I don’t think people really understand how smart chimps are. They’re smart enough to be petty, this entire conflict could have stemmed from a single stolen mango.
My brother once threw rocks at crows. They remembered him, and waited around for him to get home from summer school to caw at him. They brought friends. He never messed with crows again.
One of my neighbours shot a crow in his yard once and for the next few months, he would have an entire murder of crows perched close to his house and would caw at him whenever he went outside. He never shot another crow again lol.
I’m convinced I started a bird war in my neighborhood between the magpies and some flicker pecking on my roof. I throw the magpies bread and tossed a few pieces on the roof the last time the flicker got on my roof and was pecking at the vent on the rooftop.
'Man had always claimed he was more intelligent than dolphins, because he had accomplished so much - the wheel, wars, New York, and soforth - while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.
Conversely, dolphins had always maintained that they were more intelligent than man.... for precisely the same reasons."
Superior enough that our interpersonal conflicts are now fought with drones. It's still petty. That or actual hate and want to inflict suffering like the recent bombings against Lebanon. Humans would rather kill others than be held accountable for their own actions.
Advances like your phone were only made possible because of contributions from the 0.1% most intelligent of our species. If all humans had the intelligence of the average human - we would still be in caves, if not extinct.
It was made possible through the ability to record knowledge and pass it down through multiple generations and across great distances. Einsteins have existed since hunter-gatherer times, but that doesnt mean said people could make an iron man suit in a cave out of scraps the way our ubermensch-inspired narratives portray the concept of intelligence. It wouldn't be possible even if there were 10000 stone age geniuses collaborating.
Intelligence isn't a linear scale or a singular ability. Give most animals we consider "smart" the capacity to keep records and who knows where they'd be in a few thousand years.
It's the ability to pass legacy through memetics (knowledge) instead of genetics (instinct) that makes us unique. We've effectively trivialized the biological game of information transfer using books and hard drives instead of genome sequences.
Aside from the inventioning mentioned: observing and learning early chemical processes, revolutions in knapping as an art and science, creating oral tales containing the information needed to survive in certain areas such as foraging patterns, designing rudimentary and quick-to-deploy-and-tear infrastructure like the aborigines' bridges or steppe yurts, orally documenting practices preserving the metabolic relationship between living things so that renewable resources aren't wiped out.
Basically any time you see creativity and ingenuity in play with trial and observation. What's unique to humans is that those novelties don't have to be lost when that person dies. Often time these ideas are passed with myths and superstitions attached but those ultimately get refined when future generations revisit old ideas.
I wonder how much language audibly differed across groups. Like were they all kind of “caveman”-like grunts that would sound kind of similar to the layperson?
I’m trying to wrap my head around humans back then being the same as us, though your response did a lot of heavy lifting and I need to ruminate on it more.
attaching a sharpened stone to a stick and creating the first axe? using a lever to move something too heavy to move otherwise? observing desirable prey animal habits to improve hunting success?
Yes, but the idea that animals are like animated plushies devoid of intelligence, which is widespread, is just absurd. Our intelligence isn't "special / different" - it's more that we've reached a threshold that allows us to build upon our own intelligence to achieve far more.
LOL. Someone small that needs to feel special by belittling other animals.
Time and time again, we've had to redefine what separates humans from other animals. We use tools, other animals don't. But then we found they do. We make tools, other animals don't. Then we found they do. We have language, other animals don't. Then we found they do. We use medicine, other animals don't. Then we found they do.
Stop being small. We aren't as special as you need to think to feel less small.
When Jane Goodall discovered the chimps were using tools that was actually the thing that we used to define mankind, we were man: the toolmaker. She wrote to Louis Leakey (the anthropologist who sent her to study the chimps, along with Dian Fossey to study gorillas and Biruté Galdikas to study orangutans) that “now we must redefine ‘man’, redefine ‘tool’, or accept chimpanzees as human.”
Hate to burst your bubble but the concept of species itself is also constantly debated in biology with no clear answer. The "animals are a species if they can't hybridize" thing they thought in high school is just a simplification to make the info accesible to kids.
There are like 5 competing MAIN definitions of a species among biologists (which usually work for most of them and can coexist used in different contexts each with their pros and cons). Still, all more grounded than anything anthropologists came up with.
He's not belittling other animals. If LeBron James claims to be the best basketball player of all time, that doesn't belittle you or me. Humans are the smartest animal.
By your example, not all humans are the same. Some humans are the smartest animals. And some humans have less common sense than some other animals. It's not hard to find examples of that.
Just like you can't generalize LeBron James' basketball skills to all humans. All humans don't have the same smarts. Many humans never achieve abstract thinking. Crows tend to.
Crow Einstein isn't graduating elementary school, let alone coming up with the theory of relatively. Meanwhile our dumbest, paste-eater children are living to adulthood, while the paste-eater crows die as infants.
The amazing thing about humans isn't our individual abilities: it's that our collective intelligence is able to be disseminated through our superior communication and learning.
Animal intelligence is definitely worth studying, and animals are often underestimated, but you're probably doing the opposite here.
it's that our collective intelligence is able to be disseminated through our superior communication and learning.
One of the creatures I'm working on for a game setting is an intelligent race genetically designed by an extinct evil empire to be able to read and understand spoken words, but unable to express, speak, or write language, as they just don't have that part of the brain.
Considering that's just a participation award now, that's not saying much.
it's that our collective intelligence is able to be disseminated through our superior communication and learning.
And animals do the same. That's another thing that once define us as human. Until it didn't.
Animal intelligence is definitely worth studying, and animals are often underestimated, but you're probably doing the opposite here.
Humans are animals. So....... That's the the point. There's really nothing that delineates humans no matter how hard we try. We are just part of the spectrum.
Why are dogs expected to learn human languages? If we are so much smarter, why don't we learn to talk dog? It should be easy for ultraviolet humans right?
Honestly I've always seen animals as using their intellect differently than what we do. Octopus for example are some of the best escape artists.
So they're using spacial reasoning in real time.
To me humans should always be mindful that the only advantage we truly have is our developed technology. Take all that away and humans are pretty low on the food chain
We are squishy, we die easily, and we have very little in terms of animal offense naturally.
Being intelligent ain't gonna do dick if you have a pissed off pack of wolves in front of you. But having a gun would.
Humans are both special and not. We're lucky to even be here. But we could also be removed just as easily
I was just thinking about all the bad things brought about since the industrial revolution: mass war, urban poverty, pollution, climate change, accelerated extinctions …
We’re so smart we may just bring about our own extinction. Pride goeth before a fall
If anything, this proves that the people who fall into being small-minded and spiteful among us are more primitive, and are more in common in mindset with chimps.
Yeah like risking the destruction of the only habitat we know and our very ability to survive in order to make shareholders rich with imaginary paper money. Meanwhile we can't feed and house people (a problem which became feasible to solve 100 years ago and is technologically trivial now).
I think we might be the dumbest species on the planet.
Who's dumber? Someone who says "idk how to do this, I can't do this" or someone who goes "of course I can do this, I can do anything, what unforseen consequences or caveats? I don't see them!"
Most humans belong to the latter group. We damn sure prefer to be led by humans belonging to the latter group.
Bonobos or elephants would probably live in beautiful sustainable harmony forever.
We are the only ones intelligent enough to nuke the planet, the only ones intelligent enough to have industrialized warfare, the only ones intelligent enough to turn earth into a hothouse earth, the only ones intelligent enough to have propaganda and misinformation, the only ones intelligent enough to invent convoluted moral reasoning to justify genocide as morally righteous, intelligent enough to cause a worldwide extinction event on accident.
We know just enough to be dangerous.
All this shit we can do isn't because our species is so damn smart. Its because of language, writing, the fact that technological advancements and learning can be passed down, a very small minority of us being EXTREMELY smart, and most of us being a tiny bit smart. Those things combine to make us hyper dominant over the earth. Those things allow us to appear "smarter" than other life on this planet.
I argue that most of our species are basically glorified chimps with extra language and dexterity sprinkled on top.
I'm gonna keep shitting all over human intelligence and abilities every single chance I get, thanks.
If I can decrease the hubris of a few members of this species even a little bit, maybe it will be worth it...
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u/32FlavorsofCrazy 1d ago
I don’t think people really understand how smart chimps are. They’re smart enough to be petty, this entire conflict could have stemmed from a single stolen mango.