For the Birds Radio Program: Of Blue Jay, Squirrel, and Human Intelligence
How smart are we, compared to Blue Jays and squirrels? To avoid controversy, getting listeners angry at little radio stations that carry this program, I omitted two important paragraphs from the podcast, which I do include on today’s blog post:
“But since the 1980s, corporate America and wealthy developers have been lobbying to eviscerate the Act, pressing to make it almost impossible for new species to be listed for protection no matter how devastatingly their numbers are declining, and to chip away at enforcement.
“Now suddenly science itself—the discipline that, more than anything else, is cited to prove our so-called superiority to animals—is in jeopardy. Last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a memo cautioning scientists that even if people in their area were preparing for a hurricane that had no chance of hitting them, meteorologists must not correct totally inaccurate weather predictions made by an angry old man shaking his fists at clouds and drawing his own weather maps with a sharpie.”
