Animal Intelligence

F

freestyle

Registered Senior Member
So. Wich animal has the largest capabilities to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas, use language, to learn, and have the most creativity, personality, character, knowledge, wisdom etc.

And i dont want your personal opinion, i want some real sources. I've tried looking around google, but i cant really find anything specific. So what better place to start this discussion than on SF.

Thank you.

Edit: I changed topic to "Animal Intelligence" so we can make ths a general discussion about animals and animal cognition / psychology...
 
The leading contenders are our closest relatives, the two species of chimpanzee and the two species of gorilla. Individuals of both types have learned to "speak" in American Sign Language and the ability to use language is generally regarded as the most powerful indicator of intelligence.

Some parrots, notably Alex the African Grey, develop rudimentary abilities to actually speak and understand spoken language, which impresses us more even if their mastery isn't on a level with the apes. (I wonder what deaf people think about that. :))

Cetaceans, both the baleen whales and the "toothed whales" (dolphins and the sperm whale), clearly communicate with sound patterns that vary in complex ways we haven't learned to interpret, but they might well be sophisticated enough to qualify as language. I think you'll find that several species of primates, psittacines and cetaceans are universally regarded as the most intelligent non-humans.

The other generally accepted measure of intelligence is the use of tools. (Note that we measure other animals' intelligence by our own standards. :)) Crows and a few other birds have learned to fashion sticks for digging.

We also rate animals on how well they learn the tricks that we try to teach them, especially using verbal commands, so pinnipeds (seals and sea lions), dogs, horses, pigs and a few other species get high marks. However, this biases the test in favor of animals with hierarchical social or "pack" instincts as opposed to both solitary and herd-social animals. Pack-social animals are generally the only ones with a sense of hierarchy who would, therefore, regard someone else as a leader and even bother learning to follow their commands.

You can find a lot more detail on this subject by Googling, certainly more than you'll get from the non-professional biologists and psychologists who will participate in this thread. But I doubt that you'll get any more definitive answers than this one.

After all, the way we measure intelligence quantitatively, so ranking can be established, is by administering IQ tests, and no other animal can read. :)
 
I heard Sperm Whales have the most complex language, even more so than English.
 
Well, I couldn't quite find what I was looking for in this short search, but I found this:
"Recent evidence suggests that the sperm whale may have taken echolocation to another level. Unlike its smaller cousin the dolphin, sperm whales do not also whistle as a means of signalling simple concepts like identity, distance, and alarm between members of their own immediate pod. Instead, sperm whales click back and forth to one another. Some researchers conjecture that the whales actually vocalize the content of their echoes back and forth among one another. If it's true, then it implies that the species possesses a spoken language composed of three-dimensional sonic holograms, vaguely analogous to the word-pictures of the Chinese alphabet. It implies a complex language closer in form to a movie than a series of sound-concepts."
http://www.helsinki.fi/~lauhakan/whale/intersp/who.html

Obviously this is from 1995 (see article), so not quite that recent anymore.
 
Almost every animal that I've worked with tends to quite intelligent. Sometimes they do stupid things and that makes we as humans feel sort of superior, but when they outsmart you it's really damaging to the ego. lol. I think all animals have personalities and can reason, they all can solve problems and can comprehend things, but we always measure other animals intelligence by our own so I'm not sure that it's fair to compare. Animals that are most like us we equivocate to being intelligent like chimpanzees, gorillas, monkeys, and other primates and dolphins and other whales, also animals that follow instructions well and learn quickly, like dogs and horses.
 
Freestyle,

this link may be of interest to you: Animal Intelligence Resists Definition

Very interesting.

First part:
June 30,2006 — People generally define intelligence in terms that place our own species at the apex, but recent studies on other animals suggest skills such as abstract thinking, problem solving, reasoning, and language — once thought unique to us — may not be so uncommon after all.

"The closer we examine animals, the more they surprise us with their intelligence and awareness," said Jonathan Balcombe, a research scientist at Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, DC.

"Chickens practice deception, pigeons can categorize images in photographs as quickly as we can, a gorilla plays a joke on a human teacher, and a tiny fish leaps from one tide pool to another using a mental map formed during high tide."
 
And another:

A section of the article:

Talking With Your Mouth Full: The Feeding Calls of the Humpback Whale
"But how does one actually measure the complexity of humpback vocalizations? With colleagues Brenda McCowan and Sean Hanser of the University of California, Davis, we have been applying the mathematics used for calculating the amount of information sent through computer lines to quantify the amount of information vocalized between humpback whales (and other species). This field, incidentally, is known as "information theory," and was developed by Claude Shannon of Bell Labs several decades ago. Information theory measures not so much what is being said--that is, it does not lead directly to the meaning of the signals. Rather, it precisely measures what a particular communication system could be saying--in other words, what that system of communication's "carrying" capacity could be--what it is capable of saying. We have found that some animal communication systems are simpler than others--dolphin whistles are apparently more complex than ground squirrel alarm calls, for example.

The information theory measure that can best be used to quantify complexity is known as the "entropy." It is a measure of the number of choices available in a given communication system. Suppose we learned the communication system of squirrel monkey chuck calls. Might we ever be able to translate Shakespeare into squirrel monkey? By comparing the entropy of the two samples of communication, we would be able to conclude whether this might even be possible. From our studies to date, we would conclude that this would not be possible at the current complexity of the chuck call vocal communication system compared to the complexity of the human vocal communication system.

An important measure of entropy is the highest "entropic-order" at which the communication systems peaks. In measuring this, we ask how dependent the signals are on each other. In human speech we have grammar and in human writing we have spelling (or brush strokes, etc.) that depend on each other. If you made a copy of a written page, but the toner in the copy machine was low, you would find that you could nevertheless recover some of the missing words because there are rules of spelling and grammar superimposed on our language system. It is these rules that allow error recovery - and this works in both vocalization as well as written communication systems (as well as any others, e.g., chemical signaling units, bee dances, visual facial features, etc.)

Therefore, we have used information theory to measure the vocal communications between feeding humpback whales, including the degree of complexity (or "syntax" if you like). We have also measured feeding calls when boats were in the area, and when there were no boat engine noises in the background. It turns out that the humpback whales increase the dependence of their signals on each other (decreasing the rate of information transfer, but increasing the degree of error recovery possible) when boat noise interferes with their feeding calls being heard. On average, the boat noise in Glacier Bay, for example, would decrease the amount of information that could be transmitted through the water by about one-quarter, and this was how much lower the humpback whale vocalization rate of information was also measured to decrease. In other words, the humpbacks seemed to be responding to the boat noise (a quantification that will allow boat noise to be regulated better in Glacier Bay). But the humpbacks also seemed to know just how much to compensate--on average they did not over or under-correct for the boat noise either."

More: http://www.space.com/searchforlife/seti_doyle_whale_060126.html
 
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