Darwinists crow over study claiming pigeons can read

Apes know when someone harbors a false belief and pigeons can read, which just goes to show humans are nothing special, concluded Darwinian evolutionists interpreting two recently published research studies on animal behavior. But critics call those claims junk science based on wishful thinking.

In one study, published in the September issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers in New Zealand trained four pigeons to recognize dozens of words by rewarding them with food when they pecked at a correctly spelled word on a computer screen or when they pecked at a star if the letters on the screen did not make a word.

The pigeons also began to guess at the correct spelling of a new word based on learning which two-letter combinations often go together, such as th, he, es, or ea, Damian Scarf, the study’s lead author, told NPR.

In an unrelated study, researchers at Duke University claimed to have demonstrated that apes may be able to predict what someone will think, even when those thoughts are based on false beliefs.

During the study, the apes watched two short videos. In one video, a person dressed like an ape and nicknamed King Kong hid in one of two haystacks while another man observed. After the observer left, King Kong ran away. Next, the observer reappeared and tried to find King Kong. In the second video, King Kong hid a rock under one of two boxes while a man watched. Then the man left, King Kong ran away with the rock, and the observer returned a few seconds later to look for it.

While the apes watched the videos, an infrared eye tracker recorded the location of their gazes on the video screen. In both cases, the apes looked first and longest at the location where the man had last seen either King Kong or the rock. The researchers concluded the apes expected the man to believe King Kong and the rock would be in the last place he had seen them, even though the apes knew that was not the case.

Some Darwinian evolutionists claim these two studies provide evidence that humans, which they say evolved from an ancestor common to all animals, are not unique or special.

“It proves that it’s really not necessarily true that humans have different abilities,” Scarf said of his pigeon study.

Science Magazine titled its article about the ape research, “Humans aren’t the only great apes that can ‘read minds.’”

“It’s a useful reminder that humans shouldn’t be so quick to put themselves on a pedestal,” primatologist Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University wrote in a commentary for the Los Angeles Times.

But Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University, disagrees. There is nothing ground-breaking about evidence that animals can guess what a person is thinking, he told me: “My dog knows when I am thinking about a dog treat.”

Animals can be very savvy about intuiting what their masters are thinking, but that doesn’t mean they are capable of abstract thought, Egnor explained. And pigeons trained to recognize shapes on a computer screen is a far cry from the human ability to recognize words.

“The word recognition was done by the researchers, not by the pigeons,” Egnor said.

In these studies, neither the pigeons nor the apes demonstrated the uniquely human ability to think abstractly, according to Egnor. It is abstract thinking ability that reveals the spirit in humans and sets humans apart from animals.

“From the Christian standpoint, that is how we are created in God’s image," he said.

An animal can think about a concrete thing like food but it cannot think about an abstract concept like mercy.

Darwin’s belief that humans evolved from lower animals led to the denial that humans are special and has had lethal consequences in modern times, with concepts like euthanasia, Egnor said.

“We really have to be careful not to credit these scientists or the journalists who write about them with any real wisdom or with much integrity,” Egnor said. “A lot of this stuff really is junk science, it really is corrupt.”