probably the biggest question that
researchers in animal cognition are
asked
is how do we go about ranking animals in
terms of their intelligence or their
cognitive abilities
i think the honest answer is that it’s a
bit of a fool’s errand
you can’t really do it because animals
have evolved to be good at the things
that they need to be good at
in their natural environments even in
humans it’s
very difficult to say what what is
intelligence how do we define it
how do we explore it i think when it
comes to animals it’s even
more challenging to kind of find ways to
explore
how they see their environment and how
they solve problems
we have to remember for example humans
can’t ecolocate so in a sense you can’t
really
judge a fish by its ability to climb a
tree as we say but it is very
interesting
when they surprise us so when they do
something that we might not necessarily
expect them to be able to do
but they can do
i had no idea that a human could train
a bee it’s a bit like
training a dog they will make mistakes
at first when learning something new
and then eventually she will get most of
the choices
correct
and you end up rooting for that b
the thing that really amazed me over
time more and more is just
simply how good dogs are in general and
now i’m talking about dogs as a
population not specific individuals but
all dogs how good they are in figuring
us out like kind of
reading us understanding what we want
them to do
and where we want them to go and all
these kinds of things and i think that’s
remarkable
the honey bee at the end of the day is
an insect with 960 000 cells in her
brain i am very surprised of the level
of sophistication
it exhibits considering it’s an insect
with so few cells in its brain
when people ask me why do you study
spiders and and spider webs
the answer is pretty simple imagine you
were
a spider size of a human and you were to
make a web like the spider does it would
be the size of a qriket pitch
and in terms of strengths from the
material it would be able to catch
small airplanes if you just think about
that that’s really interesting
the way that they are able to navigate
their environment
that changes at a rapid pace
can change to really extreme degrees
i think requires a very different type
of intelligence
than we humans have to rely on
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