There’s no question that of all species on Planet Earth, modern humans, Homo sapiens, are top of the pops when it comes to intelligence (IQ). All other species, however close they might be in evolutionary terms to modern humans, pale in comparison. BUT, and there’s always a BUT, animals are way smarter, which raises questions about our actual relationship to them. Here I give numerous examples where animals are top of the pops when it comes to pure smarts.
Humans have the highest IQ; but animals have vastly more commonsense. How so? Let’s consider various settings, starting with one we all share – time and space.
Continued from yesterday’s blog…
PHYSICAL ACTIONS
Good vs. Evil: Animals are neither good nor evil – those are human inventions or concepts. There are no animal equivalents of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There’s no point in saying “good doggie” or “bad pussy cat” since they have no concept of “good” or “bad”. They may have learned what is and is not acceptable behaviour (what does and does not piss you off) but they do not understand why. While not every human transforms from good to evil and back again, and again, every human, unlike an animal, is theoretically capable of having a dual good/evil personality. Individuals’ aside, when looking at any large sample of humans, the dual nature becomes obvious.
Revenge & Justice: No animal deliberately plots and executes revengeful actions or has hidden agendas. What you see is what you get. Animals don’t fly planes into skyscrapers. Animals couldn’t even conceive of such a scenario in their wildest dreams. Humans on the other hand – need I say more?
Law & Order: All animal societies have some sort of internal regulation system which almost seems to be ingrained or hardwired. Such regulation usually doesn’t go much beyond the parents keeping the cubs in line and ensuring they don’t put themselves in harms way. Humans on the other hand have formalized their regulation of themselves to such an extreme degree that comparing the regulation of human society to say self-regulation of massive ant, termite or bee colony societies (which does just fine without cops and lawyers), is comparing not so much apples and oranges as the simplicity of a single electron with the complexity of the global weather system. How is it that an animal society can regulate itself without the need for a massive judicial infrastructure and requirement for highly specialized legal eagles and law enforcers?
Killing #1: Animals kill only as necessary for their own survival, both in defence as well as obtaining food for themselves and perhaps offspring. Humans kill out of sheer sadistic pleasure, for so-called ‘sport’, often just because they can. My cats, if they wanted to, kill garden snails – the weight of one paw would do it. However, snails are not food and pose no threat to them, so it’s live and let live. That’s unlike many humans who if they see a snail, a snail doing no harm to them or anything else, just delight in stomping on them – an 80 kg human vs. an 8 gm snail is no contest. Now that’s if the snail is lucky. All too often the sadistic human will just step on the animal lightly enough to crack the shell, leaving the snail helpless to either dry out in the sun or be at the mercy of the ants. It’s a very sad state of affairs that such examples can be expanded on by many orders of magnitude over a very wide range of species.
Killing #2: If an animal wants to kill a human it has to get up close and personal. The reverse isn’t of necessity true. I wonder how brave our so-called ‘sportsmen’ hunters would be if the animals they hunted could shoot back. The concept of ‘sport’ is about equal contests and the same rules for all. Hunting animals therefore is not sport and it is high time the glorification of sport was divorced from hunting, which is anything but a glorious activity. The exception might be if the hunter is putting food on the table, but again, that’s not a ‘sport’.
Creativity & Technology #1: Some animals can be creative and ‘manufacture’ and use ‘technology’ like animals that pull off twigs and fashion them to stick into termite mounds in order to pull out a termite snack, or making use of materials to build a nest. But that ‘technology’ never backfires and bites them on the bum. Humans invent cars, but we have a road toll. We have electricity and accidents happen. We construct nuclear plants then have to worry about terrorism. We have created computers, and thus evolved the inevitable computer hacker and the computer virus. We manufacture all sorts of synthetic chemicals then wonder what to do with the toxic waste (actually we don’t wonder at all what to do with it – we dump it in the sea or the air since the solution to pollution is dilution).
Creativity & Technology #2: Animals get along quite nicely thank you very much without Facebook, Twitter, iPads, email, mobile phones, Internet message boards, text-messaging, etc. Any human being, especially under the age of 40, and really, really especially under the age of 20, deprived of such technology becomes a basket case in nanoseconds! Attention to all those who feel the need to SMS 24/7: freedom is not being tied to your mobile phone; in contact with the rest of the world 24/7! Once upon a time, not all that long ago, human civilization (including teenagers therein) survived and thrived via communications that depended on smoke signals, semaphore flags and the pony express. If you really needed fast, there was the overland telegraph! It’s gotten to the point, maybe way beyond it already, that technology controls us; we are slaves to our own creations.
Domination: Humans Rule, OK? Left to itself, Mother Nature finds its own non-static, ever changing balance, in good times and bad times. Animals clearly affect that balance and in turn are affected by it. However, no animal species seeks to call the shots and exert ultimate control over that balance – no species except one of course, and no prizes for guessing what that species is. Humans decide, via some sort of divine right the fate and makeup of Earth’s ecosystems; what lives, what dies, in what ratios, what the landscape will be like, ever manipulating to find that balance that best suits us, which is going to be as far removed from a natural balance as it is possible to get. Take any human dominated environmental landscape. Remove the human element. Will that environmental landscape or ecosystem remain as is, as humans made it, or undergo a radical shift back to Mother Nature’s balance? Look no further than the typical backyard ecosystem/garden. It wouldn’t take long before natural change would render it unrecognizable if neglected by the garden’s occupants. If humans went poof, Earth would soon (in relatively minor geological time frames) become equally as unrecognizable as that household garden, or rather as recognizable as it was before humans came along with delusions of grandeur.
To be continued…
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