Новости за 22.09.2016

Crows, ravens and other corvids are among the most intelligent of animals, yet neuro­scientists rarely study them, because neuro­science is concerned primarily with the neocortex, the most recently evolved portion of the mammalian brain, which appears to be the seat of intelligence and cognition. Corvids have no neocortex. They have evolved differently. Somehow, corvids have arrived at the same clever behaviours by other chemical and biological means. What can we learn from this?

Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a factory-made urinal, was probably the most influential artwork of the twentieth century. It invented conceptual art, and the concept was contradiction. Obviously, a urinal was not art; yet when displayed by an artist in an art gallery it was art. Art could be anything. Duchamp was both mocking the art world and vastly extending its possibilities. “Instead of paintings and sculptures, art was suddenly Brillo boxes, an unmade bed, or a light-bulb plugged into a lemon”

Trees learn. They learn to store water in winter, to lean against neighbouring trees for support. When they are desperately thirsty, they cry out, inaudibly to humans, at ultrasonic pitch. The sound comes from vibrations in the tree trunk when the flow of water from the roots to the leaves is interrupted. This is “a purely mechanical event”. But taken in isolation, the human voice is a purely mechanical event. What if the trees are warning one another that water is running low?

At work with Médicins Sans Frontières in two of their most dangerous deployments, the Central African Republic and the Jordanian border with Syria. “Since the war in Syria began five years ago, the regime and its allies have murdered 698 Syrian doctors and nurses. Some 63 hospitals supported by MSF were bombed in 2015 and a further 16 have been attacked by August of this year. When officials planned to rebuild a hospital in southern Syria, the local residents protested — out of fear”

Why do supermarkets usually put milk at the back of the store? Conventional wisdom holds that it must be a sales ploy. You go in to buy milk, you get funnelled past shelves of other items that you can also be lured into buying. But that sounds implausible. Competition will surely force supermarkets to put the milk more or less where the customers want it. If so, the real question is why customers want to go to the back of the store. Do they themselves want to be tempted into other purchases?

Governments and laws shape the behaviour of citizens. The political and economic philosophy prevailing in the West since Adam Smith assumes that all citizens are driven primarily by self-interest; laws, policies and institutions are designed around self-interest; they will tend to produce citizens who are driven primarily by self-interest. But people can also be kind and generous. Why don’t governments do more to encourage and institutionalise kindness and generosity?