There is a lot of interesting stuff on the topic of intelligence in non-human species: About learning in invertebrates, relatively little is known. Although many species have been studied, the work has on the whole been rather primitive by vertebrate standards, and only with few species has it gone much beyond the question of whether they are capable of learning at all. The principal exceptions when I set out some years ago to try to remedy the deficiency were octopuses and honeybees, whose performance in various learning situations had been reported to be so like that of vertebrates as to suggest the operation of common principles, but there was not much useful information even about those animals. The octopus experiments, often quite sophisticated in purpose and design, could not be taken seriously because of unsuitable laboratory conditions and poor behavioral technique (Bitterman 1975b). The work with honeybees, mostly by zoologists interested in foraging who had come upon questions about learning with which they were not educated to deal, was highly idiosyncratic, clouded by looseness of conception and inadequate control of important variables. It served nevertheless to advertise the possibilities... M. E. Bitterman In: NATO ASI Series, Vol. G17 Intelligence and Evolutionary Biology Edited by H.J. Jerison and I. Jerison © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1988 *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html