According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans are always at the top of the intelligence rankings, followed by animals that look like us (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.), followed again by other ‘higher’ animals, and onwards and downwards in a league table – a great chain of intelligence drawn up by the ancient Greeks, which persists one way or another to this day. Because these organisms don’t look like us or outwardly behave like us – or have brains – they have traditionally been allocated a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale. Too often they are thought of as the inert
...more
