Saturday, April 4, 2009

Baby chicks can do arithmetic!



According to an article on MSNBC, "baby chickens aren't just cute - they are also whizzes at math, according to a new study. The study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the Royal Society's flagship biological research journal, presents the first known evidence that any non-human animal can perform consecutive addition and subtraction calculations on the same set."

The article further states that "Taken as a whole, however, the study supports the theory 'that animals and humans share a non-verbal, and even pre-verbal in the case of humans, numerical system" that can perform precise arithmetic on small number sets — 'with a limit of three or four' -- and make estimates about larger sets, said Rugani, a researcher in the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences at the University of Trento in Italy."

Pretty neat stuff! Go chickens!

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