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 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.
Watch “Ape Genius” on YouTube. It will answer your question completely. The big points are:
Lack of the ability to cooperate as readily as most humans.
Lack of a desire to be taught complex tasks, mostly due to lack of joint attention.
Lack of language syntax (e.g. chatting about how the weather makes you feel).
Lack of mental time travel (e.g. making a decision based on past experience, present circumstances, and future consequences).
Lack of emotional regulation.
A lot of the above differences are due to a prefrontal cortex (the part of your brain behind and above your eyes) that isn’t nearly as large compared to humans, but it’s never just about differences in brain structure. Brain structure does not equal function, but that’s another story for another time.
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.
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.
I’m pretty sure the chimp is much more intelligent than that; has anyone met a 3 year old? Lol
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