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
The human brain goes through some quite interesting milestones as it develops. To start off with it’s basically identical to a mid-range animal brain – hence why babies are dumb as shit. Towards about age 4, it first develops an ability called Theory of Mind, which is a set of skills that allow it to understand that other creatures perceive the world differently to itself. This can be demonstrated quite well by [tests](https://youtu.be/YGSj2zY2OEM). Here, the child named Alfie is demonstrating theory of mind when he says that he thinks his mother will think the sun is a lion. A younger child would think that its mother would know it was a sun, because they do not have the theory of mind necessary to know that other people do not know the same things they know. Many animals don’t have a complete theory of mind. Chimpanzees, however, [do](https://youtu.be/BmISd0v7AdM), which is a big part of why some people say they’re about as smart as a 3-4 year old.
Theory of mind isn’t a continuous effort though. For a long time, children have absolutely none of it, then over quite a short period of time, they gain the entire thing all at once. This is how developmental milestones all behave in humans, and these milestones have specific brain structures that cause them. So you have milestones like the ability to use symbols and the ability to do abstract thought, and those are steps rather than slopes as well. These steps act as basically caps on development. An animal that doesn’t have the brain structures necessary for abstract thought will never gain them. You’ll still have a range of intelligence within the species, but none will be able to overcome milestones they lack the structures for, so the smartest… salmon lets say, will never be smarter than a 3 year old because it won’t develop a complete theory of mind.
These steps aren’t strictly ordered though. There’s nothing in particular stopping an animal from having two milestones but missing the one that comes inbetween in humans. That does make it harder to compare to humans though. If an animal can do something an 11 year old human can do but can’t do something a 3 year old human can do, what’s the point of comparison for that?
The other major difference between human brains and the brains of other animals is that we dedicate a *huge* amount of our brain power to language. This is the [cognitive tradeoff theory](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktkjUjcZid0), the idea that language was such a huge advantage to us that our brains sacrificed cognitive power in other departments for the sake of becoming even better at communicating. This would mean though that even if all other aspects were the same, humans and chimpanzees would still have intelligences you can’t directly compare, because it’s kind of like comparing a submarine to an aeroplane – both have similar aspects like being made out of metal, but they’re designed to do very different jobs. A plane would suck at diving and a submarine would suck at flying, but that’s not a very useful comparison to make.
Edit: I woke up to 159 notifications because of this post.
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