Humans not smarter than animals In down and under , or all over in the world

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by arauca, Dec 4, 2013.

  1. arauca Banned Banned

    "For millennia, all kinds of authorities – from religion to eminent scholars – have been repeating the same idea ad nauseam, that humans are exceptional by virtue that they are the smartest in the animal kingdom," says Dr Arthur Saniotis, Visiting Research Fellow with the University's School of Medical Sciences.


    He says the belief that humans have superior intelligence harks back to the Agricultural Revolution some 10,000 years ago when people began producing cereals and domesticating animals. This gained momentum with the development of organised religion, which viewed human beings as the top species in creation.


    While animal rights began to rise in prominence during the 19th century, the drive of the Industrial Revolution forestalled any gains made in the awareness of other animals.



    "Animals offer different kinds of intelligences which have been under-rated due to humans' fixation on language and technology. These include social and kinaesthetic intelligence. Some mammals, like gibbons, can produce a large number of varied sounds – over 20 different sounds with clearly different meanings that allow these arboreal primates to communicate across tropical forest canopy. The fact that they do not build houses is irrelevant to the gibbons.

    "Many quadrupeds leave complex olfactory marks in their environment, and some, like koalas, have special pectoral glands for scent marking. Humans, with their limited sense of smell, can't even gauge the complexity of messages contained in olfactory markings, which may be as rich in information as the visual world," he says.

    Professor Henneberg says domestic pets also give us close insight into mental abilities of mammals and birds. "They can even communicate to us their demands and make us do things they want. The animal world is much more complex than we give it credit for," he says.

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  3. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Animals are as smart as humans because they are more smelly and can make more noise? In that case teenagers are a lot more intelligent than adults.
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  5. leopold Valued Senior Member

    many animals exhibit extraordinary abilities.
    hawks can spot a rabbit at one mile.
    some birds can navigate vast stretches of ocean and arrive with pinpoint accuracy.
    homing pigeons (now extinct) are these types of birds.
    to say these types of things make animal more intelligent than humans is erroneous.
    there isn't an animal alive that can imagine going to the moon much less to build the rocket that takes it there.
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  7. Russ_Watters Not a Trump supporter... Valued Senior Member

    Er - so the only comparison given was of baboons making 20 distinct sounds, which makes them smarter than humans? My recollection is that the average human vocabulary is on the order of 10,000 words. Someone want to check the math on that?

    Additional obvious error: humans don't have a sense of smell, but that doesn't mean we can't detect smells to a vastly higher sensitivity than any animal. We use tools for that...that are somewhat more complex than a baboon poking an anthill with a stick.
  8. Read-Only Valued Senior Member

    I think people are misunderstanding what was in the report. It's NOT a matter of overall intelligence at all - it's that animals have very distinctive types of intelligence or sensory equipment that in some cases are superior to humans. For instance, a bloodhound can follow a specific human scent through a trail crowded with the scents of other people. We cannot do that nor do we have a machine that can.
  9. Buddha12 Valued Senior Member

    Certain tortoises can over 200 years, humans can't. Why can certain animals outlive humans?
  10. arauca Banned Banned

    Wait Human can detect different smell and identify it and name it and categorize it
  11. billvon Valued Senior Member

    True - but we don't "leave complex olfactory marks in their environment" and we don't "have special pectoral glands for scent marking." Maybe if we ate more asparagus and peed on more things we'd be smarter?
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

    Arauca, you have rapidly become this website's most entertaining purveyor of preposterous bullshit, but you're really outdone yourself this time.
    • Humans have a far greater ability to override instinctive behavior with reasoned and learned behavior than any other animal.
    • Humans have a far greater ability to modify our natural environment to suit our own comfort and other preferences than any other animal.
    • Humans have a far greater ability to communicate than any other animal. Yes Russ, a typical adult human has a vocabulary of 10,000 words--depending on how "a word" is defined in the particular language. A large percentage of the population (particularly university graduates) exceed that by 50%, and a great many people double that by simply being bilingual. This far exceeds other animals' ability to communicate with pheromones or body language. Gorillas and chimpanzees have learned to use and understand 1,000 words in American Sign Language and assemble them in grammatically correct sentences, and African Grey parrots can do this with about 200 words and a very rudimentary grammar. Some dogs have learned to understand 200 words but not in combinations, and of course they can't speak. Speaking of body language, we have 100 muscles in our face, which gives us a much richer vocabulary of expressions than any other animal.
    • Humans are the only animals who leave records, to give our descendants a head start on continuously (although not monotonically) improving our civilization.
    • Humans are the only animals who have created art, including painting, literature, theater, sculpture, music and others. (The "songs" of birds are short, instinctive, have almost no variation, and remain the same from one generation to the next. The elephants who appear to "paint" are simply being directed by subtle tugs on their ears by their handlers who are too high for us to see clearly. The birds who decorate their nests with shiny objects to attract a mate are probably the runners-up in this category, but they'll never win a prize for it.)
    • Humans (both modern humans, Homo sapiens, and our recent ancestral species) are the only animals who have invented technologies that create an increasingly artificial environment that is more amenable to our safety, comfort and pleasure than the natural environment. (Many other animals invent tools, but only simple ones like sticks for digging, mud for camouflage and rocks for cracking food open. The runner-up in this category is probably the crows, who have learned to set nuts on the road and let cars crack them open.)
    A claim that any other animals even approach our level of intelligence is sheer lunacy.
  13. arauca Banned Banned

    You really have a crush on me . I was just to insult you , but I rather don't.
    You are an old man so am I lets don't show to the younger , how low we are.

    But that's just it: sensory equipment has nothing to do with intelligence. It is certainly true that many animals have different/superior sensory equipment, but very, very untrue that that makes them more intelligent.
    I would be shocked if we could not do that - we can analyze the chemical content of air (the smell) to a far higher sensitivity than a blodhound can. Perhaps such a machine hasn't been invented due to lack of necessity, but I see no technical reason why it couldn't be done.
  15. Pete It's not rocket surgery Registered Senior Member

    Not on the fly, and not to distinguish the intricate combination that is a particular individual's odour.

    But as you say, not all facilities are intelligence.

    Are plants intelligent for being able to extract nutrition from the ground and the air, and to attract pollinators?
  16. andy1033 Truth Seeker Valued Senior Member

    I totally agree that animals are mis-understood by humans, whom are always so arrogant. I believe that humans are a mixture of rats and monkeys, and rats and humans are virtually the only two animals on earth without empathy. Some humans develop empathy, but only a minority.

    For animals empathy rules everything they do, as it does for any human that develops it.

    So projecting human thinking into there behaviour is wrong.

    So i totally agree that animals are very intelligent. Only one thing humans have that they do not, and that is that sense of selve, that arrogance. Humans have no idea what empathy is, and this ability is what rules nature. So humans for the most part are outside nature.

    All those arrogant statements above about humans, i care not for. For me most humans are pure dumb. Humans in there arrogance claimed that gossip was high intelligence, lol. What moronic rubbish is that?

    We certainly can do it on the fly - I am involved in tracer gas testing of fume hoods and they take readings every second.

    And getting a particular individual's odour is just a matter of "smelling" something they own and getting the ratios of the gases. It doesn't seem to me to be a difficult problem, just something we choose not to do.
  18. wellwisher Banned Banned

    Part of what makes humans more intelligent is we get to define the definition, to stack the deck. We also get to inflate the score for humans by taking credit for anything any human created, such as humans put a man on the moon, even if you were not born yet. The true test would run two experiments. In the first, the human child has to develop with as much assistance as an animal in nature, which means no formal schooling. The second test would be to give the animal 12 plus years of formal training 6 hours a day. The we will compare the species and take a net score. The only thing we need to do is normalize relative to practical limitations such as a human can't do flying skills and an dog has no thumbs or fingers to play the piano, etc.
  19. origin Heading towards oblivion Valued Senior Member

    I think you accidentally confused homing pigeons with passenger pigeons.

    Passenger pigeons are extinct.

    Homing pigeons are simply a variety of the pigeons (rock doves) that infest our cities.
  20. leopold Valued Senior Member

    i seriously doubt if we actually have this "artificial dogs nose".
    tracer gases are an entirely different animal than a group of closely spaced pheromones.
    it also doesn't seem difficult to build a robot that can drive cross country either but so far it's been impossible.
  21. leopold Valued Senior Member

    the birds i'm talking about was used during WW2.
    the military had some "terrific" plans for birds back then.
  22. billvon Valued Senior Member

    Both rats and humans exhibit empathy. Fleas do not.

    As in talking about their level of empathy?

    Humans show about as much empathy as any other primate does. We call people who cannot experience empathy "sociopaths." Fortunately they are in the minority.
  23. billvon Valued Senior Member

    We have cars that will drive themselves across the country. They've been built.

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