“It seems to me that every time we humans announce that here is
the thing that makes us unique—our featherless bipedality, our
tool-using, our language—some other species comes along to
snatch it away. If modesty were a human trait, we’d have learned
to be more cautious over the years.”  That’s a quote I really
like from We are all Completely Beside Ourselves, a novel by
Karen Joy Fowler. We see this a lot in science news—headlines
about some amazing human-like feat that another creature can
perform. Heck, I write about it all the time (for example, see
last week’s post about facial recognition in paper wasps).  And
intelligence seems to take the cake. Posts and especially videos
about intelligent birds, mammals, cephalopods, and insects are
always the most popular on our site and others. Why are we
constantly astonished at animal intelligence? Aren’t we animals,
after all?  Succumbing to peer pressure and my boss’s desire to
boost numbers for Science Today, today I mine recent headlines
on animal intelligenc