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by Gravey 1771 days ago
I once watched several seagulls peck at a closed clamshell container containing pizza crusts for over half an hour. Clearly there is an upper bound to their intelligence.
4 comments

I watched a crack head at the park look for something on the ground for an hour once. Clearly there is an upper bound for human intelligence as well /s
Yep, devoting an hour to watching such activity certainly makes one wonder.
Do seagulls do crack?
It's been reported that younger gulls initially try to open clams (the animal clams, not plastic containers) by pecking. I believe they learn the dropping-from-a-height tactic from observation, and suspect that the pecking at a plastic container is merely due to them not having seen it being open by a gull before. Also, worth considering that in their natural habitat, the only transparent things around (jellyfish) are squishy and stingy.
I once spent ten minutes frantically looking for my wristwatch. It was very stressful, because I had to go to school, and I did not have much time left to catch the bus. So after a while (like I said, about ten minutes), I looked at my wristwatch to see how much time I had left. It took another 30 seconds for me to realize that I had been wearing my wristwatch the whole time.

Being smart does not save you (and not me, either!) from being dumb. And there have been times in my life when I was able to substitute inventiveness with stubbornness.

So there are upper bounds to everyone's intelligence, human or animal[0], genius or idiot. Given the variety we can observe in our fellow humans, I think it's fair to assume birds have their "village idiots", too.

[0] Except for barnacles, of course, but they are very discreet about it.

The differences in intelligence between species is exaggerated

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/04/john-paulson-loses-1...