That article is not wrong. Your quote from the article is highly probable, when evaluated via the likelihood function of our understanding of intelligence in an

That article is not wrong. Your quote from the article is highly probable, when evaluated via the likelihood function of our understanding of intelligence in animals. The article is long and the title phrasing is less than stellar but the essence: humans can plan into the future better than other animals is not at all controversial. The idea that historical knowledge is intertwined in RNA/DNA is not quite wrong but neither is it correct. There are indeed structural biases and priors which make learning things about nature easier (such as scale invariance or compositionality within the signal). Compared to animals however, human children learn slower because we seem to come with fewer such priors. A macaque will reach higher stages of an understanding of object permanence long before a human child. We spend the first few months learning to learn what needs to be learned. Some parts of the brain seem to be experientially independent but others strongly depend on experience, as for example, research into restoring vision has shown. You linked to an article stating that while detecting the faster P waves seconds before is possible in animals, there is no mechanism or consistency in studies looking for the ability to detect earthquakes at longer timescales. This is poor support for the notion that knowledge is intertwined with RNA. To the best of our current knowledge, language is key to human intelligence. When it comes to complex grammars, false belief tracking and the highest stages of understanding of object permanence, humans are unmatched. It's true that animal intelligence is underrated, pigs and chimps do track false beliefs but that is only at a basic level, since they fail to account for more complex deceptions. The ability to engage in counterfactual reasoning is unique in humans but is strongly dependent on a series of situation dependent heuristics or schema codified in language. Deaf individuals suffer similar reasoning and linguistic deficiencies to hearing individuals with damage to eg Broca speech areas. In the delayed match-to-sample task, when deprived of their ability to engage a phonological loop humans are surprisingly not much better than monkeys, apes or dolphins ( < 10 mins) or even bees (seconds). In learning a transitive inference task, humans take hundreds of trials compared to just over a thousand for a pigeon when given the same training regime. But when the relation is represented linguistically, it takes less than 5 trials to learn. Animal intelligence is certainly downplayed and beyond our ability to handle complex grammars, there is no aspect of intelligence unique to humans. But that single alteration has made a world of difference. The actual flaw in the article is that it too easily dismisses language to focus on prediction and inference. But prediction and inference is done throughout the animal kingdom and perhaps even outside of it. The complex sort of counter-factual reasoning unique to us is underpinned by language.