Just watch this and be amazed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVaITA7eBZE

Recent studies have shown that many birds, such as the ones shown here, are twice as intelligent as a 54 year old creationist.

If you took a random crow from the wild and did nothing else to it but give it that puzzle to solve....I bet the crow cannot solve the puzzle.

The reason this crow was able to solve the puzzle is because it has seen and solved all the component parts before.

Don't get me wrong...crows are very smart...but they are not nearly as smart as that video leads you to believe.

I've been contemplating teaching the crows on my property to pick up small pine cones in exchange for food.

Kinda like this guy did:

(April 17, 2014 at 11:07 am)Darwinian Wrote: Recent studies have shown that many birds, such as the ones shown here, are twice as intelligent as a 54 year old creationist.

So you are saying these birds are dumb as snails?

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The functional structure of bird brain is different from mammalian brain. Much of the cognitive activities that mammalian brain use the cereberal cortex to perform is in birds performed in a distributed fashion throughout the cerebellum.

A lot of empirical research into cognitive function of the brain has been done on mammals, so there is a tendency to correlate the thickness, area and infold convolutions of the cereberal cortex, which are entensive in humans, chimps and dolphins, with intelligence. This makes it surprising to many people that birds, with much smaller brains and minimal cerebral cortex, can also perform surprising amount of cognitive function.

Quote:In an experiment conducted by behaviorists from the University of Oxford, a small bucket of food was placed inside a tube; the crow was unable to reach the bucket because of the length of the tube. She then picked up a short length of wire, and, after a few futile attempts to snag the bucket with it, bent the wire into a hook and lifted the bucket from the tube. What’s more, the crow repeated the behavior in nine out of 10 subsequent trials.

Quote:again involved an out-of-reach bit of food. The crows quickly solved the problem by using a long stick to reach the food. And when the long stick was placed inside a cage, the crows—six out of seven in the experiment–used a shorter stick to push the long stick into a position where it could be picked up. Thus the crows used a tool to manipulate another tool, and it was not just a single individual with this skill. The use of a “metatool” is a behavior difficult even for primates.

http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/07/...-of-crows/

My point is they worked out how to do this by themselves. They are very smart creatures.

I don't trust them.

(April 17, 2014 at 11:40 am)Chuck Wrote:

(April 17, 2014 at 11:07 am)Darwinian Wrote: Recent studies have shown that many birds, such as the ones shown here, are twice as intelligent as a 54 year old creationist.

So you are saying these birds are dumb as snails?

Sorry, should have said 'at least as twice as intelligent' :p

(April 17, 2014 at 11:54 am)downbeatplumb Wrote: I don't trust them.

Hitchcock warned us.

(April 17, 2014 at 11:40 am)Chuck Wrote: A lot of empirical research into cognitive function of the brain has been done on mammals, so there is a tendency to correlate the thickness, area and infold convolutions of the cereberal cortex, which are entensive in humans, chimps and dolphins, with intelligence. This makes it surprising to many people that birds, with much smaller brains and minimal cerebral cortex, can also perform surprising amount of cognitive function.

The last episode of Nova delved into the question of bird intelligence. One of the things it pointed out is that "intelligence" in a species is generally characterized by the encephalization quotient, which is the ratio of brain size to body size. It pointed out that, relatively speaking, in terms of EQ, a crow is in the same ballpark as a chimpanzee, based on brain and body size.

PBS Nova: Inside Animal Minds - Bird Genius


I also came across the following while searching, but haven't watched it yet. It's a Nova ScienceNOW segment on bird intelligence.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/bird-brains.html

A lot smarter than you'd think with those little heads.

(April 17, 2014 at 12:06 pm)rasetsu Wrote:

(April 17, 2014 at 11:40 am)Chuck Wrote: A lot of empirical research into cognitive function of the brain has been done on mammals, so there is a tendency to correlate the thickness, area and infold convolutions of the cereberal cortex, which are entensive in humans, chimps and dolphins, with intelligence. This makes it surprising to many people that birds, with much smaller brains and minimal cerebral cortex, can also perform surprising amount of cognitive function.

The last episode of Nova delved into the question of bird intelligence. One of the things it pointed out is that "intelligence" in a species is generally characterized by the encephalization quotient, which is the ratio of brain size to body size. It pointed out that, relatively speaking, in terms of EQ, a crow is in the same ballpark as a chimpanzee, based on brain and body size.

PBS Nova: Inside Animal Minds - Bird Genius


I also came across the following while searching, but haven't watched it yet. It's a Nova ScienceNOW segment on bird intelligence.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/bird-brains.html

Hmmm, that's unexpected, because bird encephalization quotient is generally lower than mammals'. Some autonomous control functions in birds also take up less space and brain matter than in mammals. This also contributes to birds having smaller brains relative to body size compared to mammals.

During evolution of at least flying birds, there were likely much greater selective pressure for weight efficient solutions than there were for land dwelling mammals. I wonder how much that impacted the functional structural differences.

It has been suggested that in animals with larger brains, encephalization quotient (brain weight)/(body weight) is not as good a predictor of intelligence as (brain weight - brain stem weight - spinal cord weight)/(body weight)