DailyDirt: Making Smarter Animals
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Animals may (or may not) be getting smarter, but there sure is growing evidence that animals have more cognitive abilities than we might have expected. In some cases, we’re actually breeding animals for intelligence. (Who wouldn’t want to buy a genetically engineered parrot with the conversational capability of a 5 year old kid?) Perhaps we’ll end up regretting our animal experiments someday when we’re faced with super-intelligent birds or insects, but for now, it’s interesting to see just how smart our animal pals can get.
- Breeding smarter fruit flies doesn’t sound like a good plan to create a race of super intelligent insects. Still, a decent first step has been accomplished by directing the evolution of fruit flies to exhibit the ability to count to four… [url]
- Some baboons in a French laboratory have been observed to be able to tell the difference between real English words and fake words. This study probably says more about the rules of English spelling rather than evidence of baboons being linguistic geniuses. [url]
- For many mammals, the ratio of brain size to body size is a fairly predictable matter, but there are some outliers with larger than expected brains for a given body size. Curiously, the smaller mammals with larger than expected brains tend to survive extinction better and adapt more easily to environmental changes — but correlation isn’t the same as causation. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
Filed Under: animals, baboons, biology, biotech, brains, fruit flies, intelligence, smart animals, spelling
Comments on “DailyDirt: Making Smarter Animals”
super-intelligent fruit flies???
those flies can count to four, but only to four? not to five? or to three? does that really qualify as counting?
it’s a cool experiment. it’ll be cooler when they identify exactly what mutation allows the flies to count to four, and see if it exists in other animals? and if it doesn’t, then they can try injecting the gene mutation into other insects. I don’t really want super-smart cockroaches, but if they can be made, someone will make em. science, bitches.
Re: super-intelligent fruit flies???
Welcome to joe’s apartment, it’s our apartment too
We’ve been around for a 100 million years and we’ll be here long after you!
Duh.
“Curiously, the smaller mammals with larger than expected brains tend to survive extinction better and adapt more easily to environmental changes — but correlation isn’t the same as causation. “
Obviously the large brain mammals caused the extinction so adaptation was easier for them.
I wish I could unsee the picture of the guy anal fisting the rhino. (It in an article linked to by the brain size article, here: http://www.nature.com/news/endangered-species-sex-and-the-single-rhinoceros-1.10731 )
Re: Re:
Best porn ever
If it works on lemurs, can we try it on Lamars?