On 4/6/2014 9:14 PM, LizR wrote:
On 7 April 2014 15:43, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 4/6/2014 7:33 PM, LizR wrote:I'm not sure what I did wrong that led to this thread being immediately hijacked by religion - surely the possibility of crows exhibiting a similar type of intelligence to humans (albeit in a lesser degree) is a more interesting subject than some ideas people made up millennia ago in an attempt to explain a universe they had no comprehension of?Careful - you may be insulting Plotinus or Plato. :-)Touche, my dear! Perhaps some people had better ideas than others, though? (Atoms, geometry, mathematics, democracy...)Just in case anyone's interested, this was the article. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/06/060606-crows_2.html I'm sure my friend here likes it! Inline images 1I remember in the '60s there was an experiment that showed crows could count to five but probably not seven. Experimenters put out corn to attract a flock of crows to a blind. Then X number of men would walk out into the blind, which of course scared the crows and caused them to fly up into the trees. Then the men would leave one-at-a-time. If X was five or fewer, then the last man left the crows would come back down and start eating the corn again. If X was six or higher they sometimes lost count.Interesting. That seems like quite a complicated thing in itself. I don't know if crows would have the abstract idea of counting, or if they had to do it some other way ("we've had the guy with the hat, the short one, the one with glasses, the other one with glasses ... hm, maybe there's some way I could lump those together somehow... did we have the one with the tweed jacket yet?")
As I recall they tried changing jackets and hats, etc, in order to make sure it was counting. Of course the crows probably weren't subvocalizing "one", "two", "three",... like a human would.
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