Chickens have a reputation for being profoundly dumb, but in fact they are remarkably intelligent and may even be empathic.
Despite what you might think, chickens are not stupid
Chickens have a reputation for being profoundly dumb, but in fact they are remarkably intelligent and may even be empathic.
They can count, show some level of self-awareness, and even manipulate one another by Machiavellian means. In fact, chickens are so smart that even a limited amount of exposure to the living birds can crush longstanding preconceptions.
If a male chicken foraging for food finds a particularly tasty morsel, he will often try to impress nearby females by performing a dance.
However, subordinate males that perform this song-and-dance routine risk being noticed and attacked by the dominant male. So if the dominant male is nearby, the subordinate often performs his special dance in silence, in a bid to impress females without the dominant male noticing.
Meanwhile, some males may try to trick females into approaching by making the characteristic food calls even when they have not found anything worth crowing about. Unsurprisingly, females quickly wise up to males who perform this sort of deception too often.
Chickens may also have some ability to perform “mental time travel” - that is, to imagine what will happen in the future - to secure a larger amount of food.
They are also socially complex. Some studies suggest the birds can appreciate how the world must appear to their peers, and that they can use this information for personal advantage.
The uncomfortable truth about chickens is that they are far more cognitively advanced than many people might appreciate.
World’s eight richest have as much wealth as bottom half
How concentrated has wealth become in the globalized modern world? Here’s one answer: Just eight of the richest people on earth own as much combined wealth as half the human race.
That’s a notable change from last year, when it was reckoned to take 62 of the super-rich to match the assets of the 3.6 billion people in the poorer half of mankind.
The charity Oxfam does the math each year and publishes its results just in time for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where many of the spectacularly wealthy are often among the attendees, along with diplomats, political figures, and business and cultural leaders.
Oxfam bases its figures in part on Forbes’s annual list of billionaires and the magazine’s estimates of their wealth. This year, Oxfam said, new data gathered by Credit Suisse about the global poor led it to lower its estimates of their assets and revise its findings about how few rich men - the eight are all men - were needed to equal the wealth of 3.6 billion people.
Here are the eight, with their net worth as estimated by Forbes, whose annual survey depends on a range of sources:
