The Thin End

The G7 met last month in Canada.  Did you notice the big distraction? Or, perhaps I should say distractions.  The world leaders met, and yet failed to consider the most pressing problem of our time - climate change and habitat loss.  Yet,  these are the man-made causes of their problems. Instead,  they were concerned largely with trying to stabilise the status quo on global trade.  To keep things as they are.  The meeting ended in chaos.  The system is broken, but goes on clunking away destroying the planet at each turn of the wheel.  Political wood mouse We thought of writing about the wood mouse again.  The wood mouse was deemed too 'political'  for us to promote in the USA, or at least one major social outlet deemed that this was so for our podcast  Learning from the Wood Mouse .  What we can learn from  Wood Mice is dangerous stuff!  So, we will try not to mention the wood mouse in this article.  ...

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...