this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2023
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https://www.livescience.com/crows-understand-concept-of-zero.html
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/41/22/4889
edit: The idea of zero is always one of those things that seemed like it didn't need big brain mathematicians to develop, like the Pythagorean theorem being a common sense thing you naively get if you've ever walked somewhere with a diagonal shortcut. You have a practical need to understand the absence of something numerical if you are a social animal dealing with resource scarcity. If I forage 10 handfuls of berries and need to distribute that to my group of little monkey-ass things, I don't eat unless I understand that I can give away 9 handfuls but not 10. Even if I knew nothing else about mathematics I'd know 10-10 equals some kind of total absence of berries, with those still existing as a category without a quantity.
The reason this corvid study is different from intuitively knowing that 10-10=no berries is where this 0/empty set is represented on the numberline.
Considering 0 as a number vs the empty set are two different concepts. It's the difference between having a bank account with $0, vs having no bank account. They don't close your account when you have $0, so it's still an amount of money.
Crows considering 0 on the numberline, and differently from the empty set shows they have a more abstract concept of numbers than we thought.
Idk who authored this study, seems like a very specific kind of person who is both into number theory and neural pathways of birds to design.
Or Anthropology. Right now, we have realized that New Caledonian crows have entered an equivalent to the early stone age in humans. Therefore, we can gain a lot of insight both about the nature of technological progression and of the very nature of intelligence (and the differences between mammalian and avian intelligence) by doing these studies.
Isn't the Pythagorean theorem less about the fact that a diagonal is shorter than taking a corner (which is indeed obvious) and more about calculating how much shorter it is?
This reminds me of Kropotkins mutual aid a factor of evolution.