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I just finished reading the book 'Gifts of the Crow' by Marzluff & Angell, which is a popularization of current research into Corvid intelligence, consisting of anecdotes, experiments, and neuroscience.

Academics do, in fact, study recreation & play, language & song, and expressions of emotion like grief. They are considered indicators of some kind of intelligence worth studying. The book even devotes a chapter to each of those topics!

>This article focuses mostly on problem solving, planning, and tool use as the primary hallmarks of intelligence. But what problem does writing a poem solve?

The problem of expressing yourself to a specific, deeper, degree than with mere talk? And/or (in olde times, when poems where meant to be accompanied by music/oration) creating something people can be entertained with and sing/dance too.

>Do you have to be intelligent to write a great poem?

Yes. Mind you, it doesn't mean it's technical intelligence, the kind that solves math problems etc. It's intelligence with words, wordplay, expression, feelings, ways of seeing, etc.

Maybe the requirement of starting with problem solving to establish is an issue with the audience and not the author. Imagine starting out by showing the sorts of innovative play that crows engage in, and no one (or at least during blind peer review) would accept it as evidence of intelligence, even if it is.

I think larger the population, larger the hyperconnection less interesting/impactful is individual intelligence and creativity. What will overshadow individuals is what the group intelligence/creativity produces.

There are no Van Gogh's anymore just Pixar.

Early humans didn't have poetry. Were they not intelligent?

>Early humans didn't have poetry.

[Citation Needed]

OK so speech has begun 100,000 years ago (perhaps earlier). My point stands: Would humans without poetry not be considered intelligent? Hardly.

I didn't know we had any idea when speech started or even what form of proto-speech preceded and when it could be said it evolved to speech.

Homo Erectus emerged 2 millions years ago, I'm not aware of anything that says speech couldn't have started during his reign.

Do you have any source for that 100,000 years figure?

That’s a well known story. Speech beyond mooing means complex bones and muscles working together.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/could-neandert...

All I take from this article is that there's no consensus among experts whether speech was possible for homo sapiens' ancestors.

> Based on these results, most researchers agree Neanderthals were capable of emitting and hearing complex vocalizations. However, they disagree over the implications. While some consider the findings indicative of speech-based language in Neanderthals, others propose these features could have evolved for other reasons, like singing. Neanderthals may have lacked the cognitive abilities for language, but possessed the physical anatomy for musical calls to attract mates or sooth infants.

Seems to imply that speech was physically possible for neanderthals (and by extension, their common ancestor with homo sapiens), but there's no agreement among experts that it means that neanderthals did speak.

That is largely irrelevant, as there is still the possibility of sign languages.

My point had to do with writers of great poetry being (arguably) intelligent, not with claiming that non-poets (or non-poetry readers) are not intelligent.

In other words, writing great poetry is a sign of intelligence, but not a requirement for intelligence.

Conversely, being good at problem solving, tool use, and planning might also be signs of intelligence, but maybe not requirements for intelligence either.

>My point stands: Would humans without poetry not be considered intelligent? Hardly.

They would be considered less intelligent than humans that have developed speech, and later poetry and other refined forms of expression.

The same way humans that painted their caves are considered more intelligent than the humanoids that proceeded them, that weren't as able to express themselves.

I don't agree. Perhaps an entity that is more intelligent than humans will determine that poetry is not worth it and there is a more advanced art form it uses instead. Nowadays, most of us are not painting caves.

Do you mean written 'academic' poetry?

Because poetry had a more day to day use than that. The rhythm and the rhyming is a mnemonic device. It makes it much easier to remember a text than when spoken in prose.

I can't imagine even our early ancestors not making use of that. In fact the earliest literature was passed from generation to generation as an oral tradition.

Quantification seems to be the degradation of perception towards the proper understanding of human ability. It seems realistic to say that humans prefer simple matrices with which to view reality.

Consider when someone common argues politics, but their first inclination is to fall back to statistics. They have now canceled out the component sum of all other elements in the set of understanding, only to rely on numbers as the indicator of truth.

Boethius once wrote about the 10 properties of man, one being number, and the others being place, position, attributes...etc. Yet, most of these are rarely used when you really get down to it.

Ezra Pound once made a statement that poetry is language charged with meaning to the utmost.

And there really lies the connection I mean to give. Poetry is that which embraces Boethius' 10 properties including the numeric. Math in the most pure sense is focused only on quantity until it is applied to a context. (Physics, etc).

Language in itself is, discounting the vocal portions, a tool of symbolic manipulation. And from this one can generate a theory of linguistics, much like the Greeks, as that which binds symbols to images within a context, and the intended excitation of the senses.

Even math is explained and used as bound symbols within a context followed by a sort of kinesthetic sense.

Atop both of these, respectively, is grammar and the rules of mathematics.

Anyway, this is getting too long for a comment but this is my point.

- I think language and math are under a unified form of intelligence because the utilities used to perform them reach towards the same foundation.

- Poetry and writing is underappreciated not because it is technically inept, but for the reason that society has currently degraded it's understanding towards a single attribute (the numeric) and interprets anything that isn't a number as something which must originate from emotion.

- Emotion is hard to quantify so it is viewed as a isolated creative art that is not perceived as a criteria for what people mean when they think about intelligence.

- The author and the poet can and should be using their art with a technical foundation.

- Our current writers actually imply the state of society far greater than we think, which is ironic because they have the power to lead society.

- Intelligence tests as a metric imply an end result which is numeric. This is not a whole picture. Even if the number is representative of an abstract process used to indicate the success of solving a problem.

In other, other words, writing is viewed as a lesser art when it comes to quantifying intelligence because it is incompatible with such a motion in a world where the only viewpoint funnels into the numeric. It is also lesser because the quality of contemporary writing has a stark contrast to those works before us.