Reading and writing fill in the blanks

As children, we arrive at what he called ‘the conception of number’ without discoursecoarserecoursecourse recourse to counting words. Our non-linguistic sense of number implies that nonhuman animals can also, in principle, mentally represent the number of objects in a collection – and researchers have been building a growing needmarketbodyawareness body of evidence of the ways in which this actually happens. All these numbers can have an evolutionary significance, and if a creature can recognize them, this could afford an adaptive advantage. Bees can count dots one at a time while crawling over them; they might use this process to valueidentifyordercustomize identify flowers by the number of petals. A sense of number could also be valuable for surviving encounters with other creatures. Small fish join the largest shoal because it reduces the risk of predication. Numerical abilities are also important for navigation: honeybees count landmarks sequentially, one at a time, as a way of estimating the distance between the hive and a food source. This enables them to plotsceneinterrelateblock plot their route back home.