Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Cost of Smarts

The best paragraph I read today comes from the NY Times.
"Research on animal intelligence also makes me wonder what experiments animals would perform on humans if they had the chance. Every cat with an owner, for instance, is running a small-scale study in operant conditioning. I believe that if animals ran the labs, they would test us to determine the limits of our patience, our faithfulness, our memory for terrain. They would try to decide what intelligence in humans is really for, not merely how much of it there is. Above all, they would hope to study a fundamental question: Are humans actually aware of the world they live in? So far the results are inconclusive."
Read on here.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ha. The results are inconclusive! I agree. The dog behaves so much better.

Anonymous said...

But wouldn't you say that she's anthropomorphizing animals? It's weird to me when scientists who write for the Times dumb down their language in such an emotionalized way. Odd!