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Originally Posted by Cynosure
Your ability to miss my point entirely, amazes me.
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There is a difference between missing your point, and rejecting it as arrogantly asinine.
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A man who builds more stuff than, say, a monkey, is not necessarily an indicator of mankind's higher intelligence. However, a man who builds stuff that is far more complex than what a monkey can builds, is.
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Again as I said, I'm not saying that animals are smarter than humans. I am, however, saying (and you have proven my point with all of your examples) that when you create a test, knowing that you will have to take the test, the tendency is to create the test such that you will score highly on it. We do not, for instance, base our estimation of intelligence on the ability to find food in the wild, otherwise squirrels would outscore us. We do not base our estimation of intelligence on the ability to survive a global catastrophe, else cockroaches would have it all over us. Of course we are the smartest creatures on the planet. I'm not saying that we aren't. But I am saying that it is convenient that the factors making us more intelligent than the other animals happens to be the only factors that are applied in the intelligence tests that we invented.
We are quite intelligent in our environment, but tend to be dumber than the other animals when we go to theirs. This is why tigers and sharks and crocodiles are dangerous - they're much smarter about stalking and killing us than we are about avoiding them.
While I, again, do not dispute our superior intelligence to the rest of the animals, this bias has led us to underestimate the abilities of other animals. We are firmly convinced that we are the only species with language (We aren't) or that if other species have language, it's not complex (it is).
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Oh, if only animals were in charge of the world, instead of humans! Then the world would be a much better place. Oh, wait... There are no animals on this planet capable of taking and maintaining charge, like we humans are.
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When did I say I wished the animals ran things?
As to your "we build shit and therefore we're smart" measure of intelligence, that doesn't even conform with the already human-specific measure of intelligence used by the scientific community, which is generally defined as "the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience."