Asklemmy

54356 readers

171 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 7 years ago

MODERATORS

How likely is it that there's an animal on earth that's smarter than human beings in key areas? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by cinoreus@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

36 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] iByteABit@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 week ago

Mathematics is a terrible baseline for intelligence since it has so many prerequisites for it to exist at the most basic level.

We very often misunderstand the reason of our success as a species to be exclusively because of our unique intelligence alone, when it's really the special combination we have that has allowed that intelligence to be useful.

Being really good at communicate and creating languages for example, being a land based species, having fingers that we can use with a lot of ease into creating tools, being worse predators physically which gives a material reason for us to create those tools initially, intelligence alone would be a small thing without them.

As others have said, scientists believe that several species are even more intelligent than humans, but maybe they never needed our way of life and natural selection never led them to it because they were just fine as they were.