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Wednesday, February 26, 2014

A Tool-Using Fun-Loving Crow

There's been a long debate over what differentiates us from animals. Some say it's self-awareness, some say it's language, some say it's tool use, and so on.

Here's a hilarious example of a crow that demonstrates two very human qualities: tool use and having fun.


Why did the crow decide to do this? It seems unlikely someone would have gone to the effort of training it. Did it see some kids sledding down a hill and copy them? Or did it slide down a roof one day and find that it was fun but kind of rough on the tootsies, so it looked for something to sit on to prevent chafing?

Crows have long been known to be quite intelligent, able to count up to at least five, use tools and recognize human faces. Squirrels and scrub jays have a "theory of mind:" they know that if other animals see them hide food that they'll have to come back and move it. There have been parrots with large vocabularies, the ability to count and the intellectual and emotional capacity of young human children. There's a border collie that knows the names of hundreds of objects and can perform fairly complex commands with them. Dolphins exhibit self awareness. Apes like Koko and Kanzi can communicate with humans using sign language or computer lexigrams, and Koko even wanted pet kittens.

Pet owners can describe any number of seemingly intelligent behaviors that their charges exhibit; most of these are likely due to repetition and anthropomorphization, but the undeniable conclusion is that animals can form a strong two-way emotional bond with humans that extends beyond a trained Pavlovian response.

From these examples it's clear that some animals have expressed each of the abilities that comprise human cognition. Humans are the only creatures that assemble the whole package into what we call intelligence.

Intelligence is not an either-or proposition: it's a continuum with a huge variation among individuals of the same species.

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