Fascinating talk by Joshua Klein about the intelligence of crows, including a clip showing a totally untrained crow using a tool.

Early in the talk, he mentions synanthropic animal species: that is, animals like rats, crows, and cockroaches that have adapted to survive and even thrive in human-based ecosystems. 

He makes a great point about these species: ”they’ve become extremely adept at living with us, and in return we just tried to kill them all the time.  And in doing so, we were breeding them for parasitism.” 

That is, if we’re always trying to exterminate roaches, then roaches main job becomes avoiding extermination.  We set up their evolutionary environment such that the most optimal niche for them to fill is The Parasitic Mooch off Human Civilization. 

His big idea here is this: since they’re so good at mooching off living with humans, let’s give them a better niche.

(via TED)