The Thin End

These are the People of the Forest - the Orangutan, natives of Indonesia and Malaysia, inhabiting the rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra.  Their long arms and short legs, and their hands and feet are adapted for agile life in the trees.  The most solitary of the great apes, they nonetheless have an acute social intelligence, with distinctive group cultures.  Their intelligence is shown by their sophisticated use of tools.  They are toolmakers, these people of the trees. If aliens from another world ever came to the planet earth, they would recognise this intelligence.  But another aspect of their intelligence would also be evident.  They communicate abstract concepts. This is particularly so when mothers are teaching their young.  Not only do they inform the young about the presence of danger, but they will also teach them that something that has happened was dangerous.  This, of course, is what we do with our children.  Learning isn't all wor...

So what do we know about intelligence?  In the 1960s behaviourists studied animal behaviour in what they then regarded as 'controlled' laboratory conditions.  Rats were placed in boxes or mazes and their behaviour was measured in terms of 'conditioned responses'.  Rats would be 'conditioned' to press a lever for a food reward.  It made an assumption that learning was either reward or aversion based. Wood Mouse  Apodemus sylvaticus,   physical and social environment This approach appeared more 'scientific' because it was 'controlled'.  It is odd that in one sense it looked at an organism as being conditioned by its environment, and yet ignored its interaction with the environment. You take a rat and put it into a laboratory under controlled conditions.  Other variables could be excluded, or held constant, in large part because the animals had been taken out of their rich physical and social environment.  It assumed that this rich envir...

It wouldn't be Christmas without stories appearing about Einstein's brain. It is a recurring theme; the intellectual man's chitchat about the weather. A group of scientists are studying the pickled brain of Einstein to see if they can 'discover' what was exceptional about it; something that could have given him his extraordinary intellect. I cannot think of a more potentially fruitless scientific endeavour. Even supposing they find something odd about his brain, it is difficult to see how they could now associate this with his intelligence. They might find, for example, that a particular part of his brain was proportionately large or small, but to conclude that this somehow gave him extraordinary powers of understanding would remain pure speculation. None of this is particularly new. Indeed, an odd feature has already been found in Albert Einstein's brain. Back in 1999, it was reported in The Lancet  that a unique morphological feature had been found in Eins...