Can a crow that has never seen a particular problem still build the right tool to solve it, and what does that tell us about the nature of animal intelligence? Alex Kacelnik explores the boundaries between insight and learning in New Caledonian crows.

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Alex Kacelnik brings a biologist's perspective to animal cognition, positioning intelligence as an evolved toolkit shaped by natural selection rather than an abstract capacity to be ranked on a human-centric scale. He draws a critical distinction between risk, where probabilities are known, and uncertainty, where even the nature of the problem is unclear, arguing that learning transforms individual uncertainty into manageable risk by filling in the parameters that evolution could not anticipate.

The centerpiece  ...