> Animals are far smarter than you think I know this is, like, a meme in our culture. And I get that it's important for the pendulum to swing back from the 19t

> Animals are far smarter than you think I know this is, like, a meme in our culture. And I get that it's important for the pendulum to swing back from the 19th century idea of animals as dumb brutes. But human beings are way fucking smarter than animals when it comes to general plastic intelligence and problem solving. I'm not disparaging animals here, and I'm certainly not saying that we shouldn't appreciate their many capabilities. But humans can do stuff like set up a tarp to collect condensation and understand the chemistry behind phase changes for how that works. Sure, that's because we were taught by prior humans who incrementally figured that out, but no other animal is even capable of being taught anything anywhere near that level of sophistication.