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Footnote 93 Equality of capabilities, addendum
The following paper on Corbids illustrates the point well:
Tool using by non tool users
C D. Bird and N J. Emery
Insightful problem solving and creative tool modification by captive nontool-using rooks
Proc Natl Acad Sci 106 10370 (2009)
*Rooks that do not appear to use tools in the wild are capable of insightful problem solving related to sophisticated tool use, including spontaneously modifying and using a variety of tools, shaping hooks out of wire, and using a series of tools in a sequence to gain a reward.
*The ability to represent tools may be a domain-general cognitive capacity rather than an adaptive specialization and questions the relationship between physical intelligence and wild tool use.
*See for example Fig 6
See also a more recent paper by the same authors:
C D Bird, N J Emery
Rooks Use Stones to Raise the Water Level to Reach a Floating Worm
Curr Biol 19 1410
In Aesop's fable “The Crow and the Pitcher,” a thirsty crow uses stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher and quench its thirst.
*Four captive rooks solved a problem analogous to Aesop's fable: raising the level of water so that a floating worm moved into reach.
Humans are not more intelligent but more socially tuned than apes
Herrmann et al.
Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis
Science 317 1360 (2007)
Chimpanzees and orangutans, as well as to 2.5-year-old human children before literacy and schooling are studied in this paper.
Supporting the cultural intelligence hypothesis and contradicting the hypothesis that humans simply have more “general intelligence.'” we found that the children and chimpanzees had very similar cognitive skills for dealing with the physical world but that the children had more sophisticated cognitive skills than either of the ape species for dealing with the social world.
The above paper tells us that we cannot unconditionally say that the organisms have higher intelligent capability if they are closer phylogenetically to us Hominoidea. Indeed, crows may have higher capability to use tools than chimpanzees. See the following paper (which include comparison with apes):
A.H Taylor, G.R Hunt, F.S Medina, and R.D Gray
Do New Caledonian crows solve physical problems through causal reasoning ?
Proc Roy Soc 276 247 (2009)
(BG) The trap-tube paradigm has been used as the benchmark test for investigating whether non-human animals use causal reasoning to solve physical problems. In this task an individual must extract food from a horizontal tube in a direction that avoids a trap.
(BG) In the wild, New Caledonian crows, Corvus moneduloides , forage in holes for grubs and insects using a variety of tools with a level of sophistication sometimes surpassing that of the great apes (Hunt 1996, 2000a,b; Hunt & Gray 2004).
*Three out of six crows solved the initial trap-tube within 150 trials. These crows continued to avoid the trap when the arbitrary features that had previously been associated with successful performances were removed. However, they did not avoid the trap when a hole and a functional trap were in the tube.
*In contrast to a recent primate study, the three crows then solved a causally equivalent but
visually distinct problem―the trap-table task. The performance of the three crows across the four transfers made explanations based on chance, associative learning, visual and tactile generalization, and previous dispositions unlikely.
*New Caledonian crows can solve complex physical problems by reasoning both causally and analogically about causal relations. Causal and analogical reasoning may form the basis of the New Caledonian crow's exceptional tool skills.
*They seem better than apes.
If `New Caledonian Crow’ is looked for in YouTube there are many. For example,
Observations under natural conditions are
Lucas A. Bluff, Jolyon Troscianko, Alex A. S. Weir, Alex Kacelnik, and Christian Rutz
Tool use by wild New Caledonian crows Corvus moneduloides at natural foraging sites
Proc Roy Soc 277 1377 (2010), First quantitative description of larva fishing by wild crows in its full ecological context.
The following paper indicates that when New Caledonian Crows combine tools, they demonstrate `insight’:
Alex H. Taylor, Douglas Elliffe, Gavin R. Hunt, and Russell D. Gray
Complex cognition and behavioural innovation in New Caledonian crows
Proc Roy Soc 277 2637 (2010)
New Caledonian crows with a novel three-stage meta-tool problem. The task involved three distinct stages:
(i)obtaining a short stick by pulling up a string,
(ii)using the short stick as a meta-tool to extract a long stick from a toolbox, and finally (iii) using the long stick to extract food from a hole.
Crows with previous experience of the behaviours in stages 1–3 linked them into a novel sequence to solve the problem on the first trial. Crows with experience
of only using string and tools to access food also successfully solved the problem.
This innovative use of established behaviours in novel contexts was not based on resurgence, chaining and conditional reinforcement. Instead, the performance was consistent with the transfer of an abstract, causal rule: ‘out-of-reach objects can be accessed using a tool’.
YouTube video is available:
See also Alex H. Taylor et al.,
Context-dependent tool use in New Caledonian crows
BL 8 205 (2012).
The following paper suggests New Caledonian crows has cultural differences in their `crowing’:
LUCAS A. BLUFF, ALEX KACELNIK and CHRISTIAN RUTZ
Vocal culture in New Caledonian crows Corvus moneduloides
Biol J Linnaean Soc 101 767 (2010).
The New Caledonian crow Corvus moneduloides :
(1)possesses the capacity for social learning of vocalizations (experimental evidence in the form of a captive subject that reproduces human speech and other anthropogenic noises) and (2)exhibits significant large-scale, population-level variation in its vocalizations (cross-island playback experiments, with analyses controlling for a substantial set of potentially confounding variables).
In combination, this provides strong evidence for the existence of ‘ﾔculture’ in these birds.
The author wrote “ use of tools is possible for almost all ‘higher’ organisms (including insects), if it is advantageous ecologically,” the following review suggests that use of tools and physical intelligence are not so correlated:
Nathan J Emery, Nicola S Clayton Tool use and physical cognition in birds and mammals
Curr Op Neurobiolog B 27 (2009)
(BG) In the wild, chimpanzees are the most prolific and proficient tool users, yet their understanding of tools in the laboratory is surprisingly poor.
*Habitual tool use is not a clear predictor of physical intelligence, for either instrumental
tool tasks or tests of planning.
See also somewhat related
Jønsson KA, Fabre P, Irestedt M
Brains, tools, innovation and biogeography in crows and ravens
BMC Evol Biol 12 72 (2012)
This study presents the first molecular phylogeny including all species and a number of
subspecies within the genus Corvus .
The authors did not find a correlation between relative brain size, tool use, innovative feeding strategies and dispersal success. All crows and ravens have relatively large brains compared to other birds and thus the potential to be innovative if conditions and circumstances are right.
Mud wasps level ground or wall surfaces with a pebble. If this is searched in Google, only a book shows up; no original source is available.
There is a paper describing octopi carrying coconut shell to protect themselves:
Finn et al., Defensive tool use in a coconut-carrying octopus
Curr Biol 19 R1069 (2009)
Among invertebrates the acquisition of items that are deployed later has not previously
been reported.
We repeatedly observed soft-sediment dwelling octopuses carrying around coconut shell halves, assembling them as a shelter only when needed. Whilst being carried, the shells offer no protection and place a requirement on the carrier to use a novel and cumbersome form of locomotion--stilt-walking.
Watch the movies.
There is a minireview on the tool use:
Amanda Seed, Richard Byrne, Animal Tool-Use
Curr Biol 20 R1032 (2010).
In the 19th century, it was not so a shocking idea that colored people were culturally and intellectually inferior to the white people. For example, it is still a fresh memory that, as you can see from the treatment of Amerindians in the US or Aborigines in Australia, now unthinkable things were practiced with nonchalance. Thus, it is not hard to imagine that there will come the age when they would regard the present practice of treating mammals and birds is unspeakably inhuman, and the practice in the first half of 21st century is unthinkable in one’s right mind; our handling of mice is unethical.
We should be kind to animals because it makes better humans of us all.
--- Jane Goodall
The reader might have understood the intention of the assertion of the equality of capabilities was to raise the status of other animals to that of human beings, but the emphasis is strictly on the equality. The following article points out that there is a possibility that human beings’ sophisticated behavior could be explained in terms of simple intelligent capabilities; at least the research direction to demonstrate the `simplicity’ of human behaviors is ignored. For example, it is very likely a false that `insight’ is special to human beings.
Complexity from simplicity in cognition
Sara J. Shettleworth
Clever animals and killjoy explanations in comparative psychology
Trends Cognitive Sci 14 477 (2010)
Human behavior expresses unconscious responses to simple cues similar to those that influence other species. In effect, ‘anthropomorphic’ explanations are not always correct even for humans.
*Insight may be deconstructed as interconnection, combining old behaviors in new ways, ex. pigeons extinguished for flying with banana+box, metatool uses, etc.
*Recent comparative research also shows that some simple processes demonstrated first in nonhuman species can be revealed in humans with nonverbal tests.