Animals showing intelligence we thought was uniquely human

National Geographic Magazine has an interesting article on some of the smart animals that are being used to learn about intelligence and cognition. Most people who have had a pet ‘know’ that animals can think because of the way that they react to us – they sometimes seem almost human.

But for a long time this idea was seriously out of fashion – experts agreed that people were projecting human emotions and thoughts onto animals (known as anthropomorphism). For instance at school I had a friend who claimed that her goldfish was embarrassed – surely a case of anthropomorphism.

However, the view that intelligence and emotions are purely human is simplistic and a little arrogant. Intelligence (and emotions) has obvious evolutionary advantages for social and long-lived animals. Humans are also just animals – we arrived through the same evolutionary processes. Isn’t it more plausible that there are levels of intelligence with some species showing more or less?

Plenty of scientists agree with me and have been working with animals to show that many of the qualities supposedly unique to human intelligence are shared by animals. The article goes into a lot of detail with awesome examples involving dogs, chimps, bonobos, parrots, jays, crows, dolphins and others. I thought that I would extract a few of the stories about clever animals.

Alex the parrot could speak and understood numbers, shapes and colorsAlex the parrot was taught to pronounce English words and could understand several concepts. He was able to count, and distinguish shapes and colors. For instance when shown a group of toys and asked how many yellow ones there were he could tell you – ‘Five’. Alex even got impatient with other parrots who were getting their pronunciation wrong – calling out ‘Talk clearly!’ when they made mistakes.

Betsy understands over 300 wordsBetsy the border collie understands more than 300 words and is able to learn new ones easily. One test involved putting several new toys (which Betsy had not seen before) in the kitchen. Betsy was then shown a picture of a Frisbee and told to fetch it from the kitchen. That she was able to do so shows that not only does she understand words like fetch and kitchen (something the testers already knew) but that she understands that a picture represents something in the real world.

Betty was able to create toolsBetty the New Caledonian crow was able to create and use tools. In one test Betty was shown into a room in which there was a treat in a basket down a tube – out of her reach. There were also two pieces of wire in the room, one with a hook and one straight. The researchers had expected Betty to use the hooked wire to get the basket out, but another crow had already removed it….

“Betty is undeterred. She looks at the meat in the basket, then spots the straight piece of wire. She picks it up with her beak, pushes one end into a crack in the floor, and uses her beak to bend the other end into a hook. Thus armed, she lifts the basket out of the tube.”

Breath holding world records

When I was a teenager I used to enjoy testing my ability to hold me breath. My eventual record was 2 minutes and 8 seconds. I was pretty happy with that but I was aware that pros like Houdini and pearl divers could do that same for 4 or 5 minutes.

Then I read this report about what seems to be a bogus claim to have set the record at 15:58! It might be true, but there are some definite doubts cast in the comments attached to the article.

A more accepted record is 13:42 set by a guy named Robert Foster in 1959. That one was included in the Guinness Book of Records until they stopped reporting records that may tempt dangerous attempts.

This is the text from the 1978 edition of the book:

The world record for voluntarily staying underwater is 13 min 42.5 sec by Robert Foster, aged 32, an electronics technician of Richmond, California, who stayed under 10 ft 3.05m of water in the swimming pool of the Bermuda Palms Motel at San Rafeal, California, USA, on 15 March 1959. He hyperventilated with oxygen for 30 min before his descent. The longest unprepared record is 6 min 29.8 sec by Georges Pouliquin in Paris on 3 Nov. 1912. It must be stressed that record-breaking of this kind is extremely dangerous.

These are incredible records – even 5 minutes is a very, very long time to imagine not breathing. 2:08 is more than enough for me!

Portraits of people just before and just after death

Portraits from just before and just after death
Here is a weird and interesting page showing pictures from an exhibition of portraits of people before and after their deaths. It’s pretty haunting to see – one of those things that gets you to think about things differently. Clicking through to the pictures enhances the effect because there are little excerpts about the people before and after death.

This is the text from the guy on the left above:

Peter Kelling, 64
First portrait: November 29 2003
Peter Kelling had never been seriously ill in his life. He was a civil servant working for the health and safety executive, and didn’t allow himself any vices. And yet one day he was diagnosed with bowel cancer. By the time I met him, the cancer had spread to his lungs, his liver and his brain. “I’m only 64,” he muttered. “I shouldn’t be wasting away like this”

Second portrait: December 22 2003
At night he was restless, he told me, and kept turning things over in his mind. He cried a lot. But he didn’t talk about what was troubling him. In fact he hardly talked at all and his silence felt like a reproach to those around him. But there was one thing that Peter Kelling followed to the very last and that was the fortunes of the local football team. Until the day he died, every game was recorded on the chart on the door of his room

The associated blog says that a lot of people are offended by these pics. Bollocks… Death is a fact of life and these guys all consented to being part of the exhibition. Facing mortality might be distressing but instead of getting offended you should explore your feelings and thoughts. Hard thoughts should be faced not hidden behind outrage.

Birthday graphs

Today is my birthday – an event that is becoming increasingly scary! Quarter century down…

Anyway, graphs always cheer me up so here we go:

From today I am closer to 30 than 20!

From today I am closer to 30 than 20 years old

But I still have 1 year to publish a paper like Einstein’s relativity or 21 years to beat Obama to a presidential nomination!
My age relative to a few other things

People are less rational when they’re hungry

The Economist has this article about a study recently published showing that when blood sugar levels are low, people use more intuition to make decisions. You know, when you have been thinking hard about something for a while and then there is one last decision that you just can’t be bothered with? That is what the scientists were studying.

The scientists got a bunch of students to do a mentally taxing task and then gave half of them lemonade with sugar and half lemonade with another sweetener. Using a psychological trick (read about it in the article if you want) the scientists were able to show that those who had been mentally worked and not given sugar were more likely to make decisions using intuition instead of reason.

So it turns out that you really should take food into exams and that you really shouldn’t make important decisions on an empty stomach…

Islam overtakes Catholicism in numbers

Massive mosque at the Muslim holy site of Mecca

National Geographic has this article saying that Islam has now overtaken Catholicism as the world’s largest religion. According to the article this is the current breakdown (percentage of world population):

  • Islamic: 19.2%
  • Catholic: 17.4%

That said, Christians as a whole are still by far the largest religious group comprising 33% of the world population.

Arthur C. Clarke quotes

Arthur C. ClarkeArthur C. Clarke was a very well known science fiction writer who died on March 18 at 90 years old. The Economist always has superb obituary articles (probably my favorite section of the magazine) and this week the obit was about Clarke. It is an interesting read, but I enjoyed the quotes that were dropped in – some I had heard, some I had not.

  • Asked if extra-terrestrials exist: “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying”
  • Asked about UFOs: “They tell us absolutely nothing about intelligence elsewhere in the universe, but they do prove how rare it is on Earth”
  • Probably his most famous quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
  • His self-penned epitaph: “He never grew up; but he never stopped growing”

Map showing Armstrong and Aldrin’s activity on the moon

Here is a cool map showing the astronaut activity on the first lunar landing back in 1969 (yes it really happened – don’t be a daft conspiracy theorist). Produced by NASA it basically shows the activity of the astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on that first landing.

The map has been superimposed on a soccer/football pitch to give an idea of scale – these guys didn’t walk very far.
Map of lunar walking

A chunk of ice the size of a small country has broken off the Antarctic

There is quite a lot of news at the moment about a large piece (a little smaller than Swaziland) of ice shelf that recently broke off Antarctica. You can read about it here: National Geographic, Wired, BBC.

Ice shelves are made of ice already floating on the ocean so this incident won’t raise sea levels, but these shelves are holding back glaciers which will raise see levels. As the floating ice shelves break away there is nothing to hold back the land based glaciers which run faster and do raise sea levels.

These ice shelves are notoriously sensitive to warming (another one broke off during a brief warming period around 1920) so they do act as good early indicators of global warming happening – apparently “average Antarctic temperatures have risen 3 degrees (Celsius) over the past 50 years!”

If you are interested there is an busy debate going on in the comments section of the Wired article. Even if you aren’t that interested, I think you should be worried.
Ice melting in the Antarctic