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

by Justin Gregg

In a recent survey of 567 leading experts working in the field of AI, a slim majority (58.6 percent) agreed that AI researcher Pei Wang’s definition of intelligence was probably the best:10 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.”11

And this highlights the grand drawback to human intelligence. We can, and often do, use our human intellect to divine the secrets of the universe and generate philosophical theories predicated on the fragility and transience of life. But we also can, and often do, harness those secrets to wreak death and destruction, and twist those philosophies to justify our savagery.

The world is full of animals making effective, beneficial decisions all the time—and hardly any of it involves contemplating why the world is the way it is.

Levine’s work argues that, despite our obvious capacity and propensity to lie, the default setting for our species is to accept the things we hear as being true, something Levine calls truth-default theory (TDT).

A recent study in the journal Evolutionary Psychology found that participants who were the most skilled at making up plausible (but fake) explanations of concepts they didn’t understand (a bit like the game Balderdash) also scored highest on tests of cognitive ability. So being a better bullshitter is in fact correlated with being smarter.

The question of what animals know about death (and thus how they grieve) is part of comparative thanatology—a field of scientific inquiry attempting to understand animals’ death-knowledge.

This internal clock system is regulated by clock genes in our DNA. Once activated, these genes begin producing proteins—called PER proteins—that trickle into the cell during the night. Eventually, enough proteins will be produced that a threshold is reached and the clock genes stop making proteins. The PER proteins then slowly break apart until their numbers are so reduced that the clock genes turn back on and start making proteins again. This process takes almost exactly twenty-four hours—one full rotation of the Earth. This mechanism, called the transcription-translation feedback loop (TTFL), is found in the cells of most living things, from plants to bacteria to humans. It helps explain why all living things on the Earth—including animals that live in dark caves or at the bottom of the ocean where light does not penetrate—are nonetheless sensitive to the twenty-four-hour sun cycle. Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash, and Michael W. Young were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2017 for their discovery of clock genes in the 1980s.

in 2012, a group of them signed a document titled the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, which reads as follows: “Convergent evidence indicates that nonhuman animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Nonhuman animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.”5