If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity

by Justin Gregg

Nietzsche both wished he was as stupid as a cow so he wouldn’t have to contemplate existence, and pitied cows for being so stupid that they couldn’t contemplate existence.

His mental state continued to decline even as his philosophical output skyrocketed.

On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche was walking through the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin when he saw a coachman whipping his horse. Overcome, Nietzsche burst into tears, threw his arms around the animal’s neck, and collapsed in the street.

Or a vascular disease (CADASIL) that causes diverse neurological symptoms as brain tissue slowly atrophies and dies.

The absurdity of a narwhal experiencing an existential crisis is the key to understanding everything that is wrong about human thinking, and everything that is right about animal thinking.

The essence of intelligence is the principle of adapting to the environment while working with insufficient knowledge and resources. Accordingly, an intelligent system should rely on finite processing capacity, work in real time, open to unexpected tasks, and learn from experience. This working definition interprets “intelligence” as a form of “relative rationality.”

Sand fleas, it turns out, are a non-metaphorical parasite that can live happily on the anti-Semitic body.

By the time Elisabeth died in 1935, she was so popular with the Nazi regime that even Adolf Hitler attended her funeral.

Remember, this is the same guy who suffered a total mental breakdown because he saw someone hurting a horse.

With an understanding of how the world has been built comes the knowledge to break it. Humans have the capacity to both rationalize genocide and the technological competence to carry it out. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche used her brother’s philosophical writings—born of a staggering human intellect—to validate a worldview that led to the deaths of six million Jews.27 In this regard, humans are nothing like narwhals. Narwhals do not build gas chambers.

Humans are the why specialist species. It is one of a handful of cognitive traits that separates our thinking style from other animals.

Remarkably, scientists still don’t have a clear answer as to why we have chins.

Soon after our ancestors carved the first therianthropes, evidence of novel technologies begin popping up in the archaeological record. Like hats.

There’s evidence from about 23,000 years ago that a small group of humans living in current-day Israel had figured out how to plant and harvest wild barley and oats in little farm plots.

Scientists recently found a potential treatment for the antibiotic resistant superbug MRSA in Bald’s Leechbook—a medical text from the ninth century—in the form of a salve made from onions, leeks, garlic, and cow bile.

The difference between human language and animal communication is my favorite subject. I am going to fight the urge to write hundreds of pages about this and instead see if I can distill the explanation into a single, simple sentence. Here goes: Animal communication involves signals that convey information about a small set of subjects, whereas human language can convey information about any subject at all.

By simply calling it a “pet,” people began semi-ironically treating the rock as if it were a living entity with feelings, desires, and needs. This kind of behavior is both very weird, and very human.

Humans are constantly making predictions as to why other creatures are doing what they’re doing, or what they might do in the future based on our guesses as to what’s going through their heads.

Manipulating beliefs via theory of mind gives you much more control when trying to alter the behavior of other creatures.

The ability to understand that others can have false beliefs and that this dictates their behavior is rare in the animal kingdom, perhaps restricted to the great apes and maybe some corvids (e.g., ravens, crows, scrub jays).

All the cases of deception that we have thus far encountered for nonhuman animals can be understood as an attempt to manipulate the behavior, but not the mind, of the intended target.

Charlie Chaplin films are built on moment after moment of theory of mind in action, and we, the audience, enjoy them because we can guess what’s going through his mind: what he wants, what he believes, and why he’s doing what he’s doing. And all this without speaking a word.

Regardless of how and why it got here, language and theory of mind are used by our species to incessantly deceive one another.

Problems that, as we will see, could lead to the extinction of our species.

The accepted wisdom is that humans tell, on average, between one and two verbal lies a day.

The term bullshitting is a legitimate scientific term. It

Tookottsis can hide close to 100,000 seeds in as many as ten thousand separate caches18,19 in a given season. And, rather astonishingly, they can remember the location of most of these caches for up to nine months.

A tookottsi born in the spring will go through the seed-caching process even though it has never experienced a seed-scarce winter.

It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is being geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem.

to about animal behavior that are shocked at how common homosexual behavior is in the animal kingdom.

The word emotion comes from the Latin word emovere, which means to move out or agitate.

and identified seven classes of emotions that you’re likely to find in most mammals: seeking, lust, care, play, rage, fear, and panic.

It was a dream that applied to everyone except, of course, the enslaved people who were forced to trim and maintain those lawns, which is the kind of paradox the country reckons with to this day.

The closest you’ll get is the vast network of ancient termite mounds in eastern Brazil. These huge mounds (typically eight feet tall) crisscross an area of Brazil totaling 230,000 square kilometers, and can be seen from space.6 They are built more or less every twenty meters, and there are two hundred million of them. The termites began building these mounds almost four thousand years ago. They formed slowly as termites came to the surface to toss out the unwanted dirt from the network of tunnels excavated for transportation and their living quarters. They are, essentially, majestic garbage dumps.

They are a love letter to conspicuous consumption, a term coined by economist Thorstein Veblen in his book The Theory of the Leisure Class, and defined as “the purchase of goods or services for the specific purpose of displaying one’s wealth.”

Prognostic myopia is the human capacity to think about and alter the future coupled with an inability to actually care all that much about what happens in the future.

The point is, our hankering for a snack in the twenty-first century is identical to what it was ten thousand years ago, but our complex cognition allows us to engage in activities (e.g., oil and gas extraction, mechanized farming, soil depletion) on a massive scale, which is transforming this planet into an uninhabitable shithole.

I also want to personally say sorry: I keep driving around in my Subaru despite knowing exactly what this means to you.

The engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the metric system to calculate the orbiter’s trajectory, but the engineers at Lockheed Martin Astronautics (who built the orbiter’s software) used inches, feet, and pounds.

Spotted hyenas can count how many individuals there are in rival hyena groups, which helps them decide whether it’s worth getting into a fight.25 A newborn guppy is able to count to at least three, preferring to join a group of three fish over two, a handy skill when there is safety in numbers.26 Honeybees can count the number of landmarks they fly over on their way from the hive to a food source, helping them find their way back to a yummy flower patch by, for example, tallying up the number of houses there are along the way.

One’s own privilege must be considered when having breakfast conversations about the value of the human experience.

The growth of knowledge is real and—barring a world-wide catastrophe—it is now irreversible. Improvements in government and society are no less real, but they are temporary. Not only can they be lost, they are

sure to be. History is not progress or decline, but recurring gain and loss. The advance of knowledge deludes us into thinking we are different from other animals, but our history shows that we are not.

existential threats marching toward us. I believe that we can create laws that bypass our decision-making blind spots and channel our collective actions into stopping the threats of climate change and ecological collapse. I hope that the Star Trek utopia that is within us becomes a reality. I’m just not sure when that hope bleeds into delusion.

Think of the happiness it would spread throughout the animal kingdom if humans suddenly stopped doing all the destructive things that make us human.

Human intelligence is not the miracle of evolution we like to think it is.

Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction, which is exactly how evolution gets rid of adaptations that suck.

Do you experience more pleasure than your pets because of them?

Because, depending on where we go from here, human intelligence may just be the stupidest thing that has ever happened.

Something deep inside me finds the idea of captivity problematic.