Intelligence
Orangutans are among the most intelligent primates. Experiments suggest they can figure out some invisible displacement problems with a representational strategy. In addition, Zoo Atlanta has a touch-screen computer where their two Sumatran orangutans play games. Scientists hope the data they collect will help researchers learn about socializing patterns, such as whether they mimic others or learn behaviour from trial and error, and point to new conservation strategies. A 2008 study of two orangutans at the Leipzig Zoo showed orangutans can use 'calculated reciprocity', which involves weighing the costs and benefits of gift exchanges and keeping track of these over time. Orangutans are the the first nonhuman species documented to do so. Orangutans are very technically adept nest builders, making a new nest each evening in only in 5 to 6 minutes and choosing branches which they know can support their body weight.
Read more about this topic: Orang Hutan
Famous quotes containing the word intelligence:
“It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men: divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life, so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“But as these angels, the only halted ones
among the many who passed and repassed,
trod air as swimmers tread water, each gazing
on the angelic wings of the other,
the intelligence proper to great angels flew into their wings,
the intelligence called intellectual love....”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes.”
—Pierre Simon De Laplace (1749–1827)