Nor do I think it's that farfetched that birds should feel grief. A lot of animals display emotions that I identify with. I've seen pride and humiliation and saving face in cats. And dogs obviously feel joy and worry and mourning.
I understand the need to distinguish between what's likely and what's proven, but I also don't see a reason for the explanation to be complex. It looks like grief. I think it's more likely to be that than some alien phenomenon that happens to look like it.
Thinking that their actions may be done to warn of poisonous food sources isn't as far-fetched as you make it out to be. It has a clear evolutionary benefit. As for grief, it is beneficial in tight communities as it helps strengthen social bonds. This is why people are less affected by the death of a stranger than that of a close relative. But blue jays are not highly social animals and the dead bird in question is one they have never seen before anyway. Scientifically, grief is actually one of the less likely possibilities as there doesn't seem to be any reason why they would grieve an unknown bird.
And does grief really make emotional sense? When a person finds a body on the street, what do they do? They call for help. Afterwards a crowd may gather as the police cordon off the area. But the crowd isn't grieving, they're simply morbidly curious.
It's not so obvious. Especially with domestic animals, the kind of behaviour you are describing may have evolved in order to survive in humans' company. Recommended reading: Daniel Dennett's Kinds of Minds ( http://www.amazon.com/Kinds-Of-Minds-Understanding-Conscious... )
Wittgenstein on what a lion would say if he could speak: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=628eVJgHD6I (This is a very pleasant pineapple)
Not in the way you interpret the sentence. Cultures act like they were only interested in their own survival.
Also, what is human mourning good for? Perhaps we interpret too much into our own behavior, too.
I get an eerie feeling sometimes watching Western scrub jays, gray jays, and Steller's jays and how complex their behavior can seem.
All members of the family Corvidae (along with crows and ravens), and all quite intelligent -- so intelligent that the meant-to-be-critical phrase "bird-brain" seems too wide of the mark.
I just discovered that Corvids pass the mirror test. I've always known them to be very smart, but this is a new twist.
A sensible defense against poisoning? Just because evolutionary psych seems intuitive doesn't mean that every seemingly inuitive speculation passes for evolutionary psych. Do you stop eating for a day when your friend has diarrhea from a meal 12 hours earlier? Didn't your highly social species also evolve in an environment where food poisoning was a concern?
On a meta note, while I realize that it's science reporting, which is generally of bad quality -- why does every article on HN about some research findings receive at least one comment from someone at a keyboard who thinks he has a better explanation than people who spent months putting this work together. (Many of whom have committed their lives to this field)
Do you like it when, e.g., a client dismisses hours of your work because it doesn't have the latest X which he only heard about last week, and really has no clue how it works or whether that would be applicable? Don't we all generally think that such a person is an assclown? How is this different?
Or to put it another way, given a short sunmary of the story made for a public which reads at the eight grade level (at best) -- if a person could generate the criticism given that simple input, how/why would it be that the authors who invest their own careers in the research wouldn't have anticipated and addressed it?
People who work in the field do also level the same criticism, quite frequently; teleological and anthropomorphizing explanations are extremely controversial topics in biology. The critique that some researchers jump to such explanations more quickly than the evidence warrants reappears frequently, and the critique that popular-science writers and journalists do so is basically universal. Most researchers also try to avoid doing so. You'll often find such explanations in scare quotes in papers, with it being clear that they're an evocative shorthand, not part of the scientific conclusions: the researchers really have a certain set of scientific conclusions about an observed phenomenon, which they refer to as a "funeral" as shorthand, but the scientific conclusions don't usually include any attempt to prove a strong analogy with human funerals. (It does somewhat depend on the journal how strictly such careful treatment of metaphors is enforced.)
In this case, the BBC article is a lot more anthropomorphizing than the original article (linked at the bottom), which doesn't make any conclusions about mourning or similarity to human funeral practices.
In particular, I would not claim that human emotions are that special and it is plainly obvious that evolution has left its mark all over them.
Further, you may wish to consider re-reading my post carefully and considering why I used the phrase "based on the info given in this article"; compare to the same post but with that clause struck. You may discover something useful about my inner mental state as I was writing my post.
Well, those aren't really incompatible, are they?
They may be; it is true that many birds exhibit complex behavior. But at least based on the info given in this article, there's a lot of unjustified assumptions about the internal states of the bird's brains based on deep, deep subconscious assumptions about how humans would be feeling if we saw humans acting that way. I would consider it just as likely that to the extent they are "feeling" something it would be something with no human analog.