The Cromwell Institute

And yet birds can fly with a mere flap of their hollow-boned wings and roost anywhere they choose [sometimes after migrating thousands of kilometers en masse using nothing but their own intuitive navigation ability]. What need of "advancement" does a bird have?

In case it's not clear, my point is that humans are not "advanced" - they're just different; we're just organisms adapting [and sometimes maladapting] to our surrounds in our own way, just like every other organism. It is a peculiar human conceit to see other organisms as "inferior" and "undeveloped" simply because they cannot make machines or go to other planets and so on.

Besides, aren't our greatest strengths [the ability to create force/labour multiplication devices, organization and co-operation with other humans etc.] simply the methods we've devised/evolved to deal with our inherent weakness and frailty?

camp freddie

Evolution is basicaly the development of tools that help with survival and reproduction. In the case of man, evolution has gone via the route of giving us large brains capable of ever more sophisticated modeling of the universe plus the ability to use advanced language.

In other animals, evolution has gone via the route of adding speed, strength, eyesight, hearing, camoflage, etc. to help the animal survive and reproduce. They are all just as highly evolved as each other, but each animal has gone down a different path.

It has turned out that our path towards brains and language has reached a critical point, where we superceed the slow progress of evolution with the communication of thought and ideas, along with the ability to create and use ever more sophisticated tools which make upo for our deficiencies in other evolved characteristics (who needs a cheetah's legs, when we can now build a car).

To quote Dawkins (Devils Chaplain, p15):

"[...] Stand tall, bipedal ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence; the gift of revulsion against its implications; the gift of foresight - something utterly foreign to the short-term ways of natural selection - and the gift of internalizing the very cosmos"

As far as reason is concerned, we are just a bit better at it than other animals. Reason is not a yes/no characterstic, but a continuum. A deer might have reason that allows it to think, "If you spot a big noisy thing, stand perfectly still and hope it doesn't spot you". This is great against dim-witted predators, but not much use when a farmer's RangeRover comes round the corner at 60 mph! We (and some other animals) simply have better reasoning abilities that add clauses to the deer's reasoning, like, "...unless it's a car, in which case you should get out of the way quickly!".

zerostart

thanks for the responses, very informative

Oolon Colluphid

From this site on chimps:

How can we assess chimp intelligence?

• they make tools and use them to acquire foods, for social displays, etc
• they have sophisticated hunting strategies that require cooperation, and allow animals to achieve influence and rank by sharing meat
• they are highly status conscious and manipulative, capable of deception
• they are analytical and problem-solvers, clearly capable of insight and complex "cognitive performance" in both the wild and in captivity, and particularly adept at analyzing relative relationships
• language experiments have shown that chimps are creative, can learn to use symbols (and teach them to others) and understand aspects of human language including some relational syntax, concepts of number and numerical sequence

Stephen T-B

Anyone who thinks animals don't reason just hasn't observed animals.
If I put dry bread on my lawn, a magpie picks it up, flies with it to the bird bath, soaks it in the water to make it moist, and then eats it. Crows have been observed to drop shellfish which they've picked up from a near-by beach on to a road. When vehicles run over the mollusks and crush them, the birds fly down and pick out the juicy bits.

My son-in--law has a nut feeder for the birds hanging by some string from the gutter on his garage; he saw a grey squirrel climb up on to the roof of the neighbouring garage from which it leapt to the roof of his garage which it crossed, and reaching the gutter, used the string to haul up the feeder.
Faced with a surfeit of nuts, as the squirrel was when it brought the bird nut feeder in my garden to the ground by breaking the line from which it hung (the line was stretched from the house to a tree, and at a height which I’d thought made the feeder safe from squirrel attack) it’ll bury them - and in subsequent days dig them up, having remembered each buried nut’s precise location.
This is an animal with a pretty small brain, so little wonder that larger-brained creatures are capable of far more spectacular examples of reasoning power.

zerostart

Any links to studies?

thanks

anthrosciguy

Another thing to remember in any discussion of how poor our abilities are compared to other animals is that we're generalists who do a lot of things awfully well. True, we don't have the eyesight of an eagle, the speed of a cheetah, the hearing of a dog, and the lifespan of a tortoise. But we also don't have the eyesight of a deer, the endurance of the cheetah, the walking/running speed of the eagle, and the lifespan of a squirrel. On balance, that's not bad, and that's just physical abilities, before we get into thought.

meritocrat

I'd say humans are the only species to show advanced signs of abstract thought (in this instance simply being able to think of concepts beyond simple concrete existence).

Zyphius

Here's an experiment that was done with a crow.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2178920.stm

Zyphius

It's even cooler to watch the video of the experiment!

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/trial7_web.mov