http://www.cracked.com/article_19042_6-terrifying-ways-crows-are-way-smarter-than-you-think.html
Found an interesting article the other day (see above). It details the intelligence level of crows, which is remarkably high. As pointed out in the article, crows are capable of doing many things that the average human has trouble with, such as communication, memory and advanced planning. Although the article in itself is interesting it led me to examine a couple of things.
My first thought on reading this is, why are we just finding out about this now? I mean, crows have been around for thousands if not millions of years, probably have exhibited this behavior for a significant portion of that time, so why are we just now studying it? Here are the possible reasons that I came up with:
Reason #1: Just noticed
One reason that this could just now be coming to light is that the behavior in the crows was just observed recently, but I do not buy that one. For centuries, crows have been painted as evil. In order to be evil there has to be some sort of intelligence, albeit a malignant one. In many stories, crows are even able to talk, even when other animals can’t. This says that on some, possibly subconscious level humans have always realized that crows were smart and just have never really studied it. But why?
Reason #2: My take
The conclusion that I came to is that humans failed to recognize the intelligence of the crow because of a me-centric attitude. Humans always want to believe that we are special, that the world revolves around us, that something in the universe, be it our intelligence or even a higher being, provides us with a superiority over other animals. With this in mind, it is easy to see why we studied intelligence in chimps, apes, and other primates with way more voracity than other animals. These animals are the closest in their relation to us, thus, even if they are not as smart as us, they must be smarter than other animals. So we will study them before all else.
Found an interesting article the other day (see above). It details the intelligence level of crows, which is remarkably high. As pointed out in the article, crows are capable of doing many things that the average human has trouble with, such as communication, memory and advanced planning. Although the article in itself is interesting it led me to examine a couple of things.
My first thought on reading this is, why are we just finding out about this now? I mean, crows have been around for thousands if not millions of years, probably have exhibited this behavior for a significant portion of that time, so why are we just now studying it? Here are the possible reasons that I came up with:
Reason #1: Just noticed
One reason that this could just now be coming to light is that the behavior in the crows was just observed recently, but I do not buy that one. For centuries, crows have been painted as evil. In order to be evil there has to be some sort of intelligence, albeit a malignant one. In many stories, crows are even able to talk, even when other animals can’t. This says that on some, possibly subconscious level humans have always realized that crows were smart and just have never really studied it. But why?
Reason #2: My take
The conclusion that I came to is that humans failed to recognize the intelligence of the crow because of a me-centric attitude. Humans always want to believe that we are special, that the world revolves around us, that something in the universe, be it our intelligence or even a higher being, provides us with a superiority over other animals. With this in mind, it is easy to see why we studied intelligence in chimps, apes, and other primates with way more voracity than other animals. These animals are the closest in their relation to us, thus, even if they are not as smart as us, they must be smarter than other animals. So we will study them before all else.
Now on the surface this sounds like a reasoned
argument, but a deeper look will reveal the flaw in that argument and possibly
give all of us something to think about going forward. Namely, that even when we tried to apply
logic to this problem we still apply this logic through the lens of our human
bias. To me this serves as a lesson that
we need to look outside the bounds of said lens and face problems or make
decisions on a factual basis, not a wistful one.
Anyway, these were my thoughts when reading the
article and I just wanted to put them out there.
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