According to University of Adelaide experts in evolutionary biology, humans aren’t smarter than the rest of the animal kingdom. Turns out scholars and clergy who’ve been saying otherwise, for a thousand years, have been wrong.
Rather, science is now telling us that animals can have cognitive faculties that are superior to ours. Dr Arthur Saniotis, Visiting Research Fellow with the University’s School of Medical Sciences, says the idea that humans have superior intelligence dates back to the Agricultural Revolution, around 10,000 years ago, when people began producing cereals and domesticating animals. The idea then gained momentum with the development of organized religion (although he doesn’t mention which religion).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYDijuFVOGM
From the article:
“The belief of human cognitive superiority became entrenched in human philosophy and sciences. Even Aristotle, probably the most influential of all thinkers, argued that humans were superior to other animals due to our exclusive ability to reason,” Dr Saniotis says.
Professor Maciej Henneberg, a professor of anthropological and comparative anatomy from the School of Medical Sciences, says that animals often have different abilities that we don’t understand. But, just because we don’t understand them doesn’t mean our intelligences are at different levels- rather they are just that- different.
He went on to say, “Animals offer different kinds of intelligences which have been under-rated due to humans’ fixation on language and technology. These include social and kinesthetic 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.”
Then, of course, there are the animals that leave complexly mark their environment with scents, something a humans limited sense of smell can’t understand. Even our domestic pets are able to 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.
It seems the animal world is much more complex than we give it credit for. And perhaps that’s why, just knowing that these animals have lives and communicate, is part of the reason I can’t eat them. Food for thought- next time you assume that pesky squirrel outside is dumb.
Source: PHYS
