主题：【链接(集)】The Telepathy Debate -- 衲子

我懒得一个个地去翻译了。大家自己看好了。

[URL=The Cream Myth] http://www.thecorpuscle.com/2005/04/index.html[/URL]

A party conversation, April 16, 2005:

(Dialogue is an approximation. Some inebriation may be involved.)

C: You remember that show we taped?

T: What show?

C: The one with the birds. Stealing the cream.

T: Oh, yeah. Don't know if we taped it, though.

C (facing M): These birds, over in England, they... On people's porches, the milkman would leave people's milk? The bottles had little tin-foil tops on them and these birds learned how to peck through the foil covers and drink the cream. That was before the war. And then when the war came along they stopped delivering people's milk. For the whole war. Five years later they started again, and these birds, their life spans were only like one year or something, but after five years, when they started delivering the milk again, the birds knew how to peck through the foil and get the cream.

M: Wow. It's like there was a Bird Library. They went to the Bird Library and looked up how to get the cream.

C: Right. Somehow the knowledge was preserved.

M: Or they had legends. Bird legends.

T: Right. (after a brief pause.) The Cream Myth.

The Many Faces of Psychological Research in the 21st Century, Jane S. Halonen, Stephen F. Davis, Editors (2005?), Chapter 13, "Comparative Psychology and Animal Learning", by Jesse E. Purdy and Michael Domjan:

In 1949, Fisher and Hinde reported on birds (blue tits) that had been robbing cream from milk bottles delivered to the doors of English homes. Observers speculated that a single blue tit had discovered, probably quite by accident, how to peck through a bottle cap and consume the rich cream that floated on top of the milk. The occurrence of milk theft then gradually spread throughout the whole of England and into Europe through some form of social learning.

The Aggressor's Way, 2nd Edition (2004), by Francis Hardy:

The small British bird, the blue tit, has the annoying habit of pecking the covers of milk bottles that are delivered outside the doors of many UK homes, and then drinking the milk from the tops of the bottles. This practice was first reported in 1921 near Southampton in southern England, and observations over the years have shown that the habit has been slowly spreading from this area ever since. The evidence suggests that the technique was probably discovered by one particularly innovative bird and has been spreading by simple imitation. Of course, no one knows the exact circumstances of the initial discovery of this new source of food but it could have been a simple case of serendipity - as for example a bird pecking at an insect which had settled on a milk bottle cover and then finding that its beak went through the cover and into the delicious tasting liquid underneath. Many blue tits in the UK are now adept at exploiting this rich source of food - particularly in hard winters when more conventional food is scarce - and there is evidence that other bird species, such as the house sparrow and marsh tit, are also taking up the habit.