Crows found to be smarter than we think(wsj.com)
wsj.com
Crows found to be smarter than we think
https://www.wsj.com/articles/crows-found-to-be-smarter-than-we-think-11667412092
93 comments
https://archive.ph/1oUTF
I've always liked this tidbit from a family that regularly feeds peanuts in the shell to the local crows.
>she lost a lens cap in a nearby alley while photographing a bald eagle as it circled over the neighbourhood.
She didn't even have to look for it. It was sitting on the edge of the birdbath.
Had the crows returned it? Lisa logged on to her computer and pulled up their bird-cam. There was the crow she suspected. "You can see it bringing it into the yard. Walks it to the birdbath and actually spends time rinsing this lens cap."
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026
>she lost a lens cap in a nearby alley while photographing a bald eagle as it circled over the neighbourhood.
She didn't even have to look for it. It was sitting on the edge of the birdbath.
Had the crows returned it? Lisa logged on to her computer and pulled up their bird-cam. There was the crow she suspected. "You can see it bringing it into the yard. Walks it to the birdbath and actually spends time rinsing this lens cap."
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31604026
Are most other birds substantially less intelligent than crows?
Yes. The same would be true of parrots, and other corvids like ravens.
Ravens are strictly smarter.
Bengt Heinrich, writing in "Mind of the Raven", found their limit by tying bits of meat to strings hanging where they could reach the string. Some, not all, would grab the string with their beak and tuck it under one foot, and keep drawing it up until they got the meat. But none ever figured it out if the string was hung over a branch so they had to pull down to bring the prize up.
Bengt Heinrich, writing in "Mind of the Raven", found their limit by tying bits of meat to strings hanging where they could reach the string. Some, not all, would grab the string with their beak and tuck it under one foot, and keep drawing it up until they got the meat. But none ever figured it out if the string was hung over a branch so they had to pull down to bring the prize up.
Nice to see Bernd Heinrich mentioned here. He really enjoys working in nature and it shows in his books
Crows are incredible. One of my favorites.
Also underrated: scrub jays.
Also underrated: scrub jays.
I once watched a scrub jay (who had a feud with the local squirrel) very deliberately lay a peanut vertically in mulch, tap it into the ground, and lay a large square of bark over top. It was very pleasingly methodical bird.
I love feeding my little neighborhood birds so this article warmed my heart. Thanks for sharing.
Just don’t mess with craws or birds in general.
I had a dispute with a pigeon that was finding my car in my employer’s multi-floor garage and it would defecate on my right mirror, every single day. I tried parking in different spots, different floors, no luck.
I had to use my partner’s car for a couple of months to end this.
Hopefully the pigeon is not reading this.
I had a dispute with a pigeon that was finding my car in my employer’s multi-floor garage and it would defecate on my right mirror, every single day. I tried parking in different spots, different floors, no luck.
I had to use my partner’s car for a couple of months to end this.
Hopefully the pigeon is not reading this.
I used to work with a breast radiologist who happily showed everyone a paper on how he could be replaced by a pigeon.
Presumably one significantly less vindictive.
https://www.bioradiations.com/trained-pigeons-read-mammogram...
Presumably one significantly less vindictive.
https://www.bioradiations.com/trained-pigeons-read-mammogram...
You're lucky it didn't start to defecate on your partner's car!
> In the new study, two crows were trained to create embedded sequences by pecking at brackets of colors and shapes on a screen.
I had this funny image of crowns writing Lisp using rainbow-delimiters.
I had this funny image of crowns writing Lisp using rainbow-delimiters.
They support mac crows.
I’ll show myself out.
I’ll show myself out.
Yeah, but it's a Lisp-1. Goats are the only animals that can understand a separate function namespace, aside from some humans.
I hate to generalize but in my experience, goats NEVER use consistent file naming.
I have not seen it either.
How about camels?
[deleted]
I knew they programmed in Lisp! But they write it in Cuneiform with their beaks.
I thought they used crowlog
Really, it's "<animal> Found to be Smarter Than We Think" - humans are quite arrogant thinking we're the only smart animals.
Is it arrogant? Yesterday, my two year old son said “is the tow truck that is coming to get your car a bed truck or a hook truck?”
Other animals are definitely smart in some ways…and probably in ways we don’t understand…but it’s not an overstatement or arrogant to say that we are in a class of our own.
Other animals are definitely smart in some ways…and probably in ways we don’t understand…but it’s not an overstatement or arrogant to say that we are in a class of our own.
We have particular skills we like to think are most important. We entirely lack other skills, to the point we don't even know about them. Whales, elephants, and octopus probably find us singularly unimpressive at mental achievements they do easily.
Any time animal intelligence comes up, I'm reminded of this very real and informative documentary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fC9uNyhWo
But still, crows are pretty cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-fC9uNyhWo
But still, crows are pretty cool.
I find titles such as this one offensive. Who is "we"? Because everyone who isn't a complete idiot knows that animals are not stupid. Crows, cats, dogs, pigs, snakes, insects - clearly not stupid.
Arrogance seems like the major component but it binds really well with ignorance. As a kid, it never occurred to me that certain creatures appear dumb because they have trouble navigating our world. Well, no shit. Almost nothing is built to help anyone but us. Animals do not have the same vision or hearing as us. Doesn't make them stupid.
Arrogance seems like the major component but it binds really well with ignorance. As a kid, it never occurred to me that certain creatures appear dumb because they have trouble navigating our world. Well, no shit. Almost nothing is built to help anyone but us. Animals do not have the same vision or hearing as us. Doesn't make them stupid.
> everyone who isn't a complete idiot knows that animals are not stupid
To be fair the article doesn't claim anything like that. We already knew that crows are smart, but it turns out they are smarter than we thought.
To be fair the article doesn't claim anything like that. We already knew that crows are smart, but it turns out they are smarter than we thought.
Yet, many literate people throughout history have insisted exactly what you say none believe, and wrote it down where it would be re-transcribed through centuries.
Literate does not equal smart or not arrogant.
>In the new study, two crows were trained to create embedded sequences by pecking at brackets of colors and shapes on a screen. When the crows pecked a correct sequence, a chime sounded and the birds were rewarded with birdseed pellets or mealworms. If they pecked an incorrect sequence, a buzzer blared and the screen went dark for two seconds before the training resumed.
>After a few days, the crows learned to peck correct sequences using bracket combinations they hadn’t encountered before at rates significantly higher than chance, Dr. Liao said. They pecked correct patterns at around the same rate as U.S. children and outperformed monkeys from the 2020 study, she said.
That was the study
>“Our research suggests that recursion isn’t the sole difference between human and animal cognitive ability.”
I don't think anyone seriously thought this
>Dr. Chomsky said he wasn’t convinced the crow study or earlier work including Dr. Ferrigno’s monkey study demonstrated recursion. He said he believes the ability is innate, not learned.
>Rules people use to understand grammar and math go far beyond a crow’s recall of a few sequential patterns, Dr. Chomsky said. “It’s easy to show that humans have the rule in their heads,” he said. “There’s no evidence that corvids have the rule.”
Not sure if this is what he means but I also believe the crow's recursion here may not be the same as that of a human. It is possible that the crows are doing the recursion in software, so to speak, and this software is compiled into the crows brain differently from the human, which calls the recursion instruction directly, so to speak. Then the crow might not scale to more complex tasks. This said, I'm sure now that they have found this ability of the crow more complex studies will be held to understand the nature and extent of the crow's ability. It has opened a new area of investigation.
>After a few days, the crows learned to peck correct sequences using bracket combinations they hadn’t encountered before at rates significantly higher than chance, Dr. Liao said. They pecked correct patterns at around the same rate as U.S. children and outperformed monkeys from the 2020 study, she said.
That was the study
>“Our research suggests that recursion isn’t the sole difference between human and animal cognitive ability.”
I don't think anyone seriously thought this
>Dr. Chomsky said he wasn’t convinced the crow study or earlier work including Dr. Ferrigno’s monkey study demonstrated recursion. He said he believes the ability is innate, not learned.
>Rules people use to understand grammar and math go far beyond a crow’s recall of a few sequential patterns, Dr. Chomsky said. “It’s easy to show that humans have the rule in their heads,” he said. “There’s no evidence that corvids have the rule.”
Not sure if this is what he means but I also believe the crow's recursion here may not be the same as that of a human. It is possible that the crows are doing the recursion in software, so to speak, and this software is compiled into the crows brain differently from the human, which calls the recursion instruction directly, so to speak. Then the crow might not scale to more complex tasks. This said, I'm sure now that they have found this ability of the crow more complex studies will be held to understand the nature and extent of the crow's ability. It has opened a new area of investigation.
The idea that the ability to grok recursive structures is due to some part of human physiology that is unique to humans is pretty much taken as a given in Chomskyan linguistics, almost to the point of religious belief -- it's Chomsky's organ kundabuffer. Ask a Chomskyist to identify this organ or structure and they will handwave: "Well, we don't know exactly what or where it is but we know it's there, humans have it and animals don't so nyeh. We've prebunked any promising animal language study you can produce."
> is pretty much taken as a given in Chomskyan linguistics
That he believes in it is irrelevant. His linguistics do not require the feature to be absent in animals, only that humans have it.
Chomsky is famous for having some extremely insightful ideas that are important in several areas; and also for holding a lot of extremely stupid ones that are ridiculed by several areas. We don't throw the first set away because of the second.
That he believes in it is irrelevant. His linguistics do not require the feature to be absent in animals, only that humans have it.
Chomsky is famous for having some extremely insightful ideas that are important in several areas; and also for holding a lot of extremely stupid ones that are ridiculed by several areas. We don't throw the first set away because of the second.
Chomsky’s reputation isn’t helped by the fact that he has a public email address and can and will answer more or less anything anyone asks him.
It’s nice he has a lot of energy for a 93 year old but I’m not sure WSJ writers really need to ask him for comment on everything. You kind of already know what he’s going to say.
It’s nice he has a lot of energy for a 93 year old but I’m not sure WSJ writers really need to ask him for comment on everything. You kind of already know what he’s going to say.
Being right more often than a stopped clock doesn't make you a good timepiece either, though.
I do not want to be that guy but is not Chomskyan linguistics an animal language study since it concerns humans? It seems strange to me that one would think that ie. birds are more closely related to other mammals then other mammals are to humans.
Obviously here, animal means non-human animal. If, as Chompsky proposes, humans have evolved a unique structure for language processing that no other animal has, then it is irrelevant how closely or distantly related any other animal is to us. Relation would only be important if Chomsky is correct about the structure but wrong about it evolving in humans rather than in the pre-human evolutionary line.
We may well have a special structure for language processing, but Chomsky's claim that it is unique may be wrong.
Convergent evolution is a thing in nature, some structures evolved independently multiple times. Humans and octopuses have very similar eyes, which emerged from different structures.
I wouldn't be surprised if corvids developed human-like intelligence traits independently.
Convergent evolution is a thing in nature, some structures evolved independently multiple times. Humans and octopuses have very similar eyes, which emerged from different structures.
I wouldn't be surprised if corvids developed human-like intelligence traits independently.
> In the new study, two crows were trained to create embedded sequences ... The idea that the ability to grok recursive structures
I have this vision that in a year's time we'll walk into Twitter's HQ to find it being staffed by crows pecking at keyboards and spitting out Typescript.
I have this vision that in a year's time we'll walk into Twitter's HQ to find it being staffed by crows pecking at keyboards and spitting out Typescript.
Is this why we are still studying birdsong when birds are obviously not singing, but talking to each other in phonemes and words?
Singing? Sparrows have actual verbal fights all the time. I have seen and heard actual scandals many times. Even their body language speaks volumes
I have befriended and am giving daily treats to a family of three crows for about 6 months now.
They are fascinating. Gaining their trust and "interacting" with them has been very meditative.
They are fascinating. Gaining their trust and "interacting" with them has been very meditative.
I'm trying to befriend crows. When I go out for a walk, I started to get into the habit of putting a biscuit on a post. Crows fly off when you get anywhere near them. So I kinda hope that the crows spot me putting the biscuit down.
It's interesting to think about. For the first few times nothing much seemed to happen. So you never really know if the crows are doing stuff by blind luck, or they've twigged that there's a connection between me and biscuits.
I think they're catching on, though. A couple of days ago I approached the post, and the crow dispersed. I put down a biscuit, and I reckon the crows saw what I was doing. I carried on my walk. I had to get some way away, and then a crow went to the post and nabbed the biscuit. I think it bought a friend.
So I reckon that the crows now know what the system is.
One day I shall be King Of The Crows.
It's interesting to think about. For the first few times nothing much seemed to happen. So you never really know if the crows are doing stuff by blind luck, or they've twigged that there's a connection between me and biscuits.
I think they're catching on, though. A couple of days ago I approached the post, and the crow dispersed. I put down a biscuit, and I reckon the crows saw what I was doing. I carried on my walk. I had to get some way away, and then a crow went to the post and nabbed the biscuit. I think it bought a friend.
So I reckon that the crows now know what the system is.
One day I shall be King Of The Crows.
My mother does the same with ravens
What kind of interactions?
They come by at roughly the same time of day.
They make a lot noise to let me know they have arrived.
They wait in the tree above the backdoor while I take the nuts to the railing of the shed (to give them some room).
They swoop down to the railing of the shed and chow down almost as soon as I am headed back in the other direction. (they act as if they know 'the routine')
This level of "interaction" took some patience and some time. But it has been worth it.
This level of "interaction" took some patience and some time. But it has been worth it.
That’s great! Some species seem to be very vocal. They are magnificent creatures and sometimes it feels like “who is observing who?”
There's a crow that drops nuts on the road on my way home from work. I always try to hit them for him so he can get the nuts out. :)
LOL, I first read that as you would always try to hit the crow.
Guess I'm not as smart as one...
Guess I'm not as smart as one...
What color is your car? Would be cool to see if the crow also drops nuts for similar colored cars at a frequency higher than chance. Or just yours. Or if that crow has other favorite cars besides yours that he/she knows are considerate enough to sub in as a nutcracker... maybe their colors throw that whole thing for a loop.
I live in Switzerland: all the cars are drab, including mine.
I'm thinking of planting more nut bearing plants in my yard. Possibly for myself, but mostly for wildlife. Corylus americana (American Hazelnut) is native and easy to grow, I understand.
avoid black walnut. not as terrible as salting the earth, but not great.
Too late, we already have some of those. They were there when we bought the house.
C. americana is resistant to juglone, btw.
C. americana is resistant to juglone, btw.
I only just found out black cherries are native to North America.
A Prunus species, also resistant to black walnut.
List from a local nursery on resistant plants:
https://www.plantsmen.com/_files/ugd/e44642_67a1c38658fe4e9e...
List from a local nursery on resistant plants:
https://www.plantsmen.com/_files/ugd/e44642_67a1c38658fe4e9e...
Observed the same, doing the same, on my bike.
You just encourage dependency on and hanging out near humans.
Don't anger the crows. They can quite literally run you from your yard.
Crows are very resourceful. And opportunistic.
I often bristle at the implicit hubris in these assumptions about human uniqueness. Why would we assume that humans are the only species capable of understanding recursion? Why is it at all surprising that other animals can understand it too?
I'd be much more shocked by a study that provided any sort of evidence that animals cannot understand recursion, but that would probably be more difficult to draw a strong conclusion about.
I'd be much more shocked by a study that provided any sort of evidence that animals cannot understand recursion, but that would probably be more difficult to draw a strong conclusion about.
It's all a matter of perspective. From CrowNews.com: "Humans Found to Be Dumber Than We Think."
Very well-played. (I had to check the URL for good measure)
"Crow tech slaps"
- Rick Sanchez
- Rick Sanchez
Because probably 30% of my 1st year undergrad class did not understand recursion..
I won’t phrase this properly, but: maybe you did understand recursion, but not as the mathematical or computer science abstraction you needed to learn.
I remember when it clicked for me and I wrote a function that conditionally called itself, I had this distinct sense that I already understood this concept perfectly well. I was just struggling to understand it in the way a specific programming language needed me to.
The idea of recursion is very simple, but can be complicated by the rules and syntaxes of their abstractions.
Apologies if this wasn’t your experience and I’m incorrectly assuming it must be similar for other people. I’m really not sure if it is or not.
I remember when it clicked for me and I wrote a function that conditionally called itself, I had this distinct sense that I already understood this concept perfectly well. I was just struggling to understand it in the way a specific programming language needed me to.
The idea of recursion is very simple, but can be complicated by the rules and syntaxes of their abstractions.
Apologies if this wasn’t your experience and I’m incorrectly assuming it must be similar for other people. I’m really not sure if it is or not.
Full paper:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq3356 ("Recursive sequence generation in crows")
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq3356 ("Recursive sequence generation in crows")
It seems like our misestimation of animal intelligence always goes in this direction. Have we discovered recently that any species are less smart than we'd thought? (besides humans, yuk yuk)
Unlikely as most researchers operate from the point of view that all animals are mindless automatons acting from pure instinct until proven beyond a doubt. Even then they will warn you against the heady Dangers of Anthropomorphizing Animals and Projecting your Emotions onto Unthinking and Unfeeling Lumps of Meat.
There are numerous discoveries of the limits of animal intelligence, especially in the area of language acquisition. Especially when Skinner's behaviorism concept was in vogue, it had actually been assumed that at least some animals could learn human-like language with enough training. This turned out to be completely false even for animals like chimpanzees and gorillas. In fact, some of the exact limits were identified - especially around syntax and embedding (one phrase inside another).
You can read up on a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky to see one of the more infamous failures in this area (and quite a sad story of animal mistreatment). It also illustrates the dangers of wanting to believe, or of excessive anthropomorphizing - as initially the experiments were deemed successful, until more dispassionate analysis showed that the chimp's signing was far more random and determined than presented.
You can read up on a chimpanzee called Nim Chimpsky to see one of the more infamous failures in this area (and quite a sad story of animal mistreatment). It also illustrates the dangers of wanting to believe, or of excessive anthropomorphizing - as initially the experiments were deemed successful, until more dispassionate analysis showed that the chimp's signing was far more random and determined than presented.
I assumed chickens would have been much smarter than they turned out to be when we got some. Birds are known to be smart, just not all birds as it turns out.
Pheasants are as dumb as boxes of rocks. Their road sense is awful, and generally do exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.
In the dim and distant past I worked as a programmer at a company that bought an old country estate for one of its offices. As part of the estate there were about a dozen peacocks. There were none left when I joined though. My manager explained that they were completely dumb and kept get run over.
In the dim and distant past I worked as a programmer at a company that bought an old country estate for one of its offices. As part of the estate there were about a dozen peacocks. There were none left when I joined though. My manager explained that they were completely dumb and kept get run over.
Did anyone come out of lockdown thinking humans were smarter than they had initially appreciated?
This reminds me of a great short story about the intelligence of parrots, "The Great Silence" by Ted Chiang.
Full text available here: https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia...
Full text available here: https://electricliterature.com/the-great-silence-by-ted-chia...
[deleted]
Interestingly, according to Quran it's crow that first taught human how to bury the dead:
https://islamicreminder.org/quran-on-crow/
https://islamicreminder.org/quran-on-crow/
Seeing a hundred crows feasting on the body of a deceased family member would lead me to think of an alternative solution as well.
Perhaps, though that is almost exactly the "burial" practice of one of the oldest surviving organized religions in the world, Zoroastrianism (though usually it's vultures instead of crows in that area):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Silence
Of course, our childhood stories of fables and folklores started with The Crow and The Pitcher[1]. I will never forget that story. It is a simple but very effective story to tell kids.
1. https://fablesofaesop.com/the-crow-and-the-pitcher.html
1. https://fablesofaesop.com/the-crow-and-the-pitcher.html
Flying birds of necessity optimize heavily for weight. This implies their bird-brains must be remarkably efficient for their size.
> Flying birds of necessity optimize heavily for weight. This implies their bird-brains must be remarkably efficient for their size.
The first sentence is true. The second is a meaningless non sequitur.
You could equally claim that bird bones must be remarkably efficient for their size. That is true, but only in terms of mass used to prevent a given amount of bird from degenerating into a puddle. In terms of physical robustness, which is a primary purpose of all bones including bird bones, bird bones are straightforwardly worse than normal bones.
You can't just "be efficient". You have to be efficient in terms of a metric. And optimization for weight does not imply that you're efficient in terms of computational power, whether that be computation produced per unit of sugar consumed, computational capacity per unit of structural mass[1], or any other computation-related metric.
[1] "But it's optimized for weight!" Yes, but that just means it uses (ideally) the minimum weight necessary to support however much computation it wants to do. Using more of a denser material might produce much higher capacity-per-gram figures, but it would also weigh more.
And an important part of optimizing for weight is to reduce the needs that your massy infrastructure must satisfy; by this line of reasoning, you would expect birds to be exceptionally stupid, not smart.
The first sentence is true. The second is a meaningless non sequitur.
You could equally claim that bird bones must be remarkably efficient for their size. That is true, but only in terms of mass used to prevent a given amount of bird from degenerating into a puddle. In terms of physical robustness, which is a primary purpose of all bones including bird bones, bird bones are straightforwardly worse than normal bones.
You can't just "be efficient". You have to be efficient in terms of a metric. And optimization for weight does not imply that you're efficient in terms of computational power, whether that be computation produced per unit of sugar consumed, computational capacity per unit of structural mass[1], or any other computation-related metric.
[1] "But it's optimized for weight!" Yes, but that just means it uses (ideally) the minimum weight necessary to support however much computation it wants to do. Using more of a denser material might produce much higher capacity-per-gram figures, but it would also weigh more.
And an important part of optimizing for weight is to reduce the needs that your massy infrastructure must satisfy; by this line of reasoning, you would expect birds to be exceptionally stupid, not smart.
Bird bones are shaped optimally to put the bone where the most stress is. I recall reading once that they were hollow.
> You have to be efficient in terms of a metric
Since the topic here is intelligence, that is the metric.
> You have to be efficient in terms of a metric
Since the topic here is intelligence, that is the metric.
Intelligence is not a metric that the concept of efficiency can be applied to. To evaluate efficiency, you need a benefit and a cost. "Intelligence" is just one thing; the most you can do is evaluate it in terms of more or less.
What kind of intelligence efficiency do you want? Most efficient use of time? Glucose? Volume? Mass? Highest utilization rate? Are we looking at computational capacity? Computational quality? Economy in computational demands?
> Bird bones are shaped optimally to put the bone where the most stress is.
That is true, but it doesn't distinguish bird bones from the bones of any other species. However, bird bones are uniquely bad at suffering that stress.
> I recall reading once that they were hollow.
Also true. They also have very low density in what you might consider the non-hollow parts. That's why they function so poorly for maintaining physical integrity.
Sometimes two goals are in conflict. Birds need bones to maintain their physical integrity, but in order to fly, they have trouble supporting bones. The fact that their bones are subject to more constraints than those of other vertebrates doesn't mean that they magically have better bones than other vertebrates do. It means they have worse bones, because the quality of their bones had to be subordinated to their unique need to fly.
What kind of intelligence efficiency do you want? Most efficient use of time? Glucose? Volume? Mass? Highest utilization rate? Are we looking at computational capacity? Computational quality? Economy in computational demands?
> Bird bones are shaped optimally to put the bone where the most stress is.
That is true, but it doesn't distinguish bird bones from the bones of any other species. However, bird bones are uniquely bad at suffering that stress.
> I recall reading once that they were hollow.
Also true. They also have very low density in what you might consider the non-hollow parts. That's why they function so poorly for maintaining physical integrity.
Sometimes two goals are in conflict. Birds need bones to maintain their physical integrity, but in order to fly, they have trouble supporting bones. The fact that their bones are subject to more constraints than those of other vertebrates doesn't mean that they magically have better bones than other vertebrates do. It means they have worse bones, because the quality of their bones had to be subordinated to their unique need to fly.
I already thought crows were pretty smart, amazing to think they are even smarter than that!
I'm going to let a crow do my taxes.
I once saw a crow open a
we know, and they eat walnuts
i have always thought that crows were pretty smart
get twitter to hire them
So are my ex-girlfriends (as it turns out).