Monday, April 18, 2011

gee whiz.

In my behavioral psychology class this morning, we watched a video about cognitive mapping and capabilities in animals, and it was ridiculous. We watched about this lark that lives in the Grand Canyon that collects pine nuts in the warm months and buries them in the ground to save up for winter.  The thing is, this bird hides like, 33,000 pine nuts over thousands of square miles, and it is able to remember where it hid 90% of the nuts! months later! and it's looking for them in the snow!
Another segment of the video showed this woman literally conversing with a parrot.  She had a bunch of little balls made out of different materials, and she would ask the parrot, "Alex, how many yellow, wool balls are there?"  The bird would look around and then respond with the answer! She could ask him in many different ways and he would understand, count, and then answer. Amazing! and then the bird would ask if he could go eat. No joke.
Then, there was a chimpanzee who was told to count apples in one bin and oranges in another, and then add them up and go touch the total number on a computer screen.  He not only understood the command but he went and counted and added and got it right. No big deal. Ridiculous!
Lastly, there was a segment on pigeons. I hate pigeons, but this was pretty sweet. So, they showed a pigeon a series of pictures, and he learned that if he pecked the pictures of trees, he would get food, but he wouldn't get food pecking any of the other pictures.  That's pretty cool, but not shocking.  They decided to step it up a notch.  They showed the pigeon pictures of artwork, and he learned that pecking paintings by Picasso would get him food, while paintings by Monet would not.  What in the world??
I was sitting there watching this with my jaw to the floor with the rest of my class, and I was thinking about Genesis.  God gave us dominion over all the animals and He blessed us, not them (Gen 1:28).  If these creatures that He didn't even bless are capable of these ridiculous things, imagine what we can do! We were created to have relationship with Him, and that is what we have! The sky is the limit for us. What a blessing that is! I was just overcome with that this morning.

I was also overcome when, on my way to school this morning, I found that somehow a bird has managed to poop INSIDE my car.

No comments:

Post a Comment