Here is a paper on language use in great apes. Compare that with, say, a cichlid from Lake Victoria and ask yourself if humans are that much more intelligent than a chimpanzee. Does the average person’s ability to reason abstractly, to use tools, to learn really exceed that of a chimps? The content of what humans learn, or the complexity of the tools they use is largely irrelevant.
Um… are you trying to equate an ape using a hammer with a human operating a 500,000 dollar machine tool? After all, they are both using tools.
What’s the basis for this assertion?
The phrase “two seconds to midnight” comes to mind. If you compressed the several billion year history of life on earth into a single day, and you went back to the first identifiable human ancestor… you’d only be at 23:59:58. Humans are basically an unproven species. We appear to be sucessful now but how will things look in a few more geological seconds?
Perhaps the reason the other species on earth are only as smart as they need to be is due to the fact that species that are too smart for their own good fizzle out in a a few ten or hundred thousand years? Thus, on a geologic timescale, it’s unlikely the two of these evolutionary dead-ends would be doing their flash-bang act simultaneously.
That is precisely what I meant to do. What difference does it make how much it costs? Chimps can use joysticks and play video games. They can reason abstractly enough to operate buttons and levers in different sequences, in awareness of their separate effects, to produce different results based on what they want to accomplish. The difference that lies between that and the operator of a backhoe, who moves joysticks around to shift piles of dirt, is marginal at best. I imagine that a chimp could be trained to operate a backhoe or a front end loader to move piles of dirt around. It is not the gaping difference that you presuppose in your OP. Compared to the difference between a human and a sponge, it is almost insignificant. The main difference between apes and humans, which isn’t necessarily one of intelligence, is the ability to record knowledge so that the species can advance its technology collectively across generations. You are confusing advances in technology with native intelligence. Read this.
The most intelligent apes (bonobos, orangutans, gorillas) are roughly equivalent to human children in the preoperational stages of intellectual development. The intelligence gap between people and apes is roughly equivalent the difference between an 18-year old and a four year old. It just isn’t that big.
This bears repeating, and I’ve yet to hear Moonlight Drive’s rebuttal. An ecological niche is something you fight tooth and nail for. Some claim that we wiped out the Neanderthals as late as 30,000 years ago, which is, of course, a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms.
Let’s say you took a group of human infants and raised them in the wild. The resulting tribe of humans would be as intelligent as any other humans on the planet but they wouldn’t have the foundation of thousands of years of human technology. If you put these humans up against a tribe of chimpanzees they’d still be more intelligent but you’d probably develop a much better appreciation for the relative distance of the intelligence gap for individuals as opposed to communities. In a situation like that if humans were a 10, the chimps would probably rank as an 8 or 9.
Back to the OP. There were competitors to Homo Sapiens Sapiens - Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis being the main one. Homo Sapiens Sapiens (us) proved superior and so survived. Did we kill them off? Quite probably. Did we interbreed? Quite possibly. Why are there no non-primates of comparable intelligence to us? Maybe we’ll find signs in the Americas, Australia, or Antarctica, but the rest of the world was basically one big lump which allowed mammals to spread freely and thus dominate. The Americas were recently connected to Asia by a land bridge
As for the intelligence of apes, I’ll point out that none of them make use of the most basic of complex tools. You or I could weave a basket and use that to gather berries; you or I could stitch a hide to make clothes. Apes can do neither; Homo was doing this over 100,000 years ago. (Granted we’d do both badly the first time or two).
Perhaps we’re asking the wrong question? We start with the observation that we have no equals, and conclude that if there were, we killed them off, but this begs the question: suppose there were intelligent creatures that developed seperately from us and we killed them off, what would we look for and where would we look for it? South America is a pretty good cognate for Africa, with both jungle and savannah, subject to similar environmental forces, and human invasion was relatively recent.
Well I was wondering, what situation arised for humans to evolve to learn speech and language etc.
funny post, because I dont think the OP realises that he’s actually touching on philosphical ideas rather then scientific ones.
Monkeys can survive, eat, and reproduce, while sustaining their populations with a mere stupid tool. They do not need to evolve.
Humans however, breed faster. We forced ourselves to use agriculturalisation to feed our people, forced ourselves to build cities to house, and all that stuff is included. Standard of living seems to be a driving force in our civilisation.
Which is smarter? There is no answer to that.
But I think your dancing around your own question a bit, hoping for a complex answer. The answer is simple:
We have better brains. Its the only variable as to why a is smarter then b. Why do we have better brains? No one really knows, although ours is noticably more complex then other animals.
I don’t think its an answerable question though.
I think the answer has already been given, and it is that there were what Moonlight Drive would consider 8s and 9s on his scale of intelligence, but they went extinct. We 10s probably had more than a little to do with that.
Moonlight Drive appears to have left the building (forcibly removed from the building actually)
Try changing planes in Abu Dhabi! :eek:
To add to everybody else’s answer, we’ve assimulated with the species that we could relate to and identified the “lesser” species as mere animals and wiped them out. (Heck, we’re still doing that now, which is why so many conservationists are trying to make the intelligence argument.)
Our big brains and what we vaguely call intelligence are just evolutionary adaptations such as lizard tongues or fish gills. While special to us, it is not the goal of evolution to make creatures more intelligent. We are “more intelligent” than other animals because of selection pressures on random mutations, nothing more. I believe this was already said earlier.
One thing that I wouldn’t mind clearing up is…
What made humans develop intelligence?
There are arguments that always say that chimps didn’t need language and writing and etc…
But why did humans need it?
Couldn’t humans have just hunted and gathered without written language and just lived happily?
Was there just a bump from evolution or some mutation that got us writing?
If so, why not didn’t other creatures get that bump also?
Difficult to refute this without getting inside the head of a chimp, but I believe it is our moral sense and critical rationalism (the ability to argue and doubt) that sets us apart.
Darwin on the moral sense: ‘A moral being is one who is capable of comparing his past and future actions and motives, - of approving of some and disapproving of others; and the fact that man is the one being who with certainty can be thus designated makes the greatest of all distinctions between him and the lower animals.’ (The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1868)
And also: ‘The moral faculties are generally esteemed, and with justice, as of higher value than the intellectual powers.’ (op cit)
Part of Karl Popper’s epistemology is an extension of Darwinian evolution, according to which organisms evolve by trial and error, and their erroneous trials, or mutations, are ‘eliminated, as a rule, by the elimination of the organism that is the “carrier” of the error’ (Myth of the Framework p 68). In the case of the highest life form, human beings, Popper believes all this has changed radically through the evolution of a descriptive and argumentative language. Through language, and especially through the printed word, people are able to formulate their theories and to put them forward to be critically discussed. At the same time, humans have the capability to be critical of their own theories, their own ‘tentative trials’ (p 68). Indeed, Popper sees the major purpose of critical rational discussion as being the elimination of our tentative hypotheses without the elimination of ourselves (the carriers). According to Popper, then, the fundamental importance of criticism is that it is ‘the only alternative to violence so far discovered’ (p 69), and thus truly revolutionary stuff.
A big brain is a very energy hungry organ. There are survival disadvantages of having to keep an energy hungry brain as well as the obvious advantages.
Humans did not need to evolve a big brain and intelligence, since evolution could never have seen that it would be an advantage further down the track. And it may even turn out that our big, intelligent brains were not such a good ‘idea’ after all.
I dont know a good theory of why one primate started getting a bigger brain, but once it got going, and the physical structure was there for complex verbal communication, it started running in that direction, perhaps pushed by memetic driving.
Perhaps you could also ask what made toucans develop such big, colourful beaks? Couldnt they just attract mates with a colourful tail, dance or song?
Personally, I suspect that human intelligence is actually a social adaptation, rather than simply one to deal with the physical environment. Other animals are able to deal with predators, finding food, migrating, etc. just fine without the need for such a large brain. Our intelligence and memory enables us to keep track of the many reciprocal relationships among the members of the group - who helped us out in the past, who we owe favors to, and, perhaps most important of all, to tell when other members of the group are lying to us. Increasing human intelligence has been the result of an “arms race” directed at dealing with other humans, not the environment.
That’s an interesting point. I’m outside my area of expertise, but my understanding is that in the last decade or so brain research has suggested quite strongly that the ability to consider the consequences of actions is linked to parts of the brain which (in humans) don’t develop completely until late adolescence. (Which explains rather a lot…)
Assuming that this holds up, it would argue that (setting the issue of “defining intelligence” aside) there are some genuine differences in the way adult humans think, as compared either to non-adult humans or (I am supposing) to other species. Variations in tool use might arguably be merely quantitative differences; but the ability to think ahead, if it’s really something that develops so far into a human life-span as late adolescence, would be rather significant.
Humans are so intelligent because we value what we’re good at and define it as intelligence. And what we’re not good at; isn’t. It’s a self-defined score card, so of course we’re going to score highly.
But if we want to look at a couple of other areas of what might be called intelligence;
-
Ability to differentiate things, people, edibility by smell alone. You have to be pretty ‘smart’ to do this. If we were to ask a dog it’d rate it as a very desirable skill, often a matter of survival and mark of intelligence. Human score: 2/10. Total idiots.
-
Ability to navigate through sight and sense alone. Very desirable, obvious mark of intelligence and a good survival skill. Ask any pigeon and it’d rate it as very important. Human score: 3/10. Clueless.