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  3. Using tools doesn’t make humans, dolphins, and crows smart. Rather, it’s the stress and challenge of living with others—recogniz

Using tools doesn’t make humans, dolphins, and crows smart. Rather, it’s the stress and challenge of living with others—recogniz

admin2018-02-17  29
问题    Using tools doesn’t make humans, dolphins, and crows smart. Rather, it’s the stress and challenge of living with others—recognizing friend from foe, calculating who to deceive and who to befriend—that led these and other social creatures to evolve their cognitive skills. That’s the gist of the social intelligence hypothesis, an idea that’s been around since 1966. But does having to remember whose lice need picking actually improve other mental abilities, like figuring out how to open a locked box with a hunk of meat inside? A new study of four carnivores—two social and two solitary species—suggests that it does.
   "They’ve taken an important issue and tested it in a simple but novel way," says Richard Byrne, an evolutionary psychologist at The University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the study. "The results are clear; The cognitive benefit from being a social carnivore does transfer" to a mental ability that has nothing to do with being social, he says.
   Other researchers think the results aren’t as clear-cut. " It is important and a valuable stepping stone in our quest to understand how intelligence evolved, but like all studies, it is one piece of a larger puzzle," says Sarah Benson-Amram, a zoologist at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, whose recent comparative study of 39 species of carnivores reached the opposite conclusion.
   Scientists devised the social intelligence hypothesis to explain the evolution of the human brain. They’ve found that most social species (from chimpanzees to social wasps) have relatively large brains and are cognitively sophisticated, adept at experiments designed to test their smarts. But some researchers argue that another factor—a challenging environment—may also stimulate cognitive evolution. If so, then more solitary species could also be large-brained and smart thanks to the ecological difficulties they face.
   Other researchers concur, but with caveats. " They did find a nice link between sociality and success" on this task, says Evan MacLean, a comparative psychologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. But he wonders what type of cognition the ability to open a puzzle box actually demonstrates. " It may be reflective of trial and error learning, insight, or just of curiosity or interest in novel objects. "
   The puzzle box is also not particularly " ecologically relevant," to the carnivores, notes primatolo-gist Frans de Waal at Emory University in Atlanta, who would like to see the animals tested on some type of predator-prey task. Still, it is " a good first step and a fresh approach to the intelligence of carnivores , a group we have neglected for too long. "
What would be the best title for this article?
选项 A、Carnivores’ intelligence is underestimated.
B、Good social skills make animals smarter.
C、Smarts: social animals versus solitary animals.
D、Puzzle; How to solve it inside a large box.
答案B
解析 主旨题。文章开宗明义，认为相互交往是让动物变得更聪明的重要原因。后续段落则通过举例子、采访专家等形式进一步阐述社会性群居动物所拥有的“益智”优势。选项[B]最为贴切地概括了文章的中心思想，所以是正确答案。
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