[ExI] Corvids at play

[Gregory Jones]

--- On Wed, 9/15/10, lists1 at evil-genius.com <lists1 at evil-genius.com> wrote:
 
...The raven did this over and over, always cawing three times ("hey, check this out!"), tumbling like it was dead, and catching itself at the last moment.  I was jealous because it looked like a hell of a lot of fun...

 
In Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel, he goes into a very interesting chapter on how some species of beast can be domesticated and others cannot.  The most successful domesticated beast may be horses, yet the closely related zebras do not domesticate readily.
 
In the bird world it seems that seagulls for some odd reason just are naturally comfortable with humans.  Corvids are next, pretty close to gulls.  Those two groups seem to be kind of special in regards to how they interact with humans.  Parrots I suppose could be added in with those two.  
 
I don't know why species differ so much from each other with respect to their ability to interact with humans.  Diamond made an interesting comment in GGnS.  No new beast species has been domesticated in the past 3000 yrs.  
 
spike
 
 

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20100915/fe603c60/attachment.html>