Intelligence and purpose

OK, it was a science piece in the Mail, but what the hell, I found this vaguely notable for not really implying any of the various notions of ‘intelligence’ one might find in Oakeshott’s work. The story concerns the feats of ‘Betty’, a New Caledonian Crow:

[Betty had] managed to work out how to fashion bits of wire into tools to retrieve food from a variety of hard-to-get-to places. What was really extraordinary was that the hooks made by Betty were constructed from flexible steel wire – not a material readily available in the birds’ natural habitat, a small Pacific island … Now some animals do show a capacity to learn: but Betty had no prior training, nor had she watched another crow doing this. Instead, she had created her own complex solution to a new problem.

For this writer, then, an ability to learn is a genuine marker of intelligence; nonetheless, to be truly intelligent is to have a knack for finding (maybe even creating?) function without learning. I’m not entirely sure, but I think this broadly maps onto Collingwood’s understanding of the concept of intelligence – cf. An Autobiography’s emphasis on the concept of purpose (and in particular, purpose created or at least discovered in the moment) as the crucial difference between the ‘historical’ and ‘natural’ ways of understanding phenomena.