When scientists found out that chimps had better memories than students, there were unkind comments about the calibre of the human competition they faced.
But now an ape has gone one better, trouncing British memory champion Ben Pridmore.
Ayumu, a seven-year-old male brought up in captivity in Japan, did three times as well as Mr Pridmore at a computer game which involved remembering the position of numbers on a screen.
The rest of the article can be found here.
Maybe Shubin will write about our inner monkey as a sequel to "Your Inner Fish".
Speaking of my inner fish, I've haven't been blogging as much the past few days because I've been absolutely enthralled with following link after link in regard to Shubin's work. He recently interviewed with Carl Zimmer on Bloggingheads, and I've listened to it twice already. The extent to which common descent is embedded into the brains of those trained in evolutionary thought is truly amazing. Although I think his extrapolations of the evidence is off the charts, I like Shubin....he is extremely excited about his work and he's very easy to understand. I spent a bit of time this morning at Barnes and Nobel pouring through his book. It just about killed me to leave it there, but I'm not paying $24 for the thing. I'll have to wait until it's available at the library.
But, I have been jotting down a ton of notes about the Tiktaalik find and it's connection with our "inner fish". Hopefully, I'll find the time to share my thoughts at some point.
Unfortunately, I have a stack of paper work a mile high that I have to go through this weekend. It's time to do those dratted taxes again....puke.
