Like how humans can hit a hole-in-one. Or an ice skater doing a triple axle. Or a snowboarder doing one of their insane tricks. If animals could think like we do, would they be able to do the same things?
In: Biology
Well sure depending on what you mean by think.
The brain has lots of things dedicated to different stuff and the human brain has a fairly large region dedicated to motion control/balance/hand eye coordination, etc. Mostly this is done in the cerebellum, though other regions come into play. All of this gives humans (and to an extend primates) a boost in coordination that species don’t really get.
We don’t generally consider muscle memory as part of our thought process though. Instead it’s something you train with practice, much like exercise trains the body. So if you consider muscle memory as part of human intelligence (and I do personally) then sortof.
You also run into lots of problems with the actual body structure of most animals. Notably a lack of thumbs puts a lot of sports right out the door.
Depends on the athletic activity. Humans are very well suited to long-distance running. A ton of animals can beat us over short distances, but trained human athletes can beat most animals over very long distances (look up the Human v Horse Marathon). We also have very developed facilities for throwing, catching, and otherwise tracking flying objects (that’s why so many of our sports involve launching balls around). Even if you could magically give the animal of your choice a hand capable of gripping a football, you’d still do better with a human playing quarterback.
For everything else (short or mid-distance running, swimming, jumping, pure strength, etc.) there are plenty of animals that can beat us in one or both.
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