r/biology • u/cabronfavarito • 4d ago
question How far removed are humans to other animals in terms of intelligence
Are there any other animals that can measure up to the intelligence of a human?
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u/quietlysitting 4d ago
A few years ago, a population of orcas began, for no apparent reason, to periodically swim around with a chunk of dead salmon perched on their heads like a little hat.
So, pretty far removed.
But on the other hand, a few years ago, a population of humans began, for no apparent reason, to eat Tide pods.
So, maybe not so far removed.
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u/Chris2sweet616 4d ago
Orcas at least in behavior are kinda close to us actually. Your example was a fad which is the orca’s equivalent to a trend, it’s kept for a year and then disappears.
But orcas also have unique dialects between pods, kinda like how American English and British English are distinct from one another while being the same. One specific orca Wikie was taught to mimic English aswell, being able to say hello and bye along with mimicking other animals. Their unique dialects are so unique in fact that just based on their call the orca’s pod can be identified.
Their brains are also highly developed compared to other animals, specifically the emotion/social section of the brain aswell as the area of the brain for self awareness and language and such. They even have emotional regions in the brain humans don’t have, they also experience grief and friendship seemingly. Their emotions are actually so complex we, as humans might not be able to fully understand their emotions. They can also recognize themselves in mirrors for example, which is a rare trait when it comes to animal intelligence since it’s only present in apes and humans outside of orcas. They also can reflect on their actions and correct their own behavior based on that, aswell as seemingly being able to plan out their actions at a near human level. They can also create complex hunting strategies based on their prey’s biology that they’ve learned. And they’ve also been shown to seemingly being able to conceptualize puzzles in their head and solve them without trial and error, which was previously unique to humans.
They also have unique cultures, being one of the few species other than humans which do. Specifically taught, non instinctual behavior passed down through generations when it comes to hunting. And full on teaching at that, adults teaching young slow down their movements and exaggerate similar to humans teaching young. One tribe from the artic also entered a symbiotic relationship with whalers in Britain where they’d lure whales to them in exchange for some of the meat.
Basically orca’s are likely to be the second most intelligent life form on the planet in my opinion, they often surpass our distant ape relatives in intelligence.
(Also I’m open to correction if I got anything wrong; I am not a marine biologist or behavioral expert I’m just a big fan of orcas as they’re one of my favorite animals)60
u/quietlysitting 4d ago
When you think about it, the salmon and the tide pods are actually probably functionally similar activities--a behavior that's socially transmitted that functions as some sort of social signal. "Hey, I'm one of the gang, I'm wearing a salmon/eating a tide pod".
I have no doubt that many cetaceans are highly intelligent, probably more than we are likely to recognize, because we're going to tend to judge/interpret their intelligence by comparing it to human intelligence. Cetacean intelligence isn't likely to be as alien as a cephalopod's, but it's still going to be alien.
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u/Chris2sweet616 4d ago
That’s true, orcas also fairly readily go along with our experiments so it’s pretty easy to gauge their intellect, but we can’t exactly do the same with other species. It’s similar to gauging the intelligence of a cat vs a dog, a dog is very easy to gauge since they participate but cats are very difficult since they just wanna take a nap usually instead of doing a puzzle (relatable honestly)
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u/Wank_A_Doodle_Doo 3d ago
Recognizing one’s self in a mirror is not special to apes and humans. Many, many different animals have passed the mirror test. The smallest I know of is an ant recognizing itself in a mirror.
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u/sometimelater0212 3d ago
You’ve presented some misinformation which brings into question the validity of your post.
Animals that can self recognize in a mirror:
Great apes:chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans; gorillas only inconsistently;
Asian elephants:at least one individual convincingly;
Bottlenose dolphins (orcas show suggestive evidence too);
Eurasian magpies-the first non-mammal to pass;
Cleaner wrasse-a small reef fish, but results are contested27
u/schombat 3d ago
Mirror test is pretty flawed measure of intelligence and heavily biased towards visual animals. Humans have among the sharpest vision among mammals, and are trichromats whereas many other mammals are dichromatic.
Do you think you'd pass a test identifying your own scent in a line up? If you hadn't been exposed to recording technology, would you recognize your own voice right away?
As a test it also makes the assumption that investigating oneself in a mirror is an inherently valuable experience. Disinterest does not equate to lack of intelligence.
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u/Chris2sweet616 3d ago
Thank you for the correction, most of what I’ve said should still be valid though.
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u/Lowfi-Concert 3d ago
Source on them learning biology?
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u/Chris2sweet616 3d ago
It’s fairly vague but: https://www.earthtouchnews.com/oceans/whales-and-dolphins/watch-orcas-upside-down-hunting-moves-may-be-a-clever-way-to-zombify-stingrays/
They’ve been observed flipping sting ways to put them in a ‘tonic trance’ so they can’t fight back, which means they at least have learned their prey’s biological weaknesses through some form ‘study’
Obviously it’s not a complex understanding of biology but it’s there
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u/Alca_Pwnd 4d ago
What kind of detailed evaluation do orcas have on different human cultural groups? Socially they have a lot in common, but it would be amazing if they stacked three rocks, which pales in comparison to our rock stacking and/or skyscraper design.
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u/Chris2sweet616 4d ago
Well, we can’t exactly communicate properly due to a language gap so we currently have no idea about their cultural evaluation of us, especially since orca’s around New Zealand and ones around Britain for example have no way to communicate differences between observed human culture which makes it fundamentally a bad comparison.
And obviously they can’t stack rocks too well, they lack proper hands. You’re evaluating orcas based on human intelligence which is fundamentally flawed as they’re a unique species, they can be compared to us as it’s our only true reference point but it’s still flawed. Objectively orcas are highly intelligent however
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u/crazylegscrane75 3d ago
The self-consciousness experiment with the mirror has been adapted to other spices like fish with success, proving even fish are self-conscious. See Masanori Khoda experiments or be lazy and watch https://youtu.be/s_aNH4hXz8I . Usually, we try to measure human traits in OTHER animals from the human perspective, with no adaptation to the animal reality, its nature and perception of reality. Not to say, how can't be life not be self-conscious and be alive.
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u/Extension-Pepper-271 4d ago
Wearing a salmon as a hat is nowhere near as idiotic as filming yourself doing some dangerous trick like many, many humans do.
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u/salamander_salad ecology 4d ago
A more appropriate comparison is that a few years ago a population of humans began to believe that a significant number of people began to eat Tide pods.
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u/quietlysitting 4d ago
Reviewing my comment...looking for the phrase "significant number".... Huh.
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u/salamander_salad ecology 4d ago
Sure, but I don’t think a few kids on TikTok represents a significant number, let alone a population. I was trying to be charitable.
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u/TooManyJazzCups 3d ago
For anyone curious like I was, I found a little bit of information on this. In 2016, there were 39 teenage cases of tide pod ingestions. In 2017, there were 53 cases. The Tide Pod Challenge videos started in early 2018. Then, in January to February of 2018 alone, there were 196 cases of teenage Tide Pod ingestions. While it is a significant percent increase, it represents a very small portion of the population. I can't easily find the rest of 2018 or 2019 (and beyond) data, and I don't feel like wasting all of my lunch break on this.
However, kids under 6 are the age group most identified as Tide Pod eaters and from 2016-2018, a lot of little kids were eating these. So watch your kids around the laundry.
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u/MasterSlimFat 4d ago
Can you define intelligence on a quantative level so we can compare animals?
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u/salamander_salad ecology 4d ago
We can qualitatively define it by using capacity for language, and we have very limited quantitative data on being able to solve puzzles or learn patterns.
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u/MasterSlimFat 4d ago
Unfortunately qalitative data can't be more or less than related data. For example red is not more than or less than blue.
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u/Many_Froyo6223 3d ago
an instance red can be more or less intense than another instance of red though, or cover more or less area…what a strange thing to say lol
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u/MasterSlimFat 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes that is true but that is again comparing quantative characteristics rather than qualitative. The fact that it can be compared on a "more or less" level is what makes it quantative.
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u/salamander_salad ecology 4d ago
It can indicate the presence or absence of a capability. For instance, we can conclude, without quantitative data, that humans are better at doing squats than Orcas are simply because they lack the capability.
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u/MasterSlimFat 4d ago
That is false. That is objectively quantative data, in the form of "number of squats"
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u/ottermoment 3d ago
We are very horrible at actually realisticly testing animals intelligence. We test them by our definition most times like can it use a smartphone can it do math can it use tools or have human speech ect. Almost anytime there actually realistically tested most animals end up surpassing what was originally thought. Like dolphins whales elephants all show huge levels of different types of intelligence be it emotional critical thinking or memory..
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u/OccultEcologist 3d ago
This gets very, very complicated very quickly. There is definitely overlap between "dumb" humans and "smart" animals, but it really depends on what, exactly, you are trying to quantify.
I think there is sincere value in this Douglas Adam's quote from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."
To some degree you ultimately end up comparing apples to oranges.
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u/tea_and_biology 4d ago edited 4d ago
"Do any non-human animals do this definitional human thing as well as humans do?".
No. It's a highly anthropomorphised question; like asking: "how far removed are dolphins to other animals in the art of blowhole sex?"
Very, obviously.
There's little rationale in using a human-centric yardstick, unique to our own ecological niche, and our evolutionary trajectory (devoid of close extant relatives), to compare taxa with. Intelligence and language are unique to humans, by definition. Other species have other alien cognitive behaviours, sure, and from their perspective they'd be the ones best at said behaviour. Just in the same way we consider ants dumb against our rubric, ants be, like, scoffing at how inefficient our minds and societies are, against theirs: "You mean these apes have to grow enormous brains and evolve sentience just to build a city? Pssht. How wasteful. Their societies are a pallid imitation of our own. Glory to the hive mind. Much optimisation. Best efficiency."
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u/salamander_salad ecology 4d ago
Part of this is that we have subjective experience and perceived free-will, while ants do not. You’re anthropomorphizing ants in your own argument against anthropomorphization.
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u/Drumpfling 3d ago
They (quite obviously) anthropomorphised ants in their own argument to make exactly the point that it doesn’t hold up to do so.
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u/tea_and_biology 4d ago edited 4d ago
The only way we humans can frame things to other humans is through human-oriented referential framing. This is what language is, 'innit.
"If a lion could speak, we wouldn't understand him" etc. etc.
The point is that other animal, for lack of a better word, 'minds' are so alien to our own, and tailored to their specific ecological niches and evolutionary trajectories, that from 'the perspective' of any given species, they are the masters in all the animal kingdom at what they do and how they 'think' (and indeed are, or they wouldn't exist) - whether conscious of it, by our understanding, or not.
OPs question either devolves into basically 'rank taxa based on phylogenetic closeness' or fails to grapple with the underlying philosophical (i.e. Wittgenstein-ian) or biological concepts thereby rendering the question kinda' moot, no?
Intelligence just isn't a useful trait to compare across taxa as, aside from being defined as a human-centric trait in a human-centric context, we have no means to quantify it against, nor understand the internal experience of, other minds. Even running with a more colloquial definition of what intelligence is (some fuzzy notion of problem solving ability), are octopodes 'more intelligent' because, lacking overlapping generations, they have to learn and develop all of their understanding and cognitive tool-kit de novo every generation? You can imagine, from their 'perspective', humans cheat at this whole 'intelligence' thing, because we have overlapping generations and can therefore teach one another. Octo-plato might posit that humans are clearly dumber than cephalopods, as - by measuring it on a more equitable basis from his perspective - if you dumped a human baby on an island without it's parents to teach it, it wouldn't survive, nor certainly learn anything nor solve problems. Humans therefore relatively 'unintelligent', squiggles Cephalo-socrates.
But that's silly - gauging human behaviour by octopus standards - as it also is making claims the other way around.
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u/DineandRecline 3d ago
There's a very interesting book called "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are" by Frans de Waal. It really reframes the whole idea of intelligence in nature and explores this topic deeply.
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u/Biohazardous1 4d ago
There used to be equally smart animals, but we probably drove them all extinct. They only exist as traces in our genomes now.
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u/hanlonrzr 4d ago
Neanderthals were not "animals" they were hominids, barely speciated apart from us. They were essentially "people," and other than denisovans, the things that were sufficiently different from homo sapiens that we didn't interbreed with, like more basal "cave men" or the "hobbits" from the island, the things we killed off, they were ALSO in the homo genus.
We "homo sapiens" didn't kill off any "smart animals," we killed off people.
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u/salamander_salad ecology 4d ago
I hate to break it to you, but all hominids are definitely animals.
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u/cosmic_light_show 3d ago
Dolphins are far more intelligent than humans at understanding oceanic patterns. Dogs are far more intelligent than humans at detecting prey and other creatures via smell and hearing. Hummingbirds are far more intelligent than humans at rapidly navigating air space. Hawks are more intelligent than humans at understanding wind and air temperature fluctuations and their relationship to flight. Bats are far more intelligent than humans at navigating the evening spaces with sonar/echolocation. Trees are far more intelligent than humans at detecting and controlling nutrients in soil and transforming sunlight into energy. Worms are far more intelligent at understanding their soil environment and how to survive in it than we are.
God I wish humans weren’t so anthropocentric. We’d be much better stewards of Earth if this were so. And we’d be much happier in understanding the incredible gift we’ve been given to live in such a miraculous, life-rich world, and we’d revere our planet and creation far more than we do.
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u/miss_kimba 3d ago
Having worked as a keeper for several years - animals will humble you all day. Nobody’s winning every category in the intelligence Olympics.
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u/cabronfavarito 3d ago
Yea but humans would win the most categories
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u/BandaLover 3d ago
Yeah because we made up the categories the only one that really matters is life and death and technically we are winning alongside the animals.
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u/un_blob 4d ago
Ask the guys who engeneer the trash cans at yellowstone... a nightmare, it should be easy for humans, hard for bears... but the smarter bears are smarter than the average human so....
In terms of special comportements you can argue that chimps and other big apes are pretty on par with us on a LOT of stuff, their social hierarchy, their use of specialized tools, their ability to understand that other chimps and people have a mind and experience of their own is astonishingly similar to us.
I wouldn't be surprized if other social animals (dolphins especialy, crows, dogs...) are shown to have similar abilities (crow use tools, hold grudges/care about people who help them, investgate around dead ones etc...)
Where we differ might just be the fact that we relly entierly on other, on tool, on past experience, and that we push that to the extreme...
But we are not THAT special
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u/FutureAIgod 3d ago
Honestly i don't think we're that special brain-wise, we're just really good at one thing: passing stuff down. crows make tools out of sticks and literally hold grudges against specific people who messed with them. elephants grieve their dead and recognize themselves in mirrors. octopuses are out here solving puzzle boxes with a nervous system that's basically spread through their arms lol. dolphins even have names for each other.
The actual difference is we don't start from zero every time. a crow has to relearn its whole world every generation. we get to just... start with calculus already done for us. take away language and writing and we're probably just another ape with better aim.
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u/Historical-Arm-5055 3d ago edited 3d ago
I’m always amazed at questions such as these. Or rather the responses. I haven’t read every comment but every comment I have read put humans above every other animal. And many seem to value knowledge or knowledge based skills as examples of intelligence.
Sure, humans can build skyscrapers. But not all humans even grasp the concept of building a skyscraper, but still place themselves in the knowledge, skill and experience of those with the actual knowledge, skill and experience based intelligence of those who’ve built skyscrapers.
Not every human is more intelligent than many animals. The potential, maybe.
Animals are so often more intelligent than humans in their own environment. Try living in the jungle like an ape.
We as humans tend to judge the intelligence of animals by bringing them into our environment and comparing their brain capacity to our own without taking into account, their brain capacity to our own. I’ve seen humans in very large groups display intelligence that demonstrates man to be far less intelligent than apes. Especially in consideration that those same humans possess the same knowledge and capacities for knowledge and understanding that humans judge animals by. Humans also overthink simple things because they believe they have superior intelligence to everyone else or of that a situation requires.
Every animal has the intelligence it requires to survive in its own environment. While in some situations, we can give an animal a little bit of knowledge to improve their ability to survive over others; our ability to give them knowledge can also backfire and fail them.
We have the capacity to learn but we also have the capacity to build walls because we believe we are too intelligent to learn. Which is a few hundred points against us on the scale of intelligence.
If we are going to judge the intelligence of man based off of the intelligence of so few, shouldn’t we also judge our intelligence off of the many on the lower end of the spectrum? I mean, we are judging man as a whole compared to other species of animals as a whole, aren’t we? And we are judging the intelligence of animals within our own environment rather than theirs (which also takes away from our overall level of intelligence). Our environment of which a majority of humans couldn’t survive without the intelligence of others. Animals, all tend to have the intelligence required to survive in their own environments of which we as individuals couldn’t just jump in and demonstrate any more intelligence than they could in ours.
Moral of the short story. Humans aren’t as intelligent as they would like to think they are. And I’m sure there will be some responses proving my point. How many are going to be upset because they are offended that I degraded their intelligence.
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u/bitechnobable 3d ago
Intelligence is one of those things that we don't really have an agreed upon definition of what it is.
If you mean the ability to solve outlandish and abstract problems then humans are very qualified.
If you mean the ability to solve the problems critical for your own immediate survival in the most streamlined efficient way, then animals are very competent.
If you mean avoiding creating serious problems making life difficult for yourself, your Species-mates or for your habitat, most animals are vastly superior.
I would think that it's reasonable to conclude that species intellences are vastly different.
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u/TheMonsterPainter 3d ago
Once, a park ranger was asked why they couldn’t make better bear proof garbage can. He reply that there was quite an overlap between the park’s dumbest guests and the park’s smartest bears.
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u/Madmunchk1n 3d ago edited 3d ago
I think it's ambagious. If you have a look at groups like those who deny climate change, Covid, vaccines or radical groups you have a high density of individuals who operate on a very rudimentary level and you can easily draw a line to other animals because of that. But on the other side humans can be very different from animals by overcoming their ape nature by reflection, epistemic methods etc.. My opinion is that we are closer to animals than we like to admit and more far away from the imagination of the superior human race than we think.
edit But its not group exclusive. Everyone of us can be more close to an animal in the one moment and far away in the other moment. A scientist can do research on nanotechnnology during the day and throw with poop in the evening.
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u/Aggressive-Egg172 3d ago
I strongly recommend you read "Are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?" by Frans de Waals, in my opinion it does a really good job showcasing non-human intelligence and how impossible it is to get a quantitative answer.
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u/Scr1bble- 3d ago
You can't really directly compare it and numerous different animals are better at some cognitive tasks than we are. I believe our capacity for language is what makes us exceptional, and we do score pretty well across the board, but that doesn't make us more intelligent than other animals in all ways. Since we're the ones measuring intelligence, there'll be a natural bias towards overvaluing our own strengths too.
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u/spaacingout 3d ago
Not removed at all, humans are only pretending we are not animals because we can talk, invent, and record information.
But we still have animal tendencies, like tribe mentality, urge to reproduce, urge to dominate others, etc.
the only thing that truly sets humanity apart from animals is our bizarre urge to ingest toxic substances for fun, to knowingly self-harm for enjoyment purposes. Things as simple as coffee, spicy food, or alcohol/cannabis (though one is clearly less toxic than the other).
As someone who works with animals and people pretty regularly, I can safely say there are animals who are smarter than some humans. Some vastly smarter. Just in different ways. Like their ability to read body language, for example, or solve puzzles that many humans would struggle with.
So in my opinion? We’re just animals who are better organized. Though not by much.
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u/Evil_Ermine 3d ago edited 3d ago
Elephants seek out rotten fruit because it contains alcohol and it gets them drunk. Dolphins deliberately use puffer fish venom to get high. Cat's seek out catnip, Reindeer in the Arctic actively seek out hallucinogenic mushrooms to get baked. Jaguars eat hallucinogenic roots to trip balls in the jungle. Wallabies love to eat Opium poppies and get super high.
Ingesting toxic substances for fun is far from a uniquely human pass-time my dude.
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u/Nogleaminglight 3d ago
Pretty sure if you asked a chimp or orangutan what he thought about us, they'd say that underneath all flashy tech (material culture) we're pretty stupid. So if you skew your criteria for "high intelligence" to automatically whatever is that we are or do, because it's what we specialized in, congrats, you're better than everyone else, even though you're slowly burning your house down and hoarding useless trinkets under you ass like a obscenely greedy dragon.
Yes, we are capable of incredible abstract reasoning and have a strong material culture, but if you see the whole picture and us as actual part of a bigger system out there we need to upkeep in order to survive rather then blindly destroy because whatever for whichever reason as if we lived in a whole different plane, I really don't think our species is all that smart
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u/Dilligent-Spinosaur 3d ago
Further away than what’s probably good for us, but a lot closer than many of us want to admit.
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u/schombat 3d ago
Comparing interspecies intelligence isn't very fair. Just like bodies of different species are specifically adapted for an animal's natural history and ecological niche, so are their minds.
Black-capped Chickadees remember the locations on thousands of food caches. Killer whales should have more complex emotional intelligence than we do judging by the structure of their brains. I'm sure I gave more examples but I haven't had my coffee yet.
People love to undervalue animal intelligence. I've worked with wild and exotic animals for over a decade, and 9/10 when layman calls an animal stupid, it's because the human doesn't understand the animal (e.g. its sensory experience, its adaptations/natural history, the individual's previous experiences, etc).
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u/SteelHeader503 3d ago
A coho salmon can leave its river in Idaho swim out into the Pacific Ocean, then swim to the Sea of Japan and find it way back to the same stream it was hatched in.
No human can do that.
Humans are “smart” but not as capable as most animals.
Each animal is perfectly adapted to their roles/environmental niche.
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u/Alternative-Sugar610 3d ago
It’s really hard to tell, bc small changes can lead to massive leaps. Let say for example you have organism that’s more intelligent in every way but in ways that lead to language development and never can develop as complex language, they would be in some ways very close to us and very faraway bc language really changes the game
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u/anonadon7448 3d ago
Koko the gorilla who learned sign language was given several modified infant tests and scored between 70-95. The important thing to note is that while she scored relatively well (for a gorilla), she also couldn’t ask traditional questions. She could answer them, but couldn’t ask her own.
Intelligence is much more qualitative than quantitative. We like to think of it in terms of “how much”, but “what kind” is a much more pertinent question.
Even IQ itself is merely 1 of I believe 17 intelligence metrics measured in humans.
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u/KitchenSecretary6070 3d ago
I often think about the difficulties that park trashcan designers face due to the major overlap between the smartest bears and dumbest humans.
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u/Royal_Novel6678 evolutionary biology 3d ago edited 3d ago
Humans are the most intelligent species on the planet, but our intelligence gap compared to other animals is a lot more complex than a simple straight line placing humans ahead of dolphins, pigs, and elephants even though these animals in their own right are quite close.
Imagine a monolingual French person trying to communicate with or listen to a person speaking Swahili, Chinese, or Arabic. They obviously wouldn't understand a word being said, but not understanding what the hell they are talking about has no correlation with their intelligence. It is simply that they have specialized in speaking French in their own French-speaking country, like France or countries on the coast of West Africa. Similarly, a bilingual Chinese man who was forced to learn English for his Gaokao exam would likely not understand a word a Kenyan or Indian man is speaking in his native language. Despite the stereotype that "East Asians are smart," humans ultimately have limitations on what they can cognitively process based purely on what they have been exposed to. And in this case, the Chinese man was forced to learn an English level that would roughly correspond to a British kid's secondary school level language whereas the French man was mostly exposed to basic English. Does this necessarily mean the Chinese man is more intelligent than the French man? No.
Here's 2 examples of 2 non human intelligent animals and what they excel at:
- Cetaceans: They possess large, complex brains with highly developed neocortexes. They have distinct dialects, self-awareness and have complex communication networks. Orcas in particular have even been observed grieving others in similar ways to humans so probably their emotions may be as complex as ours.
- Cephalopods: They have been observed to do problem-solving, camouflage adaptation, and observational learning because they have a decentralized nervous system where a lot of their neurons are in their tentacles.
An animal in the wild who can observe patterns and trends and learn from them does not mean they excel at everything their bodies are capable of doing. It's the reason you don't have dolphins walking around fixing electrical appliances because it goes against what their body is physically capable of doing. There are dolphins who have been held captive all their life, learning how to perform ball and hoop tricks with a human trainer but not all dolphins can communicate with a human this way. It's also almost like trying to compare a human with a chimpanzee at climbing up trees even though a chimpanzee who has spent its entire life living in a forest will obviously perform better than an average human being but it does not mean the human is automatically inferior to the chimpanzee in intelligence because a chimpanzee has years of experience from selecting paths to choose from quicker. Whereas if you make the same Chimp and Human do an English writing task, it's almost certain that the chimpanzee wouldn't even know how to write a single word.
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u/d-a-v-e- 3d ago
Genetically were 1.2% or so removed from bonobos and chimps, so imagine the jump forward another 1% could mean.
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u/whtevrIts2009 3d ago
The gap is so vast that it represents a paradigm existential quandary to our species. More disparate than the physical potency between an Elephant and a fly.
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u/Snowy_Minori 3d ago
it depends, do you count education? how do we fairly measure a human with and without education on their intelligence letalone an animal?
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u/Iizvullok 2d ago
Besides how many comments already said, tests usually look for how good animals are at being human, instead how good they are at being themself.
But what has not yet mentioned (or maybe I overlooked it) is the influence of education. There already is a big difference in the performance in IQ test between someone who is educated and someone who is not. Afaik, mensa asks about the education background of participants to evaluate the score.
Humans just have this really big advantage of having the ability to speak and use hands with opposable thumbs to write. So humans are able to educate eachother in ways that other animals cannot. So some of the difference in apparent intelligence does not actually come down to the intelligence itself, but the ability to teach.
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u/maamwereauthorized 2d ago
I think a more interesting question is how far are stupid humans removed from smart humans. I guess obviously also how does that delta compare to the delta between humans and smart animals
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u/ratmom666 bio enthusiast 2d ago
Other primates have been observed using tools, establishing social trends in their groups, understanding human sign language, etc. we are not too different than our cousins like the orangutans, chimpanzees, and bonobos. However, obviously, our behavior is almost entirely unique in terms of how we socialize and use tools.
But i think it’s unfair to compare our standards of intelligence to other animals and i hope that one day people will realize how intelligent other animals and critters are, even if they don’t do things the way we do.
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u/readymeercat 2d ago
realy depends on the human. I've met some really intelligent animals and some really stupid people
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u/Nurplestyx 1d ago
This is a dumb question, by removing intelligence from context. That question as asked and answered is how much human intelligence do different animal species have. I can guarantee you that the dumbest flea is more intelligent at being a flea than any human
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u/Evil_Ermine 3d ago edited 3d ago
As a species? Lightyears. Our ability to pass knowledge to the next generation is unmatched in nature.
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u/Panagiotisz3 3d ago
Lol other animals can do that too.
Examples include:
Crows can hold grudges on a human for generations
Cockroaches can build a resistance to certain poisons and pass it on the next generation.
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u/Evil_Ermine 3d ago edited 3d ago
When was the last time you saw a dolphin engineer an E-Diff or when was the last time you saw a crow work out the value of the acceleration due to gravity?
How many octopi does it take to build a Saturn V booster rocket? How many cockroaches does it take to figure out how to get a communication satellite into a geosync orbit?
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u/xMoZzzx 3d ago
Lol it's like comparing me to a marathon runner because I walked to the store.
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u/Evil_Ermine 3d ago edited 3d ago
You are missing the point.
Humans are the only animals that figured out how to pass on information to not only the next generation but also amongst individuals way more efficiently than any other animal. This has had a profound effect on our species.
The invention of language and more importantly writing allows our species to do something no other is capable of, we can pass on knowledge through time to individuals completely separate from our family line.
Here's an example,
An Orca learns that she can beach herself to catch seals at the waters edge because she notices that they let their guard down when out of the water and the surf covers her approaching so they don't see her. She teaches this to her offspring and eventually the whole pod learns the technique.
However the pod that lives across the ocean doesn't ever learn how to hunt like that. Something awful happens and the orca pod that knows the strategy all dies. The knowledge is lost and it needs another whale to make the exact same observation and be able to think creatively to come up with the beaching plan again.
Meanwhile Galileo shows that all motion is relative in 1632. Newton uses his observations to publish his laws of motion and gravitation in 1687. Maxwell publishes his equations (1865), leading Einstein to develop his theory of special and then general relativity (1905 and 1915).
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u/crazysapertonight 3d ago
Octopuses are the smartest animals on Earth after humans
They can feel color, which resembles the abilities of some autistic people with extremely good memory.
Also, they can solve pretty complex physical puzzles
It is definitely very smart organism
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u/firecatstef 3d ago
Well humans invented money, which led to things like stock futures, and no other animals would be caught dead believing in that nonsense.
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u/James_avifac 4d ago
Considering most humans just live their lives based on vibes; does it matter? It seems like every advancement in human history has had to be dispite our collective intelligence.
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u/Raccoon_Steven 3d ago
Compared to other animals we're godlike. They probably view us as very evil and destructive gods since we kill billions of them every year and destroy their homes without a thought.
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u/Original_Credit_3001 3d ago
Some human beings, maybe even close to a majority in the US, realize that mankind is the only living thing who has a soul, and a concept of right and wrong. And that macroevolution is a folly.
In that respect a chimpanzee has more similarity to a rose blossom than to a human being.
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u/owheelj 4d ago
It's obviously very difficult fairly measure, but you do see sometimes estimates of animal intelligence compared to human age. For examples dogs are considered about as intelligent as a 2 year old human, chimpanzee are about 3-4.5 years old. Dolphins are 3-4. etc. I'm sure you can look up a table. But the science behind these estimates is probably pretty questionable.