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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  19
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. "
According to the passage, scientists accepting the social intelligence hypothesis maintain that______.
选项 A、most social animals are skilled at tackling certain tasks
B、hostile environments contribute to animals’ large brains
C、solitary animals have larger brains than social animals
D、social animals should occupy fragile habitats for evolution
答案A
解析 细节题。文章第四段第二句活说到“他们发现，大多数的社会性物种都有着相对较大的脑容量，在认知能力上表现得老练，并且能熟练地通过用来检测它们智力的实验。”[A]“大多数社会性动物擅长解决某些特定任务”。
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