Why are humans so much smarter than animals? Shouldn't there

They still exist

See : Australian Aboriginals, Pygmies

>>8229165
If dolphins had better ways of retaining intergenerational information they would have reached similar levels as humans.

>>8229197
Idk. Granted they're dumb but they're still closer to human intelligence than they are to something in between humans and animals.

>>8229222
Australian Aboriginals are extremely dumb

>>8229165
Leslie?

Africans

>>8229165
>Why are humans so much smarter than animals?
They're not.
Exhibit A: OP.

>>8229243
Average Aborigine IQ: 62.

It's kind of funny. Huffing gasoline is a major problem in Aboriginal communities.

>>8229165
Many primates in captivity have been taught sign language and have IQ's estimated to be in the low 70's to 90's.
This is higher than the average for Australian aborigines and Subsaharan Africans.
Your premise is invalid.

>>8229165
Octopi, dolphins, and apes all have high intelligence. The problem is that they don't have the specific kind of intelligence that makes humans human. My theory is that it comes down to communication: all animals besides humans lack a spoken or written language, instead communicating via simple vocal or physical cues. Without the combination of communication and tool making, intelligence is irrelevant. And many animals have exhibited tool making traits.

Personal theories aside, humans see themselves as much smarter because we have a history, culture, and education system. A man who has never spoken to another human being and lives in the wild would end up smarter than every other animal, but not by as vast a margin as one would expect. As I said, octopi, dolphins, and apes all exhibit high levels of intelligence, but without society they are unable to effectively use it. This is why gorillas trained in captivity can learn things at all instead of just throwing shit at the wall.

>>8229755
What's interesting about octopi is that our common ancestor was from the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago. Octopi and we evolved brains completely independently. We are so different that most of an octopus's brain is distributed throughout its legs, and if you cut off one of its legs, then that leg will continue to catch food and try to feed it to the mouth. Yet octopi can solve complex puzzles, and different octopi have different personalities.

If there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, they would think at least as differently from us as do octopi.

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>>8229776

>>8229755
Michio Kaku in his book The Future of the Mind proposed a theory which, in my opinion, describes the difference between humans and animals the best:
He says everything has some level of consciousness, whether it is a human, a plant, or a robot. He measures the consciousness using units, where for example a thermostat has one unit as it senses the temperature around it. Plants have more units since they can understand the temperature, the weather, humidity, gravity...

Now the difference between humans and animals is perhaps that humans have at least one more unit of consciousness than animals - humans can plan ahead in time, years ahead, whereas animals usually only plan for minutes or hours, while setting traps, for instance. But even that is mostly instinctive, I would say.

Perhaps if animals understood the concept of future, they would try to create their own form of communication, a language, a writing system which would represent a huge leap in their evolution.

>>8229802
squirrels and bears prove you wrong, also penguins

>>8229165
because of evolution reducing jaw muscles allowing for the skull to expand and facilitate a larger brain hence humans having more cognitive abilities hence "smarter"

>>8229791
>Tumblr
Stay there faggot.

>>8229811
It is idiotic bigotry to think anything from tumblr is bad.

>>8229818
It's just memes mate, chill

>>8229821
>backing down this hard

>>8229818
>bigotry
>>>/tumblr/

>>8229165

Hmm, are we smarter than animals, if we started from zero again?

Means no information passed to the next generation. Most humans are fucking idiots all that I know, they drink and drive, use drugs, all sorts of stupid things we expect stupid animals to do.

>>8229802
Or... if we learned to not 'overplan' the future, this would be great leap as well

>>8229920
>Darwin

Nope. Not Darwin.

http://www.freefictionbooks.org/books/c/11773-the-clansman-by-thomas-dixon?start=133

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>>8229805
squirrels don't randomly attack people either

did you ever think maybe some animals CAN communicate but simply choose not to

>humans so much smarter than animals
Mostly not so much.
They are good at mimicking the activity
of the (few) smarter individuals, but that
does not in any way mean they themselves
are smarter. It merely means they are
better at mimicking.

>>8229658
That's also one of the popular racist stereotypes here.

>>8229802
isnt there a way we can do this with dogs?

just get an [spoiler]engineer[/spoiler]. to spot the one with concepts of a future.