Corgan Sow

There's this question which I have yet to get an answer. This is the excuse often used by Judeo religions to justify the existence of God and Man created in His image. Humans, as my candy cranium knows, are the only advanced species I know of. We do not have dolphins having their own Atlantis, colonial ants have recorded history of their kind, and so on and so on. This even bugs that confirmation of evolution. Why since we evolved from the apes, we are much more advanced while other species are so inferior?

Forgive me for being naive, I'm just not enlightened enough.

jdawg2

my (admittedly uneducated) answer:

all of that stuff is a side effect of having these nice brains. Obviously if you measure "advanced" by intelligence, writing, building stuff, etc., then of course we probably come out on top. If we measured "advanced" by the ability to manuever in water, we would lose. If we measured "advanced" by some other factor we might lose.

*shrug* we humans are biased (and lucky, lol). And considering all "advanced stuff" didn't pop out of nowhere...we're constantly building on the knowledge of our ancestors.

Doubting Didymus

First, we have defined intelligence as the sole criteria of greatness. Humans lose in all other stakes. We are not faster, stronger, longer-lived or equipped with better senses.

Second, the differences in our intelligence are only of degree, not kind. So all we can really claim is that we are have developed intelligence to a larger degree than most.

GeoTheo

I totally disagree. Human intelligence is of another kind altogether. Non-human animals have only perceptual intelligence. Humans are capable of conceptual intelligence. Animals are sentient to a degree but are they self aware? I don't think so. Be glad to see some proof if you have it.
Maybe you can start by listing some conceptual thoughts expressed by chimps or dolphins or somthing.

bluefugue

Great apes are capable of communication, tool usage, social organization etc. Heck, there was even recently that crow who showed a remarkable ability to shape a tool for a specific purpose. Whether the difference in intellect between a human and a chimp is qualitative or quantitative does not seem to me to be settled. Our language does seem to be far more advanced than other apes' communication, though, and this is a fairly specific adaptation that required not only an increase in brain processing power (quantitative?) but also specific physiological characteristics to make speech possible, and maybe Chomsky's Universal Grammar to boot (qualitative?). As for whether chimps are self-aware, they do seem to be able to recognize themselves in mirrors, IIRC. I also recall seeing some interesting footage of Koko the gorilla, who was depressed after her cat died and kept making the sign for "crying." Koko seemed self-aware to me, though I think some have argued her behavior amounts to little more than "circus training" to get the results the scientists want, etc.

As to the question of why there are no other species that have this degree of intelligence, I look at it from a different perspective. Evolutionarily speaking, some species has got to get high intelligence first. It could in theory evolve more than once in separate lineages (as wings have), but it's got to happen for a *first* time somewhere. Our branch of the primate lineage happened to be the first ones to hit upon this sort of intelligence, and so naturally we are the first ones *capable* of asking "why are we the only ones"? The "problem" is not really a problem because it is inevitable that whichever lineage first achieved high intelligence would also be the first to ask the question of why.

(Also, based on the one example we have, highly intelligent species tend to have a large and rapid impact on their ecosystem, potentially changing the situation for many other species. Does our presence prevent other megafauna from evolving in certain directions, as we will end up trapping them all in nature preserves, the ones that are lucky enough not to be domesticated for food or driven to extinction? Or will our own existence be so fleeting as to be a mere blip on the evolutionary timescale anyway? And if we create intelligent robots, where would they fit in the evolutionary lineage?)

I am not worried about the lack of Dolphin and Ant civilizations, although I do wonder how it is that only this one particular hominid species managed to thrive; did we kill off the Neandertals? Why did they die out? What about other Homo and Australopithecene cousins in our bushy lineage? Of course, most of the species that have ever lived have gone extinct...

By the way, it's not clear that humans are "supreme" on Earth. Ants are doing rather well too. Bacteria continue to be spectacularly successful. And wherever we go, there will be cockroaches to accompany us.

Privileging intelligence is, IMO, mainly an artifact of our anthropocentric chauvinism. But intelligence does give us one edge that humans seem to have over (say) bacteria, adaptively speaking. We have the capacity to go into outer space and (theoretically) survive there. So our range of survival is not limited to this biosphere. Bacteria do not have this versatility, at least not by any mechanism we know of (though perhaps they could hitch a ride on a rock blasted into space by an asteroid collision?). (And, come to think of it, they will most certainly hitch a ride on *humans* in their spaceships...)

[ September 04, 2002: Message edited by: IesusDomini ]</p>

nogods4me

IIRC, there have been several tests showing that some few other animals are "self-aware" if I have some time later I'll do a Google search and report back if someone hasn't beat me to it.
Several species of animal apparently communicate with one another to varying degrees, whales and their songs come to mind. And I recall reading a recent post concerning the problem-solving, tool using ability of a bird.
So while we may have made the most of our intelligence, it seems we are hardly the only animals that think.

Undercurrent

I disagree. The fastest animal in the world is a human in a fighter jet. The strongest animal in the world is a human in a tank. The animal with the best senses is a human in the operations centre for a constellation of spy satellites. The longest-lived animal in the world is... well, we're working on it.

The reason high intelligence is so great is that it allows us to compensate for our biological faults.

m.

pz

What about the E. coli in the gut of the pilot?
What about the cockroach hiding in the undercarriage?
What about things like rate of reproduction, absolute numbers, adaptability, etc.?
We'll still all be dead someday, and there will be a nematode chowing down on our corpse, smirking and saying, "Where's your tank and your jet plane now, Brain Boy?". Or at least, he would say that if he had a brain to think of it, but he has developed some other features instead.

Wyz_sub10

True enough, but we are on the higher end of many of these - we are among the fastest, we are among the longest-lived, we are among those with the best comprehensive senses (i.e. all of our senses are pretty good, as opposed to one that is keen and others that are near useless).

Iesus Domini:
I was thinking this when reading your post. Funny that you should mention it.

I think one advantage we have over bacteria and roaches, etc. is our ability to treat the one, or adapt individually. As a species, bacteria are pretty robust. But as individuals, they cannot adapt or be remedied as can individual humans.

Vesica

I think the evolution of animal langauge projects and the ever increasing complexity of 'language' indicates that animals can do many of the things we consider 'human'.

To paraphrase Douglas Adams:
People think dolphins are stupid because all they do is swim around, play and eat fish. Dolphins think people are stupid for the same reason.