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Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

Animals have always seemed to me smarter than humans in some (important) ways. Squirrels, for instance, are extremely resourceful and can survive in conditions few, if any, humans could. If that isn't being "smart", I don't know what is.

In any case, the smart/brain weight ratio is not in humans' favor here, that is for sure!

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Algae can also survive in conditions human couldn't. That isn't a very meaningful bar for intelligence.

Single celled organisms are in control, they're the original intelligence. Our minds are just slaves to supercolonies of trillions of cells.

You wanna go full retard? Cells are just sheaths around aqueous liquid crystal computational systems. The water is doing most of the work.

"There are many copies. And they have a plan."?

True, algae (or rocks, for that matter) do not require intelligence to survive; it's the higher organisms that do.

Using analytic thought to problem solve? That's probably a pretty common definition. And most animals don't do that.

One interesting aspect of this is that, as a human species, we are discovering over time more and more animals that do use analytic though to problem solve. I wonder if many more than we currently know about do actually do that, we're just unaware of it at the moment. Dystopian sci-fi incoming: maybe all animals are totally aware and intelligent, and maybe we'll understand that one day ...

> we are discovering over time more and more animals that do use analytic though to problem solve

Source?

This may be true (but what do we know?). Animal don't solve problems for fun, though; those that they do have to solve, they solve pretty well, it seems.

Isn't your statement a bit fallacious? The animals that couldn't "solve problems" aren't exactly around for us to study. The difference between the two comes down to luck doesn't it? The animal that survives is far more likely to have done the right thing by random mutation rather than some weird semi-intelligence that you are attributing to them.

Sure, but it's the end result that matters. Incidentally, the human brain also has evolved by natural selection (which involves random mutation).

Exactly what conditions are you referring to?

Where do squirrels live that humans don't?

my attic

In habitats untouched by humans, duh! Oh, wait...

Trees

The natural range of humans is far more expansive than the natural range of squirrels.

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