Party Vibe

You must have seen him on that BBC documentary the other day?

BBC iPlayer – Super Smart Animals: Episode 1

He’s been trained to memorise a sequence of numbers that flash up on a touchscreen for a fraction of a second and recall them. I think he could do something like 10 numbers in 0.06s, which was a lot, lot better than the BBC journalist could manage! So at least in one respect, he’s actually more intelligent than humans! It really makes you think about just how much of our ‘intelligence’ is actually down to the vast store of information that the human race has built up and recorded over its existence (none of us invented the wheel, or printing, or the internal combustion engine), rather than any innate mental ability.

We kick their arses at abstract thought though, which is ultimately what allows us to find patterns in the universe, figure out what’s really going on, and create solutions to problems. I would consider that a far more fitting measure of intelligence than ability to remember/reproduce information.

@cheeseweasel 467241 wrote:

Not necessarily. They did another experiment at that Japanese lab where they gave each chimp a long plastic tube with a peanut in (too deep for them to reach). They had to figure out that to get to the peanut they had to fill up the tube with water from their drinking tap and float the peanut to the surface. They all managed it pretty quickly. It was a problem-solving exercise that required abstract thought.

the crow family are very good at smiler exorcizes.

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I think our ability to communicate is mainly what sets us apart, more than our non-verbal reasoning skills (the kind of thing classically thought of as ‘intelligence’). A chimp lacks the necessary vocabulary to explain something using an analogy, or ponder philisophical questions. We tend to think in words after all – imagine how differently we’d think if we didn’t have the constant voice of our thoughts in our heads.

I agree that what we’ve learned as a species is staggering, but I think that’s because over tens of thousands of years of civilisation various discoveries have been gradually added to the pool of scientific knowledge that’s been passed down from generation to generation. We take things like the wheel for granted, but I doubt that any of us would have thought to invent it if we’d been brought up outside of civilisation. As it happens, we’re brought up in a society where cars, computers and an efficient system of educating us about such things already exist.

Not saying that chimps are smarter than us, but it doesn’t surprise me to read that we’re so genetically similar.

Indeed our knowledge compounds over time but each generation has to be intelligent enough to understand it and develop it further. There’s a reason that chimps have not developed their own civilisation or even been able to integrate with ours, and its not just down to an inability to communicate.

Chimps may share 98% of our DNA but they only have about 38% the number or brain cells we do, and the number of neural connections they have drops by orders of magnitude (we have more than the number of atoms in the universe). They don’t even come close to our mental capacity.

Just a few genes can make a big big difference.