The Human Animal (Humans)

by dhw, Saturday, August 08, 2009, 11:11 (5585 days ago) @ xeno6696

By coincidence, David and Matt have referred us to different articles that cover the same experiment with crows. Four out of seven Caledonian crows succeeded in using three tools in the correct sequence to obtain food (one account mentions that a fifth succeeded later). The discrepancies between the two accounts should make us just as wary of scientific journals as we are of newspaper reports. - According to NewScientist, the birds had previously practised one part of the sequence, but according to ScienceDaily, "pre-training on each element in the sequence was not required for successful sequential tool use." According to NewScientist the four successful crows "varied in the amount of attempts they took to complete the task", whereas according to ScienceDaily, four were successful in their very first trial. There may be gaps in these reports that account for the discrepancies, but they certainly lead to different weighting of the facts. - Regardless of the discrepancies, I'd like to raise another point. ScienceDaily goes on to report: "Painstaking analysis of tool choice, tool swapping and improvement over time allowed the team to conclude that successful crows did not probe for tools at random." However, with regard to the question whether crows plan ahead, NewScientist says the experiments "cast doubt on that conclusion", and one of the researchers says: "The fact that an animal is statistically better than random should not be confused with the animal being perfect." I don't know what "perfection" has to do with it, but the same cautionary note is sounded in ScienceDaily: the team "could find no firm evidence to support previous claims that sequential tool use demonstrates analogical reasoning or human-like planning." - No-one is suggesting that crows are as intelligent as human beings, but I can't see how one can escape the conclusion that these birds have the ability to work out a problem which entails reasoning and planning. Clearly four of the crows were more intelligent than the other three ... but you'll get similar variations if you test the intelligence of human beings. I wonder what was the point of the experiment in the first place, if the researchers are not prepared to accept the results as proof of what they were testing. But I also wonder why it is that even today humans are often reluctant to acknowledge the fact that we share so many features with other animals. If we accept physiological evolution, why can't we accept similar lines of descent in other areas? Since the name Adler is now prominent in our forum, perhaps we should switch from Mortimer to Alfred: could it be that we need to assert our superiority in this way because of some almighty inferiority complex? Or is it a hangover from religion?