Aethari

Now, I was thinking about random things last night, and this question popped into my head: why don't we see a smoother progression of intelligence in species? It seems (to me) that the intelligence of other species ramps up slowly until you reach dolphin-ish-level, and then does a massive leap up to humans. Is it just luck of the draw that the Earth only ended up with one "really intelligent" (how imprecise) species? Or is this apparantly massive leap in intelligence just an illusion? (It just seemed odd to me that there were no other species that, you know, ever managed to progress to art, literature, or even discovering how to make and use fire.)

Let's get some answers!

~Aethari

GeoTheo

I think you will find that many people believe that the evolution of language is the reason humans have reached such great heights. Once this developed a sort of positive feedback system was created. Perhaps dolphins have reached the limit of how intelligent an organism can become that has language but not opposable thumbs
You also may get a lot of blather about how humans aren't all that smart blah blah blah ad nauseum.

copernicus

Perhaps there is such a big gap because humans killed off their closest competitors over time. Any animal that gets too intelligent is in deep trouble. Dolphins and whales don't really compete with us, but many of the more intelligent primates did. We spread out to fill in this particular ecological niche.

235

Aethari-

I do not have much scientific backing for my arguement, but I do have a strong opinion about it as I work with horses and collect pets. I think that as people, we have a very biased opinion of knowledge. Certainly we as humans are far more advanced than other animals in many ways, but I do not consider them to be as far behind us as many people do. One of my horses I personally consider to be more intelligent than many people with whom I went to college. Horses anticipate, learn, make plans, open gates, untie themselves, and outsmart people in many ways. Simply because they allow themselves to be used by people, many people consider them to be less of a being and treat riding them like driving a golf cart instead of interacting with them and treating them as another living creature. I have read that the estimated intelligence level of a horse is on parallel with that of a 4-5 year old child (unfortunately no link for that). Not rocket science by a long shot, but perhaps underestimated. Hell, my dog can open doors, cabinets, the refrigerator and the freezer, and she waits until she is sure that I am not around to do so. She hides things that she knows she will get into trouble for (chewed things, food containers from said refrigerator, dog puke, etc). These are things that she has learned how to do, and has learned are not what I like her to do, so she has had some semblence of a thought process in trying to cover up her indiscretions. What about the monkeys who use tools?

I have not addressed your specific examples of fire, literature or art-- but what do animals need with fire? We as humans are far less well adapted to the environment than animals. If it were not for our ability to think as we do and create such things as fire, we would not have been able to compete with other animals. Literature I have no ideas about, but art is entirely subjective. What is pleasing to the eye of another species? As you walk your dog and wait for it to pick the perfect spot to relieve itself, only to have other dogs come up and sniff and observe... Forgive my crassness (is that a word?), but could this not be art for the dog? Not so far off from Robert Mapplethorpe, I say......

Forgive my ranting, but one of my pet peeves is when people seperate themselves animals instead of accepting ourselves as one of the gang. People can learn a lot from animals, and learn a lot about themselves from observing animal behavior. This is one reason that I am upset by religion in many cases-- that I feel that many religions encourage this seperation and preach the superiority of humans.

As an end note-- can you imagine the reaction of people if chimps were discovered to be forming written language or starting fires? Do you think that we would welcome the advent of another highly functioning species, or perhaps squelch their attempts out of fear?

Godot

I thought that the accepted line of reasoning was that in moving to the savannah and freeing up our hands for tool use/development, we also freed up our brains to rapidly increase in cognitive function and ability. The development of abstarct thought, logic, cognitive awareness of the environment (and the changes within it), and of course, language has potentiated the changes in our development to such a degree as to distinguish ourselves from the remainder of species on this planet.

Aethari

Thanks for the responses

~Aethari

Dr.GH

You might take a look at this:

http://faculty.ed.uiuc.edu/g-cziko/twd/pdf/index.html

Wounded King

Whats wrong with those Dolphins? Why havent they got round to discovering fire yet? I think we give them too easy a time, stop feeding them and they would soon be rubbing two sticks together in the water with their little fins.

There may be a flaw in this argument.

ps418

No, its not an illusion. The rapid increase in the "encephalization quotient" in homonids is unprecendented in any other taxon, and this encephalization is strongly associated with various forms of "intelligence" across primate species (see Reader and Laland, 2002). As to why this happened to this degree in our genus but not in other genera, I don't know. There is an embarassment of riches when it comes to explanations for this phenomenon.

Patrick

Reader, S.M., and Laland, K.N., 2002. Social intelligence, innovation, and enhanced brain size in primates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99:7, 4436-4441.

Starboy

Hate to say it but the reason there is only one species of our intelligence on earth probably has more to do with competition than anything else. The earth is not big enough for our species let alone another tool using environment manipulating species that operates on our scale or greater. If such a proto species existed in the past we probably wiped it out.

Starboy