Monday, October 30, 2006

LiveScience.com - Elephant Self-Awareness Mirrors Humans

LiveScience.com - Elephant Self-Awareness Mirrors Humans: "Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, joining only humans, apes and dolphins as animals that possess this kind of self-awareness, researchers now report.

'This would seem to be a trait common to and independently evolved by animals with large, complex brains, complex social lives and known capacities for empathy and altruism, even though the animals all have very different kinds of brains,' researcher Diana Reiss, a senior cognitive research scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in Brooklyn, N.Y., told LiveScience."

3 comments:

Barry Dauphin said...

Donkeys, however, have not been shown to exhibit self awareness, even if they win on November 6.

Barry Dauphin said...

ugh...November 7. So much for my calendar awareness.

Reliapundit said...

a wildlife expert in brooklyn? who is not talikng about hiphop clubs? whooda thunkit possible.