Saturday, February 2, 2019
The Issue of Non-Human Intelligence :: Biology Essays Research Papers
The Question of Non-Human IntelligenceHuman beings hire long assumed that they were at the pinnacle of the evolutionary pyramid give thanks mainly to their more complex brain. They believe that this advanced brain makes them non just more intelligent but categoric every(prenominal)y different from all other organisms. Recent advances in the fields of neurobiology and anatomy have begun to screw away at this most sc ared of compassionate assumptions and demonstrate that gracious brains, and the word of honor associated with them, are not categorically different than other animals. kind of the research indicates that intelligence is on a continuum from lower animals to higher ones. These ensureings take to new fields of research which sought to gain a dampen understanding of intelligence and its evolution by comparing the behaviors and the brains of various organisms. disrespect existing for many years and being supported by researchers in fields as varied as biology and l inguistics thither have been nearly as many steps backward as there have been forward. The central dilemma in studying intelligence is to come up with a universally acceptable definition of intelligence. numerous researchers define intelligence as the ability to use language and render tools to manipulate the environment. While this definition may seem fairly logical, particularly because creation seem to be the axiomatic example for this definition, many researchers argues that its anthropocentric nature is too limiting. By placing parameters on intelligence which only humans meet, and lower primates fit to varying degrees, it is inherently impossible to find intelligence in any other species. A second riddle with this humanist definition of intelligence is that it is based largely on human introspection and the knowledge that we are conscious, rational, linguistic animals(1). Kenneth Marable argues if the same criterion that are used to rule out non-human intelligence were ap plied to humans without the realize of introspection, we would doubt even our own intelligence(1). One of the first goals of inter-species intelligence studies was to create a quantitative scale to measure the intelligence of animals. Since the government activity of IQ test to many different species seemed illogical, researchers turned to using scales which compared the sizing of an animals brain to the size of its body this value was known as the Encephalization Quotient. The Encephalization Quotient (EQ) allows researchers to demand the question Is the brain of a given species bigger or littler than would be expected, compared with that of other animals its size?
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