Why animals are smarter than we think
I think that has allowed people to have a little bit more empathy for some of these animals than they otherwise might.
Key points
- That might make us think of that animal differently than we maybe do?
- Animals’ brains “might not look exactly like ours, but they can help animals solve problems and navigate their environments and adapt to their situations really effectively.” So what does animal intelligence actually look like?
- Likewise, there are studies showing that animals like insects have remarkable capacities for perception and learning and memory and adaptive, flexible decision-making and communication with each other.
This is why we can often have much more empathy for some animals over others, even if they display the same markers of sentience and the same markers of intelligence.
What kind of abilities are we overlooking when we think of animals and intelligence?
Additional details
- David Robson, the author of The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Make Dumb Mistakes, says that traditional markers like IQ are not the only factors when considering how smart someone is.
- He’s the author of the book The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why, and he says that making humans the bar for intelligence is a mistake.
- We have more empathy by default for animals who play companion roles in our lives as opposed to animals who play commodity roles in our lives.
- Animals that we might have written off as simple, as mechanistic, are in fact incredibly complex, seemingly sensitive, seemingly intelligent.
- How much of what we call animal intelligence is actually just animals doing the things that people happen to be good at?
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
Advertisement
Every article behind this summary — 1 article from 1 outlet
Get stories like this in your inbox.
Subscribe — it's freeOne free email at 6am — your topics, deduplicated, five minutes. No account, no paywall.