The story begins with a blind date. ...........
In a blink of an eye, the young parrot lady has reached the age of looking for an object, looking at the handsome young men on both sides-go left? Go right? This is a problem.
Although these male parrots have little difference in appearance in human eyes, parrots obviously have their own aesthetic system.
The girls quickly chose a more attractive man to succeed hand in hand, leaving the sad loser man behind.
The face value is not enough, come together with intelligence!
To this end, the experimenters conducted a week-long "special training" for these frustrated boys.
In short, it is to teach them how to get food. As the saying goes, ugly people should read more books and ugly birds should find more food. )
Training is divided into elementary classes and advanced classes.
The box of the elementary class is a Petri dish, and you can get food by opening the lid; The lunch box of the advanced class is specially designed. You need to open the lid, open the door and pull out the drawer to eat.
At first, the parrot boy was at a loss, and the experimenter took pains to show them the steps of opening the box over and over again to make them remember. If you can't study again, God can't save you! )
Demonstrate how to open the box in teaching.
In order to capture the heart of the goddess, fight! A week later, all the parrots mastered the method of opening the box.
Parrots in special training, fight for sisters!
These advanced parrots have shown their magical powers, returned strongly and re-entered the stage of fighting for love.
A dramatic scene appeared:
Parrot teenagers who have received "higher education" can open boxes in an orderly way, and their proficiency is no less than 10 seconds to disassemble pistols.
On the other hand, Gao Fushuai, who once won the favor of beautiful women only by her appearance, can only be clumsy and helpless.
Elementary test, the goddess loves to attack loser, oh, not bad!
Primary test, looking at Gao Fushuai who hasn't eaten for a long time, bye-bye, vase man!
No contrast, no harm.
Miss parrot was stunned. The once ugly loser is so smart … fashionable … sexy … amazing!
Advanced test, loser 10 seconds to dismantle the pistol. Wow, I like you so much!
Gao Fushuai was completely defeated in the advanced test. I just smiled and didn't speak. ...
This time, the parrot ladies obviously increased their romantic time with specially trained parrot boys.
However, is this love?
To make the results more credible, the researchers added two groups of controls.
In the first control experiment, the researchers replaced the special food box with the ordinary loser food box, so that the parrot boy who was not liked before could eat freely, while the initially popular parrot boy could only drink the northwest wind with an empty lunch box.
But in this case, the parrot ladies maintained their previous choices and were not moved by the losers who ate and drank.
Well, I still can't resist the temptation of Yan value. ......
Contrary to the experiment, Gao Fushuai once again gained the upper hand.
It can be seen that what girls like is not the landlord who guards the surplus grain to eat and drink, but the young talents who have a pair of skillful hands to create a better life.
Is this love?
Maybe it's just a social preference. After all, everyone likes smart individuals.
Therefore, the experimenter replaced all male parrots with female parrots, and asked the parrot lady to choose between "strong woman" and "silly white sweet".
Interestingly, Miss Parrot's criteria for choosing an object and a best friend are completely different.
Other girls don't care whether they are smart or not.
"This shows that female parrots' preference for other individuals' cognitive abilities is inseparable from sexual selection." Sun Yuehua, correspondent of this paper and researcher of Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, told China Science Journal. (It seems that this is love! Ladies and gentlemen, here's your chance! )
There is a golden house in the book and Yan Ruyu in the book-this is simply the latest issue of Science magazine giving a shot in the arm to the majority of single male doctors.
Learning to change your destiny is definitely not a slogan, there is wood!
This story has reached the international stage.
Parrot boys probably didn't expect that their counterattack story was not only favored by the top international publication Science, but also praised by Georg F. Striedter, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at the University of California. Sure enough, life after the counterattack is like hanging up ...
Have you ever considered how a bird feels after being fed a mouthful of dog food? .....
As early as 100 years ago, Darwin put forward such a hypothesis in his book "The Origin and Sexual Selection of Human Beings": the development of human cognitive ability is partly realized through sexual selection.
In other words, in the competition between men and men, individuals with high cognitive level will win the marriage. So will animals do the same?
Professor strait said that people have always wanted to prove that individuals with higher cognitive level are more popular in sexual relations among other species. Unfortunately, in most cases, people can only infer the preference of female animals for cognitive ability through the characteristics related to cognitive performance such as singing and feathers.
"Chen et al.' s method provides more convincing evidence. This method has great prospects for promoting the study of cognitive level and mate selection behavior. " He said.
However, the thoughtful old man also raised a very lovely scientific question: these female parrots have not been trained to open boxes by themselves, and they may not know that doing such a thing requires clever strategies. Could it be that they mistakenly think that male parrots can open the box smoothly because they are strong and muscular?
Landmark Works: Creativity is the Soul.
Ceramic art, a researcher at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, can't restrain his inner joy. He was not directly involved in this work, but he paid close attention to the research progress of He Chen from the beginning.
He said to the China Journal of Science:
The understanding of animal cognitive behavior and its evolutionary biological explanation is a highly speculative topic. This study provides direct experimental evidence for Darwin's conjecture, especially for the evolutionary biology research of bird cognitive behavior, which is a milestone work.
This study has a remarkable feature: through simple, rigorous and reasonable experimental design, we have obtained universal results. It can be seen that although it is very important to discover biological phenomena in basic research, revealing the evolutionary biological logic (or mechanism) behind these phenomena is the soul of research work.
The cost of this research is less than 20,000 yuan (buying parrots and raising parrots is not a small expense), but the results obtained are of great significance and published in top international academic journals, which proves that international academic circles attach importance to the thinking of scientific problems themselves.
You know, this kind of macro behavioral ecology research that does not involve molecular mechanism is usually difficult to win top journals.
So far, there are only two such papers in China. The last one is the research that scientists in Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of Chinese Academy of Sciences found that spiders "suck milk".
Anyway, these "highly educated" parrot-like boys have become online celebrity stars in the laboratory.
I look at you and stare at you. ...