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Animal Intelligence
by Biol. Oscar S. Aranda Mena |
 How many times have you heard someone say that humans are the only intelligent beings on earth? I've heard it so much as the times and I have come to believe that humans are not nearly as intelligent as we seem to think. Are we really so different from the creatures around us?The Origin of the Question For a long time I have thought about how intelligent various animals are and whether any so-called "human" qualities actually exist in other creatures such as self-awareness and the ability to solve complex problems. I recently had the need to deal with problems caused by a gang by raccoons, which challenged me to wrack my brains for a logical and rational solution to eradicate my problem without hurting them. Interestingly, keeping these critters at bay has become a task that has cost me thousands of pesos and many headaches, and to my surprise, every obstacle I put in their way, they have managed to circumvent, leaving them, so far, the winners of this battle of wits. This has forced me conclude it would be unwise not to recognize that raccoons, like many other animals, are indeed able to find solutions to problems using ingenuity and intelligence that is somehow different from ours. The Problem and the Response Humans tend to believe that we are aware of everything around us, which is patently untrue. The ability to reason and the mistaken belief that we are superior and different to all other animals, has limited our understanding of the animal mind, as we tend to believe that all animals reason in the same way as we do. In fact, the way humans perceive the world around us depends on our biological capacities, which we have acquired through evolution, as our ability to perceive a certain range of light or sound waves, while other animals are capable of perceiving light and sound waves far beyond our own limitations, therefore we are only aware of certain types of information and thoughts.  There are a myriad of scientific studies that prove that animals are more intelligent than they may appear to our eyes and are capable of making truly remarkable mental feats and fascinating observations, but this is difficult for us humans to recognize. Imagine a child who has not yet learned to speak, but he knows very well and recognizes objects such as a bottle or teddy bear long before he has learned to say "bottle" or "bear." This is called "non-verbal thinking, which is identical to the thoughts of an animal that is, our pure thoughts. After learning our respective human language, where we put names to everything, our thinking becomes a "verbal thought" fitting the description and communication of our real and imagined world, but it still remains based on non-verbal thinking.Meanwhile, the animals meet their needs perfectly with their not verbal thoughts, involving only a few specific sounds or signals such as a proper name for those thoughts that are essential for survival. Spoken language is what makes us human, but we never stop being animals. The nonverbal thought that dominates us before you say even one word is what links our thinking with animals. We are not really so different from other animals: the same rules of cooperation and competition, the same impulses and reproductive powers. There is little doubt that man is indeed an animal. It is just too bad that our thoughts have evolved to include selfishness and greed. |
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