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Comment by cassalian | Hacker News Reader

> crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals.

I've always found the common thought that only humans and a select few of other animals are the only ones that posses higher intelligence to be incredibly arrogant of our species. Why wouldn't they have higher intelligence? As far as I can tell, it's because there's no simple test that could be applied to confirm or deny whether higher intelligence exists within an animal, so we then jump to the conclusion "Because I can't prove that they do have higher intelligence, then they must not have higher intelligence" - logic doesn't work that way! Glad to see some people are willing to dig a little deeper and take the time to show that crows do have this capability.

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Humans were effective in their intelligence and rule the world with it, no other animal has shown anything approaching something like that. You judge them by their results.

That's not a measure of our intelligence, only our ambition and aggression. The two may not even be correlated.

So crows could build a jumbo jet, they're just lazy? It's pretty obvious that animals lack any type of intelligence even close to human ability. It's not even in the same ballpark.

See, there's your arrogance again. They may have no interest in doing so or anything leading up to it and desire is not a measure of intelligence.

OK, so how about the fact that they haven't figured out how to heal broken bones? Is that my arrogance again, or is it that they would just prefer to flop on the ground until nightfall and then be eaten alive by coyotes?

And how are crows supposed to defend wounded fellows from coyotes? Or carry them to safety?

How about the fact they can apparently build compound tools from parts?

Your example isn't just about brains. It requires both proper bodies and arguably complex social behaviors, which are quite separate from intelligence itself.

I don't think this rebuttal holds much water. Humans are capable of doing things that our bodies cannot. We domesticated beasts of burden in order to move heavy objects from one place to another for instance.

But consider very basic advancements. Communication for instance is something humans mastered from the outset. We are able to store and pass down information beyond the instinctual for generations, something no other animal has done. Imagine if humans needed to rediscover mathematics every generation!

There are plenty of examples I could give that would provide crows with an immediate improvement in the quality of life. I think the reason they have not done these things is because they cannot, rather than because they have chosen not to.

> I don't think this rebuttal holds much water.

I don't know if it does. But I surely ain't convinced by gp.

> Humans are capable of doing things that our bodies cannot. We domesticated beasts of burden in order to move heavy objects from one place to another for instance.

I would be curious as to how a crow is supposed to domesticate an ox. Or even a dog. Birds are extremely fragile.

As for communication, well, it's both a matter of intelligence and sociability. And they do seem to be able to communicate information "beyond the instinctual" (such as how to identify specific human individuals [1])

As for "can't vs won't", my point isn't that they don't want to. I don't know. I don't know what they can or cannot do. I don't know how their minds work. And I don't know what are the actual prerequisites for our species accomplishment.

And that is exactly my point: assuming anything about such radically different creatures, or the actual prerequisites for our species', solely based on our limited experience and insights, is both vain and presumptuous.

[1]: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2011.095...

I agree with missedthecue that this response is kind of ridiculous. We know things about anaesthesia, blood clotting, soft tissue, and our physical actions are informed by an amassed body of knowledge and an ability to reason from that knowledge and apply it with a degree of sophiscation that crows don't apply, even within the domains of things that are easy for them physically to do.

This is so ridiculous that I'm wondering if I'm missing the point. Is this sarcasm? Is this playing devil's advocate to prove some kind of point?

What you're pointing out is human culture, not the wits of human individuals. For the vast majority of human existence and for most humans alive today there is no such knowledge or practice.

Edit: TDLR - There are many affirmations, assumptions, and a lot of confidence in those in many of the responses here. And I seriously doubt most of them are supported by anything more than gut feelings and certainties of unknown origins.

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> We know things about anaesthesia, blood clotting, soft tissue, [...]

Actually, most of us don't know much, if anything, about any of this. Heck, for all most of us know, it could actually be wizardry powered by small elves running in hamster wheels.

> and our physical actions are informed by an amassed body of knowledge and an ability to reason from that knowledge and apply it with a degree of sophiscation [...]

That really doesn't match most of human behaviors I can observe around me, online or in the street. Actually, it seems that implementing informed and vaguely rational decision-making is a great way to improve many things.

It often feels like we merely are pompous and arrogant monkeys who are lucky some of their ancestors built most of what's around us.

> This is so ridiculous that I'm wondering if I'm missing the point.

That's my fault. I'll try to make it clear.

- Intelligence is hard to measure.

- Our biases, as individuals and as a species, are huge.

- Our knowledge, as individuals, on other living things' perspectives, is laughable.

- Objectives and desired outcomes are relative.

- Outcomes' prerequisites are many, diverse, and often unknown.

Meaning:

-> We really don't know much,

--> Unless approaching the subject with a scientific method and an open mind, any opinion could only be founded on pre-conceived notions, gut feelings, limited personal experience, and unfounded "common sense" and "cultural knowledge.

Thus:

---> Having and expressing any personal opinion on this subject, based on anything else than scientific experience, is both pointless and presumptuous.

And now we can go into the credit we should give to science, the limits of the scientific methods, and probably many other things.

Can you heal a shattered leg all by yourself with no one around? I guarantee you’ll lay on the ground until nightfall and probably be eaten by coyotes (since you’re a human, they /might/ leave you alone).

If you have someone with you, maybe they can carry you. Crows can’t carry other crows. If they wanted to fix the other crow, they’d have to do it where the crow fell. It would still get eaten by coyotes. They can’t protect the downed bird, so it will still be eaten. Ergo, why bother trying to heal the bone?

Why crows haven't invented stretchers to carry fellow crows to safety? Making a stretcher doesn't look more complicated than building a nest.

A crow can carry about 1.5 lbs in flight. A crow weighs at most 4.5 lbs. Let's assume a stretcher that can carry a crow by more than one crow to weigh another 1-2 lbs. At most, the total payload would be ~5 lbs which requires at least 4 crows. I don't think that kind of coordination is possible with that kind of turbulence in such close quarters.

So why bother?

I think what's really at the core of this is whether crows would figure out such advances given sufficient evolutionary pressure to do so. One could reason that crows are smart enough to avoid most situations that would cause broken bones but if something forced them to adapt, would they for example evolve thicker, stronger bones. Or if their common predators disappeared, would that allow them to build more permanent communities where they had the spare time to learn about their environment enough to manipulate it?

Humans by and large, especially in less forgiving environments with harsh winters, are helpless without the ability to manipulate their environment seeing as they are hairless apes who without modern medicine could die from an infection from a mere scratch.

Basically, it's an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Humanity couldn't for 99.61% of its existence either and apes in general couldn't for nearly 100% of their existence. If we were to rely on your criterion, then all humans before a few thousand years ago would be deemed unintelligent, whereas we know they are essentially identical to us.

Occam's razor suggests that "not capable" is a better explanation than "not interested in", when considering things that are clearly an immediate and strong benefit to a life form.

Then you must be fundamentally and essentially "not capable" of masonry since that's a much simpler explanation than your lack of motivation and opportunity.

I absolutely am capable of masonry, I just don't do it much because I'm also capable of getting (by using money) someone else who's capable and willing to do it for me. Same applies to just about any other thing anyone outsources in their lives, but the end result is the same - the advanced work gets done. Other animals don't demonstrate any of that.

Crows absolutely could build a jumbo jet, they just have no need to because they can already fly.

Would they build a submarine then? Or a rocket capable of reaching orbit?

More realistically: have they mastered fire? There are caloric efficiency benefits to eating warm/cooked food[0]. Have they mastered writing? There's compound interest in terms of civilization development sitting right there, in the ability to put thoughts into a form that outlives individuals without degrading.

[0] - At least for humans; IANABiologist, but I'd guess this would be true for other animals too, including birds, and at the very least it would expand the range of foods they can consume.

It took us 1000s of years to do that. One might ask, why did we master fire in the first place? Maybe to cook? To stay warm and go north? Do crows need to cook or can they just eat what humans cook? Do they need to stay warm?

Of course they could, but they can already fly. See? Intelligence.

Well, humans just started to build jumbo jets in very very recent history. That’s not a very fair benchmark.

If we remove ourselves from the world and let it sit for another few million years, there might be a dog or elephant or crow society, sure. And while that’s interesting to imagine it also shows that a fair benchmark is indeed simply which species makes it there first.

>So crows could build a jumbo jet, they're just lazy?

How can they physically even come close to building a jet?

It seems humans physicality has a LOT to do with our intelligence. Perhaps someone with actual knowledge on this can chime in.. but it seems to me if you have a build similar to ours, you have the opportunity to actually progress and manipulate things to a level where it might a situation where as a species you continue to evolve with more intelligence over time because you are able to actually use it.

I don't know how to say that better.. but on the other hand, if we had our same brains but had the bodies where we can hardly manipulate any tools.. don't you think that makes all the difference in the world?

The specifics of jumbo jet manufacture really has nothing to do with my point. The point of my comment is that there is a very evident and very clear discrepancy between human intelligence and animal intelligence.

It's always fun to watch a clever squirrel find its way into a bird feeder, a cunning fox outsmart a rabbit, or a curious monkey recognize himself in the mirror. These are signs of sentience, sure, but all of those are far cries from what even an immature human is capable of, and this obvious evidence is what leads us to believe we are smarter than them. It's not arrogance in any sense.

Building anything significant requires a relatively high level of dexterity, does it not? Even if crows could figure out how to build and operate tools that would allow them to build significant physical structures and objects, their bodies are not well-suited to doing so.

It's not about building anything, really. The cornerstones are figuring out a reliable method to store knowledge over generations, and then figuring out mathematics more advanced than counting your food and potential mates. Having that, you have both an abstract framework for developing better understanding of the world (which is a necessity for better control over it, i.e. technology), and a way to implement it as work that spans generations.

I think more in line with reality is that we would be more likely and better off reading how to build such things. The knowledge already exists around us in our culture. I program every day but it's not because I'm some super animal genius who invented computers and programming and software design.

They can build nests. Nest building seems to often get overlooked in discussions about tool use, perhaps because shelter isn't traditionally considered a sort of tool? But it seems tool-like to me. Maybe nest building doesn't impress us because bugs do it too?

Birds might lack the physique to use human tools, but they have plenty of dexterity when it comes to building nests. They just seem to have relatively little interest in using that dexterity to build things which are not nests

> How can they physically even come close to building a jet?

A human can't do that either. Humans as a whole can do it because we have enough intelligence to implement the whole chain of technology required to be able to do things on this scale. Not just the physical scale, but also the scale of the science and engineering required to make the thing actually work.

How could a human physically come close to building a microchip? We're much, much, much too large for that to be possible.

Perhaps intelligent animals are just too well adapted to their world and don't feel the needs we do.

Or perhaps crows only have two claws that also serve as feet and a beak, making it harder to fashion tools?

Perhaps living underwater, like octopuses do, makes it quite hard to master fire?

Or perhaps measuring intelligence is hard, and focusing only on engineering outcomes is a fallacy.

It's also not like most humans would be able to build even a steam engine, let alone a jumbo jet.

What motivation does a crow have to build a jumbo jet?

Furthermore, the vast majority of humans have no idea how to build a jumbo jet, and throughout the vast majority of human history, there were no jets - jumbo or otherwise - does this mean that we only have higher intelligence in today's world, now that we are able to build jumbo jets? For the vast majority of human history, we only had the simplest of tools and if we compared those humans to today, by your standards, these humans do not possess higher intelligence. However, evolution has not progressed nearly as quickly as our ability to work with tools has; as such, the human brain really hasn't changed all that much in even the last 10,000 or even 100,000 years! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_human_intelligenc...

Finally, you have no proof that crows would be incapable of building a jumbo jet, you've simply asserted that they couldn't. To be clear, I'm not arguing that they could, merely conceding that because they haven't done so, does not mean that they are incapable of doing so.

Crows have only been around in one form or another for 30 million years give or take, so if they haven't done anything more interesting than adapt to their environment and use basic tools since, I don't think it is unreasonable to assume that the reason is because they are incapable of it, not because they have chosen not to.

At the end of the day, it is impossible to prove a negative, so no I can't show you off hand that a crow can't actually conceive of this or that or the other thing

I think the point is that we assume that because other animals don't have this kind of engineering ability, we assume that they don't have capabilities like self-awareness or higher-level thought. But we can't see into their minds, so we don't actually have direct evidence of that.

What we do see in more intelligent animals such as orcas, orang-utans, elephants, parrots, crows, octopuses, even cats and dogs, etc is sophisticated planning and inventive use of their environment. We also know that early humans were likely anatomically similar to modern humans (and may well have

Are there areas where humans are smarter. Almost certainly. But is the difference as great as the outward achievements as judged by human standards would indicate. Almost certainly not. And there may even be aspects of cognition that other animals excel at that we are completely unaware.

Language seems incredibly important, it may actually be the basis for our ability to build abstract concepts, not to mention share knowledge.

Agreed. I wouldn't like to assume that other animals don't have language though. Dolphins/Whales in particular seem pretty likely to have true language that we just can't understand.

What would you consider the bare minimum act to be judged at human-level intelligence?

Remember, for most of the history of our evolutionary ancestors, we were hunter-gatherers that used extremely crude tools. Not really better than crows. Discoveries happened a whole lot slower back then, like the eons between making fire and starting agricultural towns. Given a few millennia, crows may be making their own fires to cook.

> What would you consider the bare minimum act to be judged at human-level intelligence?

Lex Fridman discussed this topic with Françoit Chollet in his recent podcast episode "Measures of Intelligence" [1]. I highly recommend it. Lengthy but really worth it.

[1] https://youtu.be/PUAdj3w3wO4

Maybe they are smart enough to realize that jumbo jets would ruin the planet? /s

Intelligence is one of the strongest predictors for success even among humans.

You're begging the question. You've defined what humans do as success. It's not even clear that what we do isn't complete failure (see climate change, nuclear war, etc.) Let's see if our actions keep us alive for some 160 million years.

So let’s say human behavior is failure, and animals are at least reasonably smart. We’re implying the reason why animals don’t engage in human-like behavior is that they recognize it will lead to things like climate change and nuclear war. Why are they not stopping us from destroying them along with ourselves?

No, that's not the claim, only that our "success" is not a good measure of intelligence.

If the question is whether animals can be deemed intelligent in the same way we humans are, and you define intelligence to be something other than what made humans successful, then the question becomes kind of moot, doesn't it?

Possibly inversely correlated.

Tribes that expressed humanity to creatures outside of homo sapiens were frequently wiped out by tribes that couldn't even manage to express humanity to other tribes of homo sapiens.

The victors sit on a throne of skulls, wondering why they are so lonely.

Aggression is a gene that selects for itself. But if it's too successful, then the next time some external selective pressure comes from outside, that 'loneliness' may become an existential threat, wiping out the local gene pool entirely. Just like a virus.

Tell that to Orcas. They rule the seas.

Used to. Then humans invented boats and spears.

They largely still do. The Oceans are huge, both in terms of surface area and then in terms of depth.

I don't necessarily completely disagree here, but I'm always thinking of the Douglas Adams quote in Hitchhiker's Guide on this:

"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."

But this type of reasoning went out the window, as soon as humans started killing dolphins in large numbers (see tuna nets), and the dolphins had no way to defend themselves or otherwise dissuade humans from doing that.

This is one of the big lessons in history. The civilizations that use their intelligence to make tools and weapons end up screwing civilizations that "muck about, having a good time".

what would be the next trump card above intelligence for survival/evolution/procreation/whatever the "goal" is?

Omnipotence. Or something approaching it.

I think the ability to 'reprogram' oneself. We are currently more or less stuck with the genetic code we receive at birth. A species which is able to modify their code at will would be incredibly adaptable and would likely surpass us very quickly.

hey we might be there in a couple hundred years

your comment reminds me of something that I secretly do which I personally used to think was kind of bizarre. when i stumble upon evidence or signs that a certain way of my thinking is incorrect, i like to confirm that suspicion and dedicate time to go into a meditative state where i take my findings and effectively attempt to reprogram my mental algorithms/principles. this takes anywhere from 15m to several hours depending on how fundamental and low level the change is. obviously, the perceived roi is immense.

for instance, this is how i converted from religion to atheism (arguably still a religion)... a product of my nurture that i decided to shed. other examples include my interaction model with others which included tenets such as curbing my decidedly unjustified high level of empathy for all others, controversial as it may be.

1. reprogram in the sense of mental models and thoughts or in a literal cells and atoms sense?

2. potentially depending on your definition and scope of `reprogram`, wouldn't that be a subset of intelligence, as opposed to something higher order or different?

3. what kind of behaviors/habits do you think humans (like you or I, not high-funded corporations) could employ now to get as close to achieving your second sentence as possible?

Self knowledge and self control.

That's uncomfortably close to Eurocentric claims of superiority that point to their colonization and exploitation of other countries in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century.

I don't necessarily buy it. A pacifist civilization might be "dominated" by a violent civilization, but they might still choose death over becoming violent themselves.

I agree with your post but it’s worth noting it does not apply to dolphins. Dolphins are not pacifists[0].

[0] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160204-cute-and-cuddly-dolp...

They can be pretty brutal to sharks and themselves. Also on a more bizarre note they can get rather rape-y esp. on hallucinogens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prmx0lYBTko

I do not read that the previous poster meant that the superior one was morally superior. Only superior in terms of violent power.

You're not buying it but they're not selling it?

The nets aren't a plot to subjugate the dolphins though; for the most part humans would rather not have dolphin bycatch. They're just something that dolphins haven't collectively figured out how to avoid.

That’s like saying humans aren’t intelligent because they can’t avoid car accidents in the rain.

Even if you were super intelligent, i bet you’d get fucked up in a net if you had low visibility in the water, you were traveling at high speed, and you didn’t have opposable thumbs to untangle yourself.

If I was an sonar-equipped aquatic mammal that was also superintelligent, I'd expect generations of losses might have taught my civilization not to swim near boats.

(Unless we're positing that running the risk of being trawled is an essential part of mucking about and having fun, or a scientific experiment, or dolphins having enough imagination for some of them to speculate warnings about boats are a conspiracy to keep them from the best fish :D)

Boats go where your food is. Avoid boats and you'll have to avoid the most plentiful food sources. Either starve or run the risk that you might stumble upon a boat and someone from your group might get tangled.

> humans aren’t intelligent because they can’t avoid car accidents in the rain

A reasonable exhibit one for the presently observable limits on (at least collective) human intelligence.

Where did anyone say anything about superiority? If anything, the implication is that the humans are stupid for not mucking about and having a good time, and that even though the dolphins may be “superior” in this regard, it’s a race to the bottom since the more violent species wipes out the fun-loving one.

Aha, so when an interstellar empire comes around and fucks up our planet -- if not outright just sending an asteroid our way, it's justified because we are of a lower technological level?

The humans and proto-humans of the past weren't 'stupid'. And even if they were comparatively, 'stupidity' isn't a justification for committing harmful actions, degrading, or otherwise treating the recipient as lesser. This sounds like a philosophy that encourages "well I'm going to hurt you and it must be right because you can't stop me or dissuade me".

> even if they were comparatively, 'stupidity' isn't a justification for committing harmful actions, degrading, or otherwise treating the recipient as lesser

I don't think the GP was saying it is. I think he was trying to look at it from the dolphins' point of view: he was proposing that the fact that they didn't use any of their intelligence (assuming they have it) to construct ways to defend themselves from other intelligent species, like humans, was a mistake on their part.

Why are you assuming that previous poster aimed to justify that behaviour? I don't see that that was implied.

> it's justified because we are of a lower technological level?

No, it isn't. Just like killing dolphins isn't justified. But it probably means that the interstellar empire in question is very likely to be more intelligent and/or advanced than us.

Well, species success is measured in periods of time orders of magnitude larger than recorded human history.

It’s an open question whether our aggressive strategy will be successful past anything but the very short term. (Currently it’s not looking that good.)

> (Currently it’s not looking that good.)

I dunno. There is a real, if dwindling and not that large, possibility that mankind breaks free of earth and establishes itself elsewhere.

You can't say that for any other species except perhaps some microscopic extremophiles.

It's only so easy to be cynical about this because of how close we are to something greater, because of how much we are poised to lose.

Exactly. There are species that have been successful for millions of years.

Modern humanity has certainly impacted the ecology dramatically over the past couple hundred-thousand, but calling us successful is premature. When we're as old as bluegreen algae (or hell, even Araucaria araucana), I'll happily revise my position.

Dolphins have a rough start, it's so hard to build anything in the ocean other than just have it biologically.

It's just so unfair. Just imagine if our brain is the same but we are fish and swim. How will civilization ever develop? Everything from bronze age up is pretty much impossible. That and we'd have no hands.

It's tool use and language that differentiate us. Other species have one but not both. Learning is much more efficient when communicated rather than done in an isolated vacuum and all the knowledge in the world is useless if you lack fine motor control manipulation to take advantage of it.

How do you know crows and dolphins lack language? Because they don’t use a syntax like ours?

I think the implication was dolphins have language but not tool use.

A theory is that dophins communicate by transmitting 3D information. They see with sonar and can use the same mechanisms to transfer 3D information. Probably vastly superior to the grunts of us apes for many tasks.

On the other hand, the best of our inventions and discoveries seem to have been just barely within our grasp, and it took modern Homo sapiens 200 thousand years to reach this level of domination of the planet.

A slightly less intelligent species (or perhaps one lacking just the right body type), such as our own ancestors or perhaps our extinct close relatives, might have taken 10 million years instead of 200 thousand, or just never have done it at all.

Would our physical abilities not play a role in our ability to "rule" the world? We're relatively large animals, blessed with arms, finger, thumbs and a remarkable degree of physical dexterity. These physical abilities collectively enable us to physically manipulate the world.

Or in other words, if dolphins had arms and thumbs (or generally any physical attributes that allows them to manipulate their environment as humans do), would it crazy to suggest that they could dominate the seas, as humans dominate land?

Besides lacking thumbs, dolphins would also have a pretty hard time harnessing fire as a tool. This probably truncates their tech tree severely.

It would truncate the human tech tree. It's anybody's guess what a Dolphin-based tech tree would look like, given their environmental constraints.

> Besides lacking thumbs, dolphins would also have a pretty hard time harnessing fire as a tool.

I keep reading about this, and I don't see it as a major problem.

Sure, it might take a while for them to even grasp the concept of fire. Much like it took us a while to grasp relativity.

However, once they know it to be possible, it's an engineering problem. They can build their forges above water. Holding breath to operate them (until they can do it remotely) is inconvenient but they are pretty good at it.

There's also a fair bit of construction they could do without even resorting to that. Humans can weld underwater. They could too.

> Holding breath to operate them (until they can do it remotely) is inconvenient but they are pretty good at it.

Nitpick: Dolphins breathe air.

Humans can weld underwater - with equipment that they built on dry land, using materials that they created on dry land. Could they have created the materials underwater? It would have been hard, even knowing how.

Dolphins are mammals like us. They're holding their breath when they're underwater like us :P

True, but perhaps they could harness technology we never thought of as valuable. Perhaps they could build structures around sea vents, or use sticks and weeds to build pens in which to farm fish. Many possibilities exist. They could even be doing agriculture right now and we wouldn't even know it.

I like your ideas but without dexterous extremities it at least a very versatile mouth it seems you'd be very limited in your capacity to control or shape your environment.

Dolphins do have a versatile mouth. Even seals have been trained to do fancy things with their mouths. But staying on the dolphin theme, check out these dolphins blowing air rings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT-fctr32pE

I'm endlessly grateful that Raccoons aren't more intelligent.

Yet. Coexisting near humans, it's likely that the environment will incentivize smarter raccoons.

I think it’s the opposite. Any idiot raccoon can raid a trash can and get lots of calories. And unlike rats we are generally not out there looking to kill them.

We didn't come to rule the world with our intelligence... we came to rule it with fire.

Fire, control over it and the ability to make it, is the one thing humans have that no other animal has. We may (or not) be more intelligent, have a more complex capacity for language, etc., but those are differences of degree. Only fire is truly a difference of kind. We are the animal that makes fire.

Fire is literally what made us what we are... it is probable that increased availability of food calories from cooking was what allowed us to grow our big and calorically expensive brains. So fire comes before our vaunted intelligence. And then fire made us the most powerful creatures on earth, and enabled what we call civilization and technology and progress, each new stage in our development enabled by ever greater dissipation of energy gradients... mostly through fire. Although we did also harness other energy sources throughout history, such as wind and running water, and lately, nuclear fission, always fire was primary, the real driver of our dominion over the planet, even today.

And as it looks, fire will be our end as well, as we use it to release the fossil energy nature stored up over millions of years in mere decades and turn our lovely earth into an inferno.

I really do wonder how humans would've adapted had we been aquatic animals. Energy usage via fire is not possible, and it seems other energy usage under water is much harder than simply creating fire, so we could still have the same level of intelligence as now, yet be so far behind technologically than we are now.

Water is crazy competitive. Octopi ate probably pushing the limits on useful intelligence.

Except for Australian Hawks, who use wildfire to flush out smaller animals.

Do the hawks create or aid the spread of fire? One could say Redwood trees are similar for having evolved to take advantage of fire.

IIRC, Australian hawks intentionally spread fires by dropping burning pieces of wood. They do this cooperatively, too. (Don't piss off Australian Hawks, I guess ;)

https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-ethnobiology/volume-3...

Probably neither. The evidence for any of this is about as strong as the evidence for Bigfoot. A bunch of tall tails from people who swear they're sincere.

I wonder if the Black Kite will ever come to rule the world one day then.

The alternative for intelligent species without fire is to evolve fancier biochemistry; it's hard to know where this might evolve but several species have independently produced harsh acids, venoms, and even combustion (bombardier beetle). When it comes down to it you can grow your tools or you can make them out of the environment, and arguably being able to grow effective tools is superior (which likely means it's more complex and why it didn't evolve before fire use).

My bet would be on the cephalopods; they've already got ink and venom and intelligence and prehensile limbs with chromatophores that could potentially evolve into tiny manipulable chemical factories. They would probably also need to evolve the longevity and social and communication abilities to pass knowledge on in a society.

Maybe the longer term results are different. If the Fermi Paradox is a thing, perhaps our brand of intelligence - the combination of brains and dexterity and environment that let us quickly advance from sophisticated tool building to a global industrial economy - is an evolutionary dead end and species that have gone down this path destroy their ecosystem and themselves along with it inside a few thousand years.

Whereas other intelligent species that lack the environment or manual dexterity to even light a fire will keep on going long after we're extinct.

This reminds me of the discussion a while ago about how efficiency and robustness are at odds.

It's the same thing, but on a much grander scale.

The opposite could also be true:

Our brand of intelligence - the combination of brains and dexterity and environment that let us quickly advance from sophisticated tool building to a global industrial economy - is precisely the rare Goldilocks combination of features that allows a civilisation to spread throughout the universe.

Because that combination is incredibly rare we might very well be the first to be poised to attempt to do so.

This is the strong anthropic principle at play, which of course could be taken with a grain of salt. Still, this scenario nicely answers the question "Where is everyone?", too.

We definitely have a unique ability to change our world but whether that's an effective "ruling of the world" and "smart" is really debatable. While that may sound be glib "judging them by their results" is really a ridiculous notion. The "results" would be purely framed in human terms "who can solve puzzles" who can "think like we do".

A cat doesn't need to think like us to live in their cat world, a worm doesn't need to solve a puzzle to live and thrive. Yet they both have thrived for a long time and existed in a way let them persist with their environment in an equilibrium.

It seems pretty reasonable to frame intelligence as thriving within your environment and persisting, and humans have only been around a short time and driven our planet to literal environmental collapse. I'd contend it's equally reasonable to describe humans as some of the least intelligent species.

I'm not sure this is a fair characterization. Almost all predator animals overhunt if given the chance. The equilibrium is typically due to the predator's inability to catch the remaining prey rather than some intelligent realization by the predator that they ought to stop hunting so much to preserve the ecosystem.

Eh, I'd argue beavers come close, especially when compared with paleolithic humans.

> Humans were effective in their intelligence

Well, another thing humans have going for them is hands

On the other hand, there are more kangaroos in Australia than people...

Or if that doesn't tickle you, how about: cockroaches!

effective -> selfish seems equally scientific

Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

Cockroaches, ants and plankton rule the world, depending on your definition.

Or sourdough: https://xkcd.com/2296/

I think the argument goes both ways. Chimpanzees are (roughly) as intelligent as our toddlers, but we haven't necessarily been treating them as such. That said, if we never mentally developed past being toddlers we might not even have invented speech, let alone civilization. Animals possess intelligence well above what people used to give them credit for, whoever they are still far and away from where people are.

Hah! Rule the world? Have you read the news lately? If human intelligence is judged by results, we'd score quite poorly. We are well on our way to causing a 6th mass extinction, which may very well include our own demise.

if it's "results", the dinosaurs "ruled the world" much longer than people, and likely that record will stand.

High intelligence isn't just a blessing. There are serious evolutionary costs associated (such as, for one, longer childhood). Evolution patterns follow the adage "use it or lose it", so if a species doesn't show signs of benefiting from higher intelligence, why should we assume that it's there? Why would natural selection maintain this trait if there was no obvious payback?

> High intelligence isn't just a blessing.

Not only that, mental illness correlates strongly with higher IQ: https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human...

Perhaps that's why I frequently see links about depression, bipolar etc on HN... I read so many comments about "I got burned out coding 15 hour days and then I got diagnosed with major depression and my life's been a wreck since and no one will hire me" sort of themes!

> Why wouldn't they have higher intelligence?

Because almost no other animal appears to think ahead of time , master fire, build tools that did not exist before? You can come up with numerous explanations as to why it's that, but what one's species' brain can come up with will be a serious constraint as well.

> think ahead of time

The angry, injured tiger that killed its hunter by stalking his house and planning an ambush comes to mind

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129551...

> master fire,

Nothing comes to mind but I would not rule out some kind of animal using fire for some purpose

> build tools that did not exist before

A number of species have been shown to construct tools to make their labor easier. "That didn't exist before" is a little difficult to pin down as animal communities are hyperlocal.

Regarding the tiger - that's a fascinating story, but it's worth noting that the article stresses "it was anything but typical" and that "in living memory, there was no record of an incident like this".

> master fire

To be fair, I don't think tigers were visited by Prometheus nor did they benefit from his sacrifice to humans!

Sorry, I'll see my way out...

It's not like the idea is arbitrary. Have you ever seen a giraffe build a car, or even a skateboard?

We don't assume superior intelligence, we observe it.

Perhaps it’s humans that lack the higher intelligence that would allow them to understand that other species may also be intelligent.

I believe it's something like the adage, "it's difficult to make someone understand something their paycheck depends on their not understanding."

Think about people who will tell you lobsters can't feel pain while they're rattling in a pot. The idea we are the only intelligent species, and that everything around us exists only to be exploited for our benefit, is quite convenient.

Edited to add: I think this is also related to the way tech companies view their users. They aren't humans with needs to be fulfilled, they're a resource to be extracted. More a coal mine than a customer. (Not to lob a grenade into the discussion, I just found it relevant.)

I think it might be quite the opposite. Our highly developed minds/egos sometimes cloud our ability to see reality as it is, and often make us believe that we are more/less special or gifted than others.

There is very consistent supporting information to explore that thought further.

We rely too heavily on structured vocal responses to determine intelligence. On top of that we rely on observing erroneous unnecessary behavior to consider something might be thinking. This could be a real limitation of us as a species.

I don't think it's intelligence, but humility.

We are (hopefully) transitioning through an era where being a conqueror is less successful than collaboration. But there are way too many of us who are less than seven generations separated from conquerors. Conquerors bank on exclusiveness, not inclusiveness.

We're still trying to convince each other that all the humans deserve to be in the Humanity Club. If we can't hack that, then who is going to want to talk about cetaceans and chimpanzees and corvids?

Historically, humans have frequently tried to claim other groups of humans aren't really intelligent, so ...

Because then it's easier to justify enslaving or killing them. Mostly we just don't even want to know.

Well, that reasoning is your wording alone.

The reason scientists do not optimistically assert animals must have human-analogous intelligence is because of the difficulty required to design a test that will reveal traces of it.

Consider the Turing Test, not as a goal for AI, but rather the working definition of intelligence. Put another way, game knows game.

I think in 100 years this general thought will be something we look back on as obvious and the denial of it barbaric.

all you have to do is watch a nature documentary to see many different animal species reason, work together and have emotional reactions which shows that they have a sense of self and thus a consciousness

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