“True teachers are called into being by the contradictions generated by civilization,” the poet Gary Snyder reflected in his reckoning with the real work of life. “We need them.” We have always needed them because we need each other, because we have always been each other’s teachers. Ever since one human being watched another rub wood and flint into fire, we have taught each other how to use our hands and how to use our minds, how to wield our tools at the world and our theories of living at the predicament of being alive. Social learning — this jungle gym for training the plasticity of being we call adaptation — may be the lever by which we lifted ourselves up from the flatland of survival to the mountain of civilization, the key that liberated us from the prison of our destiny as predators to become poets. And yet social learning is not unique to the human animal, not even to the so-called higher animals. (“Never say higher or lower,” Darwin argued in the margin of a book he was reading. “Say more complicated.”) It may even be most interesting — because it reveals reaches of reality alien to us — in minds that are most unlike ours. Few minds are more other than that of the caracara — the planet’s southernmost bird of prey and one of the rarest, about as few of them alive as there are giant pandas.1775 watercolor of a caracara by Georg Forster from James Cook’s second voyage under 2025 images of the Triffid and Lagoon nebulae from the Vera Rubin Observatory. Available as a print and a greeting card.Jonathan Meiburg investigates and celebrates these “disarmingly conscious” animals in his wonderful book A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey (public library), largely inspired by the legacy of William Henry Hudson and written with kindred literary splendor. He writes:Unless you live south of the Rio Grande, chances are you’ve never even heard of caracaras. But if you try to imagine ten separate attempts to build a crow on a falcon chassis, with results falling somewhere between elegant, menacing, and whimsical, you wouldn’t be far off. A few species are drab and inconspicuous, but most are boldly patterned in black and white, with red or yellow skin on their faces and legs. Some are nearly as small as magpies; others are as large as ravens. All have broad wings, hooked beaks, and an alert, curious expression, and they live in every part of their supremely varied continent, from the arid peaks of the Andes to the steaming forests of the Amazon basin. Their most striking qualities, however, are their minds. Unlike most birds of prey, caracaras are social and curious, and they feed with gusto on foods other predators disdain… In the high Andes, a species whose feathers adorned the heads of Inca emperors has been seen working in teams to uncover lizards and insects by flipping heavy rocks, and the crested caracaras who unnerved Darwin in Patagonia are said to spread wildfires by dropping burning sticks in dry grass, and feasting on the ensuing stream of refugees.[…][Caracaras] have surprising and important stories to tell us: about the history of life, about the hidden worlds of their grand and mysterious continent, about how evolution can fashion a mind like ours from different materials. They might even offer us some advice about surviving in a world primed for an upheaval.What the caracaras offer us above all is an invitation to rethink our understanding of intelligence, the self-referential ways in which we define it, the disembodied mathematical modalities against which we measure our definition. Among the three extant species of caracaras — striated, crested, and chimango — the chimangos (Milvago chimango) astonish with their feats of what we readily recognize as intelligence (like the use of memory in the service of planning and the use of tools in the service of executing plans) and what is more subtly so (like the capacity for deep play and the capacity for boredom). Reflecting on his encounter with two especially intelligent chimangos and their human companions, Meiburg draws on the science of how cells become selves to consider the surprising understanding between them despite the divergent development of our two kinds of brains:As you grew inside your mother’s womb, drawing nutrients through your umbilical cord, your folded neocortex grew from the lower surface of your fetal forebrain. Tina’s equivalent structure, a smooth bulb called a pallium, grew from the upper surface of hers, as she slowly absorbed the yolk of her hard-shelled egg. But though the structures of the neocortex and the pallium are distinct, their functions are alike: Geoff and Tina, like Hudson and Polly, could understand each other because their parallel journeys had led them to the same place.The interesting question, the irresistible question, is why markers of intelligence like curiosity and innovation can clearly develop independently in different lineages, yet have not developed in every branch of the tree of life — why can’t mayflies solve mazes and snails perpetrate revenge? Meiburg argues that social learning, and the plasticity of being it implies, may be the key:One factor that seems especially important in the evolution of what we call intelligence is a habitat in which the distribution, type, and availability of food is inherently unpredictable. Any animal that finds itself in this situation can’t afford to rely on pure routine or rote behaviors; it needs to be observant and curious enough to find new sources of food, even if it’s never seen them before.[…]This is where social learning is especially helpful. If you can learn from the example of your peers, you can reap the benefits of their successes and failures in your own lifetime, without waiting for natural selection to do its slow work on your gene pool. But keeping track of so many details — the individual personalities and relationships of other members of your social group, the locations of many different food sources, and the places you might have hidden food to eat later — requires a larger, more flexible brain. It’s also the kind of life that you’d expect to favor generalists over specialists. Indeed, nearly all the animals we regard as intelligent — baboons, crows, raccoons, caracaras, humans — are big-brained social generalists that thrive in unpredictable environments.This, indeed, may be what makes an intelligent creature in the deepest sense — a teachable generalist capable of teaching, a social animal endowed with the behavioral plasticity and “negative capability” necessary for embracing the inherent uncertainty of this brief embodiment.Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.Couple with the story of how nature developed dream — another technology for practicing the possible — in the avian brain and the fascinating science of how owls see with sound, then consider how the new science of plant intelligence is challenging our notions of what makes a mind. donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). 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