Duvenoy

An interesting question.

Antelope are herd animals and as such are imprinted on the herd. If one memebr of the herd panicks and runs, all of the herd will follow even if none of the others have seen/sensed the preditor. Other herds in sight range will take off also.

Animal intelligence is a field that has it's surface barely scratched. It has been shown that many species have an ability to 'reason', parrots, for example. Crocodilians have also been shown to be able to "figger it out" in a limited way. Octopi quickly learn to unscrew jar lids to get at a vrab inside. From an evolutionary point of view, these abilities, help the species find food and avoid being food.

As to which animal is 'smarter', The question is meaningless. They are as 'smart' as they need to be to survive in their environmental nitch, as are we, pretty much.

Which, by extention, kills the question of, "Are they as smart as we?" Hell, a lot of them are smarter (chuckle).

d

tronvillain

pepperlandgirl:
Well, most animals are extremely poor at learning by imitation, which humans are pretty good at.

lpetrich

I'm not MrDarwin, but I'll take a whack at that. There is a giant gulf between our species and most of the animal kingdom, but some species do come a good part of the way, notably the chimpanzee.

Chimps have complicated social lives; they have been known to keep themselves from making impolitic sounds. They can construct tools, such as de-leaved sticks for fishing termites; different groups of chimps have different preferences in tools, the human-like feature of having cultural traditions. They also have the less flattering human-like feature of systematic warfare against other groups of chimps. Chimps have some abstract knowledge of their surroundings; they do succh things as stack crates to get at inaccessible bananas (Kohler's classic experiments). Chimps even act as if they can recognize themselves in a mirror, another human-like ability.

Chimpanzees and gorillas were recognized to be the closest relatives of our species in the mid-19th-cy., and Charles Darwin used their distribution to propose that humanity had originated in Africa. Which was essentially confirmed. The close relationship was also confirmed as protein and gene sequencing became feasible -- our species and the chimps have genes that are 98-99% identical, with chimps being the closest species to our species.

More distant species have less by way of mental capabilities, usually much less, though dolphins may be a partial exception.

There is an interesting epistemological question: how much can we learn by studying behavior, since the subjects are incapable of reporting on whatever introspection that they might be capable of. Behaviorism is one solution; it treats mental processes as impenetrable black boxes. However, it has gone out of style with the rise of cognitive psychology, which tries to infer mental processes and states from behavior.

RufusAtticus

Since this appears to not immediately concern e/c I'm going to move it to the science forum.

~~RvFvS~~

trunks2k

As mentioned above, humans and chimps have a lot in common.

First of all chimps have been shown to be capable of abstract thought. i.e. Being able to equate a small model of a room with the actual room (mentioned above). The can also make and use tools, and even figure out to work some basic "machines" (like a lock and key), without having previously been shown how to use it, or only after a single, casual observance.

Scientists are also teaching chimps to equate sounds with letters and teach them how to spell. And even more amazingly, chimps seem to have some sort of very, very primitave verbal communication (besides just mating calls and the like). The experiment went like this:

A group of chimps that have been living together for a while are tmporarily isolated from eachother. Each chimp is given an item that they are familiar with (soda, or candy or something like that), and the noise they make when recieving that item is recorded. Another chimp is then taken into a room with a computer screen that has pictures of all the items that could have been offered to the other chimp. The sound is played and the chimp (that is not on the recording) points to an item on the screen. Scientists found that the overwhelming majority of the time (more times than can be attributed to random chance), the chimp would point to the proper item on the screen. That shows some definite more advanced cognitive functions.

Scientists know that chimps can associate written words with items, and items with sounds. Now the next step is if they can make the next step and go from sounds to written words. At least in the case of sounds that other chimps make. I'm rather sure they have already been able to associate human sounds with written words.

Also chimps have been shown to have rather emotions and social rules. If you throw a group of chimps a pile of food, and one chimp takes much more than his fare share, the next time they are fed, the other chimps will not allow that chimp to eat. The chimp is eventually allowed to eat again, and in most cases will not take all the food again, it's learned it's lesson. The basic idea is similar to our system of punishment. You do something wrong, you are not allowed any privledges and isolated from the rest of the community. Eventually you are allowed back in to the society and are expected to act like everyone else wants you to.

You can also see similar behaviors in gorrillas (especially "emotions"), monkeys (to a lesser extent), and other primates.

pepperlandgirl

First off, sorry for all the typos.

Someone pointed out that I haven't defined "abstract" thought enough...the problem is though, that neither has my professor. That's one of the reasons I brought it to II.

*sigh* I don't know. I didn't mean chimps in my post...because my class was discussing every animal. All of them.

I'm going to reread the relevent chapter again tonight and try to explain myself better. In the meantime, sorry for wasting everybody's time. And sorry for putting it in the wrong forum...

Kyzra

to answer the topic question, i don't think any non-human animal can think like humans, except perhaps the chimp in a limited way.

however, most animals do exhibit some intelligance, at least enough to survive, learn and adapt to their respective environments. without this ability, they wouldn't be where they are now.

perhaps the correct question to ask in this situation would be: "does any non-human animal exihibit self-conscious awareness?" which would be the true sign of adaptive intelligence.

as to the answer for that question, i believe thus far, we have only encountered one other animal with that ability: the chimp (though my information may be dated).

Bill

In his book <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=625" target="_blank">The Symbolic Species : The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain</a>, Terrance Deacon directly answers this question. The answer is a resounding NO!

In his book <a href="http://www.secweb.org/bookstore/bookdetail.asp?BookID=112" target="_blank">Darwin's Dangerous Idea</a>, Daniel Dennet reaches a similarly strong conclusion. The human mode of thought is quite qualitatively distinct from the mode of thought of animals; even of animals (like beavers) which appear to formulate long-term plans (like building a dam).

What "evidence" exists in favor of the proposition that animals can think like humans derives from the fact that, since humans are evolved from the same common ancestor(s) of all other animal species, we do (obviously) have some commonalities; and for thinking animals, there are modes of thought which are common between those animals and humans. But those are not the modes of thought which we generally think of when we define what is "special" or "unique" about humans.

So, I'll stick with the answer given above: NO!

== Bill

lpetrich

PPLG, does anyone else in your class realize what a big territory that is? And how almost-human chimpanzees are known to act? There are certainly some big gaps, notably language; chimpanzees can learn lots of different signs, but they do not go much further than that -- they don't produce full-scale sentences that follow some well-defined grammar.

From <a href="http://www.asu.edu/clas/iho/waal_abs.html" target="_blank">http://www.asu.edu/clas/iho/waal_abs.html</a> there is this interesting list, courtesy of Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal of Emory University of "things apes do but monkeys don't".

Cultural learning: Monkeys have isolated traditions, apes have entire sets of interrelated traditions, called cultures.

Politics: Chimpanzees show separating interventions and mediated reconciliations, indicating high levels of triadic knowledge. In monkeys these phenomena have not been observed despite the existence of some triadic knowledge.

Empathy: Consolation of distresed individuals is common in chimpanzees, but attempts to demonstrate this behavior in several monkey species have remained unsuccessful.

Mirror self-recognition: This is the oldest and best investigated empirical difference between monkeys and apes, thought to index self-awareness.

Theory-of-mind: There exists mixed evidence for TOM in apes, both in experimental settings and in spontaneous behavior (e.g. deception), but little or no evidence in monkeys.

Reciprocity: There is evidence for memory-based reciprocal altruism in apes, whereas in monkeys reciprocity does occur but may rest on simpler mechanisms.

To which FdW could have added tool making and systematic warfare, both of which chimpanzees have been known to do.

lpetrich

Self-awareness is rather difficult to measure in a species that lacks human-scale language capabilities (ape species) or whose language is difficult to interpret (dolphins); we are unable to ask them if they have some concept of "themselves".

However, over 30 years ago, Gordon Gallup, Jr. devised an ingenious way of getting around that limitation by seeing if his experimental subjects could recognize themselves in mirrors -- or at least act as if they could do so. URL by him: <a href="http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198intelligence/1198gallup.html" target="_blank">http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198intelligence/1198gallup.html</a>

Orangutans and chimpanzees can recognize themselves in mirrors, but gorillas are a doubtful case. Looking beyond the great apes, only dolphins and elephants can recognize themselves in mirrors, and this is not for lack of trying, such as raising rhesus monkeys around mirrors. And though the monkeys, like some other species tested, such as lesser apes and parrots, can develop an understanding of mirror reflection, they never apply that concept to themselves -- what they see in the mirror is, to them, another monkey. And so it goes with all of the rest of the animal kingdom that has been tested.

In our species, the ability to recognize oneself starts at 18-24 months; this is about when autobiographical memories start and when the brain's prefrontal cortex becomes sufficiently well-developed.

By comparison, chimps learn to recognize themselves only in their adolescence, suggesting that the ability is some great-ape addition.

URL on dolphin self-recognition: <a href="http://www.jhu.edu/~newslett/05-3-01/Science/2.html" target="_blank">http://www.jhu.edu/~newslett/05-3-01/Science/2.html</a>

URL on elephant self-recognition: <a href="http://www.cosmiverse.com/science083001.html" target="_blank">http://www.cosmiverse.com/science083001.html</a>

It is interesting to speculate about what may have induced the evolution of a concept of self; the known groups of examples -- human / great ape, elephant, and dolphin -- are all social species with big brains.

[ May 09, 2002: Message edited by: lpetrich ]</p>