Today Japanese researchers reported that the commonly held belief that humans are smarter than other animals may not be true. Actually, I haven't thought it was true for a long time. There are many kinds of "smart" and humans are lower on many of them. Most animals and other life forms take only what they need to survive. Most animals do not kill except to breed and eat and keep enough territory to live. What do we do? We kill because others don't agree with our mythic stories, and the rules we have created from them. We kill and invade other countries for our selfish economic needs, or I should say, the economic needs of the people who benefit from the military industrial complex...people like our Vice President and his Haliburton buddies. But I digress....
Tesuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University has been studying the mental abilites of chimps. Five year old chimps competed with college students in a task of seeing and memorizing numbers flashed on a screen. The conclusion, as the time of the flashing of the numbers decreased to four-tenths or two-tenths of a second, the chimp was the champ. The chimp was better at taking in the whole pattern of numbers at a glance.
Humans may be better at language, but we are also arrogant. So many animals are high in intelligence--emotional intelligence, community building intelligence, cross species intelligence. It is time for us to leave our tribal consciousness and consider the needs of the other species, to consider how our dumbness is affecting their survival, and to consider what we can learn from them. How about it?
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