Planning is the ability to think through future events taking place at a different location. Ten years ago, Mathias Osvath, a cognitive biologist at Lund University in Sweden, designed a series of tests to measure whether other primates were planners. Great apes—like chimpanzees—passed. Monkeys failed.
It seems in similar studies with birds, ravens passed while other birds failed.
An interesting thought… can these be considered the pinnacle of the evolution of intelligence in dinosaurs? LOL
Corvids can learn tricks and even invent new tricks that give rewards. For example, when I was winterfeeding small birds, I put a small ball of a mixture with fat on a string, hanging it from a branch. Hooded crows tried to get it but the place was such that they could not take pieces by flying to the ball. Finally one of the birds sat on the branch above the ball and started to pull the string with it feets and beak, inch by inch. Then it opened the slipknot I had used with the beak. After that it flew away with the reward. If it had only opened the slipknot, the fat ball would have dropped to the ground where other crows would have taken it. Now it got everything to itself. Clever!
At least breeding magpies use regularly cooperation when they want to rob thrush nests. One bird flies in front of the nests, attracting the defending thrushes to attack. At the same time, the other bird sneaks to the nest by approaching behind the tree trunck, jumping from one branch to another instead of flying. Usually it manages to snatch an egg before the thrushes realize they have been fooled. This could be counted as some sort of planning.
No doubt corvids are clever, can invent new tricks and plan raids. What level of consciousness they have is another question. Also wolves and many other animals, even ants, use cooperation when hunting or defending their nest, so cooperation does not reveal much about consciousness. No doubt corvids are clever compared to most other animals. I have not yet heard that slime molds would plan their trips in advance.
They could be said to ‘learn from experience’ though. Maybe just adding good memory (and heritage) makes it seem like planning among more ‘clever’ creatures? Do they really understand cause and effect? Pavlov comes to mind.
I was listening to The Language of God podcast interview with Jeff Hardin earlier today. Hardin and Stump were talking about cells rearranging themselves as part of embryonic development. In their discussion they needed to contrast the anthropomorphic metaphor we use casually that implies intelligence in cells, against the cell’s abilities to be responsive to stimuli that indicate changes the cell needs to make in order to continue proper embryonic development. I copied the part I thought was pertinent below in case it helps answer your question. Sorry the transcript didn’t have time stamps.
An interesting question of yours.
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I don’t think of cells having a collective consciousness or something like that. When I say cells need to know which way to move, it’s because cells can emit signals, which are received by neighboring cells using receptor molecules on their surfaces, which act like molecular antennae to allow a cell to receive that signal. Then it’s pre-programmed, in some ways, with a limited repertoire of responses to that signal. That’s very cumbersome what I just said. So it is true that sometimes, with in a popular discussion, we’ll use words like know and sense or something like that in a way that might lead some people to think that there’s some overarching, intelligence exerting effects on individual cells and rearranging them like checkers on the checkerboard or something. But really, scientists don’t think in that way about how embryos develop, it’s really better to think about the unfertilized egg having molecules in it, when that egg is fertilized, it sets in motion, a set of chemical reactions inside of that cell that leads to molecules being moved to different locations. As cells divide then different cells have different properties that allow them to communicate with one another. Eventually, in the period of morphogenesis, when the cells have to move around, we are thinking about chemical influences on the surface of cells leading to changes within cells and involve building blocks, assembling into chains of molecules and doing all those kinds of things. So we use shorthand that sounds teleological, we didn’t actually define that word. This is the notion that there’s a directedness to natural processes.
You may also be interested in the novel Blood Music. It shows up in some discussions around here, if you haven’t already seen them.
I think it is as absurd to talk about cells doing things because they have different properties as it is to talk about people doing things because they have different properties. There is a huge difference between cells and atoms. Atoms have no awareness of their environment or themselves. There are no mechanisms for self maintenance in an atom. A cell does things because it already has a directedness in its agenda to survive.
Is the formation of an embryo really just a clockwork mechanism? Is everything that happens all planned? Surely you cannot think so. There is constant assault by viruses, radiation, micro-organisms, and substances of varying toxicity. And survival depends on the embryo having enough adaptability to handle all of these things. “It’s alive.”
So there is a third option between these ridiculous extremes – not all according to some intelligent chess player and not a clockwork mechanism either, but a living organism adapting to all the things happening in order to survive. To be sure the clockwork mechanism fits better than the chess player, but this clockwork metaphor has its limitations also. And there is a directedness to the process because it is the product of millions of years adaptation to give it whatever abilities are needed to survive.
He pretty much gives every scientist and philosopher the finger and delves into his own pantheistic ideas and cosmology; interestingly, Poe was right about the universe having an infinitesimal beginning.
You can find many self-organizing processes in the universe. And life is a self-organizing process. But most self-organizing processes are not alive – not living organisms. There is a good reason to make a distinction. Just because something is self-organizing doesn’t mean it has the environmental awareness/responsiveness, self-maintenance, and ability to learn which are a basic necessity for all living organisms. You can find some of these in non-living processes – like in the way a hurricane (or the red spot on Jupiter) will absorb energy from its surroundings to maintain its own dynamic structure. Or we can program a computer with ability to learn so that it plays games like chess better than we can. But a living organism requires all of these not just some of them: self-organization, environmental awareness/responsiveness, self-maintenance, and the ability to learn/adapt.
Hi @mitchellmckain,
If you are responding to the quote I posted from the interview with Hardin, I recommend looking at more of the transcript or listening to the podcast. At this point he was trying to translate for the public what is quite technical. I think you would actually probably find this part of the discussion of cell movement in the development of the embryonic digestive system in sea urchins interesting.
