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.
Every animal is smarter than me in finding food in its ecosystem. As far as math and critical thinking, spiders and their webs come to mind.
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.
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.
I think it’s gorillas or some kind of other primate that is on average better at a specific memory or logic puzzel. I can’t remember it that well though.
Likely. Apes have better spatial recognition. Bees i think too, though different (large area vs. 3D). Also elephants and long-term memory.
I’d say there’s around 50% that either multiple large dolphin species, or more likely, just one dolphin species, being truly smarter than us and that’s the Orca. Orca’s are the only known species known to have more cerebrum neurons than human beings. They just don’t have any fingers, let alone opposable thumbs, and live in the ocean.
There is a possibility however that Orca’s are still less smart than the average human for they could be using much of their brains to manage sleep as they can’t fall asleep like humans do or they’d drown.If we were be able to communicate with them, I would imagine them arguing for humans to turn their society into a more permanent matriarchy instead of the current human feminist ideal, through genetic engineering, specifically making human females a little bit taller, while arguing that the human males are fine in length, but should prefer giant women like a Greg Universe. And for the average desired human female length, seven or eight meters tall should be enough.
Also, chimps are smarter than humans in one key area, which is short-term-memory.
They can easily beat you in a game of memory without fail.Many. Our idea of intelligence is inherently flawed.
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 HiddenLayer is not saying that, then I will.
Bottlenoses, I’ve read somewhere, are as smart as 7-year olds.
Orcas are either the only one or one of the few species of dolphin with a larger amount of cerebrum neurons than us, so they should be smarter.I’m not sure if that counts for the males though, because females are bigger and it’s a matriarchal society.
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?
Chimpanzees are considerably better than us at short-term memory.
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
How do you define intelligence?
“The ability to acquire, understand, and use knowledge.”
Someone having faster reflexes giving them the ability to catch fast moving objects is not a matter of knowledge, but muscle strength and agility.
The same would go for running, or swimming, or catching a fish with giant claws.
When doing things, it’s whether the limiting factor is physical or if it’s information they have or don’t have.
I suppose with running, for example, there will be a lot of knowledge for running technique. But no amount of technique or breathing exercise would make up for lack of muscle.
Most functions are learned. Even by animals.
It sounds like your definition is “learning”.
All animals possess this ability.
Acquisition of learning relies on sensory and motor systems of an animal.
For instance. If I trained a rat to push a lever with its paw. It would learn it much faster than if I trained a rat to peck (like a chicken) with it’s nose at a lever.
Likewise. I could train a pigeon to peck at a lever to push it much faster than training it to use its wing to push a lever.
A rat doesn’t use its nose to peck and a pigeon doesn’t use its wing to grab or push things.
The animal wouldn’t be stupid for not learning to use an appendage in an abnormal way.
There is an enormous amount of research on animal intelligence. Many people are not aware of this.
You might be surprised by what it shows.
When you evaluate animals based on their systems they show remarkable ability to problem solve and learn.
Many animals also learn quickly by watching another animal of the same species do the action. Sometimes requiring only one viewing.
Sounds like human level learning, huh?
The brains and neuro processes for learning are basically identical in vertebrae animals. We all have the same basic structures and the same types of neurons and organization. It’s not surprising we are more similar than different.
People often think animals and humans are much more different than what they really are.
They tend to focus on superficial factors like speech.
Or say animals don’t create art (many do). Dont morn over deaths (many do) . Don’t play (almost all do). Don’t learn (the all do). Don’t feel pain (they all do).Well. I dont know how to speak bird talk either. Does that make me dumber than them ?
Also a neat study on pigeons (who happen to have a pretty small brain ) found they could learn to distinguish painting styles from different artist.
A bird can learn to tell who painted an art piece that they have never seen before based on previous experiences with the same artists works.
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/c12401/
Also even Wikipedia has a decent section on animal intelligence research.
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.
“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.
Unfortunately, by the tightening up the language, the question resembles more and more “Are there animals with human brains?” To which of course we have to say no, so somewhere along the scale before the question turning into that there must be some version that is an interesting question with an interesting answer.
So what kind of answer are you looking for? An intelligence that resembles human problem solving sufficiently that we could somehow use it ourselves? A fungus can solve a maze through branching in a way that we can’t so its solution isn’t useful for a human actually in a maze. But maybe a linear algebraist could apply the technique to families of problems and a solver could be implemented in specialized hardware more efficiently than a Turing machine GPP.
But I don’t think we left any non-human intelligent species around to compete with us, if you’re looking for a conversation. Neanderthal was the last.
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.
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
What if they don’t have hands and live in the ocean?
The question was more intelligent that us in applied mathematics and critical thinking. Dolphins, whales, orcas have all been well studied. And while they are in the top 0.01% of intelligent life on earth. They are on average not smarter than humans. Though I can not speak for the below average humans.
What makes you think that they are not smarter than humans?
We haven’t been able to even communicate with Orca’s, so we can’t tell if they’d perform better on a math quiz.
We do know that they have more neurons in their cerebrum than humans, which would potentially make them smarter.
We know they have language, we know that they can pass on knowledge, we know that they communicate to each other to discuss hunting strategies, we know that they give names to each other, we know that some Orca’s have learned to communicate with other dolphin species, we know that they understand the concept of literally pointing out things, so they’re at least smarter than chimps.What makes you think that they are not smarter than humans?
The past 30 years of studies conducted on them.
All of the things you’ve highlighted, except speaking to dolphins, are things primates also do.
The very specific topic for this post, were applied mathematics and critical thinking. And no, orcas do not show any advanced application of mathematics.
If you know of a study that indicates their understanding and application of mathematics rivals ours. Please link it.
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.
