• Question: what is the smartest animal in the world

    Asked by tazawillis to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 19 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 19 Mar 2013:

      Hi tazawallis

      I think it’s safe to say that it’s us! Humans are probably the most intelligent creatures on the planet, but then, we would think that wouldn’t we! We don’t necessarily have the largest brains but we definitely have the biggest brains relative to our body size, meaning that although we are quite small we have surprisingly large brains. We have more folds on the surface meaning we have more brain cells for thinking, and we also have a larger frontal lobe above the eyes which separates us from other animals like moneys and apes. This frontal lobe allows us to communicate with language and operate in large groups, no other animals in the world can do this!

    • Photo: Ben Brilot

      Ben Brilot answered on 19 Mar 2013:

      Hi, I’m afraid I’m going to be a pain and say that it’s a question that doesn’t really have an answer. What do I mean by that? Well you have to define what you mean by ‘smart’. If you mean ‘has language, can play chess, can build warships’, then absolutely humans are the smartest animals. But if I put you down in Scandinavia in autumn and told you to navigate your way to the antarctic then I’m guessing you’d struggle to do it without at least a map and a compass. An arctic tern on the other hand, does this every year without difficulty. That doesn’t make the tern ‘smarter’ than you, it just means that the tern is very, very good at doing what it’s evolved to do: overcome the difficulties that it faces every day to survive. So the answer to your question is really this: every single species of animal is the smartest at doing what that animal does: bees are the smartest animals at being bees, humans are the smartest animal at being humans, whales are the smartest animals at being whales and so on and so on. Of course the things that humans have achieved with their mental power are amazing and abstract, but bear in mind we aren’t always so smart: the easter islanders nearly died out because they chopped down all of their trees in order to put up stone statues…and then didn’t have any wood left to build boats, so couldn’t go to sea and catch fish. Not so smart.

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