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Many animal species have been shown to have abilities previously thought to be exclusive to humans, including the use and manufacture of tools, the capacity to solve novel problems without reinforcement of intermediate steps, planning behavioral sequences, and sudden acquisition of relational concepts without reinforcement. These findings pose hard challenges to behavioral analysis, as they require the articulation of hypotheses about the know-how that animals inherit, how this know-how is modified it by individual and social experience, and how all of this information combines to generate innovative behavior. I will present and discuss examples from research on crows, parrots, human infants and other species, with a focus on our quest for parsimonious theoretical accounts of apparently intelligent behavior.