Skepticblog

Some of them are fairly dumb. Some of them are fairly smart. It really all depends on the bird and the situation. However, for years scientists looked down on the bird as a minor player in the cognition game.

In a recent study of cognition involving rooks, a type of corvid related to crows and ravens, scientists (one of whom I worked with once upon a time) succeeded in recreating one of Aesop’s fables. From the abstract:

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. A number of corvids have been found to use tools in the wild [1,2,3,4], and New Caledonian crows appear to understand the functional properties of tools and solve complex physical problems via causal and analogical reasoning [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. The rook, another member of the corvid family that does not appear to use tools in the wild, also appears able to solve non-tool-related problems via similar reasoning [12]. Here, we present evidence that captive rooks are also able to solve a complex problem by using tools. We presented four captive rooks with a problem analogous to Aesop’s fable: raising the level of water so that a floating worm moved into reach. All four subjects solved the problem with an appreciation of precisely how many stones were needed. Three subjects also rapidly learned to use large stones over small ones, and that sawdust cannot be manipulated in the same manner as water. This behavior demonstrates a flexible ability to use tools, a finding with implications for the evolution of tool use and cognition in animals.

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I am in receipt of an interesting email exchange between a Skeptoid listener who prefers to remain anonymous (let’s call him Gump in retaliation for his anonymity) and a professor, Jim Corven in the Organic Agriculture program at Bristol Community College in Massachusetts.

Gump read on the school’s web site the following:

Organic agriculture is one of the fastest growing segments of U.S. agriculture. Its earth-friendly, resource-gentle approach to providing food and fiber attracts a generation who worries that the overuse of synthetics and agribusiness techniques deplete the earth’s health and resources out of the world. The sustainable farming movement uses fewer nonrenewable resources and in that way nurtures not only our bodies, but our earth. (continue reading…)

I wasn’t going to write about this, since it’s really just schadenfreude, but so many people have sent it to me via email I figure it’s touching on some level of skeptical consciousness.

Moon hoax conspiracy promulgator, astronaut stalker, and Buzz Aldrin punching bag Bart Sibrel was recently arrested for vandalism. Apparently, someone took too long to get out of a parking space he wanted. He parked nearby, got out of his car, and then repeatedly jumped up and down on the offending car, doing over $1400 worth of damage.

Now, there is certainly a vast array of snark just quivering to be let loose here. Sibrel is largely responsible for the dumbosity of the Moon hoax still being around, and has used arguably slimy tactics to keep it so. He has lied about me, and still says things that are provably wrong even when I have told him to his face (well, over the radio) that they are factually wrong. Yet he keeps on saying them.

And, of course, there is the potentially huge ad hominem about a conspiracy theorist who goes ballistic over such a minor issue as a parking space. It’s certainly easy to assume he’s a nutsoid goofball who’s just a NASA photo away from losing it completely. But that should be avoided: I know I myself have daydreamed of what I would do to people who take too long to pull out of a parking space — generally at some point large electric shocks applied to delicate body parts are involved.

But the difference, of course, is in idly fantasizing about something versus actually doing it. The real irony here is that Sibrel’s Apollo claims are fantasy, and aimed against people who actually did do something.

So I won’t go out of my way to engage in beating this particular zombie horse. Instead I’ll let you idly daydream about it. Try not to write anything slanderous in the comments, but the best "parking space travel" joke will get the kudos of the Skepticblog community.

Susan Blackmore is a memeticist – that is she studies memes. The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, and refers to a unit of cultural evolution, just as a gene is a unit of biological evolution. Genes and memes are both replicators – information subject to evolutionary processes. Now Blackmore is arguing that we are on the brink of developing a new third replicator – a technological one.

The idea is interesting, and I wonder if Blackmore is aware of the degree to which her ideas mirror those of Ray Kurzweil and his “singularity”. For background, Kurzweil argues that any system that encodes information is likely to form a positive feedback loop  – information build on information in an accelerating process.

Actually, this goes back even before life arose on earth. The prebiotic earth saw chemical evolution, which is what likely lead to the first self-repilcating systems that can be said to be alive. At this time we can only know about the prebiotic earth by positing plausible prebiotic environements and plausible chemical pathways that could have lead to RNA (the current theory), and then how RNA could have led to the first cells and life. This process of chemical evolution was relatively slow and with limited potential in terms of what it could create.

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With a newly elected reality-based President in the White House, I was optimistic that our descend into an  age of “endarkenment” would be slowed down and halted. This optimistic outlook was further reinforced by last June 8 issue of Newsweek magazine.  The cover story took the very popular daytime TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey to task for promoting New Age stuff and “alternative” medicine for the masses uncritically.
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