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> It's not the Victorian model where the human is more evolved much less more perfect than any other animal.

In colloquial terms, think we'd find few who'd argue humans flying around in helicopters shooting elephants with high power rifles are not more evolved than said elephants.

> Consider it a big parallel hill-climbing problem with each animal being a local optimum for its environment.

There is rarely "its" environment. Because environment is shared. Especially shared with humans, who have great ability to manipulate said environment (usually for the worse). They will polute it, introduce other species which would end up dominating the food chain, completely change the physical form (built a dam and alter the course of a river), end up enslaving species in order to provide food for themselves. Would you say chickens have evolved and got to an optimal point? Or have they been evolved by humans so they can turn into dinner.

> Consider my dog: ... would you really call one of them "inferior" to the other?

I would call the organism which types on the computer, connected to an artifically created world wide network, and who is able to contemplate the fate of the universe, evolution and other concepts, a bit more evolved ;-)

Domestic animals are more successful right now than the humans breeding them if we count the total mass of organisms sharing similar genes; which IMO simply demonstrates the absurdity of much of our thinking about evolution in terms of winners and losers. (Another example - if you look at "evolutionary success" as the prevalence of patterns in general and not necessarily genes, then simple molecules like H2O are infinitely more successful/prevalent in terms of their total mass than any kind of a living organism, which means that the best way to win the evolution game is not to play. If we think of evolution as a game where winning equals maximizing the number of times a pattern appears in the physical space, then it ought to be one of the stupidest and most pointless games ever.)

> In colloquial terms, think we'd find few who'd argue humans flying around in helicopters shooting elephants with high power rifles are not more evolved than said elephants.

You should try to understand what evolved actually means. What that shows is that we have gained a higher level of tool use than the elephants. Intelligence is not a sign of being more evolved, it is purely a sign of intelligence.

This is like a bird saying that they are more evolved than a human because they can fly without artificial aids.

> It's not the Victorian model where the human is more evolved much less more perfect than any other animal

This view of evolution seems to be surprisingly widespread in my experience, even among those who consider themselves scientifically minded.

>...would you really call one of them "inferior" to the other?

I think I would consider the dog brain to be generally inferior, sufficiently so that I would simply label it as inferior. With sufficient general intelligence, you can delegate tasks that your brain is inadequate to accomplish to technology (or possibly other entities, like dogs!), something dogs cannot do and something that makes the human brain clearly superior.

You can argue against human brain superiority without access to technology, but then we're comparing the two in more specific scenarios. Without any particular constraints, the human brain has sufficiently superior general intelligence to make it superior overall.

You have a solipsistic view: you consider the human brain "superior" because it's good at things you want to do. That simply says it's better for humans.

That doesn't mean a dog, whale, elephant or nematode wants to do those things. In fact the "superior" human brain would be useless for a nematode since that brain has support for organs (i.e. peripherals) the nematode doesn't have and requires a lot of energy and other resources the nematode also doesn't have access to. And the mass of nematodes far exceeds the mass of humans on this planet, so who's more successful? Humans are simply more successful at being human and nematodes at being nematoda.

You wouldn't argue that an i7 would be "superior" in a phone (much less an A9 in a laptop!!) so why is the human brain unequivocally better than all others?

I revel in my human brain and would not want to be an animal without opposable manipulators. But hell, seals and narwals have senses I do not and, Asimov aside, I am sorry I'll never know what those feel like.

It's called "anthropocentric" not "solipsistic". Solipsism has nothing to do with it. But except of terminology, I agree with you. I would even go as far as saying, that there's nothing that makes humans objectively "smarter" (not to mention "better") than rocks: it's just that the range of possible actions rocks are to perform is much more narrow than that of humans, and contains just one item — laying around. Which, I might add, rocks are executing much more perfectly than humans are typically performing actions they are to perform.

A lot of animals have brains that are cheaper than human brains, in terms of size and food. But usually when we're talking about what's better, we exclude budget. By those terms, the human brain is vastly superior to almost all others. Just like an i7 crushes every little embedded processor out there.

Being superior and being more optimized for a niche are not the same thing.

While value judgment of any sort requires perspective I don't think it's wrong to prefer our own. Rejecting all value judgements of any sort would simply leave us without anything to converse about.

I think the kind of things people can do have more value than the sort of things a dog can do and further that it's only the dogs limitations that prevent us from appreciating it. Our abilities are nearly a superset of theirs.

Finally survival beyond the scope of your biosphere ultimately requires intelligence of the human sort and that is certainly worth something.

>>While value judgment of any sort requires perspective I don't think it's wrong to prefer our own. Rejecting all value judgements of any sort would simply leave us without anything to converse about.

You have raised a very important point. Sadly I can't upvote it more than once.

Nowadays the political correctness is forcing people to shun from passing on any sort of such judgments. In fact, it has sort of become politically incorrect to call dogs and other animal species to be intellectually inferior to human beings. [1] Please correct me if I am wrong.

>>Finally survival beyond the scope of your biosphere ultimately requires intelligence of the human sort and that is certainly worth something.

Thanks for pointing this out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness

But, the human brain _is_ better than an i7 or A9!

Not in a math competition.

I think you need to have a better understanding of how to talk to people without sounding like a dick.

https://www.google.com/search?q="I+think+you"+site:news.ycom...

It's a common pattern around here. :/ I'm probably guilty of it myself.

Yes. Everyone does from time to time. Perhaps if we learned to speak in a less authoritative way more people would take our views seriously..