Great story about animal intelligence

Check out this BBC article by Jason G. Goldman. I've always suspected that animals - particularly other primates - are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. And now it seems there is reliable evidence that they can imagine:

Kanzi, the famous bonobo, liked to pretend as well. Primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh described watching Kanzi hide invisible objects under blankets or leaves, later removing them from their hiding spots, and pretending to eat them. "Kanzi also engages the participation of others" in these games, Savage-Rumbaugh notes, "by giving them the pretend object and watching to see what they do with it."

How can you not love a story like that? There are other eye-opening behaviors reported in the article. It's worth reading, if such things interest you.

BTW, I've followed Jason Goldman's rise from lone blogger to respected science writer. He always wrote great posts and I'm glad he's seeing some success in the wider world of science writing. His words never fail to catch my interest -- and he seems to be a very decent fellow, to boot. Good for him!

Small tendency? Small shift? Ha!

There's an article at Yahoo about what would happen if we could double people's intelligence -- a thing that's becoming more and more possible as science progresses. "What if we could double people's IQs so that everyone scored 200?" That's the question.

It's not an incisive article in any way. I was particularly struck by this ridiculous paragraph:

According to Hunt, there's evidence to suggest that many humans, if significantly smarter, would lose their belief in God. "There is a small tendency for people with high scores to be more liberal in their social attitudes and less likely to accept strong religious beliefs. This makes sense; we can know things by reasoning or we can accept something on faith. If we all became very good reasoners, there would probably be a small shift to preferring reasoned over faith-based explanations of the phenomenon of life," he wrote.

Small tendency? Small shift? Get real. If everyone was smart no one would believe in god. Period. Belief in god is dependent on gullibility, stupidity and a lack of curiosity. A high IQ would fix all that and people would begin to take down the churches immediately. Sounds like fun!

Dolphin language looks like human language

There's an article at (where else?) physorg today about dolphin intelligence and language. (It's also about alien communication but I'll leave that aside for now.) Although we don't understand the language used by dolphins, it seems to follow the same basic patterns of human speech. Here's an excerpt in case you don't want to read the whole article.

Think of all the different sounds human beings make as they speak to each other, the different letters and pronunciations. Some, such as the letters ‘e’ and ‘t’ or words such as ‘and’ or ‘the’ will occur far more frequently than ‘q’ or ‘z’ or longer words such as ‘astrobiology’. Plot these on a graph, in order of the most frequently occurring letters or sounds, and the points form a slope with a –1 gradient. A toddler learning to speak will have a steeper slope – as they experiment with words they use fewer sounds but say them more often. At the most extreme a baby’s babble is completely random, and so any slope will be nearly level with all sounds occurring fairly evenly. It doesn’t matter which human language is put through the information theory test – be it English, Russian, Arabic or Mandarin – the same result follows.

What is remarkable is that putting dolphin whistles through the information theory blender renders exactly the same result: a –1 slope, with a steeper slope for younger dolphins still being taught how to communicate by their mothers, and a horizontal slope for baby dolphins babbling. This tells us that dolphins have structure to how they communicate.

We're not set apart from the other animals. The differences between us and them are a matter of degree. This story lifted my spirits. There's still so damn much we don't know about ourselves, our planet and the relationships among all of Earth's residents. And yet we feel free to kill any creature and pollute the planet at will, as if we and we alone lived here. We are an infant race, just beginning to understand the complexities of the world around us, and yet our M.O. is so arrogant. This makes no sense. We're babies.

The rest of the article is fun, especially the part about looking for alien intelligence out there. G'wan, go read it. Here's the link one more time.