[milquetoastaf]

>And yet, somehow Humans are in a completely different category than all other life.

Lol no we are not. We share 98 percent of our DNA with various simians. We share 97 percent of our DNA with mice.

Are we the only species to communicate? No. Are we the only species to communicate symbolically? No. Great Apes use hand gestures.

Are we the only species to recognize themselves? No. Plenty of animals do. In fact, even wasps can perform facial recognition on members of their species.

Are we the only species to use technology? No. Corvids and apes use tools all the time.

Are we the only species to develop culture? No. Simians teach their young various customs, some of which (such as the washing of food by macaques in Japan [http://alfre.dk/monkeys-washing-potatoes/]) are local to the group.

Are we the smartest species? Monkeys have been able to naturally memorize a sequence of numbers after looking at it for fractions of a second. It took dedicated teams of research scientists several practice sessions to even come close to the performance of a so-called "lesser animal".

Humans are exceptional (I honestly would just say lucky), but are we truly in a different category? Highly recommend the book "Are We Smart Enough To Know How Smart Animals Are?" by Frans de Waal.

[ams6110]

Biology notwithstanding, no other species has deliberately transformed its environment and improved it longevity and standard of living like humans have. Not even slightly.

[milquetoastaf]

Animals transform their environments all the time, deliberately (I don't get why people act as if animals don't do deliberate things?). What of the great honey fungus in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, a living organism whose size is measured in miles - it deliberately transformed its environment in a way we, the species Aristotle put at the top, can barely even comprehend.

The difference is in degree, not of kind.

[JumpCrisscross]

> The difference is in degree, not of kind

Everything is a difference of degree. At a certain point, a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind. There is a difference of kind between a fungus altering its environment through enzymes it produces from its genetic programming and people inventing steam engines.

[mcbits]

I think written language is our primary difference. Prehistoric wild humans had spoken language for hundreds of thousands of years, but we didn't have the explosion of "intelligence" until the advent of written language ~5,000 years ago.

Or in more general terms, we have the ability to use our environment as a durable supplemental memory. This is what I would look for in assessing whether another species has the potential for human-like intelligence.

[bonzini]

While I agree in general with what you wrote, there are examples of orally preserving collective memory. Think of the ancient epic poems for example.

Painted or etched drawings on cave walls came long before writing, and no other existing species on Earth does that except if we teach them.

Non-homo species also do not domesticate fire. Fire means not being afraid of something that you usually have seen only in scary situations, and it can lead to writing tens of thousands of years down the road (papyrus happens to preserve well in a pyramid in the desert, but cooking clay tablets or melting metals works better everywhere else).

[thaumasiotes]

> Fire [...] can lead to writing tens of thousands of years down the road (papyrus happens to preserve well in a pyramid in the desert, but cooking clay tablets or melting metals works better everywhere else).

I feel pretty safe in saying fire had no direct influence on the development of writing anywhere. Chinese characters first show up carved into bones. (They are well-developed at this point; obviously they originated some other way. But we don't know how.) Cuneiform tablets were originally unbaked; baking for preservation was an innovation that happened long, long after writing was established.

And the difficulty of working with metal means it is totally unsuitable as a writing medium. Although particularly important cuneiform documents (peace treaties) were sometimes cast in metal, only the final draft would be -- as the treaty was "in negotiations", messages back and forth were in clay. A society that can only write on metal is a society that will never develop writing in the first place. There is no reason other than wishing to impart a ceremonial permanence to write in metal.

[milquetoastaf]

>Or in more general terms, we have the ability to use our environment as a durable supplemental memory.

You mean like how some species of nut-hiding birds can hide over 20,000 nuts in distinct locations comprising several square miles of territory and then recall precisely where they are when necessary?

[mcbits]

That points to a well developed individual memory. I don't think they're using the locations of nuts to encode knowledge for each other and future generations. (If they are, that's tremendous.)

But imagine if the birds also carved symbols into tree trunks and taught their friends how to interpret the symbols to find hidden caches of nuts, or to share techniques for building more durable nests, etc.

Written language allows us to store, access, and share information beyond our individual memory limits. It is sort of a collective memory as well as an expansion of individual memory. I can write down the locations of 21,000 nuts, and I can hand that book off to you.

[hyperpallium]

You can argue for their intelligence, but they can't argue for yours.

[milquetoastaf]

Is argumentation and rhetoric the basis of intelligence?

[JetSetWilly]

We share 50% of our DNA with a banana. That doesn't mean that a banana has all these incredible human characteristics. Stats about "percentage of DNA shared" are meaningless. A very small change in DNA can produce very large changes in the organism - ones fundamental to its nature.

[milquetoastaf]

It's the fact that we share the DNA with such diverse amounts of life that matters. You argue that humankind is fundamentally different and exceptional than all other life is to reinforce the hierarchy set forth by Aristotle and offers an outdated pyramidal view of the biosphere. The more we share, the more in common we seem to have. You can't tell me it's meaningless, that's just completely ignoring decades of scientific research.

[scythe]

My answer to this is simple: we have Turing machines. Somehow, our communications are Turing-complete, whereas other species's aren't.

(I make no assumption as to why we have Turing machines, but note that implementing one usually requires some work)

[milquetoastaf]

Your answer is as simple as it is unsatisfactory and arbitrary. Humans have turing machines, sure. But we have yet to truly translate an animal language (though we do know they exist) so your point is rather moot.

My point isn't that humans aren't amazing, it's that we perhaps think too highly of ourselves in relation to our incredible relatives.

[kpil]

I don't think you can 'translate' animal languages.

There is nothing to translate, basically.

We can get a good grip of the meaning of their sounds though, if we spend some time listening, but there is no deeper meaning hidden that we can not access.

[LoSboccacc]

Experiment on dolphins showed they can explain each other what trick to perform. Can't find the exact experiment but trainer showed the trick to one dolphin and rewarded the pair only when the other dolphin perormed the same trick

[zeroer]

Recursive grammar.

[milquetoastaf]

Being able to live six years without food. Humans can't even come close to that, yet a tiny tick can outlast the so-called smartest species on earth.

See, species tit-for-tat is easy. What's your point?

[zeroer]

Yea, point taken, but recursive grammar is a prerequisite for arbitrary cognition or computation.

[danmaz74]

See sorites paradox.