Not really, otherwise whales and elephants would be way smarter, than us.
Well, some people say, they are, but it does not show in our intelligence tests.
And birds brains evolved differently than those of mammals, so maybe they are more efficient with their relative small brain? Because yeah, they are definitely smarter than dogs, who have a bigger brain.
And this is not further explained in the book, but it likely sounds like technology. And when you want to have and use technology, you have to do more than just splashing around..
Well, when you consider that we react to global crisis like a pandemic with more confrontation, than cooperation (there was no real exchange of technology between west and east and patents and licencing were still more important, than producing enough vaccines) and to the climate crisis rather with more wars over whats left of the ressources, than to unite and solve the problems - no, we are not.
We are smart enough to see, what could be possible, but unable to overcome primitive power struggles.
And cherrypicking, well climate change is the current problem, affecting the whole earth, so a smart species by my definition would act globally and coordinated and not only talk about it. But sure, by comparison we still seem to be the smartest around.
How do you know that? I mentioned this in another comment, but dolphins and orcas have more folds in their brain than we do, and folding is associated with greater processing power and higher function. Additionally, the areas of their and whales' brains associated with emotional intelligence are much larger relative to the rest of their brain than the same areas in our brain are. Their brains are very, very interesting. For example, they keep one brain hemisphere active during sleep since they are conscious breathers, and they actually alternate which hemisphere is kept awake.
Whales, dolphins, and orcas are damn smart, and I think there's evidence enough that we cannot conclude that they aren't more intelligent than us. Although they lack technological development, this is due to their living environment and physiobiology and not due to their intelligence. Orcas in particular have achieved complete dominance of their environment, aside from human activity, and are geographically widespread with diverse cultures. There are many cases where orcas actually use humans as tools, even training humans to help them in hunts (and not the other way around).
Humans existed a long time before proper technology development, and those humans were just as intelligent as modern ones. The ability to create technology is not a requirement for higher intelligence.
Even then, orcas do use tools, what they have access to. Without technology, humans stand no chance against an orca, and that goes for any animal in the ocean, from blue whales to great white sharks.
We see dialects, to an extent, in orcas, but we do not see the human behaviors we might expect.
The problem, I think, is in the pure consideration of it as intelligence. This is a limited view.
Isn’t it more intelligence to convey all the information that you need to with the highest efficiency?
We rate a poet who can convey tremendous meaning in few lines as superior to someone who is long winded and their writing is full of bullshit and tropes conveying nothing but using many words.
One person alone is without language and without advanced tools, no matter how big their brains. See feral children.
It is possible that cetaceans pushed long ago pushed past complex verbosity into communication via wisdom and are all enlightened beings. Maybe they communicate electrically. Maybe they are in a local maximum of telepathic connection. I hope so.
Why? But nonetheless, they have. They pass on locations, routes, hunting techniques, etc. vocally and behaviorally down through generations.
You and some of the other comments bring up a lot of things that don’t really have much to do with intelligence. They really only have anything to do with a human-centric view of intelligence.
Is that actually true? In cases of feral or severely neglected children who lack any exposure to human language, isn't there an impediment that prevents them learning more complex language later in life that exceeds anything that could be attributed to reduced brain development due to nutrition?
World wide hasn't intelligence been increasing, and while part of that is due to better nutrition, another part is due to better childhood conditions to enable intelligence? Exposures to the technology of language, written language, and similar at a young age seem to lead to an increased capacity for intelligence later in life.
I’m not for sure what feral or neglected children has to do with this.
To address your later point, intelligence does not equal knowledge. Any increase in intelligence in a person’s life seems to be intralifetime and doesn’t spill over to further generations. Increasing intelligence through diet and behaviors and such are just mechanisms for exposing the underlying intelligence that’s already there.
This is just one of the many paths to the fundamental question that plagues this sort of topic, what is intelligence. Is intelligence the capacity for gaining knowledge or having actually gained knowledge? Or maybe not directly related to knowledge at all, though the previous question was more about the capacity to gain vs the gaining than it was about knowledge.
It is known that the capacity a single individual changes based on what they were exposed to (feral/neglected children being the extreme negative cases, I'm not as well read on extreme positive cases). But perhaps we aren't talking about an individua's capacity and instead we are talking some baseline genetic average capacity for a larger group that doesn't take into account environmental cases pushing it to either extreme? But in such a case have we not defined intelligence so that technology's impact is excluded a priori?
I do not know it. I am not an expert and had only limited, (but fascinating) contact with them.
But I would assume, if they would be "way smarter", than they could and would find ways of communicating with us. As far as I know, the research shows that they can communcicate towards each other quite well, but not towards us beyond very basic things.
But of course that reminds me of an old joke:
A donkey and a dog on a farm are talking to each other in the evening and the donkey complains that he has so much work to do, but would like to become a writer. The dog asks: why don't you tell the farmer? The donkey answers, are you crazy? If he finds out, I can read and write, I will also have to do his bookkeeping.
Meaning, maybe whales and co. could communicate with us, but choose not to. But if this would be the case, their reasoning would have to include some very astonishing things, as whales are still hunted - which they likely could almost completely stop by telling us exactly that.
That’s a human centric approach and a little strange, because how do we communicate with them? We can’t understand them or communicate with them any more than they can with us.
Old Tom was an orca off the Australian coast who, with his pod, trained humans on how to efficiently catch whales. Old Tom demanded the tongues of the whales, which was given to him by the whalers.
Where's this evidence? What exactly does "more intelligent" mean to you? Do you think a dolphin can learn to play e.g. Chess? I doubt you can teach them to play even tic-tac-toe.