This opinion is based on reading people’s thoughts on the internet and remembering what I was taught in my own time in school (where they essentially stumbled into teaching that humans were some kind of ‘peak’ of the evolutionary process)
I think people have waaaaayyyy too much faith in human intelligence and it’s leading to the destruction of the world.
1- People keep thinking a scientist or a ‘rich entrepreneur’ is going to come up with some magic bullet to save the world, if we taught more about how other animals have tools, language, larger and older and more complex brain structures than us - People might realize it’s similar to believing that dolphin will arise from the sea with some idea to stop climate change
2- we keep participating in these systems that have been created under the assumption that we are ‘making progress’. I would argue that the minority of human invention represents real progress.
3- It leads to undervaluing the earth and taking it for granted. We worship ourselves as gods (literally). Almost everything you have wasn’t invented by humans. It was the result of billions of years of selective design. Yet we teach as if things we harvest from nature were ‘invented’ by humans. In reality, we often have no way to produce or even of conceive of these things without a natural example.
Thanks for reading
Dolphins actually do have a top plan to stop climate change. Unfortunately, they don’t have appendages capable of carrying out the take over of earth and destroying all humans.
I like to think the first step would be to trying minor attacks to gauge the speed of humans fighting back. Such as sending a larger species to attack an important commerical tradeline. Sort of like if orcas started attacking ships in a place luke the gibralter strait. Starting with small sail boats eventually moving to sink larger vessels eventually crippling world trade by blockade.
Why would they bother when they can just fly off into space back to their home planet? Of course they’ll likely thank us for all the fish before they leave, but as humans don’t speak dolphin it’ll just look like a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double backwards somersault through a hoop while whistling the Star Spangled Banner.
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Individually, we are above average. But our advantage over other animals is language x technology. We are able to collect knowledge, preserve it and pass it down to our descendents. This body of knowledge spanning 10,000 years is the reason for our supremacy. We are a proto-hive mind.
Other animals pass down cultural knowledge
Not to the same degree, show me the animal with internet storage or books.
Again humans are biased towards methods that use artifacts/tools.
If you’re a whale underwater your whalesong is as good as the internet, but whatever its not a physical object and its a totally sustainable method that doesn’t require harvesting half the planet so WE DGAF, doesn’t count!
Whale song is not as good as the internet, and we’re biased toward tools because the jump from word-of-mouth to written information was a colossal paradigm shift. “On the shoulders of giants” is only possible because we aren’t bound just by our living memory and traditional stories. Cultural knowledge aint shit compared to cuneiform tablets.
I just want to pick you peoples brains at this point.
- Humans have had internet for less than 100 years, whales have had sonar and whale song for millions of years, allowing communication and thought sharing over spaces humans weren’t capable of.
- So then, were whales smarter than humans up until the moment we gained internet?
- Internet can easily be taken away from you leaving you weak and helpless, whales can’t be separated from their internet.
Human survival strategy is very min/max glass cannon right now - we are dependent on complex, unsustainable, rapidly degrading systems for survival yet feel superior to other animals for those very same systems. Seems profoundly dumb to me in a way we fail to see because we are so obsessed with our intellect.
As I said in another comment, maybe it can be said ‘we are most intellectual’ species but its in a kind of rain man way where we lose other necessary wisdom about how to survive long term on the planet.
Your argument makes no sense because humans have been passing down oral history for ages too before the internet and writing. It was literally one person’s job to memorize everything and then teach it to the next “history holder.” That’s why we have such shit record keeping before we invented books. And why ballads and songs were also used to help memorization.
However to a lesser extent books, but definitely the internet is far beyond a basic data aggregator. It allows instant communication across the entire world akin to telepathy, seemingly endless space for knowledge good or bad, entertainment, business enabling/generating, allows you to 1 way communicate with the dead by reading wisdom from some person 1,000 of years ago. You keep saying “well humans have a tool bias”, yeah no kidding because the tools we make LITERALLY CHANGE THE WORLD, for good or bad. I believe it was the phantom menace who so aptly put it, “the ability to communicate doesn’t make you intelligent.”
okay why doesnt the oral histories of other species count? They seem to pass down tradition and behavior for just as long, and we cannot observe their inner beliefs about more than that. So why are you assuming only humans do it?
Cetaceans have a structure in their brain that we don’t have that MIGHT allow them to experience life as a group. That is different than internet but not WORSE just because it doesnt require an external tool. Why are you obesssed with a way of being that ‘CHANGES THE WORLD’ so that you go extinct?
We’ll agree that our ‘tool intelligence’ doesn’t make us wise at least
Disagree. We’re by far the most intelligent species on the planet, but this is kind of like the AI problem - being intelligent doesn’t make us benevolent or immune to screwed up incentives, and it doesn’t automatically solve all coordination problems.
I might agree we are ‘intelligent without being wise’ but then I would say that THAT should be taught.
Currently we function as the equivalent of the neighborhood mad scientist. Obsessed with their own ideas but actively destroying everything and everyone including themselves. Smart not wise.
Agreed. Human intelligence is way over valued. i feel much of this thinking has roots in exceptionalism.
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Good points. It is always good to keep and educate the ideas in context. Humans are the most intelligent species based on the ability to change the environment to suit us. Human intelligence have made us extremely adaptable to extreme environments as well.
That does not mean we’re the best at surviving on an evolutionary time scale. Many species have us beat at that.
I think you are mixing up biologics with lack of cultuure. It would be far better to teach critical thinking (which they already do or at least did with me) so that kids learn to diferentiate dumb arguments with good ones. And they already do that in the liguistic class, (whatever is your countrys language) specially when they start teaching about news and the scientific method. But ill give you points for the fact that this is an unpopular opinion.
I think you are mixing up biologics with lack of culture.
Can you expand on what you mean by this? What does a biologic mean in this context and who lacks culture? Here’s the definition of biologics I know of
FWIW I don’t enjoy being contrarian on this and I’m open to smoothing my opinion. Agreed that critical thinking is a crucial skill and more important than this
I mean that you are atributing an issue about people being dumb and having dumb opinions to the fact that they are humans in a biological sence and that humans as whole is dumber and therefore other species are smart just because humans can have dumb opinions. In my book that makes no sense and makes me think that its mixing up two diferent fields. Thats all.
oh okay, I’d disagree with that take but fair. I think most humans are generally unaware they are getting dumber though, and possibly from the pollution of all that ‘amazing tool creation’. A lot of the progress man made as before, we’ve been resting on our laurels lately and offloading mental tasks to technology and our species may be dumbing down
Well now you are just changing the subject.
But if whe dont question the validity of iq tests (and for the sake of this discusion we wont) then yes, the average has whent down ever since and polution and lead wather may be the initial cause for bad functioning brains since lead in the wather pipes has definetly been correlated with rise of crimes according to this.
At this point, I would rather work with an orangutan than another human on a project because of how much I end up being the one doing all the work.
What animal specie is the peak if not humans? Not saying humans are anywhere near the far end of the intelligence spectrum but as far as we know we’re still the most intelligent and special thing in the universe.
Yeah I think I might also have a problem with the lack of understanding on evolution. You are not more evolved than other species.
Evolution does not have a peak and it a constantly ongoing process. You can say that some things are more successful than others but you need a metric to measure by, there is no overall ‘peak evolved’ thing and in fact that statement makes no sense.
Other animals on earth make up more biomass. Other animals on earth have lived longer than humans. Other animals on earth have more complex DNA. Other animals on earth have bigger bodies. Other animals on earth have bigger brains.
We simply choose to look at tool use and ability to terraform because we are good at those things
