Amanda sent a story of a cat who rides the bus.
According to the London Daily Mail, a mystery cat has been hitching a ride for the past few weeks.
A policeman in Vancouver, Canada, feels a duck tugging at his pants. She yanks repeatedly, then waddles to a sewer drain. Following her, the officer finds her trapped ducklings below the street.
In Scotland, safari-park wardens answer their phones to hear the heavy breathing of Chippy the chimpanzee. The chimp had pressed the right buttons to dial preprogrammed numbers on a cell phone he'd swiped from a keeper.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1590/is_6_58/ai_80748082
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that animals are smart. But do animals really think? And if so, are their thoughts similar to ours? Scientists have long tried to figure out the intricate workings of human intelligence, but the process of how a thought is chemically produced in the brain still remains a mystery. Researchers do know that humans rank high on the "smart meter" because of our abilities to use complex language and express abstract ideas. Now ethologists (animal behavior scientists) look for clear signs of intelligence in other animals, starting with three top categories:
* emotions: Chimps react to dramatic TV scenes starring other chimps, which suggests they recognize and express emotions.
* self-recognition: Bottlenose dolphins and chimpanzees recognize themselves in mirrors, which suggests they're aware of themselves as individuals. So far, only primates (humans and apes) and dolphins display this ability.
* language: New research shows that prairie dogs use descriptive chirps to inform their colonies about predators and intruders--a human's size, for example, the colors he wears, how fast he's moving, even whether he's carrying a gun.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_cognition
Animal cognition, or cognitive ethology, is the title given to a modern approach to the mental capacities of animals. It has developed out of comparative psychology, but has also been strongly influenced by the approach of ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology. Much of what used to be considered under the title of animal intelligence is now thought of under this heading. Animal language acquisition, attempting to discern or understand the degree to which animal cognistics can be revealed by linguistics-related study, has been controversial among cognitive linguists.
http://www.edwardwillett.com/Columns/animalintelligence.htm
Copyright 2000 by Edward Willett
People with pets find it hard to believe, but scientists continue to debate whether or not animals are conscious--that is, whether they're aware of themselves as individuals.
Some still claim that anything animals do is strictly the result of conditioning. Others are willing to grant animals a certain amount of intelligence, but argue that animals are no more self-aware than computers, which, after all, are also capable of complex, seemingly conscious behavior.
Such critics are getting fewer in number, however, thanks to research at places like Ohio State University, where the first colony of college-educated apes can count, add and subtract, understand fractions on a computer and even match a quantity of objects to its correct Arabic number.
Sarah Boysen, a psychology professor, began trying to teach arithmetic to chimpanzees in the 1970s. By 1991, a chimp named Sheba had figured it out. Once one chimp learned it, others followed.
Fish Capable of Human-Like Logic
Monday, 26 February 2007
Live Science is reporting that scientists have concluded that fish are capable of human-like logic, at least in certain realms.
Fish have the reasoning capacity of a 4- or 5-year-old child when it comes to figuring out who among their peers is “top dog,” new research shows. Stanford University scientists made the discovery—said to be the first demonstration that fish can use logical reasoning to figure out their social pecking order—by studying fights among small, highly territorial, spiny-finned fish called cichlids, common in freshwater in tropical Africa, including in Lake Tanganyika in central Africa.
Logan Grosenick, a graduate student in statistics, and his colleagues found that a sixth fish could infer or learn indirectly which were the 1st through 5th strongest simply by observing fights among them in adjacent, transparent tanks, rather than by directly fighting each fish itself or seeing each fish fight all four others.
This type of reasoning, called transitive inference (TI), is a developmental milestone for human children, showing up nonverbally as early as ages 4 and 5; it also has been reported in monkeys, rats and birds. It allows thinkers to reason that if A is bigger than B, and B is bigger than C, then A is also bigger than C.
Anthropomorphizing animals, or casting human intentions on them, is a mistake, Grosenick said, but it’s a philosophical matter as to whether the cichlids’ ability to infer rankings is the same as similar reasoning in humans. “They are making correct logical inferences on an abstract representation of their world, which would usually be called ‘reasoning’ in humans,” he said.
Biologist Russell D. Fernald, one of Grosenick’s colleagues on the study, said that fish thinking is very different from that of humans. “The capacity shown here is a necessary precondition for reasoning, but having this capacity does not mean these fish actually reason or do any other specific logical tasks,” he told LiveScience.
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