people are marveling at animals doing things like using automatic doors and opening bags of chips. Who would be impressed if a human did these things? I don't exactly find myself persuaded by these examples that actually animal intelligence is just like human intelligence.
> Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works
I'm not sure I see that, that is, the "understanding" part. I mean, this is not some new kind of behavior, even if everyone here reacts with surprise. Anyone with a pet dog or cat knows the various mischief they can get into. Many of us have been at the beach and watched seagulls do all sorts of interesting stuff. Animals aren't "dumb" and I don't know anyone who would say that they are. What people do object to is the unwarranted inference that because they display what looks like clever behavior then this must entail capacity for abstract thought with concepts. I don't see how abstraction is necessary in these examples at all. Language in the fullest sense demonstrates the existence of abstract thought. Non-human language does not appear to show any sign of descriptive and argumentative function, only signalling and expression (in the Popperian sense).
I have been training the crows in my neighbourhood to solve puzzles. They visit me every day now.
One goal I'm really excited about is to see if they can solve a puzzle that requires two crows to work together, because I've only seen videos of individual crows solving puzzles online. Can you tell me more about the teamwork that you're referring to? Are there videos or papers I can look at? I'm super curious!
Not only do crows learn to recognize PEOPLE by their FACES, they teach their offspring to avoid/mistrust those same people. Those offspring teach their offspring.
So the "grandchild" of the original bird learns to avoid a specific person. *(Note the documentary I watched with this revelation didn't follow any further generations. We don't know how many generations are taught this lesson.)
Think about that for a minute. I don't recognize the people that live 2 houses away from me, these birds teach their young that SPECIFIC humans are dangerous.
They are smart but TBH that crow already did all the sub-puzzles independently, he knew what the possible moves are just had to execute them in some order.
One time when my daughter was 2 years old, riding on my wife's back in an Ergo baby carrier while we were walking up the Brighton Pier eating an apple, a seagull came stealthily hovering in from behind on the strong winds and took a bite out of the apple from my daughter's dangling arm before any of us could react.
The idea that zero was "invented" at a certain time by recent humans and not in use until then has always seemed absolutely absurd to me. I will admit I haven't read deeply into it, but there's just no way people didn't have a concept for "none of a thing" until a couple millennia ago.
One of the justifications used for this reasoning is "You don't go to the market and buy 0 fish". But all that tells us is: There's no reason to record buying 0 fish or owning 0 acres of land. Another justification given is the difficulty children experience with 0 - but we don't teach children to start counting with 0, so it makes sense that they would get tripped up there.
I guess the argument sometimes seems to be that we didn't have a symbol for 0, and that this was somehow more confusing to adopt than other symbols? But if that's the case, then isn't claiming any culture "invented" zero the same as claiming a culture "invented" any concept they came up with a word for?
I'd love to hear all the reasons I am wrong and stupid.
I think the thing which came surprisingly late in history wasn't having a concept of 'none' but rather of allowing it to be considered a number with the same status as 1, 2, 3 and the rest.
Indeed some of the ancient Greeks were of the opinion that 1 was not a number (since numbers were for counting a plurality of things).
It's quite the realisation that you can use the usual rules of arithmetic for 1 and 0, and not have anything go wrong. (Except of course division does go wrong!)
You see this in programming languages too. Many languages distinguish between one of something and a collection of them, e.g. int x vs vector<int> x. In other languages, like Matlab, everything's a vector, and a scalar is just a vector of length one.
Having a concept of "none of a thing" is one thing. Abstracting that to a number is a different thing.
Even today, when you ask someone "how many kids to you have," and they don't have any, they say "I don't have any," not "zero." In other words, they respond with a phrase, often one with a negation (not), instead of a number.
Seems contrived. 'None' is an equally valid answer, and easy to conceptualize as a number, eg 'start with three, take away two, take away one, now you have none.'
There's a book called "Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea" that goes into the history of zero in detail, admittedly I haven't finished reading the book myself but got at least partway through and it was fascinating to read about it and I'll one day finish it :)
What you said about it not being in the numeric system is definitely part of it (ex: roman numerals not having it) but also all the problems that come up with zero have to be dealt with (e.g allowing dividing by it allows you to prove anything, and there's a great proof that winston churchill is a carrot in the book showing as such), and there's some overlap with religions in fearing "nothing" and what that might mean
I more or less had understood that what was meant by "zero was invented" is zero as used in a positional number system. In other words, the digit zero, not the quantity zero.
Zero is an overloaded concept. There are at least like 5 or so different things that we use the word "zero" for, some of which are very sophisticated.
On the one hand, it means there's none of a thing in there. Most animals understand this. There is zero food here. There are zero predators on that island. Pretty sure crows have this one down pat.
Taking it one step further, you have zero as a number. Zero which is on equal footing as numbers like one or seven-- it is a number that you can perform arithmetic on or with. You can multiple by zero, you can add by zero, you can divide by -- wait, you can't divide by zero! The Greeks understood this. But lots of people say the Greek's "didn't have/didn't invent zero" because they used the word "nothing" instead of its own word. But Aristotle did say "nothing and nothing, added together, make nothing" and "there is no ratio of nothing to a number".
Crows probably don't understand that you cannot divide by zero. Maybe you could teach a crow that if two crows got ten total nuts, each crow would get five nuts, and so on. If you told that crow to split ten nuts between no crows, and ask the crow how many nuts each crow would get, the crow might tell you ten nuts, but it's not going to tell you that that operation is undefined.
Then there's the use of zero as a digit in a place-value system, like the one we use, as opposed to Roman numerals or Chinese numerals or so forth. Before there was a symbol for zero, you couldn't write one hundred and four as 104, it would just be 14 which was ambiguous. So when the Indians "invented zero" in the 7th century or whatever, it wasn't zero that they were inventing, it was the place-value system we use today to conduct our daily lives with, which is a shitload better than Roman numerals or trying to do arithmetic with a straightedge and compass or whatever.
There are a lot of people who claim that, for instance, the Maya were more mathematically advanced than the ancient Greeks, because the Maya had a symbol for zero (which looks sorta like a French baguette and an American football had a baby) and the Greeks didn't. While the Mayan way of writing down a number was much better than the Greek method, we don't have any evidence that the Mayans had much in the way of math beyond counting and extrapolating. The Mayans primary method of calculating is by drawing out tables: they knew the cycle of Venus is (roughly) 585 days, they knew the cycle of Mercury was 117 days, so you'd get a table with thousands of entries counting up the cycles. The Dresden codex has a table with 2340 entries, with 585 entries for Venus repeated 4 times and 117 entries for Mercury repeated 20 times. With a place-value system that used zeroes for zero digits. Which... ok, the place-value system was more advanced than the Greeks, but the Greeks would have done that same 'calculation' with a lot less tedium.
Then you have zero as in the additive identity, which opens whole new worlds of mathematics to you. Now you can start talking about things like rings, fields, and groups, and can have all sorts of fun. Pretty sure crows haven't sat down and discusses abelian vs non-abelian groups, but I wouldn't put it past them.
So anyway, any time someone starts talking about inventing or understanding the concept of zero but do not, themselves, display an understanding the concept of zero, (by explaining what it means in that context) it's generally a good time to stop listening.
If I don't give my cats the usual number of treats, they look at me like they know they're being cheated. I never thought they could count, but I figured they have a sense of relative quantity ('enough', 'more', 'less' and so on).
My dog just does a protest sit-in when I do that. He wouldnt move till he gets his due number (two). I can fool him by splitting a treat into two, so seems he is counting rather than going by mass.
It depends on cats, I have had a few in the past and currently have one that always tries to convince me when I get home that for some reasons my wife forgot to feed her.
Clearly she has clear the negative concept of "not enough".
Do the birds and the bees actually count? Or is there some more innate/intuitive process involved. I doubt I could tell the difference between 9 or 10 dots on a page without actually counting them.
Many years ago there was a study involving crows, as I recall. N, starting at 2, researchers went into a blind, then N-1 came out. They had to get up to N = 13 before they fooled the birds into thinking the blind was actually empty.
For us humans it is a process of establishing a one-to-one relationship between objects and a long-since-memorized sequence of words that requires just one member of the sequence to be remembered in order to represent the number of objects.
Article seems to resolutely believe that the entities 600MM+ years ago could not understand numbers and thus counting emerged recently many times over in parallel across a variety of species [1], but provides nothing to back up this claim ([2] is not supported beyond “an expert said).
This is an odd claim —- based on the neural network experiment (which showed that gradient descent applied to object detection problems naturally results in the development of “counting” signals), it seems much more likely that for as long as beings have been interacting with their surroundings they’ve been able to count, and any modern slight differences in counting infrastructure are simply a divergence of the original counting machinery rather than the same thing being invented over and over by evolution in many different ways, but only recently (for some reason..?)
> The fact that those three species are from diverse taxonomic groups — primates, insects and birds — suggests that certain numerical abilities have evolved over and over again throughout the animal kingdom.
> Their last common ancestor “was [barely] able to perceive anything,” Avarguès-Weber said, much less count.
> Moreover, he added, “When you look at the history of mathematics, it turns out that [zero] is an extreme latecomer in our culture as well.” Historical research finds that human societies didn’t begin to use zero as a number in their mathematical calculations until around the seventh century.
There are huge differences between zero as the concept of "none" (I had five cows and someone took them all away, how many do I have?), zero as a more formal integer value (e.g. solution to 2 + 7 - 4 + x = 5), zero as unit placeholder (e.g. 101 dalmations), and zero as a real number (on the continuum from positive to negative rationals and irrationals).
When people make claims about "zero" they're essentially meaningless unless they specify which meaning of zero they're talking about.
I really wonder how zero came to be, was it a need to homogenize the algebraic tools (we have nice operations and want to reify the 'nothing' dead end into something that can be kept chugging along) or something else /
I think most such research don't delve upon ancient India wherein use of zero with a proper modern like numerals have been extensively observed at least since thousands of years [0].
> Hindu units of time are described in Hindu texts ranging from microseconds to trillions of years, including cycles of cosmic time that repeat general events in Hindu cosmology.
You don't appreciate zero until you try to invent a positional number system. In the past, when they used positional system they would often just leave a blank spot in the place of zero. This inevitably leads to errors. Is that two numbers or one number with zero between? How do you distinguish between 1 and 10?
Source:
A popular science book
"The history of numbers or the history of a great discovery" (Georges Ifrah)
Contains some fun chapters like "How to count if you can't count". For example if natives in a stereotypical jungle want to count numbers to a holiday. They memorize a sequence of items, for example body parts: little finger of one hand, palm, wrist, forearm, arm, shoulder, neck.... then they measure once and conclude one needs to wait as many days as there are from the little finger on left hand to, say, navel.
Readit News
They were training a younger parrot and trying to get the younger parrot to count to two by tapping twice.
Alex overheard the training and got impatient with the other bird. He yelled out “two” and then after two more taps “four” and then “six”.
The trainers were just expecting “two” each time.
It was this book: https://www.amazon.com/Are-Smart-Enough-Know-Animals/dp/0393...
The book is interesting and goes into how humans need to set up experiments properly to actually test non-human animals in ways that make sense (rather than just in some biased human way).
One quick example was testing tool use, the original experimenters left branches on the ground for the monkeys to use, but the monkeys can’t pick stuff up that’s flat on the ground since they’re normally in trees (their hands don’t have thumbs that move that way). When he redid the experiment with the tool raised they were able to grab and use it.
Same author also wrote Chimpanzee Politics and did this great video experiment: https://youtu.be/meiU6TxysCg
When the number of taps approached the correct answer, his trainer became excited. Hans picked up on this and stopped right when the trainer's excitement reached its peak. The trainer had no idea this was happening. He was fooled by a horse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
Children will make similar classification errors when learning too.
None of this means that it’s not possible they can also learn counting, but just that scientists need to be clever about experimental design. The book goes into that.
Deleted Comment
I’d recommend his other stories too if you like that one.
I’ve also got a bunch of links to other stories I’ve liked here too: https://zalberico.com/about/
> The crows mixed up a blank screen more often with images of a single dot than they did with images of two, three or four dots. Recordings of the crows’ brain activity during these tasks revealed that neurons in a region of their brain called the pallium represent zero as a quantity alongside other numerosities, just as is found in the primate prefrontal cortex.
(I'm a little disgruntled about skimming a longish article to find this 2/3 of the way down.)
> Some researchers, for example, propose that while humans have a “true” understanding of numerical concepts, animals only appear to be discriminating between groups of objects based on quantity when they’re instead relying on less abstract characteristics, like size or color.
It's a cognitive bias. People have this because their model of the world is ego centric with themselves as hero and Number 1, and animals far below.
We are alongside all other animals, with some skills much worse than other animals, some much better. Nothing more than that.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2009/09/fmrisalmon/
That said, I don't find the interpretation of the results very convincing. I'm going only on the Quanta article, perhaps the original research tells a more compelling story. But with the details provided so far I don't see how the physiology can rule out the idea that crows have a concept of "none" but don't consider "none" as a potential number like "two".
Hopefully the original research addressed this, but it felt like the Quanta article was reporting the results in a way completely disconnected with the material it had just introduced.
If we know the animals arrange quantities like a number line, why is there no report on where the animals place an empty set in that experiment? If we know that some young children don't understand the empty set can be a number, then why aren't results from young children on these tasks compared?
There are some interesting results described, but I wasn't convinced at all by the argument about zero specifically, which they make a big deal of in the intro and discussion.
To be honest I think Quanta is a bit overrated on HN in general, but that's another issue.
Me too, the title felt a little click-baitey
I don't know anymore if we should salute the efforts of the author to contextualize the news, to the detriment of the news itself, or I'd we should blame them for lengthening artificially the article...
Probably a bit of both, as always.
That being said, thanks for the summary of the article, great tl;dr; ;)
Blaming people is discouraging, and divides communities. Criticise the article, not the author, and thank the author for what they got right (a good topic for discussion) so they'll create more in future.
We can also increase trust in the community using links. Mentioning names in a good way is particularly helpful, like academic citations.
Thank you for finishing with the "great tl;dr", xcambar, you're asking the right questions :)
I recently saw a video of a seagull that entered a grocery store through the automatic door, picked up a (non-transparent) bag of potato chips (or something similar), walked out again, opened the bag and ate the chips. Think about it for a moment, the bird has to understand (to a degree) how an automatic door works, and that there is food inside these shiny bags. When let that sink in, I was thoroughly impressed. I knew seagulls are very opportunistic eaters, but I did not know they were capable of this degree of intelligence and planning.
I wonder how much more there is discover, and how that might affect how we view and more importantly treat animals. We might have to rethink our relationship with them.
All of these require planning and risk assessment abilities. Being able to take a bag of potato chips away from human-infested buildings and opening it is not really that far outside the scope of their adaptations.
Still, crafty little bastards they are indeed.
Being smart does not save you (and not me, either!) from being dumb. And there have been times in my life when I was able to substitute inventiveness with stubbornness.
So there are upper bounds to everyone's intelligence, human or animal[0], genius or idiot. Given the variety we can observe in our fellow humans, I think it's fair to assume birds have their "village idiots", too.
[0] Except for barnacles, of course, but they are very discreet about it.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/04/john-paulson-loses-1...
Dead Comment
It goes both ways, in the past we had Clever Hans[1]. People believed Hans could perform simple math, when his cleverness was actually watching his owners expression for small changes. So any observed intelligence ends up under suspicion of them acting on information gained from a much simpler side channel.
[1]https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans
Mammals are somewhat close to us, but we have diverged from birds over a hundred million years ago and we still struggle to understand how a tiny and smooth brain such as corvids have can produce such an observably intelligent behavior.
There is another one fancying cold sandwiches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZZ822Za-nE
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/i69mu1/no...
An example of something that might surprise many people: animals can use medicine.
Here is a fascinating podcast that discuss the subject with researchers and experts.
Podcast description:
> Listener Andrew Chen got in touch to ask whether animals use any kind of medicine themselves. After all, our own drugs largely come from the plants and minerals found in wild habitats. So perhaps animals themselves are using medicines they find in nature.
> We think of medicine as a human invention - but it turns out that we’ve learnt a lot of what we know from copying the birds, bugs and beasts.
This podcast is highly recommended - I guarantee you'll come away amazed and humbled by the intelligence of animals.
Do animals use medicine?: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszv77
Earlier BBC documentaries show animals (birds and fish) seek the "service" of certain types of fish to clean them from parasites.
So the idea of animals using medicine is kind of presenting itself. It's not totally in your face, but it's no more out there than prehistoric humans discovering the medicinal properties of certain plants.
Some hypothesizes and argues that our ancestors extinguished every other species that showed intelligence by eating them, which I think is a bit too wild of a theory. But maybe the fact that it’s often small birds that shows intelligence is also interesting. They’re among hardest to hunt.
> The attitude that animals are basically humans seems much healthier than the converse.
From his book https://www.prickly-paradigm.com/titles/the-western-illusion...
https://philosophynow.org/issues/108/Descartes_versus_Cudwor...
Are you referring to hunter gatherers doing a mystical bear or eagle dance? Reincarnation as an ant? in those cases, it is belief in a non-corporeal spirit-being that underpins the other belief. Do you believe in non-corporeal spirit-beings, and if you do, aren't you more mystified by people who don't believe in them; or vice versa?
Otherwise, I'm skeptical and would love citations?
Well, riddle me this. In this thread people are marveling at animals doing things like using automatic doors and opening bags of chips. Who would be impressed if a human did these things? I don't exactly find myself persuaded by these examples that actually animal intelligence is just like human intelligence.
I'm not sure I see that, that is, the "understanding" part. I mean, this is not some new kind of behavior, even if everyone here reacts with surprise. Anyone with a pet dog or cat knows the various mischief they can get into. Many of us have been at the beach and watched seagulls do all sorts of interesting stuff. Animals aren't "dumb" and I don't know anyone who would say that they are. What people do object to is the unwarranted inference that because they display what looks like clever behavior then this must entail capacity for abstract thought with concepts. I don't see how abstraction is necessary in these examples at all. Language in the fullest sense demonstrates the existence of abstract thought. Non-human language does not appear to show any sign of descriptive and argumentative function, only signalling and expression (in the Popperian sense).
monkeys can team up to resolve non trivial coordinated tasks
(vaguely related: gorillas still have the zero lag face recognition)
beside not speaking, often when I look at animals, it feels that they got wiser than us.. they could do more smart things but they just coast.
One goal I'm really excited about is to see if they can solve a puzzle that requires two crows to work together, because I've only seen videos of individual crows solving puzzles online. Can you tell me more about the teamwork that you're referring to? Are there videos or papers I can look at? I'm super curious!
Thanks!
Not only do crows learn to recognize PEOPLE by their FACES, they teach their offspring to avoid/mistrust those same people. Those offspring teach their offspring. So the "grandchild" of the original bird learns to avoid a specific person. *(Note the documentary I watched with this revelation didn't follow any further generations. We don't know how many generations are taught this lesson.)
Think about that for a minute. I don't recognize the people that live 2 houses away from me, these birds teach their young that SPECIFIC humans are dangerous.
This isn't the study I watched, but it's close. https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/grudge-holding...
"Are Crows the Ultimate Problem Solvers?"
https://youtu.be/cbSu2PXOTOc
It’s not hard for me to see how our language faculty convinced past humans we were somehow masters of reality beyond other creatures.
Past humans did pass on a lot of dumb ideas.
One of the justifications used for this reasoning is "You don't go to the market and buy 0 fish". But all that tells us is: There's no reason to record buying 0 fish or owning 0 acres of land. Another justification given is the difficulty children experience with 0 - but we don't teach children to start counting with 0, so it makes sense that they would get tripped up there.
I guess the argument sometimes seems to be that we didn't have a symbol for 0, and that this was somehow more confusing to adopt than other symbols? But if that's the case, then isn't claiming any culture "invented" zero the same as claiming a culture "invented" any concept they came up with a word for?
I'd love to hear all the reasons I am wrong and stupid.
Indeed some of the ancient Greeks were of the opinion that 1 was not a number (since numbers were for counting a plurality of things).
It's quite the realisation that you can use the usual rules of arithmetic for 1 and 0, and not have anything go wrong. (Except of course division does go wrong!)
Even today, when you ask someone "how many kids to you have," and they don't have any, they say "I don't have any," not "zero." In other words, they respond with a phrase, often one with a negation (not), instead of a number.
Please err on the side of me understanding your question well.
What you said about it not being in the numeric system is definitely part of it (ex: roman numerals not having it) but also all the problems that come up with zero have to be dealt with (e.g allowing dividing by it allows you to prove anything, and there's a great proof that winston churchill is a carrot in the book showing as such), and there's some overlap with religions in fearing "nothing" and what that might mean
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On the one hand, it means there's none of a thing in there. Most animals understand this. There is zero food here. There are zero predators on that island. Pretty sure crows have this one down pat.
Taking it one step further, you have zero as a number. Zero which is on equal footing as numbers like one or seven-- it is a number that you can perform arithmetic on or with. You can multiple by zero, you can add by zero, you can divide by -- wait, you can't divide by zero! The Greeks understood this. But lots of people say the Greek's "didn't have/didn't invent zero" because they used the word "nothing" instead of its own word. But Aristotle did say "nothing and nothing, added together, make nothing" and "there is no ratio of nothing to a number".
Crows probably don't understand that you cannot divide by zero. Maybe you could teach a crow that if two crows got ten total nuts, each crow would get five nuts, and so on. If you told that crow to split ten nuts between no crows, and ask the crow how many nuts each crow would get, the crow might tell you ten nuts, but it's not going to tell you that that operation is undefined.
Then there's the use of zero as a digit in a place-value system, like the one we use, as opposed to Roman numerals or Chinese numerals or so forth. Before there was a symbol for zero, you couldn't write one hundred and four as 104, it would just be 14 which was ambiguous. So when the Indians "invented zero" in the 7th century or whatever, it wasn't zero that they were inventing, it was the place-value system we use today to conduct our daily lives with, which is a shitload better than Roman numerals or trying to do arithmetic with a straightedge and compass or whatever.
There are a lot of people who claim that, for instance, the Maya were more mathematically advanced than the ancient Greeks, because the Maya had a symbol for zero (which looks sorta like a French baguette and an American football had a baby) and the Greeks didn't. While the Mayan way of writing down a number was much better than the Greek method, we don't have any evidence that the Mayans had much in the way of math beyond counting and extrapolating. The Mayans primary method of calculating is by drawing out tables: they knew the cycle of Venus is (roughly) 585 days, they knew the cycle of Mercury was 117 days, so you'd get a table with thousands of entries counting up the cycles. The Dresden codex has a table with 2340 entries, with 585 entries for Venus repeated 4 times and 117 entries for Mercury repeated 20 times. With a place-value system that used zeroes for zero digits. Which... ok, the place-value system was more advanced than the Greeks, but the Greeks would have done that same 'calculation' with a lot less tedium.
Then you have zero as in the additive identity, which opens whole new worlds of mathematics to you. Now you can start talking about things like rings, fields, and groups, and can have all sorts of fun. Pretty sure crows haven't sat down and discusses abelian vs non-abelian groups, but I wouldn't put it past them.
So anyway, any time someone starts talking about inventing or understanding the concept of zero but do not, themselves, display an understanding the concept of zero, (by explaining what it means in that context) it's generally a good time to stop listening.
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One of the cats left when he had them all, while other cats kept waiting ( or begging ). Sometimes they needed to be shown there were none left.
But that one cat, no matter how many people were at the table, always seemed to know when he had them all.
Clearly she has clear the negative concept of "not enough".
Many years ago there was a study involving crows, as I recall. N, starting at 2, researchers went into a blind, then N-1 came out. They had to get up to N = 13 before they fooled the birds into thinking the blind was actually empty.
This is an odd claim —- based on the neural network experiment (which showed that gradient descent applied to object detection problems naturally results in the development of “counting” signals), it seems much more likely that for as long as beings have been interacting with their surroundings they’ve been able to count, and any modern slight differences in counting infrastructure are simply a divergence of the original counting machinery rather than the same thing being invented over and over by evolution in many different ways, but only recently (for some reason..?)
> The fact that those three species are from diverse taxonomic groups — primates, insects and birds — suggests that certain numerical abilities have evolved over and over again throughout the animal kingdom.
> Their last common ancestor “was [barely] able to perceive anything,” Avarguès-Weber said, much less count.
> Moreover, he added, “When you look at the history of mathematics, it turns out that [zero] is an extreme latecomer in our culture as well.” Historical research finds that human societies didn’t begin to use zero as a number in their mathematical calculations until around the seventh century.
When people make claims about "zero" they're essentially meaningless unless they specify which meaning of zero they're talking about.
> Hindu units of time are described in Hindu texts ranging from microseconds to trillions of years, including cycles of cosmic time that repeat general events in Hindu cosmology.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_units_of_time
Source:
A popular science book
"The history of numbers or the history of a great discovery" (Georges Ifrah)
Contains some fun chapters like "How to count if you can't count". For example if natives in a stereotypical jungle want to count numbers to a holiday. They memorize a sequence of items, for example body parts: little finger of one hand, palm, wrist, forearm, arm, shoulder, neck.... then they measure once and conclude one needs to wait as many days as there are from the little finger on left hand to, say, navel.