Animal minds

Squid are smart . From book advert: Peter Godfrey-Smith is a leading philosopher of science. He is also a scuba diver whose underwater videos of warring octopuses have attracted wide notice. In this book, he brings his parallel careers together to tell a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself. Mammals and birds are widely seen as the smartest creatures on earth. But one other branch of the tree of life has also sprouted surprising intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. New research shows that these marvelous creatures display remarkable gifts. What does it mean that intelligence on earth has evolved not once but twice? And that the mind Read More ›

Old news. Darwin noted that two centuries ago. From Agata Blaszczak-Boxe at New Scientist: New Caledonian crows have figured out how to move two things in one fell swoop. The adept tool users have been filmed inserting sticks into objects to transport both items at once – a feat that has never been seen in non-humans. More. No? Darwin wrote about that kind of thing in 1859. Here’s a book from 2007 that describes something similar. The fact that the speared object was a metal nut instead of something edible, like a grub, mainly suggests that the birds sense they are going to get fed somehow anyway. They are not entering the Metal Nut Age. But this is August and Read More ›

From Science Daily: Without having tasted a new juice mix before, an orangutan in a Swedish zoo has enough sense to know whether it will taste nice or not based on how he recombined relevant memories from the past. Only humans were thought to have this ability of affective forecasting, in which prior experiences are used to conjure up mental pictures about totally new situations. – Paper. (public access) Gabriela-Alina Sauciuc, Tomas Persson, Rasmus Bååth, Katarzyna Bobrowicz, Mathias Osvath. Affective forecasting in an orangutan: predicting the hedonic outcome of novel juice mixes. Animal Cognition, 2016; DOI: 10.1007/s10071-016-1015-0 More. But the average domestic cat can do that. To prop up a failing thesis that human and animal minds are essentially the Read More ›

The spider’s leg accidentally caught and broke while he was being placed in the jar. Luckily, the big guy has just the fix. See also: Spider brains are amazing, say Cornell researchers and Does intelligence depend on a specific type of brain? Follow UD News at Twitter! Hat tip: Digg

From Ed Yong at Atlantic: Tyler Lyson from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science has devised a fascinating new idea about turtle origins. He thinks that their iconic shells evolved not for defense, but for digging. They anchored the powerful arm strokes needed to shift soil and sand. Before turtles became impregnable walking fortresses, they were professional burrowers. For almost a century, biologists argued about how turtles got their shells—a debate almost as slow and plodding as the creatures themselves. Paleontologists mostly argued that the shells evolved from bony scales called osteoderms, which are also responsible for the armor of crocodiles, armadillos, and many dinosaurs. These scales simply expanded to fuse with the ribs and backbone, creating a solid Read More ›

Must be BBC. Must be summer. Last summer, chimpanzees were entering the stone age. This summer, from BBC: An orangutan copying sounds made by researchers offers new clues to how human speech evolved, scientists say. Rocky mimicked more than 500 vowel-like noises, suggesting an ability to control his voice and make new sounds. It had been thought these great apes were unable to do this and, since human speech is a learned behaviour, it could not have originated from them. Study lead Dr Adriano Lameira said this “notion” could now be thrown “into the trash can”. More. The reporter must have got something wrong somewhere. Who says humans learned speech from orangutans? It’s not reported that the orangutan started a Read More ›

At “Animals and abstraction: Reflections on Vincent Torley’s thoughts,” commenter Charles Do cats explore for the sake of exploring (curioisity)? Or are they just reconnoitering for food, danger, shelter, sex, and if so, is that a form of learning? asks. Good questions. My impression is that cats are not generally lifelong learners. They are very curious when young, and learn almost everything they need to know in the first year or two. Once they have learned a way of life, they stick to it. There can be a comical aspect to that. A vet once told me that it is wise to neuter a tomcat as young as he can safely sustain the operation. If one waits a few years Read More ›

Yes, this is getting a bit bistro, isn’t it? From Animals, abstraction, arithmetic and language: During the past two weeks, over at Evolution News and Views, Professor Michael Egnor has been arguing that it is the capacity for abstract thought which distinguishes humans from other animals, and that human language arises from this capacity. While I share Dr. Egnor’s belief in human uniqueness, I have to take issue with his claim that abstraction is what separates man from the beasts. More. We ask questions about how we think, and about how animals think. No animal asks such questions. Terms like “abstraction” are human ideas; whether an animal can abstract hardly matters. He is none the worse for not caring. All Read More ›

During the past two weeks, over at Evolution News and Views, Professor Michael Egnor has been arguing that it is the capacity for abstract thought which distinguishes humans from other animals, and that human language arises from this capacity. While I share Dr. Egnor’s belief in human uniqueness, I have to take issue with his claim that abstraction is what separates man from the beasts. Why the distinction between humans and other animals is real, but hard to express I have written over a dozen articles in the past, arguing that there is a real, qualitative difference between the minds of humans and other animals. As I’ve argued here, there appear to be several traits which are unique to human Read More ›

Interesting question. From : While the human midbrain and the insect brain may even be evolutionarily related, an insect’s inner life is obviously more basic than our own. Accordingly, bugs feel something like hunger and pain, and “perhaps very simple analogs of anger,” but no grief or jealousy. “They plan, but don’t imagine,” Klein says. Even so, insects’ highly distilled sense of self is a potential gift to the far-out study of consciousness. Probing the insect brain could help quantify questions of what it means to think that vexed the likes of Aristotle and Descartes, and could even aid the development of sentient robots. More. A lot depends on what one thinks consciousness even is. Jealousy would likely be meaningless Read More ›

Better than great apes, some say. From Marianne Freiberger at PlusMaths: It’s a question that has recently received a partial answer in a (refreshingly simple) experiment conducted by scientists in Japan. The study showed that cats know what it means when a container rattles when shaken, and that they expect something to fall out when the container is turned over. This may not appear hugely impressive, but our relatives, the great apes, have failed similar tests. Cats themselves haven’t fared well in other tasks testing their causal understanding (for example tests involving the pulling of strings) and were therefore thought a little unsophisticated in that respect. The new study appears to vindicate them.More. The cat is not in fact abstracting Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: The elephantnose fish explores objects in its surroundings by using its eyes or its electrical sense — sometimes both together. Zoologists have now found out how complex the processing of these sensory impressions is. With its tiny brain, the fish achieves performance comparable to that of humans or mammals. More. Paper. (paywall) – Sarah Schumacher, Theresa Burt de Perera, Johanna Thenert, Gerhard von der Emde. Cross-modal object recognition and dynamic weighting of sensory inputs in a fish. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2016; 201603120 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1603120113 See also: What can we hope to learn about animal minds? Are apes entering the Stone Age? Furry, feathery, and finny animals speak their minds Does intelligence depend on a specific Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Cats understand the principle of cause and effect as well as some elements of physics. Combining these abilities with their keen sense of hearing, they can predict where possible prey hides. These are the findings of researchers from Kyoto University in Japan, led by Saho Takagi and published in Springer’s journal Animal Cognition. Of course cats understand cause and effect. The cat who jumped onto the hot stove does not do it again, as Mark Twain observed. That has nothing to do with understanding the elements of physics, which are a pure abstraction. Which is why, as Twain observed, the cat never jumps up on any stove again, and learns nothing further from the experience. Researchers suggest that Read More ›

From Washington Post: “We think they are using quantum mechanics to navigate,” said Daniel Kattnig, a researcher in the chemistry department at Oxford University. Kattnig works in a lab that studies radical pairs — a phenomenon in which atoms acquire extra electrons that are “entangled” with one another, each affecting the other’s motion even though they’re separated by space. It’s a field of science that’s difficult to understand under the best of circumstances; imagine trying to figure out it out with a bird brain. But according to an increasingly popular theory, birds and other animals use a radical pair-based compass to “see” the Earth’s magnetic field, allowing them to undertake great migrations and daring rescues without getting lost. It’s still Read More ›

It’s unclear how neurons relate to intelligence, exactly. From ScienceDaily: The macaw has a brain the size of an unshelled walnut, while the macaque monkey has a brain about the size of a lemon. Nevertheless, the macaw has more neurons in its forebrain — the portion of the brain associated with intelligent behavior — than the macaque. That is one of the surprising results of the first study to systematically measure the number of neurons in the brains of more than two dozen species of birds ranging in size from the tiny zebra finch to the six-foot-tall emu, which found that they consistently have more neurons packed into their small brains than are stuffed into mammalian or even primate brains Read More ›