According to Scientific American, human cognition is more of an “upgrade” than a giant leap of intellectual superiority above the non-humans:
Such biological subtleties, along with behavioral ones, suggest that human intelligence is best likened to an upgrade of the cognitive capacities of nonhuman primates rather than an exceptionally advanced form of cognition.
But, I’m sure this guy disagrees.
One Comment
Yeah, this is really interesting. Richard Dawkins and other biologists have remarked upon how humans are not just “smart” but they are “absurdly smart” or “perversely intelligent” (from the God Delusion). Either that intelligence evolved over a gradient that no longer exists (our closest ancestors) or something else brought it out. I tend to believe it’s a matter of acculuration. In ‘Rattling the Cage’, Wise metions chimpanzees that are “perversely smart” compared to other chimps not because of their innate abilities, but their human aided acculturation, which exposed them to things they would other wise not experience like a complex system of language and iconography. I’m just shooting in the dark here, but my quess is that the displayed intelligence of humans is, in part, an accident. Other developments (like language and the passage of information from one gen to the next) allowed humans to tap into a kind of latent intelligence that many mammals have.