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Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

bbc.com

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Re: Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

#141

Post by zmzrr »

kingbirdy wrote: post #9
duelingjello wrote: post #4

Crows are social too, will hold a grudge... you's swear they were part Irish. A crow once sneaked quite far into my mechanic's shop without being seen, got up on a rolling toolbox and stole a bag of sunflower seeds without being noticed. I found this because I saw a crow and their other crow buddies were having a sunflower seed party in the alley, and one of the mechanics lost their snack. Also, crows will remember i…

>will hold a grudge... you's swear they were part Irish There's no need for this.

Let me guess: you are American.

Re: Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

#142

Post by londons_explore »

netcan wrote: post #111

It's fascinating that intelligence exists in different clades & phylum of animals: crows, octopus, apes etc. It suggests intelligence is not very progressive, in evolution. It advances & recedes, and evolution can find multiple paths to it from various starting point. It doesn't take a mammalian brain. Who know what other animal intelligence exists today, or in the past. The current crop of species (us excepted) may…

Intelligence might be easy to evolve, but have a high energy cost.

In many environments, the extra intelligence wouldn't allow you to find enough extra food for the trait to be worthwhile.

Re: Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

#143

Post by jmkni »

kingbirdy wrote: post #9
duelingjello wrote: post #4

Crows are social too, will hold a grudge... you's swear they were part Irish. A crow once sneaked quite far into my mechanic's shop without being seen, got up on a rolling toolbox and stole a bag of sunflower seeds without being noticed. I found this because I saw a crow and their other crow buddies were having a sunflower seed party in the alley, and one of the mechanics lost their snack. Also, crows will remember i…

>will hold a grudge... you's swear they were part Irish There's no need for this.

It's pretty funny (I'm Irish)

Re: Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

#144

Post by fyfy18 »

I remember a few months ago I saw some crows in a park. They were going through a bin and pulling out McDonalds paper bags, and ripping them apart to see if there was anything inside.

Whenever someone came near they would move away from the bin and started looking around aimlessly, as if to say "there's nothing going on here".

Re: Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

#145

Post by jgraham »

sean-duffy wrote: post #135
SiVal wrote: post #20

We have crows and jackrabbits in our neighborhood. You drive down the road toward a bunch (I think they prefer the term "murder") of crows having a meeting in the middle of the road. They'll eventually start nonchalantly strolling to the side at a calm, measured pace perfectly timed to just barely get out of the way as you pass and stroll back again, no feathers ruffled. Jackrabbits will be sitting safely in the gras…

Pigeons do the exact same though, I never slow down for them because I know they always fly out of the way just in time, even when it looks like you're about to roll over them.

Pigeons have been trained to discriminate between different styles of art [1], which suggests complex, adaptable, visual processing and skill retention. So they may not be a great example of a bird that can only exhibit simple behaviours.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1334394/

Re: Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

#147

Post by philipov »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #140
philipov wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's stereotyping. Racism is systematic denial of opportunity to people on the basis of their ancestry.

Personally, I would consider your definition "institutional racism," and both it and stereotyping would be forms of racism.

Stereotyping can be a tool of racism, but to do that I think it needs to imply the inferiority or superiority of an ancestry-group. It's not clear to me that holding a grudge is either a positive or negative quality.

Re: Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

#148

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

netcan wrote: post #111

It's fascinating that intelligence exists in different clades & phylum of animals: crows, octopus, apes etc. It suggests intelligence is not very progressive, in evolution. It advances & recedes, and evolution can find multiple paths to it from various starting point. It doesn't take a mammalian brain. Who know what other animal intelligence exists today, or in the past. The current crop of species (us excepted) may…

A wild untrained human animal isn't that bright. We can probably operate above the crow level, but maybe not by much.

What makes us special is persistent collective learning and abstract communication.

Unlike animals, generations of humans don't have to keep re-solving the same problems. As a species we have cumulative persistent memory for techniques and abstractions. That's the real game changer.

But it took a surprisingly long time - tens of thousands of years - for our brains to make this ability central to culture. And there's no guarantee that if we re-ran history we'd do it again on the same scale.

Re: Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

#149

Post by wruza »

ralusek wrote: post #55
john111 wrote: post #15

I really wish we had better definitions for "smart", "cognition", and "intelligence." With our current definitions, all comparisons are purely subjective. Maybe crows are the "smartest" today. Tomorrow it'll be dolphins, parrots, elephants, pigs, or cephalopods. Who knows?

I mean, there are pretty objective things to test for. Object permanence. How many things can they keep in working memory? How many steps can they work through linearly to an objective? How many dependent elements of a puzzle can be branched off for a single step? Can they understand symbols as being representative of objects? Of verbs? Adjectives? Can they understand counting, grouping? Can they extrapolate solution…

Can they abelinize a simplicial resolvent and show that it is an integer cohomology of a given group?

Re: Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

#150

Post by bristleworm »

burtonator wrote: post #6

Crows are amazingly intelligent animals. My GF and I went to the beach about a month ago and took our dog. The crows weren't frightened at ALL of our dog. They realized they could basically just 'float' up in the air when he came by using the breeze. The fact that they were amazingly calm about it was really telling. Second. We hid our stuff under a blanket. They realize it's still there as they have item persistence…

That reminds me of the kitchen scene in Jurassic Park: "Unless they figure out how to open doors." :)
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