DailyDirt: Making Smarter Animals

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Animals may (or may not) be getting smarter, but there sure is growing evidence that animals have more cognitive abilities than we might have expected. In some cases, we're actually breeding animals for intelligence. (Who wouldn't want to buy a genetically engineered parrot with the conversational capability of a 5 year old kid?) Perhaps we'll end up regretting our animal experiments someday when we're faced with super-intelligent birds or insects, but for now, it's interesting to see just how smart our animal pals can get. If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
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Filed Under: animals, baboons, biology, biotech, brains, fruit flies, intelligence, smart animals, spelling


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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 19 Jul 2012 @ 5:42pm

    super-intelligent fruit flies???

    those flies can count to four, but only to four? not to five? or to three? does that really qualify as counting?

    it's a cool experiment. it'll be cooler when they identify exactly what mutation allows the flies to count to four, and see if it exists in other animals? and if it doesn't, then they can try injecting the gene mutation into other insects. I don't really want super-smart cockroaches, but if they can be made, someone will make em. science, bitches.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 19 Jul 2012 @ 6:06pm

      Re: super-intelligent fruit flies???

      Welcome to joe's apartment, it's our apartment too

      We've been around for a 100 million years and we'll be here long after you!

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Pixelation, 19 Jul 2012 @ 5:43pm

    Duh.

    "Curiously, the smaller mammals with larger than expected brains tend to survive extinction better and adapt more easily to environmental changes -- but correlation isn't the same as causation. "

    Obviously the large brain mammals caused the extinction so adaptation was easier for them.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    fb39ca4 (profile), 19 Jul 2012 @ 6:23pm

    I wish I could unsee the picture of the guy anal fisting the rhino. (It in an article linked to by the brain size article, here: http://www.nature.com/news/endangered-species-sex-and-the-single-rhinoceros-1.10731 )

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    gab4moi (profile), 19 Jul 2012 @ 7:09pm

    If it works on lemurs, can we try it on Lamars?

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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