#also i love getting to shit on jon bc i'm 90% sure he argues humans don't have aind not bc he believes it

[sofipitch]

☕️ intelligence/emotional capacity of animals (do you think our current understanding over or underestimates which creatures are capable of complex thought, self awareness, etc)

Okay this is something I am super passionate about. So for a long time researchers were in the underestimating category. However I also think some people, like the ppl with the talking buttons are in the overestimating category.

So for the first one science wasn't interested in animal intelligence for a long time bc it didn't seem like something worth studying. Many religions and philosophies will say humans are distinctly special from animals, and I have heard ppl say this a fair amount in biology and psychology classes. Which is just something that annoys me because it is a statement with no backing, and often times the line in the sand of what separates humans from animals will be surpassed by some animal and then ppl will come up with a new one (we've been "beholding a man" for a lot of human history now 🥱). One famous example is when Jane Goodall recorded Chimpanzees using sticks to fish for termites, which was evidence of tool use (considered at the time a unique and defining trait of humans), her mentor, paleontologist Louis Leaky said, “Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human.”

However the beginning of a lot of animal intelligence research still involved testing animal's ability to act like humans, such as trying to get chimps to talk and act like humans. The most horrifying example being Gua who was a baby chimp raised by the Kelloggs at the same time as their own human child, to see if they could essentially raise a chimp into a human. I think a lot of studies about whether animals can talk have this issue. Even beloved ones like Koko the Gorilla, her signing is about as scientific as a Rorschach inkblot test, it often requires a lot of interpretation that cannot be confirmed in an experiment. We decided that something we do is the marker for intelligence, but just bc other animals don't communicate like we do or even think like we do does not mean that they aren't intelligent. Some people discount certain displays of animal intelligence as not intelligent bc they are seen as "intrinsic behavior", but we are social animals and count emotional intelligence as a type of intelligence. Is recognizing the emotions of others not intrinsic to social animals?

Each species has their own umwelt, which is the way they experience the world. We can't do some things such as sense electrical activity or see in infrared, inversely animals aren't going to talk or even display intelligence like we do. So researchers will have to get a little creative with their experiments of testing what animals do and don't know by taking a species' umwelt into account. Also somethings are just hard to define, like what is the line in the sand for complex thought? Self awareness also has that same issue. We inherently trust that other humans have self awareness and thoughts because we do. Behaviorists, scientists from a specific field of psychology will say that other people having thoughts or a mind is not something you can test in an experiment so we should not believe in it. You can't say other ppl have a mind bc you do, what if you are the ONLY person who has one (I'm not making this shit up my mentor in grad school was one of these ppl and this shit was unit one of the learning class). Cognitive psychology is the science of uncovering thought processes and while psychology has shifted in their direction, behaviorists still argue it's dumb. So yeah if ppl say that shit about humans you can imagine how hard it is to test in animals.

Anyways, some cool examples of potential complex thought are:

Moray Eels and Groupers working together to hunt: video of moray eel and grouper communicating and hunting together

Ravens can use water displacement to get something they can't reach: video

Irene Pepperberg's studies with African Grey Parrots are basically the best I've seen in terms of using human language to understand animal intelligence. Alex was taught various colors, shapes, material types, and count small thing and can then tell you about certain objects when prompted. What makes her interesting is the method for teaching the parrots was based not on humans but what parrot's umwelt and social behaviors. It was not recorded on camera but Pepperberg says one evening Alex asked her what color he was, implying self awareness: a long video on Pepperberg's experiments experiment comparing parrots to small children

There are also other phenomena observed in the wild such as animals such as apes, elephants, and cetaceans displaying mourning/funerary behavior over deceased animals they knew.

Another thing that people used to say is that humans were the only animals that had culture. Also, now being proven not to be true. I taught an animal behavior class and the textbook had an entire chapter on cultural transmission. Here's a cool video on one form of cultural transmission, whale songs

So, I don't think humans will ever sit down and have a conversation with a chimpanzee like a human, or they'll invent a way for dogs to speak to us in full sentences like the movie Up. However animals are more intelligent than they are often given credit for, there isn't a lot of evidence for animals being stimulus response machines as (especially behaviorists) previously thought.

Some good books if you are interested in the subject:

Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are and Mama's Last Hug by Frans de Waal (he has more books that are probably good but those are the two I've read)

Through A Window by Jane Goodall

Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin

What a Fish Knows by Jonathan Balcombe

Beyond Words by Carl Safina

Inside a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz

The Emotional Lives of Animals by Marc Bekoff