- cross-posted to:
- biodiversity@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- biodiversity@mander.xyz
Humans tend to put our own intelligence on a pedestal. Our brains can do math, employ logic, explore abstractions and think critically. But we can’t claim a monopoly on thought. Among a variety of nonhuman species known to display intelligent behavior, birds have been shown time and again to have advanced cognitive abilities. Ravens plan for the future, crows count and use tools, cockatoos open and pillage booby-trapped garbage cans, and chickadees keep track of tens of thousands of seeds cached across a landscape. Notably, birds achieve such feats with brains that look completely different from ours: They’re smaller and lack the highly organized structures that scientists associate with mammalian intelligence.
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The premise of most of these type of arguments is that intelligence is something we can measure. Meanwhile, nobody knows what’s going on inside their own brains, never mind other species.
Until very recently we just assumed that animals don’t have a complex inner life because it doesn’t superficially resemblance our own. It’s also convenient to make that assumption if you’re going to industrially farm those animals or destroy their habitats, etc.
Our domestic animals are some of the most intelligent creatures on this planet. Pigs? Smarter than a second-grader. Cows? Cows understand what’s going on, they are not dumb lumps of meat. (But chickens … chickens really are stupid.) They also all taste good. I try to finish my meal out of respect for the creature that died for it.
Amen brother
Yes, this is cool, but imagine if you will the octopus, evolving intelligence from inside phylum mollusca, whose common ancestor with us (and all chordates) is an ancient worm.
Their brains might as well be alien compared to chordate intelligence.
It’s super interesting that they’re not social animals either. So much of our brainpower goes towards complex social bonds and effective cooperation, whereas octopuses generally just do not care about that stuff
But that’s also what holds them back, because without socialization, they can’t accrue and pass on knowledge through communities or down generations. They’re incredibly intelligent, perhaps rivaling our own; but they’re perpetually stuck in the Neolithic Era, because each has to learn tool use from scratch.
Plus they live very short lives, giving less opportunity for the accumulation of a lot of knowledge.
Their reproduction strategy and life cycles also basically don’t allow for generational interaction: most octopuses reproduce only once, produce tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of offspring, and die shortly after reproduction. Then the young paralarvae drift as plankton until they grow large enough to settle wherever on the sea floor they happen to be.
To be fair, neither do most Lemmyngs.
Yes, it’s at least 3 times, that intelligence evolved.
“at least twice” says the jokers who have picked an arbitrary human concept of “intelligence” to try to measure.
That’s not science because they don’t have any reasonable or reliable definition of the constraints of what they’re claiming to measure (“intelligence”).
It’s intellectual supremacist bullshit. They always shift the goal posts away from the term intelligence - for the same reason IQ tests measure a relativistic “quotient” of score (relative to others tested) rather than being able to measure anything going by “intelligence”.
“Intelligence” is essentially just a brand they slap on research because they all think they’ve got it in spades.
That is a really dumb response to an article whose whole point was to argue that we have been thinking too narrowly about intelligence.
Whatever you want to call the set of traits that makes humans so good at manipulating the world, surely that set is still an interesting and worthwhile thing to study? It does frame every experience any of us ever has, after all. It seems notable to me that the birds that are amongst our closest peers in that specific set of traits seem to have gotten there by a completely separate path. I’d like to understand how we wound up thinking the way we do, anyway.
Heh. You both make perfect sense. I agree with both of your somewhat opposing viewpoints.
You’re making Lemmy a great place to be.
I am fine with someone arguing that maybe the traits we consider to be a sign of intelligence are defined too narrowly–though in this case it is a really weird take because the article authors would clearly completely agree with this sentiment! I am not so fine with them calling the people they disagree with things like “intellectual supremacists”.
Take it easy. It’s the internet. Hyperbole is a thing.
And what’s the issue with that term? Really. As you say, the article does in fact support this very viewpoint. “Intelligence doesn’t come with an instruction manual. It is hard to define, there are no ideal steps toward it, and it doesn’t have an optimal design”.
That entire comment is specifically being derisive of the article authors, so it is calling them “intellectual supremacists”, rather than agreeing with them.
And that’s ok …
Not really; being as derisive of the authors as that comment was contributed absolutely nothing positive to the conversation.
