nature in a experiment i have no yet why is like so far like it sounds so simple they had no idea

but now the data's i find this not only refreshing but but at some level astounding nature

welcome back to the nature.

Nature.

Welcome back to the Nature podcast.

This week in the show, the social smarts of macpies and making tougher timber.

Plus cloned crayfish in Madagascar.

This is the nature podcast for the 8th of February 2018.

I'm Charmany Bandale.

And I'm Benjamin Thompson.

First up today, it's reporter Adam Levy, and this week he's marvelling at his own intellect.

As far as animals go, I reckon I'm pretty smart. I mean, there probably aren't many non-human animals that can beat me at chess, for example,

or write a pithy podcast intro for that matter.

But where does my intelligence come from? For that matter, where does intelligence itself

come from? What drives it to evolve? Well, broadly, there are two schools of thought on the matter.

One suggests that challenges in our environment drives the evolution of intelligence. For example, intelligence could have evolved in response to a need to catch or access hard-to-reach food.

But there's another idea, the social intelligence hypothesis.

This suggests that intelligence evolves so animals can better handle complex social situations,

working out who are their friends, enemies, and anything in between.

To test this hypothesis, researchers previously compared the brain size of a species

with the average size of their social groups.

Species who tend to live in bigger groups should need more social intelligence. Sure enough, it seems like there may be a link,

...