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Well, you got chickens and then you got corvids - and that's your avian intelligence scale, from 0 to 1. Chickens are the dumbest animal on earth. They're dumb

Well, you got chickens and then you got corvids - and that's your avian intelligence scale, from 0 to 1. Chickens are the dumbest animal on earth. They're dumber than fish. They're dumber than oysters. They're even dumber than people. They only survive because they breed so much and because we breed so many of them to eat them. You are what you eat, we say. We eat so much chicken that we've become dumb like them and an animal that does something that a chicken would never do, on account of the animal not being terminally dumb as the chicken, strikes us as really clever. Hey, look at that clever bird, it learned to eat the toads. Yeah, duh. People used to come up with tricks like that all the time, back in the day, when they had to find their food in the wild. Nowadays the greatest challenge in securing sustenance is in finding which aisle the pasta was moved to every time the supermarket hires a new manager. Intelligence is so overrated. What does it all lead to in the end? We've dominated our environment and now our environment sucks, and btw, it's also dying, with us in it. All those smarts that helped us eat wild animals and poisonous plants, they don't look that smart now, do they? But maybe those birds, those "bin chickens", are really smart. They've learned to live in our world, even after we've covered up everything with concrete and cars. Maybe when we're gone they'll evolve into a better intelligent species than ours, make a better civilisation than ours. One that is not so smart that it can't avoid destroying itself.

hidroto 4y ago
i would put turkeys below chickens. the ones we had could not even find there way out of an open pen.
hilbert42 4y ago
"They're even dumber than people. " Years ago when thinking about this I used to envisage a graph with a log scale that would indicate the intelligence of brightest humans (the Einsteins of this world), the dumbest ones and also all other supposedly sentient animals extending way down to the simplest forms of life. I pictured the graph with humans way out in front at the top but closely grouped together (that is there isn't that much difference between the dumbest and smartest human on an absolute scale). The next most intelligent animal on the scale would be widely separated from humans and a long way down the graph (despite the log scale). In recent years, witnessing some of the things you mention and other antics I've seen, that gap has just about eroded altogether. Now, I no longer have any clear idea where humans should be placed on the graph (I still find it hard to believe how stupid humans can be—and I'm not being elitist about it as I include myself in that category). Right, we need to reevaluate intelligence, IQ tests don't mean much in the grand schema. I suppose the thing that may distinguish us humans from other species is that at least some of us know how stupid we humans are. BTW, I'd still group all humans pretty much together on an absolute scale (if it were ever possible to construct one), we're all pretty much the same. PS: you're right about chickens, they're about as dumb as it gets when intelligence is measured in cognitive terms, but as you infer surviving with humans implies evolutionary intelligence (again what is intelligence?). Nevertheless, the difference in intelligence (in its cognitive sense) between chickens and covids and currawongs are miles apart—a comparison would almost be a non sequitur.

hidroto 4y ago

i would put turkeys below chickens. the ones we had could not even find there way out of an open pen.

hilbert42 4y ago

"They're even dumber than people. " Years ago when thinking about this I used to envisage a graph with a log scale that would indicate the intelligence of brightest humans (the Einsteins of this world), the dumbest ones and also all other supposedly sentient animals extending way down to the simplest forms of life. I pictured the graph with humans way out in front at the top but closely grouped together (that is there isn't that much difference between the dumbest and smartest human on an absolute scale). The next most intelligent animal on the scale would be widely separated from humans and a long way down the graph (despite the log scale). In recent years, witnessing some of the things you mention and other antics I've seen, that gap has just about eroded altogether. Now, I no longer have any clear idea where humans should be placed on the graph (I still find it hard to believe how stupid humans can be—and I'm not being elitist about it as I include myself in that category). Right, we need to reevaluate intelligence, IQ tests don't mean much in the grand schema. I suppose the thing that may distinguish us humans from other species is that at least some of us know how stupid we humans are. BTW, I'd still group all humans pretty much together on an absolute scale (if it were ever possible to construct one), we're all pretty much the same. PS: you're right about chickens, they're about as dumb as it gets when intelligence is measured in cognitive terms, but as you infer surviving with humans implies evolutionary intelligence (again what is intelligence?). Nevertheless, the difference in intelligence (in its cognitive sense) between chickens and covids and currawongs are miles apart—a comparison would almost be a non sequitur.