Complex Numbers

Crow Magnon

We've all known for a while that corvids are smart (and smart-asses), but it's always good to have some science backing things up.

Brainiacs, not birdbrains: Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute  

As usual, I have a few quibbles with the article, but I think it's generally effective in communicating what's going on.

Whether crows, ravens, and other “corvids” are making multipart tools like hooked sticks to reach grubs, solving geometry puzzles made famous by Aesop, or nudging a clueless hedgehog across a highway before it becomes roadkill, they have long impressed scientists with their intelligence and creativity.

Don't know why they had to put the quotes there. And it's not only scientists who are aware of these bird's big brains -- anyone who's watched them long enough can tell you they're scary smart.

Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals.

1) This article is dated last September. "Thursday" doesn't help much now.

2) I've known some humans who can't "ponder the content of their own minds."

3) The author uses the adjective "higher" here and in a couple other places. I don't like it. "Higher" implies a hierarchy that can be misleading, or it could mean "more intelligent," in which case it's redundant in an article talking about intelligence. No species is really more advanced than any other, in general; they've merely evolved different survival strategies, only one of which is what we'd call "intelligence."

Knowing what you know is also a form of consciousness, and the discovery that more and more nonhumans seem to have it raises tricky questions about how we treat them.

Unless they're also delicious, like pigs.

The article goes on to describe, in detail, an experiment that demonstrated the cognitive abilities of crows, and another that studied the neuroanatomy of sky rats. Er, I mean, pigeons. I have to admit I kinda zoned out on this part, more interested in the conclusions than the methodology.

“Besides crows, this kind of neurobiological evidence for sensory consciousness only exists in humans and macaque monkeys.”

Snort. He said "macaque monkeys." Snicker.

“In theory, any brain that has a large number of neurons connected into associative circuitry … could be expected to add flexibility and complexity to behavior,” said Herculano-Houzel. “That is my favorite operational definition of intelligence: behavioral flexibility.”

I do wonder about this, but the woman quoted there is a scientist and I'm just an onlooker. Either way, though, I find this sort of thing fascinating. It's like how a crow can't resist a shiny thing, or how a raven can't resist annoying an angsty poet.