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Comment by mrlala | Hacker News Reader

>So crows could build a jumbo jet, they're just lazy?

How can they physically even come close to building a jet?

It seems humans physicality has a LOT to do with our intelligence. Perhaps someone with actual knowledge on this can chime in.. but it seems to me if you have a build similar to ours, you have the opportunity to actually progress and manipulate things to a level where it might a situation where as a species you continue to evolve with more intelligence over time because you are able to actually use it.

I don't know how to say that better.. but on the other hand, if we had our same brains but had the bodies where we can hardly manipulate any tools.. don't you think that makes all the difference in the world?

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The specifics of jumbo jet manufacture really has nothing to do with my point. The point of my comment is that there is a very evident and very clear discrepancy between human intelligence and animal intelligence.

It's always fun to watch a clever squirrel find its way into a bird feeder, a cunning fox outsmart a rabbit, or a curious monkey recognize himself in the mirror. These are signs of sentience, sure, but all of those are far cries from what even an immature human is capable of, and this obvious evidence is what leads us to believe we are smarter than them. It's not arrogance in any sense.

Building anything significant requires a relatively high level of dexterity, does it not? Even if crows could figure out how to build and operate tools that would allow them to build significant physical structures and objects, their bodies are not well-suited to doing so.

It's not about building anything, really. The cornerstones are figuring out a reliable method to store knowledge over generations, and then figuring out mathematics more advanced than counting your food and potential mates. Having that, you have both an abstract framework for developing better understanding of the world (which is a necessity for better control over it, i.e. technology), and a way to implement it as work that spans generations.

I think more in line with reality is that we would be more likely and better off reading how to build such things. The knowledge already exists around us in our culture. I program every day but it's not because I'm some super animal genius who invented computers and programming and software design.

They can build nests. Nest building seems to often get overlooked in discussions about tool use, perhaps because shelter isn't traditionally considered a sort of tool? But it seems tool-like to me. Maybe nest building doesn't impress us because bugs do it too?

Birds might lack the physique to use human tools, but they have plenty of dexterity when it comes to building nests. They just seem to have relatively little interest in using that dexterity to build things which are not nests

How could a human physically come close to building a microchip? We're much, much, much too large for that to be possible.

> How can they physically even come close to building a jet?

A human can't do that either. Humans as a whole can do it because we have enough intelligence to implement the whole chain of technology required to be able to do things on this scale. Not just the physical scale, but also the scale of the science and engineering required to make the thing actually work.

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