I went through my bookmarks and found an old hacker news discussion thread where people are going in circles with some quite sincerely insisting that crows are more intelligent or every bit as intelligent as humans and that it’s a kind of specieism and arrogance to suggest humans are more intelligent.

I felt like I was losing my mind reading that thread, which I think is why I bookmarked it.

I get appreciating the remarkable intelligence of animals and understanding their capabilities and the application of different forms of intelligence in different contexts. And the importance of having humility when it comes to understanding human intelligence and how a lot of our productive capacity comes from standing on the shoulder of giants. But take all of those caveats and add them all together and none of them I think at the end of the day amount to the idea that we should be uncertain about whether humans are more intelligent than crows.

I think there’s a trap here of vortex of excessive humility that seems like a virtuous principle, but ends up missing the forest for the trees and putting people in the preposterous position of insisting that there’s nothing special about humans building jumbo jets or being able to run hospitals compared to crows who apparently in the right circumstances could if they wanted to.

So I’m not crazy, right? Can reasonable people agree that humans are more intelligent than crows? And if that question sounds like a crazy question to ask in the first place, I’m glad you agree. But check out the Hacker News thread and try not to lose your mind.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24583981

  • frozenspinach@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
    1·
    4 days ago

    How much of that do you think is inherent intelligence and how much is nurture?

    We spend years helping and teaching our offspring the most basic of functions and how to communicate. We’ve taught other species very basic communication skills as well, like Coco the gorilla. Hell, my own dog knew how to tell me when he had to pee. And that’s nurture, but it does speak to a certain potential.

    Breaking this off for a separate comment. I want to reply on two levels. First and most importantly, I think there’s probably an integral relation between the two (the capability of responding to training and socialization is an aspect of intelligence, and being able to learn is an important part of being intelligent and may very well be something we are born with).

    So I wouldn’t want to tie the whole question of intelligence to the idea that we’re supposed to adjust for X amount of nature and Y amount of nurture, and then look at animals in light of those adjustments, scaling down how much we credit humans because we benefit from social knowledge. Our capability of growing our intelligence through training and socialization is a reflection of our knowledge and we get full credit for that. Crows have been around for between 17 to 30 million years(!!) enough time for the fruits of socialization and training to materialize, if the ground were fertile for it. Apes are 25 million years, possums curiously are 65 million years, bears 20 million years. Humans depending on where you start, have been here for 300,000 years, or maybe 2 million if you want to go back to homo erectus, yet we leapfrogged everybody.

    So that’s the first level. But the second level is just a direct answer: humans go through a practically supernatural level of language explosion between ages 2 and 3, and start retaining new words at nearly impossible speeds, something like 20, 30 new words a day at its peak. A 3-year-old can hear a new verb in one sentence and apply it correctly in another, something that stumps even the most language-trained non-human animals. Apes in controlled conditions can take months to learn, and even then through rote repetition.

    I think it’s just getting too lost in the weeds to look at a dog needing to go outside and pee, and set that side by side with linguistic capability that gave rise to human civilization like an ounce of one is equivalent to an ounce of the other. And here’s the thing: I do think it’s impressive, dogs especially are social creatures, apes learn sign language is special. And I don’t think anyone is losing sight of that when they say humans, at the end of the day, still do it better.