you often hear people saying dolphins are clever, but how do we rank animals’ intelligence?
In: Biology
Two levels to conside 1. Animals are very good at what they are supposed to do, so equally intelligent to humans.
2. You are likely asking about how they perform on cognitive skills that are human abilities. Lots of debates.
With re language Have taught apes sign language, dogs to use short sentences but there is argument over whether the animal is using the words the same way as humans or creating their own sentences. I fall on the side of thinking they might but it isnt my area. Just example of big literature.
With re problem solving, it is challenging to devise a problem useable across animals. One was putting desirable thing on other side of glass and tracking how long it took to figure out “go around the glass”. As you can see not a high level skill but variation did show up across species.
By comparing how they fare in tasks we as humans can perform at different stages in our development.
For instance, a toddler will not understand “object permanence” ( this means, an object is still there, even if you cannot see it right now becasue it might be hidden under a blanket), while an older child will.
Many intelligent animals do understand object permanence, which puts them in this category at the level of little children.
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