The Thief in the Mirror
نویسنده
چکیده
Primer T he Eurasian magpie (Pica pica) has a poor reputation. As a child, I learned never to leave small shiny objects, such as teaspoons, unattended outdoors as these raucous birds will steal anything they can put their beaks on. This folklore even inspired a Rossini opera, " La gazza ladra " (" The Thieving Magpie "). Nowadays, this view has been replaced with one that is more sensitive to ecological balance, in which magpies are depicted as murderous plunderers of the nests of innocent songbirds. Either way, they are black-and-white gangsters. But no one has ever accused a magpie of being stupid. The bird belongs to the Corvidae, a worldwide family (also including crows, ravens, jackdaws, jays, and nutcrackers) marked by an exceptionally large forebrain, which permits innovative foraging [1]. In recent years, this family has begun to pose a challenge to the idea that primates constitute the pinnacle of cognitive evolution by showing creative tool-use, visual perspective-taking, foresight, and so on [2]. The one cognitive accomplishment still missing, and therefore sometimes glossed over by corvid fans, is recognition of oneself in a mirror, a capacity found in only a handful of large-brained mammals. A great deal has been made of this capacity, including turning it into a touchstone for the legal concept of " personhood " [3]. The typical mirror mark test, developed four decades ago by Gordon Gallup [4], seeks to determine whether an animal recognizes itself in the mirror by marking a visible colored dot on the animal's body. The mark needs to be placed on an out-of-view body part so that it can be detected only with guidance of a mirror. The mark test determines if the animal can use its reflection to locate the mark on its body, as measured by its inspection, touching, or rubbing of the spot. Obviously, an animal that considers its mirror image as another individual should perceive the mark as the other's problem, not its own. Very few species pass the mark test of mirror self-recognition (MSR), despite hundreds that have been tested. Apart from humans, strong indications for MSR have been obtained only for the four great apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants [5–7]. MSR is sometimes seen as a Rubicon, setting animals with a sense of self apart from those lacking such a sense. This dividing line has been questioned in several ways. Behaviorists, for example, have …
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ورودعنوان ژورنال:
- PLoS Biology
دوره 6 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2008