[NeedSpace]

The study of intelligence is really fascinating. The problem with the definition is it keeps changing over time. Unfortunately, there is a political and social connotation that has caused us to change it from time to time.

While this has been done with different human cultures, (ie in history calling blacks savages), while this has happily largely gone away, most recently, it has been with comparisons to animals. Many wish to see animals as consequentially different from humans. They do this by saying animals are not intelligent. For instance, animals cannot communicate, therefore they are not intelligent. However, there are quite a number of references of animal communication that we have either discovered or trained animals to do.

Here bees communicate with a dance


And most pet owns can testify to a certain understanding of their humans (ex. "want to go outside?")

Here is Kanzi communicating in sign.


However, uncomfortable with animals showing "intelligence", we needed to discount the "communication" as merely strict behaviorism, no different than teaching a rat to press a lever when they want a food pellet.

That is, there is no comprehension. In fact, in the video above, you can see kanzi coming up with unique phrases of words that shows an understanding.

In fact, Alex (a bird) was able to do this as well, so it is not limited to primates.


This caused us to change the definition of intelligence to include logic or using tools.

However, we have seen several examples of various animals using tools. Primates to birds.

Here is a bird making a tool.


Currently, anytime we come up with a good way to measure intelligence or a good way of measuring it some group gets hurt so we have to redefine it. They use examples of savants showing incredible memory or incredible abilities to figure stuff out in Asberger's kids. So now they have added "emotional intelligence" to bring in the social aspect of intelligence.

Personally, I think comprehension, logic and a decent memory account for intelligence...mostly traditionally WAIS and Binet tests. While I recognize the importance to social intelligence it is not what is commonly thought of in the general population as what defines "intelligent".