Let me elaborate, how likely is that there’s an animal on earth that’s smarter than us? By smarter, I understand intelligence is a nuanced topic unique to different animals, so for the sake of argument, let’s talk about, mathematics, critical thinking about where and how to apply those mathematical concepts, and creativity in any form.
I think humans are not really more intelligent than most beings; we have a unique ability to manipulate physical things, but most animals are not crazy enough to follow and do that because our species pays a very high price for that in happiness.
It’s that sacrifice we all individually made to be like most other humans, as babies, that make us think our way is superior and look down on other animals.
All sorts of animals have superior application-specific circuitry. Like bearded vultures that, while in flight, can drop bones precisely onto rocks to break them open and get at the marrow. But they lack the general-purpose processing power needed to abstract such skills into mathematical representations. Same abstraction likely needed to apply one skill creatively to other uses or apply logic to analyze something.
I’m no neuroscientist/biologist, but I could see an ideal scenario and measurement setup where dolphins and orcas maybe rival our general-purpose intelligence. But whatever it is, it still isn’t enough for them to build any recognizable society yet.
Chimpanzees are considerably better than us at short-term memory.
“intelligence is a nuanced topic” Understatement champion. Applying your examples “in any form” still doesn’t really work since those examples are built on communicating the steps as well as the result. If an animal can intuit precision without showing the work, do we still give credit for intelligence? Jumping spiders, for example, have an extremely developed intuition for parabolic trajectories, but I’d bet real money there’s no neural structure in their brains that looks like y^2 = 4ax.
And yet every professional physicist will tell you that physics IS math, and that if you don’t understand the math, you can’t understand physics, and shouldn’t try.
Yeah I did expect my language wasn’t precise enough, so to be more clear, animal that can excel at maths or creativity in a similar way humans do.
There may be some mental tasks that other animals can probably do better than humans. However, if you’re talking about complex topics like mathematics, I would bet on modern humans being better given that being good at math is far more likely to be an evolutionary advantage to humans over other animals.
