Let me elaborate, how likely is that there’s an animal on earth that’s smarter than us? By smarter, I understand intelligence is a nuanced topic unique to different animals, so for the sake of argument, let’s talk about, mathematics, critical thinking about where and how to apply those mathematical concepts, and creativity in any form.
Intelligence is nuanced so let’s test everyone on mathematics
It’s like testing if a fish is faster at climbing tree than a monkey.
Almost all the animals I’ve seen 1thing or other that they can do which is impossible for me.
Bees and birds navigating. Even with GPS I sometimes get lost.
Dogs being able to identity people. Sometimes I’m like have seen this person before whose talking to me
Birds creating intricate nests, etc
This doesn’t mean I’m dumber than these animals I can write code these animals won’t even be able to dream about. This just means every species specialized in something for the sake of survival of the shittiest.
Mathematics is a terrible baseline for intelligence since it has so many prerequisites for it to exist at the most basic level.
We very often misunderstand the reason of our success as a species to be exclusively because of our unique intelligence alone, when it’s really the special combination we have that has allowed that intelligence to be useful.
Being really good at communicating and creating languages for example, being a land based species, having fingers that we can use with a lot of ease into creating tools, being worse predators physically which gives a material reason for us to create those tools initially, intelligence alone would be a small thing without them.
As others have said, scientists believe that several species are even more intelligent than humans, but maybe they never needed our way of life and natural selection never led them to it because they were just fine as they were.
The likelihood of that is a statistical zero.
Intelligent civilisations leave traces. We’ve found none that would indicate another species that would have the potential of rivaling us
Bowerbirds build elaborate color-coordinated displays to attract mates. How the female bird chooses the bower (and mate) is still unclear - it is not simple number or color or shape. So, in our human understanding, bowerbirds have a concept of “art”.
AFAIK some scientists have argued that some porpoises (dolphins, orcas, etc) are more intelligent than us period. They’re just severely limited in what technology they can develop because of their bodies and where they live.
So you’re saying if dolphins develop fingers/a thumb on their prehensile penis, we’re hosed?
If he’s not, then I will.
Sounds like a skill issue to me
I mean sure, but that’s irrelevant to the discussion of intelligence and cognitive faculties.
A paralytic also can’t build anything, does it make Steven Hawking less intelligent than the average redneck?
All animals are smarter than humans in multiple ways.
A cat is better at catching a rat than a human.
A fish is better at swimming.
A bear is better at catching salmon.
As my professor always likes to point out.
A cat is really good at being a cat. A human is really good at being a human.
Just because dolphins don’t want to do capitalism or build bombs doesn’t mean they aren’t as smart as us.
Just because racoons don’t have complex vocal language doesn’t mean they don’t have have complex language.
We can’t evaluate animals based on human abilities.
Most of those do not fit “smarter” by my understanding of the word. Someone that can run or swim faster than me is not smarter than me. Someone more skilled in shooting a gun is not smarter, either. Most of these abilities are separate from intelligence
Not really, it requires intelligence to calculate the trajectory of a bullet, or angle to move to cut off a fleeing animal, etc. The op is just describing situations where animals use their intelligence for things humans generally don’t do, therefore are more intelligent in those areas.
Specialisation vs generalisation, a perigrin falcon does one thing amazingly, where humans have a wider range of skills.
all of them.
Chimpanzees are considerably better than us at short-term memory.
I have to wonder if whales or dolphins can do math. They have the curiosity required and some of the largest brains around.
If bees can do math surely so can dolphins
“intelligence is a nuanced topic” Understatement champion. Applying your examples “in any form” still doesn’t really work since those examples are built on communicating the steps as well as the result. If an animal can intuit precision without showing the work, do we still give credit for intelligence? Jumping spiders, for example, have an extremely developed intuition for parabolic trajectories, but I’d bet real money there’s no neural structure in their brains that looks like y^2 = 4ax.
And yet every professional physicist will tell you that physics IS math, and that if you don’t understand the math, you can’t understand physics, and shouldn’t try.
As a physicist, physics is not math. Math is a tool you can use to do physics, but you can absolutely do physics without it. In fact, qualitative physics is the best kind.
Physics is a mathematical model with the most proven utility to humans.
If you have a model more applicable to a situation, youre free to use it, but its pretty unlikely to be as broadly applicable as modern mathematical physics (A thousand times so when considering computers).
But yeah the study of physics is 100% math (And its not 100% a perfect model of reality! Thats why we study it).
Yeah I did expect my language wasn’t precise enough, so to be more clear, animal that can excel at maths or creativity in a similar way humans do.
All sorts of animals have superior application-specific circuitry. Like bearded vultures that, while in flight, can drop bones precisely onto rocks to break them open and get at the marrow. But they lack the general-purpose processing power needed to abstract such skills into mathematical representations. Same abstraction likely needed to apply one skill creatively to other uses or apply logic to analyze something.
I’m no neuroscientist/biologist, but I could see an ideal scenario and measurement setup where dolphins and orcas maybe rival our general-purpose intelligence. But whatever it is, it still isn’t enough for them to build any recognizable society yet.
There may be some mental tasks that other animals can probably do better than humans. However, if you’re talking about complex topics like mathematics, I would bet on modern humans being better given that being good at math is far more likely to be an evolutionary advantage to humans over other animals.
I think humans are not really more intelligent than most beings; we have a unique ability to manipulate physical things, but most animals are not crazy enough to follow and do that because our species pays a very high price for that in happiness.
It’s that sacrifice we all individually made to be like most other humans, as babies, that make us think our way is superior and look down on other animals.
