Plan Like a Raven

Many will know of my fascination with crows, ravens, and other members of the Corvidae family. This group of birds also includes the jays, magpies, and whisky jacks (grey jays). I have previously described (blog posts here and here and my favourite here) the great intelligence of these birds (specifically the Corvus moneduloides or New Caledonian crow) and so it comes as no surprise that a recent study[1] links one member of this family to the ability to plan for the future. A group of common ravens (Corvus corax), studied at the Lund University of Sweden, was found to be at least as good as small children and apes at “flexible planning.”[2]

A series of behavioural experiments revealed that the ravens were capable of planning for the future beyond common instincts they would have experienced in the wild. Some of the behaviours exhibited included the ability to select a rock that was useless to them then but proved to be useful in getting a food treat later. They could also delay gratification by choosing a useful rock, over an average treat, which would later allow them to retrieve a spectacular treat. There were further ways in which useful tools were purposely set aside for later use.

Seeing this intelligence in these birds causes some to marvel at the mystery of the universe and see a natural progression of intelligence in evolutionary systems. For others, it results in praise for the Creator’s perfect intelligence that bestowed upon these beasts a portion of intellectual prowess. For some of us, it does both.

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[1] C. Kabadayi and M. Osvath. Ravens parallel great apes in flexible planning for tool-use and bartering. Science. July 14, 2017. Vol. 357, p. 202. doi:10.1126/science.aam8138

[2] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ravens-pass-tests-planning-ahead-unnatural-tasks

Avian Einsteins

You may already know of my interest in crows, jays, and other intelligent bird species. (If not, you can catch up by reading previous blog posts here and here.) Today I want to share with you another interesting study that suggests that crows have the ability to teach other crows to avoid dangerous human individuals. Researchers at the University of Washington in Seattle have performed a fascinating field study in urban Seattle. The "dangerous person" researchers put on "cave man" masks and then engaged in threatening behaviours with the crows of a certain area of the campus: they trapped, banded, and released the crows while wearing the "dangerous person" mask. Later when researchers walked about in the same area of the campus, wearing the "dangerous person" mask, crows scolded them from tree-tops and other safe distances. The crows did not react to other persons wearing different but similar masks. Their eye for detail made the scolding very specific. Both crows that had been "threatened" (trapped, banded, and released) and those that had not been threatened engaged in the scolding. This indicates that the crows are capable of communicating the danger of certain individuals to companion crows and family members. The researchers showed that it was not simply one type of mask that got a response from the crows by repeating the experiment in different regions using different masks for the "dangerous persons" and "safe persons."

This research suggests a couple of things. First, crows are intelligent enough to know a person who has done something scary to them. They recognize individual people and can tell us apart by facial recognition. Second, they can communicate information about individual people to each other. Even crows that had not been scared by certain individuals knew the particular face that belonged to a person who was a potential threat. This suggests that their communicative powers are better than we might have expected. Whatever the mechanisms, the communication methods are sufficient to communicate complex information about facial characteristics.

I am inspired by the intelligence of both the birds and the researchers. The researchers carefully designed their field research and were alert to test alternate theories. As the researchers readily admit, it is field research, as opposed to the controlled setting of a laboratory, and is therefore messy; but by not over-interpreting the results these investigators have contributed to the scientific knowledge base. The crows have once again shown themselves to be intelligent, protective, and communicative. This is another testimony to the glory of our God who created birds with intelligence. This inspires me to praise men, crows, and God.

"Crows Share Intelligence About Enemies;" CBC.ca/Technology and Science; June 30, 2011 (accessed 2013-11-17) http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/crows-share-intelligence-about-enemies-1.1014915.

Follow-up to Observation

As a follow-up to Saturday's blog entitled "Observation," I offer the following quotes related to science and observation. The first two are equally true although in tension with each other.

[Those] who have an excessive faith in their theories or in their ideas are not only poorly disposed to make discoveries, but they also make very poor observations. - Claude Bernard (1813-78) French physiologist, 1865.

The dispassionate intellect, the open mind, the unprejudiced observer, exist in an exact sense only in a sort of intellectualist folk-lore; states even approaching them cannot be reached without a moral and emotional effort most of us cannot or will not make. - Wilfred Batten Lewis Trotter (1872-1939) English surgeon.

Sherlock Holmes, although fictional, is a great proponent of observation, data, and theory - in that order.

It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories instead of theories to suit facts. - Sherlock Holmes, the fictional creation of Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) British physician and novelist.

George Santayana offers this definition which seems to agree with my own sentiments.

Science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent, common sense rounded out and minutely articulated. - George Santayana (1863-1952) U. S. philosopher and writer. The Life of Reason.

Lastly, Voltaire has this witty comment.

Common sense is not so common. - Voltaire, a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher.

Observation

Because I have studied science most of my life, some people will confide with me that they wish they had studied more science. I usually tell them that it is never too late to start. The convenient thing about science is that one can begin studying at any time. Science, at its core, starts with observation and extrapolation. We have all observed that if the wind is coming out of the east then a flag on a flagpole will point to the west. So, we observe a flag and can draw conclusions about which way the wind is blowing. If we notice that a flag ten feet above the ground is pointing one direction and one on top of a 250 foot building is pointing another direction, we can draw some conclusions about the movement of air currents at different altitudes.

The world is wide open for this type of observation and discovery. Great scientific breakthroughs happen because someone paid attention to their world. Take a look around you and see what lines of observation might be available to you. Many of us can see the moon rise and set from where we live. Have we really observed the moon? Can you answer this simple question? When the moon is waning, that is, going from full to new moon, which side of the moon is lit up? Left? Right? Another way to ask this question is, "When the moon is waning, does it take the shape of a 'C' or a 'D'?" One should be able to answer this question after just a few nights of observation. If you get good at answering this question you will be able to make predictions about whether the moon will be brighter or dimmer the next evening. It will also allow you to make predictions about tides if you happen to live close to the ocean. The movement of tidal waters is another great source of scientific study. See what you can learn by noticing the direction anchored boats turn in the water at any given time of the day and how high the water is on the shore. What can you learn from these simple descriptions?

Another lunar observation that is available to us relates to the direction in which the moon revolves around the earth. You can do some observation over the next few days or weeks to see if you can determine whether the rotation is clockwise or anti-clockwise relative to a view from above the earth's north pole. Here is a hint, you will need to observe where the moon rises in the sky (east, west, north, or south) and the time of moonrise over a few days. Is the time of moonrise the same every day or does it rise later or earlier each day? This was a query posed to me by a tenth grade physics teacher which set me off on a lifetime of observation and discovery. Try not to cheat and look up the answer on the internet. This is where much of present scientific study can falter. We get lazy and do not seek the answer ourselves. Instead, we trust someone else's answer without even seeing the data that led them to their conclusion.

There is a group of crows that collect mussels from the seashore close to my house. They have learned how to do a sort of crowish “science.” Once the birds have collected the mussels they must find ways to break open the shells to get at the life-giving meat inside. This hunger, and survival by eating, is the huge motivator for their scientific study. If they drop the mussels from a height onto rocky places, some will break open; but often the mussels will catch too much air and flutter to the ground without making a significant impact with the ground. These crows have observed that if they drop them on the seawall, a walking and biking path along the shores of the ocean, there is a good chance that a human will step on the mussels or run them over with their bicycle. This nicely opens the shells and allows the crows to get their breakfast or dinner of mussels. These crows have become keen observers of human behaviour. They know when the paths are busy and how to use this tool to their advantage. They have also discovered that bicycles are much more likely to break open the shells than are footsteps. Cyclists race along the path and do not even notice that they are running over mussel shells whereas pedestrians tend to step around the shells to avoid the crunching underfoot. In places where the seawall is nicely divided into a cycling path on one side and a pedestrian path on the other side, one can observe approximately ten mussel shells on the bicycle side for every one mussel shell on the pedestrian side. Crows have learned probability. Presumably, the crows that do put the odd shell on the pedestrian side also know that occasionally the tourists do not pay attention to the segregation of bicycles and pedestrians; and cyclists will sometimes ride on the pedestrian path.

Vancouver has massive murders of crows that fly through the air at predictable times. Every evening, about a half hour before sunset, they fly past the windows of my home. I am not sure how long it took me to come to this conclusion but it was a natural one as I noted the murders of crows, the time of day, and the amount of light at the time. They are expert at flight and use the currents of air to their great advantage. I am sure I could learn several things about the weather and bird behaviour if I took the time to chart things like wind speed, wind direction, relative humidity, temperature, speed of the birds and altitude at which they fly. Science is very egalitarian. It makes itself available to all.

Who Made the Moon?

I am currently guest blogging at the Cosmos website. Please take a look at my review of Sigmund Brouwer's great little book, Who Made the Moon?

Constant Protection

Gravity is a universal force that acts upon all bodies with mass. It would not do if one day you became impervious to gravity and could not put your feet down on the floor next to your bed. Each day we get up and trust that gravity will still pull in the same direction it did yesterday. Mathematics works and can explain things around us. Today, one plus two equals three. The circumference of a circle is pi (3.14159...) times the  diameter of the circle. We can count on these things being true tomorrow. God could have created a universe in which these basic principles changed every few moments of time. Without these bedrock principles of our universe, chaos would reign and we would be in constant danger.

Our earth is in a place in our galaxy that makes it possible for life. At the centre of galaxies such as our own there is a black hole and a lot of deadly gamma rays and x-rays. Such rays would blast DNA to bits if we lived closer to the centre of the galaxy and this would make it impossible for life as we know it to exist. Furthermore, this planet on which we live is, on average, 150 million kilometers from the sun and so the life-giving energy of the sun takes about eight and a half minutes to get to us. If we were any closer to the sun our planet would be too hot for our kind of life. The average temperature on the planet Venus is 460 degrees C. Any further away and it would be too cold for us. The average temperature on Mars is -55 degrees C with an extreme range from -123 degrees C to 27 degrees C.

The planet earth has an orbit that is stable and is not unbalanced by other stars or planets in the vicinity. Thus, the duration of our orbit around the sun remains constant and we are not thrown about in a fashion that would make tidal forces extreme and land surfaces much more susceptible to large earthquakes. Our earth rotates at a relatively rapid rate around its polar axis and, much like a smooth running rotisserie, this rapid rotation keeps the entire earth warming quite nicely without extreme differences in temperature between night and day. Plants that rely on photosynthesis function well in this type of environment.

Earth is also tilted at approximately 23 degrees relative to the polar axis (23.44 degrees presently - varying between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees).  When you purchase a globe, that represents our planet, it usually comes in a stand that shows this 23 degree tilt. This is a representation of how our planet travels through space around our sun. The moon that circles around our planet helps to stabilize this 23 degrees that helps protect our planet and make life, as we know it, possible. This 23 degree tilt is the major contributor to why we experience seasons. If you are like me you may need to pull out a globe (or ball of some sort) and walk it around a light source to imagine how this works. This 23 degree tilt causes the northern hemisphere to be partly pointed away from the sun at one particular position in its orbit and, at this same place in the orbit, the southern hemisphere is pointed more directly at the sun. This particular point in our orbit would be approximately December 21 of each year when the northern hemisphere experiences winter and the southern hemisphere experiences summer. So, while some of us celebrate Christmas in a winter wonderland, our Australian cousins are shouting, "fire up the barbie!" and having beach parties for Christmas fun. This variation of how directly or indirectly the sun's rays hit the earth also results in variation in the heating and cooling of various places on the earth. With a greater tilt, larger portions of the planet would be perpetually frozen, while others would be too hot to sustain life. With no tilt there would be no seasons and no summer or winter. Temperatures would be more like a perpetual spring.

Of course there could have been other ways to create a planet on which life might have been possible. Science fiction writers have often tried to imagine other worlds with dramatically different conditions. Poul Anderson in an epic short-story entitled, "Call Me Joe,"1 writes of a being named Joe who lives on Jupiter where the temperatures are cold enough, and the air is dense enough, for methane to exist as liquid. In this story Joe is able to live on the surface of this world, filling his lungs with this hyper-pressured atmosphere, survive the cold and drink methane like we drink water. Anderson imagines a world in which you and I could never survive; but one which is perfectly suited to Joe. Yet, even in this scenario the author imagines a degree of stability to this environment. Things like, the orbit of the planet, and physical principles of the universe in which Joe lives, and the temperatures at which he thrives remain relatively constant. So the point is not so much that our planet is the only planet on which life might thrive but rather that in order for life to develop and continue to exist on any given planet there must be some degree of stability and protection for that particular life to exist.

We could go on much further speaking of the various ways in which God has placed us in a protected corner of the universe surrounded by a number of properties that make life as we know it possible. Thus, we can recognize the large body of data that suggests that God is already protecting and sustaining us in an abundance of ways.

These various protections that make it possible to live on the planet earth are often spoken of in a different context. They are often used to describe the improbability that human-kind could ever come to be without the direct intervention and sustaining influence of a Creator. That is another important conversation. But, here, in a context in which we make the assumption that a creator God has indeed created this world in this way, we can also see these facets of the universe in which we live as examples of God's constant protection and sustaining activity.


1 Bova, Ben, ed. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Vol. Two A. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, 1973, p. 1-33.

Courage

Sigmund Brouwer wrote the book Who Made the Moon* with a few purposes in mind. One stated purpose is found at location 1394 of the Kindle version of the book:

Many scientists do, . . . . serve in their churches as well as in their laboratories . . . . I hope this book makes their lives easier as more believers learn how faith and science can find harmony in explaining our origins.

But a greater pupose of the book is found in how he introduces the book to his two daughters, Olivia and Savannah. He tells them,

Your questions about where the moon, the dinosaurs, and people came from are good, important questions. Your curiosity is one of the special things about you. I'm proud of you for wanting to know and understand God's world better. Only a really courageous person asks the big questions and dares to seek honest answers. I'm proud of you for being so brave, and I'm glad that you told me about your questions. These big questions are ones that people throughout history have been asking. (Loc 19)

When Brouwer wrote this book his daughters were not yet old enough to read it but he wrote it to encourage them to keep on asking questions. It struck me that there are not enough people asking these big questions. Perhaps we have tired of the arguments that are sometimes generated, particularly in church circles. Perhaps we feel we don't have sufficient information to weigh the evidence. Perhaps we feel that we just don't have the mental strength to deal with the honest answers.

But courageous questions and honest answers are the only way that humans have made forward progress. Where would we be today if William Wilberforce had not questioned the practise of slavery? What would have happened if people like Thomas Edison had not asked questions about how we might develop safer ways to light our homes?

What is your level of curiosity? What questions are you asking today? What questions are your children asking? Are you seeking with them to find truly honest answers? Or are you giving them the answers you have always heard without checking to see if those answers still make sense? Are we encouraging our children to keep on asking good questions or do we wish that they would just trust others with the answers that have been given so that we can go back to watching "Dancing With The Stars?" It is a truly human trait to continue to ask questions throughout our lives. I encourage you to keep learning and asking more and more questions.


*Brouwer, Sigmund. Who Made the Moon? Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008.