What you see with your own eyes vs what scientists claim

Heh. I've seen that with Artibeus spp. fruit bats and fermenting mangoes in Central America. I'm not sure this behavior fits into your argument, though. The bats normally eat mangoes. These particular mangoes were rotting (and thus fermenting). The bats got drunk on the fermented mangoes. In other words, this was normal behavior for the bats, but the consequences of this normal behavior were abnormal. I doubt they actually learned anything. In fact, if the behavior were to be repeated deliberately, you could make a good case that it would be negatively impacted by natural selection (so it couldn't become normative) due to highly increased vulnerability to predation. In the Artibeus example, if I hadn't restrained my dog, the abnormal consequences of the behavior would have negatively impacted the individual bats' survival .

Right. I got that part. What I was trying to point out with my reply was that ingestion of a substance with abnormal consequences - such as fermented fruit - doesn't constitute any kind of behavioral change if the ingestion was "accidental" during the course of normal behavior. It's neither learned nor evolved - it's accidental. And doesn't, in fact, constitute a behavior change per se. In short, there is nothing there to challenge the conclusions in the paper as I read it.

I'm not trying to jump on you here. Rather I'm genuinely curious to learn what other type of behavior the paper might represent. You say: If those two possibilities mentioned AREN'T in fact the only possibilities, what is the other (or others, for that matter)? Is there a way to distinguish this third (or however many) possible explanations for the behavior in question from the "assumed" evolved/learned? Could be an interesting discussion after all. A positive answer would go a long way toward clarifying your OP, I think.

I dunno. My opinion would be that in order to defend the premise in the OP, or at least as it has evolved in the subsequent discussion concerning the crow behavior paper, it would be appropriate to talk specifics about how the assumptions in the paper lead to erroneous conclusions that are contradicted by (in this case your) personal observations. That, in fact, the assumptions noted are symptomatic of a widespread "blind spot" in scientific research, of which the paper is an example. To do that, of course, you'd have to come up with specifics as I asked.On the other hand, Percy owns the joint, and if he feels it is off-topic, then by Darwin it is. Are you confident enough of your position to open a more rigorously-defined thread in the science fora? If so, we can pursue the question there.