New Zealand Birds Show Humanlike Ability To Make Predictions (sciencemag.org) 54
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Whether it's calculating your risk of catching the new coronavirus or gauging the chance of rain on your upcoming beach vacation, you use a mix of statistical, physical, and social information to make a decision. So do New Zealand parrots known as keas, scientists report today. It's the first time this cognitive ability has been demonstrated outside of apes, and it may have implications for understanding how intelligence evolved. [...] The findings indicate that keas, like humans, have something known as "domain general intelligence" -- the mental ability to integrate several kinds of information, the researchers argue. That's despite the fact that birds and humans last shared a common ancestor some 312 million years ago and have markedly different brain anatomies. Previously, cognitive researchers have argued that domain general intelligence requires language. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.
Cockroaches in my dorm do make predictions (Score:4, Insightful)
go for the snack or wait until I have left the room.
They have been around for +320 million years.
Re: (Score:3)
go for the snack or wait until I have left the room. They have been around for +320 million years.
Human intelligence, being the only type of intelligence we mere humans are familiar with, only allows us to barely believe in the intelligence of life forms other than ourselves,,, isn't it amazing life forms such as ours have evolved to dominate a planet?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, we're the only prime multi-cellular apex predator on the planet. Our intelligence is supreme in that we have the capability to create a tool that could eventually make tools better than the original creator (AI over Mankind). At the very least, we're exploring new planets and the known universe with instrumentation.
You're correct. We are, yet, is there another earthly life form that might've been better suited for interplanetary exploration had it evolved the big brain humans are saddled with? Sadly, human physiology is the weak link that makes anthropogenic-developed robotic exploration of the universe much more likely.
Now wisdom OTOH is an entirely different matter all together....
I suspect the wisdom is not unattainable, but may be more centuries ahead of us than we have time for.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, we dominate the Moon and Mars, sure, but there isn't much there to "dominate."
The dominant creatures on Earth of course are ants.
Re: (Score:2)
Sure, we dominate the Moon and Mars, sure, but there isn't much there to "dominate."
The dominant creatures on Earth of course are ants.
Fair enough. Creature, yes. Opposite human selfishness, I am in awe of insect colonies who sacrifice the needs of the individual for the good of the hive/colony/mound; but, if we're going to conflate dominance with sheer biomass, Plants are in 1st place by a wide margin. [smithsonianmag.com]
The carbonaceous winners are plants, which make up about 80 percent of all biomass on Earth. Bacteria comes in second at 13 percent and fungus is third at just 2 percent.
Estimates for the biomass of phytoplankton and bacteria vary so widely it is difficult to crown them yet, but hey would be in the race, unlike Warren.
Considerung humans generally suck at this... (Score:3)
If these birds can do this without education or language, they may actually be effectively smarter than the average human being.
Re: (Score:3)
Being able to make these kinds of basic predictions at all is a useful survival mechanism, so it's hardly surprisin
Re: (Score:2)
Our brains are huge correlation calculating systems. This makes it easy to predict events from our experience. However it fails when dealing with more complex predictions, where we just need to do the match and trust the results.
However I would like to say we are good a forecasting vs prediction
Categorization (Score:1)
This is using an abstract commonality to group two organisms from vastly different locations on the biological tree.
That only makes sense if you are talking about commonality of design, rather than commonality of descent. The proposed path to it in one case, has no genetic relevance to the other case.
Re: (Score:1)
This is clear and objective evidence that the Universe was created and evolution is false.
We know you're a creationist and a theist and as such we really can't take you seriously in a discussion on any science issue.
Re: (Score:1)
But hey, I have some ground-up biology to get to. Want a taco? It's got fire sauce.
Re: (Score:1)
No, this constant lying is objectively harmful to the world.
But I'm sure you know -all about- that. Good thing there's a defined mechanism to relieve the world of you, and there's no way you'll escape it.
Re: (Score:1)
By the way, you -seriously- don't know who Godel is? Thought I mean God?
You truly are a profound idiot. Don't even try science, you'll continue to fail there as badly as you demonstrate here. Sorry there is -no- domain you aren't worthless in. Must be why you're reduced to trolling AC... yeah, it all becomes clear now.
Re: (Score:1)
Nothing wrong with adding information, as your desperate for any ad hominem as you're squeezed into nothingness from all directions, religion, science, and physical basic reality.
But this is tedious. There's nothing that will keep you from being gone, and you're mostly gone as soon as I stop talking to you, because you clearly, as you've repeatedly demonstrated, as totally dependent and subordinate to me as if you were sucking my...
But yeah, I'll just wait, and then that'll be what she said.
Re: (Score:1)
Fair enough. I'll let evolution handle you from here.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Categorization (Score:1)
Yes. Don't mess with Him.
No society, no need for language (Score:3)
It's the first time humans have been able to see.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Microscopes didn't create germs. Telescopes didn't create galaxies.
It's a marvel that scientists have achieved the ability to recognize "domain general intelligence" outside of apes. Another ten years, with more effort and observation and better tools, they'll be able to see it in dolphins too.
They'll eventually figure out what the appendix does, how bees fly, why it rains, what lightning is, how trees grow, what makes the wind, and how the four elements combine to create everything we see.
According to my history teacher, thirty years ago, dogs don't dream. He never had one. They also can't lie. Again, he never had one.
Science isn't about truth; it's about the search for truth. Developing the tools to objectively measure and repeatedly quantify observations is what makes science impressively able to predict future events. But there's nothing impressive about the speed with which science advances in its observations.
We're still discovering that trees work together as a forest way more like avatar that anyone would have guessed. We're still discovering how quantum mechanics can siphon electricity, while botanical photosynthesis has been doing it all around us -- hundreds of thousands of leaves per tree, millions of trees per city, billions of trees literally everywhere we live; so many working examples, and while we have a good idea of how it works, we haven't the foggiest notion of how it can possibly be that efficient.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a marvel that scientists have achieved the ability to recognize "domain general intelligence" outside of apes. (...) But there's nothing impressive about the speed with which science advances in its observations.
Huh? Aren't you using "a marvel" and "nothing impressive" to describe the same event? I find that we're picking the world apart and figuring out how it works at an incredible pace. If you look at somebody like Leonardo da Vinci what he knew was impressive for the 1500s but a few centuries later in the 1700s life hadn't changed that much. Now compare 1820 or 1920 and 2020, holy shit... of course we've got a lot to discover in the future too so it's not like our generation is exceptionally lucky or anything.
Re: (Score:2)
I used "marvel" to describe "recognize". It's no surprise that birds are intelligent. It's a surprise that we can recognize it -- that's what "requires language": being able to translate bird behaviour into human understanding.
It's really nice that you see the iphone as something impressive compared to a rotary phone. I'm sorry to say, it's not. As something that happened fifteen years ago, it's a big deal because it spawned today's culture. But in a hundred years, it'll be seen as the middle step, not
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Now compare that to the refrigerator. When will the refrigerator be obsolete? And locomotives aren't obsolete. Good chance they never will be -- more volume for nearly zero additional drag is awesome.
smartphones are within cellphones, cellphones are within telephones. to say that the iphone is somehow special in history is to say that the honda accord changed the world. might be the best car ever built, but it doesn't change anything as one-of-many similar iterations. You simply can't compare the hond
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
50 years ago? I think it was already in star trek by then. And since yours wouldn't work, they would just look at you funny. Like a car without a road, totally useless. Also, not a global economy, and friends lived within the same community, so they'd ask you why you need to be so reachable by people you don't know.
50 years ago is a different culture. It wouldn't have been successful even if it had been invented 50 years ago. There was simply no consumer need for it.
But back to my point, think about th
Re: It's the first time humans have been able to s (Score:2)
Note that the parent talks about iPhones because the first comment brings them up. Just replace it by smartphones. After all, iPhone wasn't the first smartphone...
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, yeah, I presumed as much. Design aside, all smartphones are the same in my rant -- a step between cell phones and whatever's next -- which hopefully won't be a touchscreen, won't be a huge brick in one's pants (mine's a tiny 1" smartphone, btw), and won't be a distinct device at all.
And I didn't even mention tvision, batteries, audio speakers, the assembly line, microwave ovens, and the amazing shipping container responsible for most of our global economy.
Really, smartphones have done absolutely nothin
Re: It's the first time humans have been able to (Score:2)
In the broadest sense of technology, my top 10 contains cooking food (which the predecessors of homo sapiens already did, it made our brain size possible), writing, the wheel, the lever, the cog, the refrigerator, the stream engine, the aeroplane, the helicopter, the transistor...
Okay, I'm perhaps missing some essential parts here and there, programmable devices and such...
But I agree that a smartphone is an evolutionary device. And it would indeed be cool
Re: (Score:2)
I hadn't thought of the cog, the transistor, and writing! Good ones all.
Yeah, no screen. I'm actually waiting for all screens to disappear. I hate that my kitchen has SIX clocks! The microwave, the oven, the toaster, the stove...at least I have one of those cat-clocks with the moving eyes and tail to watch over all the others.
I'm thinking bluetooth glasses/contact lenses would do it. I might have fifty tiny screens throughout my house. They don't need to be there. Let them "popup" in my lenses when I
Typical self-centered humans. (Score:2)
Riiight. "only we" again.
My grandma still used to believe that "animals" (she meant other animals than the human) don't think or feel but are simple automatons, put there for our enjoyment.
Just like other people believed the sun and indeed entire universe revolves around *us*. Or that there is such a thing as "races" and of course *we* are the superior one. Or countless other such ideas that we're somehow "special" and the chosen people.
If there is one thing that needs to be hammered into humans, then that
My Favorite Part (Score:3)
Instead of the studies I read only 20 years ago with conventions of "removing the subject from its cage" to do x,y, and z...
Non stressed beings on both sides of the method. That's my favorite part.
Now, if studies presented to the public on dolphins and their language, a lexicon and grammar of clicks and vibrations having evolved to traverse leagues and fathoms of seawater, could be taken out of the echo-chamber a concrete-lined pool is...I'll be relieved of a compulsion to shout at least a fewer clouds, but not all, because the real research on their linguistic and cognitive capacities are classified delivery systems.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if those birds know the difference between "no" and "know"....
Aren't driven to explain (Score:1)
It must be 20 years ago, that I heard someone had demonstrated symbolic reasoning by parrots. Words are symbols we attach to our experiences; of objects, actions and the properties of both (eg. green, quickly). Which makes it interesting when a human culture lacks a word (eg. horizon, blue). We found bees have a language, so do dogs. The conclusion might be that animals, individually, don't compare the experiences they have and thus aren't driven to explain them to another creature.
Birds have a complex language (Score:2)
Humans Show Birdlike Ability To Manage Resources (Score:1)
I see (Score:2)
"So do New Zealand parrots known as keas, scientists report today. It's the first time this cognitive ability has been ... "
So if they see branches moving, they predict wind, if the branches are wet, they predict rain, if they throw a shadow it will be sunny and if they are white there will be snow.
It could not be any other way (Score:2)
If birds could not make very good future predictions they would be extinct as a species. In fact a very large percentage of their brain has to be dedicated to making the prediction, that if I turn my feathers in this direction I may be able to land on that branch over there for lunch, and if I turn it this other way I wind up with the Darwin Award instead. You simply can not fly if you don't have an extremely good ability to make those future predictions. How could this possibly be seen as an optional cogni
"Requires Language" is so... in the box thinking (Score:2)
I mean, come on. Language is cool and all... but give me a break. You are telling me that if a human was raised without real language, they couldn't process things this way? No imagination on the part of people making these claims.