What’s the most or least intelligent animal?

There is a lovely statement in the opening paragraph of Tyson Yunkaporta’s book Sand Talk. It says that ‘fifty per cent of the echidna brain is used for some of the hardest kinds of thinking. In humans, it’s not even thirty per cent’. So, What’s the most (or least) intelligent animal? And why does it matter? I don’t think there is a better definition of intelligence, other than:

The knowledge something has, that enables it to best survive, within the context of its environment.

Even then, this definition of “intelligence” can be measured on many different spatial, temporal and population scales.

How intelligent is a species that goes extinct within a few years compared to another that lasts millennia?

The first humans to populate Australia would at first, have lacked the intelligence to co-exist in their environment but over time, developed an intelligence or “culture” aligned with the world they created to survive in. They became supremely intelligent but only in their living space, after a few thousand years.

You can have a human with a high IQ that performs brilliantly in an urban setting, perhaps as a lawyer or entrepreneur but put them into a different geographic context, where they have to find wild food to survive, and it might literally kill them.

The other thing is, intelligence isn’t a constant. We know IQs go up as you get older, because you gain more experience about your culture. Intelligence can also decline, if you destroy the world around you.

I’d argue that the growth of social media and disruptive technologies have reduced overall human intelligence, by breaking cultural traditions, destroying centuries-old customs for trade and business, leaving many unable to compete in the new market. It’s created an “intelligence-divide”, a bit like a poverty-divide, where the people who are most suited to the new world they’ve created, do very well, but at the expense of many others.

Colonialists did the same to Indigenous populations when they settled in new countries and their cultures disintegrated, along with the knowledge of sustainable land-use. It was just another form of disruptionThe result of an action that creates a sudden change in the stability of an ecosystem or process. This tends to create a gap where there is free surplus energy and organisms will move in to fill the space. Disruption might be a tree fall, or the application of pesticide to farmland. Disruption is important to maintain dynamics in ecosystems More, designed to create gaps in a market place, so one intelligence could dominate over another.

When it comes to animals, species like Sperm Whales, whose forebears existed in our oceans 50 million years ago, are supremely intelligent. They can blindly hunt squid at body-crushing depths and pressures, using only echolocation. However, they don’t last very long anywhere else.

And wow! Hey! What’s this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? Very very fast. So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like … ow … ound … round … ground! That’s it! That’s a good name – ground!

I wonder if it will be friends with me?

And the rest, after a sudden wet thud, was silence.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (thoughts of a sperm whale, after, against all probability, it was suddenly called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet).

Sperm Whales have the largest brain of any animal on Earth. But intelligence can’t be measured by brain size or IQ, it’s far more sophisticated and marvellous than that. It’s an extension of our environment and our brain’s ability to align with the world we know (or have created).

Comparing whether one thing is more or less intelligent than another, isn’t really possible. The answer to the obvious question “what’s the most intelligent animal?” is … none. No animals are more or less intelligent than any other.

To understand why this is the case, there is one final dimension to intelligence that I want you to think about and that’s collective intelligence, as this is fundamental to our survival because it connects humans to all animals on Earth.

As animals, we are dependent on ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More that cannot be habitable, unless they are stable. That stabilisation process is driven by animals alone, us among them, and no single species can ever hope to hold together the intricate fabric of a food web, without a supporting cast of all other animals.

Therefore, collectively, all animal intelligences, as they relate to our ability to survive on Earth, are interdependent. This means, whenever we destroy animals, we erode the overall intelligence of all animals. This action changes the environment around us, so we also become less likely to survive.

By killing other animals, we become less intelligent.

Which begs another question: if we’re the only animal on Earth that can contemplate this and we don’t choose to do something about it, how intelligent does that make us?