Hi, friends!
It’s my favorite part of the summer, aka when National Geographic channel and Discovery channel run a ton of shark content. I love sharks. I think they’re super cool.
Anyways, this episode I’m watching is talking about orcas teaching their young how to hunt sharks.
This got me thinking, which animals are smarter than people think, in your opinion? You know, I’ll include insects too since it seems rude to exclude them.
I’m convinced that the entire cetacean group has true language like humans do. This is a hill I will die on, and hopefully the orcas will avenge me if this comes to pass.
By true language, I mean the ability to express complicated subjects and with temporal dimension. The contrast would be like how plenty of animals have different communication sounds to mean different things, but can’t carry additional context. For example, there are monkey species that have different calls to warn of leopards vs eagles, but it’s not calling out “a leopard ate my Uncle Tony last year.”
But whales? Or dolphins? Or porpoises? I think they can have all sorts of interesting conversations. With the evolution to multifamily groups, they have complex lives and there’s no reason to think they can’t communicate. Just because my ears don’t hear all their sounds, it would be hubris to believe there isn’t meaning.
I cannot find it now, but back in grad school when I was in a linguistics course, there was a journal article I read where they found that word frequency has similar patterning across basically any language. So they took written and spoken language examples (transcribed a recorded conversation at a library, chapter from a Tolstoy novel in Russian, Shakespearean sonnet, a bunch of stuff) and graphed frequency of repeated words in each. In English, for example, you’d expect words like a, the, for, I etc to be really common in an example, but other words showed up much less often. The pattern held regardless of source example. For a whim, and trying to find an example that wouldn’t have the same pattern, the researchers were like sure let’s use a tally of dolphin recordings from some pod observed in the ocean. When the included the tally of the sounds inaudible to humans but listed able to be identified in the recording after the fact? The fucking pattern was the same. It was fascinating.
Dogs and cats.
Squirrels (fucking assholes get everywhere.)
Mice (42)!
Octopus (not why I don’t eat them, but it’s just another reason.)
I’m not convinced with squirrels. I’ve seen them try to bury rocks instead of acorns.
Hmm, thinking about your comment about not eating octopus in part because of their intelligence.
I agree octopi are super smart and wouldn’t eat them either. But I admit I do love me some fried calamari so there’s some cephalopod bias happening in my brain.
Well, turtles. I wouldn’t call Sheldon smart, but he’s smarter than most people would think. He recognizes and prefers me (my family all acknowledge this) mostly because I feed him and clean his tank, I think. If we go outside he’ll stay pretty close to me for protection. He seems to have some sense of time because he positions himself under his feeder every day before it goes off. He also seems to dream — he seems to have nightmares where he panics and dives off his rock and hurls himself frantically across the tank until he calms down. He doesn’t like being outside on our atrium and will bang against the door to be let in, so he has some understanding of what a door is (my atrium has three doors but he only bangs against the one that we use most) and that inside is “home.”
The animals that surprise me are birds. There’s a bunch of bird species that are crazy smart, with corvids (crows and ravens) at the top of the list. They’re capable of solving problems, they understand numbers (including zero), use tools, communicate information to each other, and even mourn their dead. They’re roughly as intelligent as chimpanzees. There was a study a while back that stated that they understand recursion, but I don’t know if that’s definitive (recursion is embedding concepts into other concepts — “The cat that chased me before is over there” — basically distinguishing that cat from all other cats). Fascinating if true.
Birds have small brains too, which upends a lot of naive pseudoscience about linking brain size and intelligence. Not that it stops a lot of dumb people from trying to be smart by claiming there are easy correlations to be made.
The idea that small brains means less intelligence never made sense to me. Like even within something like dog breeds – I would never say Great Danes are smarter than Cairn terriers. We all know that’s illogical.
One thing that interests me is that so many animals have much better networked intelligence than people. It’s the reason why many mammals, fish and even insects are much better at moving in swarms and maneuvering as a unit through narrow openings than humans are.
One of the major evolutionary developments for human intelligence was wiping out a lot of this innate intelligence, so that people have to be taught to do things like drive on a highway which shrinks from five lanes to two and then expands again. Even when people are taught how to do it, they struggle to pull it off unless a society puts a major emphasis on drilling people on specific behaviors.
The advantage is that people are better at solving unique problems than animals, but the downside is that people screw up more often in situations where slow contemplation isn’t an option. We lack the ability to think as a member of a herd, and when societies don’t create that kind of thinking, it’s awfully hard for most individuals to figure it out.
Missouri Department of Transportation has been a bunch of lazy fucks about restriping interstate 70 up near the airport.
As in they finished redoing the asphalt about 4 weeks ago and we still just have those reflective stickers instead of actual lane striping.
People are struggling to stay in lanes when we all know they’re supposed to be there. Like we have such bad abilities to move as a group, like you said with swarming.
It’s fine to not have that kind of intelligence when people lived together in small groups, but it’s a problem when groups scale up.
I think it helps establish that a lot of things people call intelligence in the modern world just don’t make sense as inherited traits. Racist intelligence theories try to reason backwards from things like ability to rapidly manipulate numbers and assume there must have been some kind of genetic advantage to humans 50,000+ years ago. But it makes a lot more sense to accept that modern life is such a departure from our past that it’s far more likely the pseudo evolutionary explanations are just made up stories.
coywolves
Are those wolf-coyote hybrids?
We have coyotes in my city but I’ve never seen one. They’re evidently a lot more shy than the foxes I see.
We have coyote sightings pretty often along the train tracks. The areas along the tracks act as pretty solid wildlife corridors.
My grandparents’ house – also in St Louis county – used to have a golf course on one side of their subdivision and a massive cemetary with undisturbed woods on the other. The woods are now shitty mcmansions. It wasn’t uncommon to hear packs of coyotes though howling at night to each other.
It’s a very memorable sound!
My sister has seen them lolling around in the sun in Chicago. I’m not sure what makes Chicago different from here from a coyote’s perspective.
Rodents to eat, trash to eat, absense of other predators in a big city like Chicago I guess. Shit, they might be the biggest predator in Illinois. Missouri only has like a dozen real sightings of mountain lions a year and a growing population of black bears (like 800 total in the state). I don’t think Illinois has either of those species living on the state.
They actually travel along train tracks and are all overcities like Chicago and Toronto. Very rarely seen because they are usually out at night and are really good at avoiding humans.
Yes! I watched a really cool PBS documentary on them years ago.
https://www.pbs.org/video/nature-meet-coywolf/
Sheep are dumb. Sweet but dumb.