There is a question about animal communication that has been argued for a long time, and alarm calls are where the evidence is strongest.
The question is whether animal signals…
There is a satisfying category of question where something entirely familiar turns out to be unexplained, and purring belongs in it.
The sound is known to essentially everybody. It is…
There is a category of behaviour that everybody recognises immediately and nobody can define precisely, which is usually a sign that something interesting is going on.
Play is obvious when…
There is a strong intuition that coordinated group movement requires coordination — something issuing instructions, or at minimum some shared signal that everybody is responding to.
That intuition is wrong,…
There is an assumption embedded in how nervous systems are usually described, and it comes from studying animals built like us.
The assumption is that a nervous system has a…
There is a long-standing assumption in how intelligence gets discussed, and corvids are the clearest available argument against it.
The assumption is that sophisticated cognition requires a particular kind of…