That’s pretty much it. I searched, but I didn’t find anything that addressed my exact question.
It’s frequently said that chimps have the intelligence of a 3 year old human. But some 3 year olds are smarter than others, just like some animals are smarter than others of the same species. So why haven’t we come across a chimp with the intelligence of a 10 year old? Like…still pretty dumb, but able to fully use and comprehend written language. Is it likely that this “Hawking chimp” has already existed, but since we don’t put forth much effort educating (most) apes we just haven’t noticed? Or is there something else going on, maybe some genetic barrier preventing them from ever truly achieving sapience? I’m not expecting an ape to write an essay on Tolstoy, but it seems like as smart as we know these animals to be we should’ve found one that could read and comprehend, for instance, The Hungry Caterpillar as written in plain english.
In: Biology
I’m pretty sure the chimp is much more intelligent than that; has anyone met a 3 year old? Lol
A chimp might have the raw processing power of a 7 year old. But it won’t have the brain structure for it.
In GPU terms a 3 year old has 100 compute units, 50 are rasterization, and the other 50 are ray tracing.
Super chimp has 200 compute units, but all of then are rasterization. If it tries to run Ray tracing it won’t really work.
Basically even though a 4 year old might be more stupid than a chimp humans are hardware optimized to do certain tasks like language and writing, while even a superior chimp can’t grasp those things.
Language would likely be a barrier to us knowing.
You could be as intelligent a chimp as you like, but if you couldn’t communicate it in human language, none of us would ever know.
Stephen Hawking is a pretty good human example of this – think about it; we only knew of his immense intelligence a) because his debilitating condition occurred when he was already an academic, b) through a combination of luck and technology he was able to carry on communicating his theories.
Now imagine a chimp of vast intelligence, or a dolphin, or whatever member of the animal kingdom; even if they’d worked out the meaning of the universe, how would we humans ever know? They might be able to communicate this to other chimps/dolphins, of course, but they’d likely be considered weird outsiders who should be concentrating on more practical matters like gathering more food or keeping the kids safe from killer whales rather than dreaming about that kind of nonsense all day.
Language also shapes conceptual thinking, and abstract thought, etc., but again the question is, even if they were geniuses in these regards, how would we ever know?
I think it was in Carl Sagan’s book “The Dragons of Eden” where I first learned about Imo, a potential genius in the primate world. It’s been a long time, so I may get some details wrong. Apologies.
Imo was a Macaca fuscata (Japanese monkey also known as the snow monkey) who lived on the island of Kōjima in an archipelago. She lived near the coast/beach. They were studied by Japanese primatologists in the 1950s who would leave them food. The other members of her tribe, would ignore food that had been dropped/covered in sand, and search for clean fruit.
Imo was the first to realise that sweet potatoes could be held under the water, (running fresh water was best but the sea would give a salty flavour) and the sand washed off.
Human researchers, watching the tribe, saw that she tried to pass this trick on to the male leaders of the tribe, who weren’t interested. She was able to pass it on to her offspring though, so they were able to claim a lot of previously unavailable food.
Proving the first discovery wasn’t a fluke, Imo also learned how to sift wheat grains out of the sand by throwing handfuls of sand and wheat into the water, then catching the wheat that floated to the top. You could argue this was her EUREKA moment.
Like the washing, this technique also spread. But there were too many monkeys on the island with too little wheat coming from the humans. Competition became too fierce and the stronger monkeys would steal the collected wheat from the weaker ones, so they stopped the learned behaviour in self-preservation. The stronger ones (the jocks?) were happy to steal from the nerds, but not to do the sifting themselves.
Imo (or her sibling) started another innovation after the submerging of food and wheat in water – the monkeys started submerging more of their bodies in the water, and play-splashing in the ocean. They lost their fear of the water. They can swim up to half a kilometer, but they usually do not like to.
Lyall Watson came up with a theory (in the 1970s) called the 100th monkey effect to explain the sort of psychic Jungian group-mind as the means by which this skill propagated even to monkeys on other islands, because it never occurred to him that Imo might have used her newly found love of water to swim to a nearby island and spread the technique there. His new-agey type theory has since been debunked and discredited.
Imo was a genius of her kind. She used to run down to the shore when the primatologists came with their food. Which might explain why she didn’t flee from poachers, who came to the island, captured and presumably killed her. Poachers often grab the snow monkeys – which can end up as food in China, where they are said to be an aphrodisiac, and for laboratory studies in countries like Holland.
Imo, which first washed the sand from sweet potatoes, and realised wheat floated while sand sunk, was killed by a member of the primate species homo sapiens.
Part of the basis to this question has more to do with the way study results get twisted in reporting and the way intelligence testing is flawed in the first place than anything else.
Intelligence testing, particularly early childhood intelligence testing are based on estimations through the observation of specific skills appropriate for an age group within a given society.
A toddler’s limiting factor on language skills is experience, a chimp’s may be total ability, observers from the outside see the same level of evidence of mastery, but the internal process can be quite different and difficult to judge.
Apes would likely do much better if we had standardized IQ tests based on something they actually had use for in daily life, but they would still not surpass adults on anything where reasoning can beat dexterity.
Dogs beat chimps in some of the more human centric tests because they have better skill at reading the human intention in some situations and natural abilities that make some of the tests easier.
This gets further muddied by the reporting that takes a paper that says something like “ape trained in sign language for 12 years now has language recognition scores approximately equivalent to the average intelligence 3yr old” and says ‘ape as smart as 3yr old’
The other thing that at least used to be true was that most of the tests from 0-3 involved very little problem solving, so any animal that could be trained to recognize things could score reasonably well, after three many of the common tests started to introduce reasoning which most animals have limited capacity for compared to humans unless it is something that the animal has an evolutionary reason to be concerned with.
At the end of the day, while interesting, the results of giving human IQ tests to non-humans is rather apples and oranges and since most animals have no interest or need for most of the skills we measure they will always score in the range of early childhood development.
In all likelihood larger primates are smarter than a 3yr old, we just aren’t giving them a fair test, but the scale on a fair test for other primates would be different and diverge into it’s own direction away from the human measures as it moves up the scale.
You should check out the book Humankind by Rutger Bregman.
He’s got a whole section about the evolution of humans and why we are more emotionally intelligent than the chimpanzee, and then goes onto explain how our cultural ancestry is more closely related to that of the bonobo.
He makes the really compelling argument that we’ve been looking at our evolution wrong.
It’s not survival of the fittest, it’s *survival of the friendliest*
We evolved to work together as a team, learning from one another, mirroring one another, and it’s often the most friendliest of us that gets to reproduce (you don’t learn dad jokes when you become a dad, you become a dad because you make dad jokes and she thought you were cute and fun to be with)
It’s a great read either way and has given me the hope that I needed for humanity. That in spite of what our television and media has been telling us, that alone won’t stop our genetic growth towards being a kinder and gentler species.
I read a funny and sad comment at the same time. There was a question that went something like “why is there a problem to design a proper trash can” in one of the public wilderness parks. And the response from the forest ranger was that there is a significant overlap from the dumbest people and smartest bears. If that makes sense? English is not my first language so it might have been worded differently
One reason is that human brains and chimp brains don’t work the same way, they each have evolved to adapt to their environment and needs. Human brains are built to develop language and abstraction, whereas chimp brains are better adapted to agility and other chimpy things.
What this leads to is that chimps can easily get *really good* at simple tasks, but it would take a particularly special chimp to get anywhere near being able to read.
On the other hand, humans need a lot of practise for even simple stuff like walking, but we’re able to go much deeper and form much more complex models in our minds, which is why we can read and write, do mathematics, design machines, etc…
The actual answer is that chimps aren’t as smart as 3 year old human children.
The number is made up.
Chimps can equal toddlers in some tasks, but their general intelligence is far lower.
As for why?
Genetics. Intelligence is almost entirely controlled by genetics. Humans evolved to have vastly larger and more sophisticated brains.
Chimps are smart for animals but are vastly below human intelligence. Same goes for parrots, dolphins, corvids, and parrots.
Humans underwent some really strong selection for intelligence. Why is unclear.
Biological fact: they held back by a gene responsible to regulate the jaw muscle thickness on the skull. Sounds funny tho but HSS gave up bone cracking bit force for bigger brain cavity, ergo brainsize. Source: some documentary on nat geo back in the days when they still fluttered around science stuff.
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