Date: Sun, 14 Dec 1997 13:28:49 -0500 (EST)
From: Valla Pishva <vpishva@emerald.tufts.edu>
Subject: Re: poor transmittion
To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
Concerning the present discussion thats been going around on tits,
magpies, jackdaws, crows, and others I'd like to add my bit to help cure
this "distributed memory lapse" (a term coined by a friend of mine).
1. I was under the impression that crows could actually count to 7 or 8,
and that this number was frequently used as a sort of intelligence
quotient for animals (but then again, remember the magic number paper-
7"=or-"2 for humans). Incidentally, Walruses come in at about 3 or 4 (as
evidenced by eskimos coming in a boat to a walrus shore and leaving with
less people than when they came- the ones who stayed behind would hide).
2. as for the milkbottle story, I heard it best explained by Rupert
Sheldrake in the "A glorious accident" series a few years back.
Apparently, it happened around the time of WW2. I dont remember the
bird's name (though my intuition says tit) but this is one of Ruperts
favorite examples for evidence of his morphic field resonance theory (so
it should be in some of his books/online interviews also) since he also
holds that this behavior poped up independently in other, migrationarily
isolated, parts of the world after it happened in england, thus showing
(in his mind) that once birds in one area have discovered a certain
strategy/method/"meme" for solving a "problem" it would be easier for
other birds to independently solve this same problem without observing
other birds conducting the solution--- How? because the birds who first
solved it emit/have attuned their morphic fields to make it easier (kind
of like a species-specific unconscious telepathy) for others to come to
the same conclusion. We could start a whole discussion group on this, but
let's just say that his work is tremendously engaging, if nothing else (he
also holds that the laws of physics have actually "evolved" this way). So
there you have it.
-val pishva
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