Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who's the smartest corvid?

thetyee.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 139 posts

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#71

Post by ggm »

Australian Magpies are NOT corvid but Artamidae along with the butcherbird, but they are absolutely this intelligent.

They hold court over their juvelines and enforce behaviour, and they mourn the passing of members of the community.

I think it's possible the niche encourages large brains. A bit of nature not nurture maybe.

They are tool users. And they can teach offspring lessons learned from humans, and recognize friend and foe. Well mostly: cyclists are routinely mis-cast as foe no matter what. This is why Australian cyclists look like demented wheelie porcupines: cable ties on the helmet keep the eye-peckers at bay.

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#72

Post by phyzome »

tejohnso wrote: post #6

Chasing a bird of lesser intelligence so that it slams into an office building window seems especially cruel.

How is it so different from, I don't know, directly grabbing it and tearing it apart? There are only so many ways they have to kill something (or injure it enough to allow killing it).

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#73

Post by JohnMakin »

wrboyce wrote: post #66
JohnMakin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read there's also a social aspect - crows are extremely social creatures, as are humans, and other highly intelligent animals like whales. That does seem to be a common denominator. Regarding that, I'm reminded of another story - on my daily walk near work, there was a dead crow on the pavement. 5 or so crows were standing all around it, doing nothing really. Even me passing close by did not trigger them to fly…

Corvids have been known to investigate deaths, truly fascinating creatures! https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00033...

Thanks for linking this, I had been wondering what the heck I had observed. It was really interesting. I love watching them. I almost always see something new (for me)

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#76

Post by [deleted] »

Animats wrote: post #67
prerok wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading an article in National Geographic of how crow's brains are much more interconnected than is the norm in mammals, i.e. IIRC they have a higher density of synapses between neurons. From that article, it seems that the usual brain weight vs. body weight to determine intelligence, which seems can be used to approximate intelligence in different species of mammals, cannot be used for birds (or at least…

The brains of corvids are not closely related to mammalian brains. All the mammals have roughly the same brain, but corvids have a different architecture.[1] Intelligence seems to have evolved three times on this planet - mammals, corvids, and octopuses. Octopuses have a distributed system rather than one central brain. They all have neurons, but the higher level architecture differs drastically. Knowing that several…

[deleted]

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#77

Post by bryanrasmussen »

kibwen wrote: post #58
ifwinterco wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also do this to lambs, they're smart but evil

> smart but evil Sadly I have yet to see evidence that something can be smart without being evil.

the evil here seems to be being a predator, which for the doe it would be reasonable to say the predator is evil, but examining the natural order of things from outside, as a human observing the doe, the fawn, and the crows, that is a pretty weird judgement to make. The predator has evolved to eat the prey, if that is evil then nature is evil or if you like, whatever created nature.

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#78

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

jancsika wrote: post #69
jamiek88 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I glanced at this and moved on but then my brain did a kind of record scratch on this comment. Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil? I’m gonna think about this a bit, but my knee jerk was to (violently) disagree with this but I don’t know why.

> Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil? No. E.g., a bunch of chimps who come upon food will probably become aggressive, whereas a bunch of bonobos will probably get frisky with each other. They are closely related primates, and their level of intelligence is at least comparable. So it's quite unlikely that the chimps higher level of social aggression is a hard dependency of their level of intel…

Bonobos commit strategic infanticide amongst competing tribes.

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#79

Post by verisimi »

jamiek88 wrote: post #64
kibwen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> smart but evil Sadly I have yet to see evidence that something can be smart without being evil.

I glanced at this and moved on but then my brain did a kind of record scratch on this comment. Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil? I’m gonna think about this a bit, but my knee jerk was to (violently) disagree with this but I don’t know why.

> Great question does intelligence require selfishness / evil?

You think 'selfishness' and 'evil' are equivalent?

Re: Who's the smartest corvid?

#80

Post by verisimi »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #77
kibwen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> smart but evil Sadly I have yet to see evidence that something can be smart without being evil.

the evil here seems to be being a predator, which for the doe it would be reasonable to say the predator is evil, but examining the natural order of things from outside, as a human observing the doe, the fawn, and the crows, that is a pretty weird judgement to make. The predator has evolved to eat the prey, if that is evil then nature is evil or if you like, whatever created nature.

'Evil' is a human characterisation, and is not applicable to animals imo; to apply it is to anthropomorphise the animal.

An applicable use of 'evil' for an animal, would be if you believe the animal 'knows better', eg a dog that knows right or wrong (in its way) but does something it thinks it shouldn't.

Post reply on HN