RE: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
October 9, 2015 at 11:50 pm
(October 9, 2015 at 9:39 pm)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote: (October 9, 2015 at 9:26 pm)MTL Wrote: remarkable.
I think we underestimate a lot of animals.
Crows are remarkably intelligent. Octopus have even been shown to have problem-solving skills.
Ducks have asked humans for help rescuing trapped young.
Crow asks for and receives a drink of water:
That's a fearless bird. Must have been very thirsty!
To me, one of the big indicators for intellectual function is tool use, the ability to fashion useful things from the environment in order to accomplish a secondary task. Anyone who has raised kids knows about watching as kids begin to develop the ability to think "into the future", rather than the here-and-now. Otters, several primates, and some birds do this.
I like the one of the sledding Russian crow:
that's amazing....he's probably just doing that for fun, or as an experiment.
I watched a documentary where the tool-using and problem-solving ability of crows was tested rigorously:
birds are so smart.
even the common sparrow is remarkable.
sparrows, like dolphins, are extremely adaptable to their specialized localities
and teach their young the skills they've learned.
Another great indicator of high intelligence is self-awareness.
Octopus have been proven to possess it, using an experiment where the Octopus is placed in a container with different sized holes to escape out of of; only one of the openings is big enough.
The entire octopus is of course soft, EXCEPT it's "skull", which is made of cartilage.
the experiment proved that different size octopus could determine (just by feeling with their tentacles) whether or not a given opening was big enough to accommodate their skull, demonstrating awareness, not just of its own existence, but of its own dimensions and limitations, which I found remarkable;
and dolphins were put to an experiment using a mirror to test self-awareness:
