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Hi, it's the wife again. What a great post. I have some to add to that. I have seen footage of squid in separate tanks. #1 squid knew how to uncork a bottle to get the fish out, #2 did not. They were placed in adjacent tanks, and #1 was given a corked bottle to open, which he did, as #2 observed. The same type bottle then was placed in the #2's tank, and it was then able to open the bottle, having learned from watching #1.
That was really something!
I work with dogs, doing many different sports. My dogs know dozens of commands. Jack can discriminate between the words ball and frisbee, and will hunt through the house to find the correct one. He remembers where he last put things much better than I can. I can direct him through an obstical course, and he can discriminate btween 'jump' and 'tunnel' and 'teeter' in seconds.
I think that we as humans put much more emphasis on language and higher thought because it makes us 'better'. We may be more intelligent in some ways, but we are vastly deficient in others. I would have a very difficult time in agility(a dog sport) if the roles were reversed, and I had to run flat out, jumping and weaving and make split second decisions based on a unreliable handler and not trip or knock myself out cold. You could call it reactions, but when an athlete hones his abilities to perfection, say in basketball, we don't watch and say, wow, look how reactive he is. Michael Jorden is a physical genius. He is pretty rough compared to a lemur, or a porpose, or a cat. I would like to see him do what my dogs do.
As far as babies, as someone who spent 10 years working with kids, the thoughts seem to gain complexity as the vocabulary develops. I am not sure how much of that is coincidence. An infant just isn't aware of himself in the way an adult is, that is in relation to others. An infant seems to feel more directly, without associations, where as an adult takes what he feels and anylizes it (sometimes to death)and compares it to what he knows and feels about things. I see the same behavior in dogs, a puppy is much more open and reactive, where in an adult dog, you can gage the response based on the experiences the dog has had. Interesting stuff....
Jen
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