We all learn stuff. We apply it in our daily lives. a simple example is how to tie our shoe laces - we see someone doing it and we learn. learning basically is the cognitive process of acquiring a skill or knowledge (strict dictionary definition). cognition is basically knowing something through logic.. that means to learn we have to use logic.. or understand the logic behind that particular skill or relate a particular skill to the end result of using that skill.
i was watching Nat Geo and they showed a vast dry savannah landscape. A jackal was trying to break a hard ostrich egg. It could not and a lion came along. It also tried to bite into it, but could not. It left the egg. Along came an egyptian vulture. It does not look like the regular vulture. But this vulture looked at the egg and the commentator spoke in the background 'no way this vulture can break into the hard shell with it's beak' and he paused... the vulture took a big stone in it's beak and it threw the stone on the egg. It repeated this action a few times and the egg cracked. Once it cracked, it opened up the shell using it's beak. I was dumbstruck, I never realized that animals can acquire a cognitive process like that. I did hear about the fable of the crow throwing stones into a glass to get the water up near to the brim, but dismissed it as a fairy tale. But this bird used it's learning to break open the egg shell. I thought - there must be a vulture up the generations which started this in the first place and this practice got carried on into the subsequent generations. I can also imagine that the first vulture MIGHT have accidentally dropped a stone and it might have cracked the shell. But how did that bird connect the dots? it requires intelligence to connect the dots.... and if it is intelligent and if intelligence evolves over subsequent generations, would be see vulture civilizations in the future?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
there is a possibility but the question is will the more intelligent human race let that happen?
ReplyDeleteYes, intelligence of the human kind is present in varying shades and proportions in many animal species. The Dolphin's intelligence was supposed to rival that of primitive ancestors of man. Monkeys are highly intelligent - I have had one walk into my house through the balcony and open the fridge and drink the juice from a Tropicana carton - and their natural evolution led to Homo Sapiens. Parrots are intelligent enough to select which of their rote phrases to repeat by occasion. Elephants are also known to be quite intelligent. The thing though is that Intelligence is not enough.....the form that the animal possesses must also complement it. Primates had amazingly dexterous and tactile limbs which could be used for building and manipulating things and evolution built it up further. Parrots, dolphins, elephants lost out. With the consequence that primates won the evolutionary lottery.
ReplyDelete- AK
There is no value in learning. You are all mistaken in learning. The only value of knowledge is in the strengthening, the disciplining, of the mind. By all this eternal swallowing it is a wonder that we are not all dyspeptics. Let us stop, and burn all the books, and get hold of ourselves, and think.
ReplyDelete~somebody