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Humans were effective in their intelligence and rule the world with it, no other animal has shown anything approaching something like that. You judge them by t

• guerrilla 6y ago
  That's not a measure of our intelligence, only our ambition and aggression. The two may not even be correlated.
  • missedthecue 6y ago
    So crows could build a jumbo jet, they're just lazy? It's pretty obvious that animals lack any type of intelligence even close to human ability. It's not even in the same ballpark.
    • guerrilla 6y ago
      See, there's your arrogance again. They may have no interest in doing so or anything leading up to it and desire is not a measure of intelligence.
      • missedthecue 6y ago
        OK, so how about the fact that they haven't figured out how to heal broken bones? Is that my arrogance again, or is it that they would just prefer to flop on the ground until nightfall and then be eaten alive by coyotes?
        • ElFitz 6y ago
          And how are crows supposed to defend wounded fellows from coyotes? Or carry them to safety? How about the fact they can apparently build compound tools from parts? Your example isn't just about brains. It requires both proper bodies and arguably complex social behaviors, which are quite separate from intelligence itself.
          • missedthecue 6y ago
            I don't think this rebuttal holds much water. Humans are capable of doing things that our bodies cannot. We domesticated beasts of burden in order to move heavy objects from one place to another for instance. But consider very basic advancements. Communication for instance is something humans mastered from the outset. We are able to store and pass down information beyond the instinctual for generations, something no other animal has done. Imagine if humans needed to rediscover mathematics every generation! There are plenty of examples I could give that would provide crows with an immediate improvement in the quality of life. I think the reason they have not done these things is because they cannot, rather than because they have chosen not to.
            • ElFitz 6y ago
              > I don't think this rebuttal holds much water. I don't know if it does. But I surely ain't convinced by gp. > Humans are capable of doing things that our bodies cannot. We domesticated beasts of burden in order to move heavy objects from one place to another for instance. I would be curious as to how a crow is supposed to domesticate an ox. Or even a dog. Birds are extremely fragile. As for communication, well, it's both a matter of intelligence and sociability. And they do seem to be able to communicate information "beyond the instinctual" (such as how to identify specific human individuals [1]) As for "can't vs won't", my point isn't that they don't want to. I don't know. I don't know what they can or cannot do. I don't know how their minds work. And I don't know what are the actual prerequisites for our species accomplishment. And that is exactly my point: assuming anything about such radically different creatures, or the actual prerequisites for our species', solely based on our limited experience and insights, is both vain and presumptuous. [1]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2011.0957 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2011.095...
          • glenstein 6y ago
            I agree with missedthecue that this response is kind of ridiculous. We know things about anaesthesia, blood clotting, soft tissue, and our physical actions are informed by an amassed body of knowledge and an ability to reason from that knowledge and apply it with a degree of sophiscation that crows don't apply, even within the domains of things that are easy for them physically to do. This is so ridiculous that I'm wondering if I'm missing the point. Is this sarcasm? Is this playing devil's advocate to prove some kind of point?
        • withinboredom 6y ago
          Can you heal a shattered leg all by yourself with no one around? I guarantee you’ll lay on the ground until nightfall and probably be eaten by coyotes (since you’re a human, they /might/ leave you alone). If you have someone with you, maybe they can carry you. Crows can’t carry other crows. If they wanted to fix the other crow, they’d have to do it where the crow fell. It would still get eaten by coyotes. They can’t protect the downed bird, so it will still be eaten. Ergo, why bother trying to heal the bone?
          • gdy 6y ago
            Why crows haven't invented stretchers to carry fellow crows to safety? Making a stretcher doesn't look more complicated than building a nest.
            • withinboredom 6y ago
              A crow can carry about 1.5 lbs in flight. A crow weighs at most 4.5 lbs. Let's assume a stretcher that can carry a crow by more than one crow to weigh another 1-2 lbs. At most, the total payload would be ~5 lbs which requires at least 4 crows. I don't think that kind of coordination is possible with that kind of turbulence in such close quarters. So why bother?
          • kyuudou 6y ago
            I think what's really at the core of this is whether crows would figure out such advances given sufficient evolutionary pressure to do so. One could reason that crows are smart enough to avoid most situations that would cause broken bones but if something forced them to adapt, would they for example evolve thicker, stronger bones. Or if their common predators disappeared, would that allow them to build more permanent communities where they had the spare time to learn about their environment enough to manipulate it? Humans by and large, especially in less forgiving environments with harsh winters, are helpless without the ability to manipulate their environment seeing as they are hairless apes who without modern medicine could die from an infection from a mere scratch. Basically, it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.
        • guerrilla 6y ago
          Humanity couldn't for 99.61% of its existence either and apes in general couldn't for nearly 100% of their existence. If we were to rely on your criterion, then all humans before a few thousand years ago would be deemed unintelligent, whereas we know they are essentially identical to us.
      • TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Occam's razor suggests that "not capable" is a better explanation than "not interested in", when considering things that are clearly an immediate and strong benefit to a life form.
        • guerrilla 6y ago
          Then you must be fundamentally and essentially "not capable" of masonry since that's a much simpler explanation than your lack of motivation and opportunity.
          • TeMPOraL 6y ago
            I absolutely am capable of masonry, I just don't do it much because I'm also capable of getting (by using money) someone else who's capable and willing to do it for me. Same applies to just about any other thing anyone outsources in their lives, but the end result is the same - the advanced work gets done. Other animals don't demonstrate any of that.
    • sdwa 6y ago
      Crows absolutely could build a jumbo jet, they just have no need to because they can already fly.
      • TeMPOraL 6y ago
        Would they build a submarine then? Or a rocket capable of reaching orbit? More realistically: have they mastered fire? There are caloric efficiency benefits to eating warm/cooked food[0]. Have they mastered writing? There's compound interest in terms of civilization development sitting right there, in the ability to put thoughts into a form that outlives individuals without degrading. -- [0] - At least for humans; IANABiologist, but I'd guess this would be true for other animals too, including birds, and at the very least it would expand the range of foods they can consume.
        • withinboredom 6y ago
          It took us 1000s of years to do that. One might ask, why did we master fire in the first place? Maybe to cook? To stay warm and go north? Do crows need to cook or can they just eat what humans cook? Do they need to stay warm?
    • chance_state 6y ago
      Of course they could, but they can already fly. See? Intelligence.
    • tomtomistaken 6y ago
      Well, humans just started to build jumbo jets in very very recent history. That’s not a very fair benchmark.
      • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        If we remove ourselves from the world and let it sit for another few million years, there might be a dog or elephant or crow society, sure. And while that’s interesting to imagine it also shows that a fair benchmark is indeed simply which species makes it there first.
    • mrlala 6y ago
      >So crows could build a jumbo jet, they're just lazy? How can they physically even come close to building a jet? It seems humans physicality has a LOT to do with our intelligence. Perhaps someone with actual knowledge on this can chime in.. but it seems to me if you have a build similar to ours, you have the opportunity to actually progress and manipulate things to a level where it might a situation where as a species you continue to evolve with more intelligence over time because you are able to actually use it. I don't know how to say that better.. but on the other hand, if we had our same brains but had the bodies where we can hardly manipulate any tools.. don't you think that makes all the difference in the world?
      • missedthecue 6y ago
        The specifics of jumbo jet manufacture really has nothing to do with my point. The point of my comment is that there is a very evident and very clear discrepancy between human intelligence and animal intelligence. It's always fun to watch a clever squirrel find its way into a bird feeder, a cunning fox outsmart a rabbit, or a curious monkey recognize himself in the mirror. These are signs of sentience, sure, but all of those are far cries from what even an immature human is capable of, and this obvious evidence is what leads us to believe we are smarter than them. It's not arrogance in any sense.
        • snazz 6y ago
          Building anything significant requires a relatively high level of dexterity, does it not? Even if crows could figure out how to build and operate tools that would allow them to build significant physical structures and objects, their bodies are not well-suited to doing so.
          • TeMPOraL 6y ago
            It's not about building anything, really. The cornerstones are figuring out a reliable method to store knowledge over generations, and then figuring out mathematics more advanced than counting your food and potential mates. Having that, you have both an abstract framework for developing better understanding of the world (which is a necessity for better control over it, i.e. technology), and a way to implement it as work that spans generations.
    • ElFitz 6y ago
      Perhaps intelligent animals are just too well adapted to their world and don't feel the needs we do. Or perhaps crows only have two claws that also serve as feet and a beak, making it harder to fashion tools? Perhaps living underwater, like octopuses do, makes it quite hard to master fire? Or perhaps measuring intelligence is hard, and focusing only on engineering outcomes is a fallacy. It's also not like most humans would be able to build even a steam engine, let alone a jumbo jet.
    • cassalian 6y ago
      What motivation does a crow have to build a jumbo jet? Furthermore, the vast majority of humans have no idea how to build a jumbo jet, and throughout the vast majority of human history, there were no jets - jumbo or otherwise - does this mean that we only have higher intelligence in today's world, now that we are able to build jumbo jets? For the vast majority of human history, we only had the simplest of tools and if we compared those humans to today, by your standards, these humans do not possess higher intelligence. However, evolution has not progressed nearly as quickly as our ability to work with tools has; as such, the human brain really hasn't changed all that much in even the last 10,000 or even 100,000 years! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligence#Homo_sapiens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligenc... Finally, you have no proof that crows would be incapable of building a jumbo jet, you've simply asserted that they couldn't. To be clear, I'm not arguing that they could, merely conceding that because they haven't done so, does not mean that they are incapable of doing so.
      • missedthecue 6y ago
        Crows have only been around in one form or another for 30 million years give or take, so if they haven't done anything more interesting than adapt to their environment and use basic tools since, I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that the reason is because they are incapable of it, not because they have chosen not to. At the end of the day, it is impossible to prove a negative, so no I can't show you off hand that a crow can't actually conceive of this or that or the other thing
    • nicoburns 6y ago
      I think the point is that we assume that because other animals don't have this kind of engineering ability, we assume that they don't have capabilities like self-awareness or higher-level thought. But we can't see into their minds, so we don't actually have direct evidence of that. What we do see in more intelligent animals such as orcas, orang-utans, elephants, parrots, crows, octopuses, even cats and dogs, etc is sophisticated planning and inventive use of their environment. We also know that early humans were likely anatomically similar to modern humans (and may well have Are there areas where humans are smarter. Almost certainly. But is the difference as great as the outward achievements as judged by human standards would indicate. Almost certainly not. And there may even be aspects of cognition that other animals excel at that we are completely unaware.
      • aeternum 6y ago
        Language seems incredibly important, it may actually be the basis for our ability to build abstract concepts, not to mention share knowledge.
        • nicoburns 6y ago
          Agreed. I wouldn't like to assume that other animals don't have language though. Dolphins/Whales in particular seem pretty likely to have true language that we just can't understand.
    • vharuck 6y ago
      What would you consider the bare minimum act to be judged at human-level intelligence? Remember, for most of the history of our evolutionary ancestors, we were hunter-gatherers that used extremely crude tools. Not really better than crows. Discoveries happened a whole lot slower back then, like the eons between making fire and starting agricultural towns. Given a few millennia, crows may be making their own fires to cook.
      • yamrzou 6y ago
        > What would you consider the bare minimum act to be judged at human-level intelligence? Lex Fridman discussed this topic with Françoit Chollet in his recent podcast episode "Measures of Intelligence" [1]. I highly recommend it. Lengthy but really worth it. [1] https://youtu.be/PUAdj3w3wO4 https://youtu.be/PUAdj3w3wO4
    • titzer 6y ago
      Maybe they are smart enough to realize that jumbo jets would ruin the planet? /s
  • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    Intelligence is one of the strongest predictors for success even among humans.
    • guerrilla 6y ago
      You're begging the question. You've defined what humans do as success. It's not even clear that what we do isn't complete failure (see climate change, nuclear war, etc.) Let's see if our actions keep us alive for some 160 million years.
      • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        So let’s say human behavior is failure, and animals are at least reasonably smart. We’re implying the reason why animals don’t engage in human-like behavior is that they recognize it will lead to things like climate change and nuclear war. Why are they not stopping us from destroying them along with ourselves?
        • guerrilla 6y ago
          No, that's not the claim, only that our "success" is not a good measure of intelligence.
          • read_if_gay_ 6y ago
            If the question is whether animals can be deemed intelligent in the same way we humans are, and you define intelligence to be something other than what made humans successful, then the question becomes kind of moot, doesn't it?
  • hinkley 6y ago
    Possibly inversely correlated. Tribes that expressed humanity to creatures outside of homo sapiens were frequently wiped out by tribes that couldn't even manage to express humanity to other tribes of homo sapiens. The victors sit on a throne of skulls, wondering why they are so lonely. Aggression is a gene that selects for itself. But if it's too successful, then the next time some external selective pressure comes from outside, that 'loneliness' may become an existential threat, wiping out the local gene pool entirely. Just like a virus.
• nicoburns 6y ago
  Tell that to Orcas. They rule the seas.
  • TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Used to. Then humans invented boats and spears.
    • nicoburns 6y ago
      They largely still do. The Oceans are huge, both in terms of surface area and then in terms of depth.
• derg 6y ago
  I don't necessarily completely disagree here, but I'm always thinking of the Douglas Adams quote in Hitchhiker's Guide on this: "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."
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    But this type of reasoning went out the window, as soon as humans started killing dolphins in large numbers (see tuna nets), and the dolphins had no way to defend themselves or otherwise dissuade humans from doing that. This is one of the big lessons in history. The civilizations that use their intelligence to make tools and weapons end up screwing civilizations that "muck about, having a good time".
    • summitsummit 6y ago
      what would be the next trump card above intelligence for survival/evolution/procreation/whatever the "goal" is?
      • armatav 6y ago
        Omnipotence. Or something approaching it.
      • aeternum 6y ago
        I think the ability to 'reprogram' oneself. We are currently more or less stuck with the genetic code we receive at birth. A species which is able to modify their code at will would be incredibly adaptable and would likely surpass us very quickly.
        • novok 6y ago
          hey we might be there in a couple hundred years
• DavidSJ 6y ago
  On the other hand, the best of our inventions and discoveries seem to have been just barely within our grasp, and it took modern Homo sapiens 200 thousand years to reach this level of domination of the planet. A slightly less intelligent species (or perhaps one lacking just the right body type), such as our own ancestors or perhaps our extinct close relatives, might have taken 10 million years instead of 200 thousand, or just never have done it at all.
• spideymans 6y ago
  Would our physical abilities not play a role in our ability to "rule" the world? We're relatively large animals, blessed with arms, finger, thumbs and a remarkable degree of physical dexterity. These physical abilities collectively enable us to physically manipulate the world. Or in other words, if dolphins had arms and thumbs (or generally any physical attributes that allows them to manipulate their environment as humans do), would it crazy to suggest that they could dominate the seas, as humans dominate land?
  • liability 6y ago
    Besides lacking thumbs, dolphins would also have a pretty hard time harnessing fire as a tool. This probably truncates their tech tree severely.
    • spideymans 6y ago
      It would truncate the human tech tree. It's anybody's guess what a Dolphin-based tech tree would look like, given their environmental constraints.
    • outworlder 6y ago
      > Besides lacking thumbs, dolphins would also have a pretty hard time harnessing fire as a tool. I keep reading about this, and I don't see it as a major problem. Sure, it might take a while for them to even grasp the concept of fire. Much like it took us a while to grasp relativity. However, once they know it to be possible, it's an engineering problem. They can build their forges above water. Holding breath to operate them (until they can do it remotely) is inconvenient but they are pretty good at it. There's also a fair bit of construction they could do without even resorting to that. Humans can weld underwater. They could too.
      • NobodyNada 6y ago
        > Holding breath to operate them (until they can do it remotely) is inconvenient but they are pretty good at it. Nitpick: Dolphins breathe air.
• jbotz 6y ago
  We didn't come to rule the world with our intelligence... we came to rule it with fire. Fire, control over it and the ability to make it, is the one thing humans have that no other animal has. We may (or not) be more intelligent, have a more complex capacity for language, etc., but those are differences of degree. Only fire is truly a difference of kind. We are the animal that makes fire. Fire is literally what made us what we are... it is probable that increased availability of food calories from cooking was what allowed us to grow our big and calorically expensive brains. So fire comes before our vaunted intelligence. And then fire made us the most powerful creatures on earth, and enabled what we call civilization and technology and progress, each new stage in our development enabled by ever greater dissipation of energy gradients... mostly through fire. Although we did also harness other energy sources throughout history, such as wind and running water, and lately, nuclear fission, always fire was primary, the real driver of our dominion over the planet, even today. And as it looks, fire will be our end as well, as we use it to release the fossil energy nature stored up over millions of years in mere decades and turn our lovely earth into an inferno.
  • cercatrova 6y ago
    I really do wonder how humans would've adapted had we been aquatic animals. Energy usage via fire is not possible, and it seems other energy usage under water is much harder than simply creating fire, so we could still have the same level of intelligence as now, yet be so far behind technologically than we are now.
    • treeman79 6y ago
      Water is crazy competitive. Octopi ate probably pushing the limits on useful intelligence.
  • groby_b 6y ago
    Except for Australian Hawks, who use wildfire to flush out smaller animals.
    • minitoar 6y ago
• danjac 6y ago
  Maybe the longer term results are different. If the Fermi Paradox is a thing, perhaps our brand of intelligence - the combination of brains and dexterity and environment that let us quickly advance from sophisticated tool building to a global industrial economy - is an evolutionary dead end and species that have gone down this path destroy their ecosystem and themselves along with it inside a few thousand years. Whereas other intelligent species that lack the environment or manual dexterity to even light a fire will keep on going long after we're extinct.
  • Shared404 6y ago
    This reminds me of the discussion a while ago about how efficiency and robustness are at odds. It's the same thing, but on a much grander scale.
  • BjoernKW 6y ago
    The opposite could also be true: Our brand of intelligence - the combination of brains and dexterity and environment that let us quickly advance from sophisticated tool building to a global industrial economy - is precisely the rare Goldilocks combination of features that allows a civilisation to spread throughout the universe. Because that combination is incredibly rare we might very well be the first to be poised to attempt to do so. This is the strong anthropic principle at play, which of course could be taken with a grain of salt. Still, this scenario nicely answers the question "Where is everyone?", too.
• marricks 6y ago
  We definitely have a unique ability to change our world but whether that's an effective "ruling of the world" and "smart" is really debatable. While that may sound be glib "judging them by their results" is really a ridiculous notion. The "results" would be purely framed in human terms "who can solve puzzles" who can "think like we do". A cat doesn't need to think like us to live in their cat world, a worm doesn't need to solve a puzzle to live and thrive. Yet they both have thrived for a long time and existed in a way let them persist with their environment in an equilibrium. It seems pretty reasonable to frame intelligence as thriving within your environment and persisting, and humans have only been around a short time and driven our planet to literal environmental collapse. I'd contend it's equally reasonable to describe humans as some of the least intelligent species.
  • aeternum 6y ago
    I'm not sure this is a fair characterization. Almost all predator animals overhunt if given the chance. The equilibrium is typically due to the predator's inability to catch the remaining prey rather than some intelligent realization by the predator that they ought to stop hunting so much to preserve the ecosystem.
• ummonk 6y ago
  Eh, I'd argue beavers come close, especially when compared with paleolithic humans.
• outworlder 6y ago
  > Humans were effective in their intelligence Well, another thing humans have going for them is hands
• TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  On the other hand, there are more kangaroos in Australia than people... Or if that doesn't tickle you, how about: cockroaches!
• meroes 6y ago
  effective -> selfish seems equally scientific
• MrsPeaches 6y ago
  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.
• quickthrower2 6y ago
  Cockroaches, ants and plankton rule the world, depending on your definition. Or sourdough: https://xkcd.com/2296/ https://xkcd.com/2296/
• everdrive 6y ago
  I think the argument goes both ways. Chimpanzees are (roughly) as intelligent as our toddlers, but we haven't necessarily been treating them as such. That said, if we never mentally developed past being toddlers we might not even have invented speech, let alone civilization. Animals possess intelligence well above what people used to give them credit for, whoever they are still far and away from where people are.
• edgefield0 6y ago
  Hah! Rule the world? Have you read the news lately? If human intelligence is judged by results, we'd score quite poorly. We are well on our way to causing a 6th mass extinction, which may very well include our own demise.
• Upvoter33 6y ago
  if it's "results", the dinosaurs "ruled the world" much longer than people, and likely that record will stand.