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by RcouF1uZ4gsC 831 days ago
> You're implying that bees are less intelligent than humans.

Intelligent is not a synonym for “have amazing capabilities” but rather the ability to process and adapt to new information and transform their environment.

No other life form comes even close to humans in that regard. Our abilities (for better or worse) are godlike compared to other animals. There is a reason this epoch is called the “Anthropocene”.
2 comments
CuriouslyC 831 days ago
This isn't so correct. Humans in isolation aren't so vastly superior from other animals, if you observed primitive humans and your typical troop of chimps it wouldn't be the slam dunk you're singing about. The truth is we're just enough better to develop and use written communication, and the majority of human progress beyond that has been trial/error and imitation with successes preserved through writing. Transmission of the written word enabled humanity to become a collective intelligence of sorts, individually we aren't that smart.
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notahacker 831 days ago
Our communication and experimentation was sufficiently far ahead of other advanced mammals to cause mass extinction events long before writing came into play. (It's debatable whether some fairly advanced civilizations even had "writing" in the sense of general symbolic communication)

"Just enough better" is doing a lot of work when that leads to space travel and computers and inventing reasons to feel bad about our phenomenally efficient expansion and predation, whilst members of other species prove extremely limited at acquiring human knowledge even when we're expressly trying to share it with them.

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FrustratedMonky 831 days ago
"comes even close"

I think the argument in this thread is more between people thinking animals have 'zero' ability, it is just instinct, or some other mechanism different than what is taking place in a human. And the group that is saying, animals are using the same mechanisms as a human, just humans are scaled up. Abilities between Humans and animals is a sliding scale.

They are wanting to argue that Humans have a singular ability that does NOT exist anywhere else, kind of a 'divine' argument. And animals are doing something different.

"comes even close" is indicating, it's a scale, might be a big scale, but it is the same scale.

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