What is "Mind?"

Abstract
Many animals understand numbers at a basic level for use in essential tasks such as foraging, shoaling, and resource management. However, complex arithmetic operations, such as addition and subtraction, using symbols and/or labeling have only been demonstrated in a limited number of nonhuman vertebrates. We show that honeybees, with a miniature brain, can learn to use blue and yellow as symbolic representations for addition or subtraction. In a free-flying environment, individual bees used this information to solve unfamiliar problems involving adding or subtracting one element from a group of elements. This display of numerosity requires bees to acquire long-term rules and use short-term working memory. Given that honeybees and humans are separated by over 400 million years of evolution, our findings suggest that advanced numerical cognition may be more accessible to nonhuman d animals than previously suspected.

Some societies are much more adaptive to current selective pressures such as productive life in crowded urban environments. Others such as our own seem to be clinging to an outdated frontier model and then blaming others for out lack of competitiveness.

Fish Appear to Recognize Themselves in the Mirror

. . . females might evolve preferences for certain valueless traits, like bright plumage, that just happened to correspond with health and vigor. Their children would tend to inherit the genes underlying both their mother’s preference and their father’s trait. Over time, genetic correlation would reach a tipping point, creating a runaway cycle that would greatly exaggerate both preference and trait, glorifying beauty at the expense of the male’s survival . . . . “Animals are agents in their own evolution,” [Prum] . . . . “Birds are beautiful because they are beautiful to themselves.”