Ending Week 3

We started off the week by reading the chapter "Whines and Pet Peeves" by Safina. In this chapter he goes into results found by other scientists and especially into the concepts such as "Theory of Mind" and tests like the Mirror test.

Personally, I really enjoyed reading the chapters and reading about Safina's critics on these tests. What I found very interesting is how Safina clearly disagreed with many of the conclusions made by these scientists who conducted the tests. Really, after reading the chapter it really made me understand the flaws of many of these "intelligence" tests and that being able to say an animal is intelligent is as simple as solving a single puzzle or a test.

Overall, from these first weeks I think one of the topics I'm most curious about is social structures and friendship in animals. There are a lot of examples but I was interested from the Time Magazine article. Additionally, birds and bird intelligence seems fairly interesting because of the fact it they are non-mammals. Many of the famously intelligent animals, such as dolphins, apes, and elephants are all mammals; so the fact many birds show a lot of intelligence is very interesting and may have connotations to other intelligence species outside of the umbrella of mammals.

So far, most of my research has not really come up with anything particular stand-out. I think I am still a little unsure of what I want to write about later on, so nothing for me to really look for. The research done by John Marzluff on crows was very interesting. There was also a lot more from information from Bird Brains that seemed useful. Really, I plan on continuing to look around for sources to see how I feel about this topic, but things are still very tentative.