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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."
It has been known that magpies can solve various kinds of mechanical puzzles, much better than most (all?) other birds and even mammals. Now this isn't related to self-avareness, I guess, but it is quite interesting nonetheless.
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In Australia, when its nesting season for Magpies they swoop people who go within their territory. Now I had to walk a fair way to catch a bus which just happened to intersect with a couple of magpies. One particular time I had one swoop, peck and draw some blood on some demon birdesque fly-by. I ran and took shelter at a nearby mall and waited about 5 minutes or so. I saw other people walking around and assumed that the coast was clear and went on my merry way. However, said demon bird was waiting for me and attacked again. Why it didnt attack any of the other potential targets and instead wait for me I'll never know.
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Lookup the intelligent grey parrots Alex or N'kisi, of which the intelligence has been compared to the intelligence of 6 year old human. Their intelligence might have evolved as a as "a consequence of their history of cooperative feeding as largely tree-dwelling birds in central Africa" (wikipedia: gray parrots). It might be that mirror neurons play an important role in the developmenet of intelligence: "A mirror neuron is a neuron which fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another (especially conspecific) animal. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of another animal, as though the observer were itself acting. These neurons have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to exist in humans and in some birds. In humans, brain activity consistent with mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex and the inferior parietal cortex." (wikipedia mirror neuron).
Watching the roadkill feeding magpies cooly walk around just behind the white road lines, you can tell they have worked out a pretty solid theory for how cars move and that they understand how the cars are dangerous hazards but nevertheless predictable and avoidable. Other birds simply take flight in panic and some don't even recognize cars as a hazard - dumb turkeys and pheasants dumbly just obliviously waddle out in traffic.
In Tokyo crows - corvid relatives of magpies - have been observed figuring out how to exploit the traffic signal cycles. The crows drop nuts in the path of the cars, in the middle of the pedestrian crossings, and patiently sit overhead waiting for the light to change so they can go down and have a look and pick up the nuts crushed by the car tires. Maybe these crows developed a theory of cars as practical and dependable "thing crushers" - producing crispy roadkill and other delicious crush jobs.
Fascinating birds.
Birds actually have more brains than people realise - literally.
While they may not have a mammalian brain, they haven't been idle. Once they diverged from the rest of the raptor dinosaurs (or possibly before it, based on some evidence of mating/nesting habits), birds developed another brain 'layer' much like mammals did. This layer was not the same as the mammal one, but it was nonetheless more sophisticated than the reptilian brain stem we all inherit.
Certainly, birds have shown remarkable intelligence in various studies.
More here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_intelligence
"In recent years it was realized that certain birds have developed high intelligence entirely convergently from mammals such as humans."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test
Please understand what self-recognition in a mirror is. It has been known for a long time that dogs recognize their own scent, but with their black-and-white eyesight they have never shown any signs of recognizing themselves in a mirror, at least not in any social sense.
Don't give them all so much credit.
My "automatic vision systems" teacher gave an interesting lecture about research on hens. Hens are awfully dumb. They have an instinctive reaction to images of weasels (panic/run) and to sound (tweeting) of small chickens ("herd/care"). The researchers made a model of a weasel that was making the chicken noise. Hens exposed to this experienced software failure: they would freeze and stop reacting to all other external signals/impulses until the chirping weasel was removed. :)
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I've always noticed that, despite their propensity for hanging around roadkill on busy highways, I've never seen a dead crow on the road.
The reason we believe that animals aren't conscious, and are like little automaton, is because it allows us to treat them with callous disregard. Humans who are ideologically unbound from natural sympathy and empathy and treat other animals with callous disregard achieve dominance over their environment.
We do the same thing to the world itself. We are not OF this place, we are simply IN this place, temporarily, after which our soul will leave. So, we can treat the world itself with callous disregard, without consequence.
We also do this to other humans. They don't have a soul, only we have a soul. Therefore, we do not belittle ourselves when we belittle them, because we are so much more than they are, while they are simply creatures of the muck, like animals.
This ruthless perspective is an overwhelmingly effective tool. Therefore, it is the truth. The rest is just supporting mythology.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth