Animal minds

In “Why Do Parrots Talk? Venezuelan Site Offers Clues” (Science, 22 July 2011) Virginia Morell explains

Researchers have discovered details of the parrotlets’ ecology and life histories, and the project has now entered a new phase focusing on their communicative skills. Last week, researchers reported that the contact calls of wild parrotlet nestlings—vocalizations that function much like a name—are not genetically programmed. Instead, they learn these calls from their parents, almost like human children learning their names. It is the first study to provide experimental evidence for learned vocalizations in wild parrots.

Not sure about the “names” claim. Do the parrotlets associate these calls with themselves? Attach significance to them? Keep them through life?

That the calls wouldn’t be genetically programmed is no surprising find. Consider this starling: Read More ›

Science Daily reports “A three-year international research project, directed by two academics at the University of Oxford, finds that humans have natural tendencies to believe in gods and an afterlife.” As my friend added, “This research was quite costly – they could have saved money by reading the Bible!” Link here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110714103828.htm I wonder how the New Atheists will take this research. There are two possible logical spins on it I can see, if you take the research’s conclusions at face value. You could say, “Belief is hard-wired – that’s why it’s so hard to reprogram people to think rationally!” But this avoids the key issue of why it would be hard-wired. That leads to the second possible response: “Belief Read More ›

… give a chimp a gun:

Which professional communicators always suspected. The guy who worked with Nim Chimpsky, Herbert Terrace, speaks honestly* about his research here.

The language didn’t materialize. A human baby starts out mostly imitating, then begins to string words together. Nim didn’t learn. His three-sign combinations — such as ‘eat me eat’ or ‘play me Nim’ — were redundant. He imitated signs to get rewards. I published the negative results in 1979 in the journal Science, which had a chilling effect on the field. Read More ›

In “Smart lizard solves a problem it’s never seen before” (New Scientist July 2011), Michael Marshall reports,

Clever lizards have worked out how to unplug holes to reach food, suggesting that problem-solving is not the sole preserve of warm-blooded birds and mammals.

Read More ›

And didn’t star Ronald Reagan opposite a chimp.

On July 8, a documentary on the fate of Nim opens in U.S. theatres (trailer). In “Project Nim: A chimp raised like a human” (New Scientist 4 July 2011), Rowan Hooper tackles the question of why:

What on earth were they thinking of? Nim was put in diapers and dressed in clothes. He was breastfed by his human surrogate mother, Stephanie Lafarge. “It seemed natural,” she says.Lafarge’s daughter, Jenny Lee, has a better explanation: “It was the seventies”. Jenny was 10-years-old when Nim came to live with her family. Read More ›

In “Finches tweet using grammar,” Clare Pain (ABC , 27 June 2011) reports The scientists played jumbled-up birdsongs to individual finches to see whether the birds responded with the usual burst of calls to the jumbled songs. To their surprise they found that there were some jumbled songs that elicited a call-burst response and some that did not. Even more surprising: all the birds responded in the same way. If one bird ignored a jumbled call, all the other birds ignored that call too. It seems that the order of syllables matters to the birds, and that suggests grammar in action. The birds, the researchers say, do better than monkeys would. “Our results indicate that syllable sequences in birdsongs convey Read More ›

In “Clever Tool Use in Parrots and Crows”, (ScienceDaily, June 13, 2011) , we learn:

Parrots and Corvids frequently astonish researchers investigating animal intelligence, in particular when it comes to solving technical problems. The New Caledonian crow (Corvus monduloides), for example, manufactures and uses elongated objects such as sticks or pieces of Pandanus leaves as tools to probe for grubs in tree bark and dead wood. The kea (Nestor notabilis), a mountain parrot which is unknown to employ tools in the wild, can accomplish the use of compact objects tools to knock a food reward out of place. Read More ›

At Scientific American, Anna Kuchment tells us about “The Smartest Bacteria on Earth” (June 2011)

One species of soil microbe makes unusually wise communal decisions

The team identified this relative intelligence by comparing the P. vortex genome with that of 502 different bacterial species whose genomes were known and, based on that comparison, calculating what Ben-Jacob calls the bugs’ “social IQ score.” The researchers counted genes associated with social function, such as those allowing bacteria to communicate and process environmental information and to synthesize chemicals that are useful when competing with other organisms. P. vortex and two other Paenibacillus strains have more of those genes than any of the other 499 bacteria Ben-Jacob studied, including pathogenic bacteria such as Escherichia coli, indicating a capacity for “exceptionally brilliant social skills.”

(You have to pay to read the article.)

Does this

a) violate Darwinist language laws Read More ›

A reason captured in photos: Here, Barry Arrington notes, “Natural Selection Defies the Odds,” As in

Recently the management of a casino hired Professor Hannum to investigate a roulette player whom they suspected might be cheating. The house has a huge mathematical advantage in roulette, which is why the casino suspected something other than random chance was involved when the player parlayed a few thousand dollars into over $1.4 million.

Professor Hannum crunched the numbers, however, and told the casino that while the player’s run was very unlikely (about an 80:1 shot), it was not so unlikely as to suggest cheating. And sure enough, over the next few gaming sessions the player blew his entire $1.4 million stack.

Yes, that’s just the trouble. We are forever being told, as he goes on to note, how the magic of natural selection bests the odds, when in fact no natural force can do so.

A friend writes to tell us a remarkable story from Kenya about a moment when natural selection fails: Three cheetahs spare tiny antelope’s life, … and play with him instead” (Daily Mail, 5th February 2010) Read More ›

This had to happen, of course: John R. Schneider at Calvin College, according to “The Search for the Historical Adam” (Christianity Today, June 2011 ) Vices we associate with consequences of the Fall and original sin, such as self-serving behavior, exist in lower primates ad would have been passed on via evolution to humans. Thus Eden “cannot be a literal description of how things really were in the primal human past.” (p. 26)0 So does the Evolutionary Agony Aunt chair the psychology department at Calvin? Yes, the Aunt’s  real, just as real as the Christian profs getting in on the act.

Here’s a project to test that: Read More ›