Petulant parrot proves a point—but atheists can’t (or won’t) see
it
by David Catchpoole
26 September 2006
Many teachers of young children have experienced the frustration of not getting
a correct answer, or sometimes even any answer, from bright youngsters who evidently
know the right answer, but won’t admit it.
 I’ve seen in such
circumstances a child defiantly remaining silent rather than give an answer, or
even deliberately giving every possible wrong answer, steadfastly avoiding acknowledging
the right one.
Well, it seems parrots are just the same.
Professor Irene Pepperberg of Brandeis University, USA, says the results of a long-running
study of parrots shows they have an impressive intelligence—about the same
as a five-year-old human.1
An African grey parrot named ‘Alex’ in the study was able to correctly
identify 100 objects, do simple addition and identify seven colours, just like children
do.
But how does Alex communicate—can parrots speak?
‘If you put language in quotes, yes, they use English speech,’ Pepperberg
said. ‘So if I ask Alex … how many keys; he’ll tell me
“two”. If I ask him what colour, he’ll say “green”
and if I ask what shape, he’ll say “three-quarter”.’
… by chance he couldn't do that.
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But if Alex did not want to cooperate, he showed he can put on the same ploy as
human children, as Pepperberg explains:
‘He’ll generally perform with almost perfect accuracy for about the
first maybe 12, 15 trials, and then he just does not want to do it … he’ll
sit there and he’ll preen, or he’ll give me all the wrong answers in
a row, which takes a lot of intelligence because he’s avoiding the one correct
answer.
‘If he’s giving me six wrong answers in a row, you know he’s avoiding
that seventh answer carefully.
‘So you know he knows it, because by chance he couldn’t do that.’
Quite so. Not by chance. Yet evolutionists claim it
is by chance that the parrot ‘evolved’ that ability, and that
the parrot itself (along with everything else) is the result of chance processes
over millions of years.2
But the smart ‘Alex’ parrot and other documented examples of high intelligence
in other birds (see, e.g.,
‘Crows out-tool chimps’) highlight a problem with that idea.
If chimpanzees are ‘our close evolutionary cousins’, then how is it
that birds (which are not supposed to be our evolutionary cousins, and which have
much smaller brains), can surpass chimps in various measures of ‘intelligence’?
Unfortunately, vocal proponents of evolution such as atheists
Richard Dawkins and Sir David Attenborough, obviously highly intelligent
people, either steadfastly avoid answering evolutionary problems like ‘Alex’3 or else give ‘wrong
answers’. Not so far different from defiant young children—and
disgruntled parrots. It’s as if such evolutionists are deliberately
ignoring the reality of a Creator (2
Peter 3:5) and that His Word is true.
Now that’s a real shame because if only they desired to seek the truth, they
would surely find it (Luke
11:9). And be rewarded accordingly (John
3:36).
References
- Veness, K., Parrots ‘as intelligent’ as young children, ABC
News Online, 21 July 2006. Return to text.
- Evolutionists often protest and say it is not chance, but
mutation + selection. However, they are really saying: Whatever genetic accidents
happen to have come along (by chance), filtered by their ‘fit’ to whatever
environment happened (by chance) to exist. Chance + chance = chance.
Return to text.
- This is not the first time that ‘Alex’ has
been in the spotlight of the news media, having been the subject of research by
Professor Pepperberg for quite some years now, which we have earlier reported on.
See ‘Bird-brain matches
chimps (and neither makes it to grade school)’, Creation
19(1):47, 1996. Return to text.
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