Magpies Are Self-Aware

FireStormZ writes "Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies, a species with a brain structure very different from mammals, could also identify themselves. It had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, don't have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways."

Comments

Re:Crows, for one

[ShieldW0lf]

Oh the irony of your post. Especially your "mythology" when you mention the "soul" 3 times in your post. Pray tell, where does this "soul" of which you speak go after we leave this place?

The point is that those tribes which have embraced this ideology have dominated the world, while those that did not were driven to extinction. It's evolution at work, just at a different level of granularity than what you can look at in a lab.

The whole concept of a "soul" exists for the purpose of supporting the perspective that we are aliens in this place, that we will go home through some mystical means when our vehicle here (our body) wears out, and we can do anything we like to the place while we're here, because it's alien and inconsequential.

Re:Crows, for one

[galoise]

Although i am a hard-line meat eating humanist, i do think he has a point, and you have not been able to contradict him.

Apart from an species bias based on genetic composition, there's no clear cut criteria to define human (tool making and self awareness discarded). Now you propose, among others, i presume, city building, literature writing and movie directing as criteria. I have not done anything of the above, and apart from genetic similarity, i have no relation to anyone who has. Am I Human?

To put it differently: Who built cities? was it the worker? his part in city building is no more complex than the role performed by the crow using a tool. Maybe the architect? then his humanity is tied to a capacity for abstract design, but then again, there are many homo sapiens of whom we do not know if they posses such capacity. Are they to be considered human too? and if we have no proof of their capacity, on what basis should they be considered human?

In the end, the whole capacity-based point of view is flawed. It's impossible to determine now if any capacity chosen as criteria will not be replicated by some non-human agent in the future, be it because we discovered it or because we create it, so we end up with only two possible criteria: Genetics and Empathy. And both are arbitrary: In the strict sense, the concept of "species" is irrelevant form a genetic point of view, as argued by Dawkins in the Selfish Gene and the Extended Phenotype. And empathy is just a generalization and aggregation of a capacity based criteria, not to say it's subjective and not possible to state formally (e.g. some forms of disability produce repulsion, etc).

All in all, i think this is no trivial matter...