Andrew Wrigley has conjectured that the house fly may be more intelligent than many other insects. The comparison of intelligence across animal species is interesting because it also has implications for comparing the intelligence of humans who evolved in isolated breeding populations situated in different environments. In his excellent book, ***Are we Smart enough to Know How Smart Animals Are***, research psychologist Frans de Waal states (p. 9):
*[When] Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declared, “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” Some scholars were offended, complaining that Wittgenstein had no idea of the subtleties of animal communication, but the crux of his aphorism was that since our own experiences are so unlike a lion’s, we would fail to understand the king of fauna even if the spoke our tongue. In fact, Wittgenstein’s reflections extended to people in strange cultures with whom we, even if we know their language, fail to “find our feet”. His point was our limitability to enter the inner lives of others, whether they are foreign humans or different organisms.*
In his book, Frans de Waal provides many examples of a variety of different animals that show behaviors that seem to suggest high intelligence. However, their intelligence is relative to the environment in which they function. If someone were to ask, “Which is more intelligent, the wolf or the domestic dog?” We might suggest the dog because we’ve observed our domestic pets learn our routines and anticipate our actions, yet wolves are much more capable of hunting in packs, tracking their prey and isolating them by using decoys and capture strategies. The short answer, is that dogs are smarter at what dogs do and wolves are smarter at what wolves do.
A quote often attributed (probably falsely) to Einstein is, “Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability *to* climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” The quote essentially means that intelligence must be measured relative to environment. As our society becomes increasingly based on technology, the ability to reason abstractly, to interpret mathematical notation and to make sense of statistical data becomes increasingly important and becomes a measure of our intelligence. However, if we were immersed in an environment near the South Pole where we had no technology and had to survive by killing our food with primitive tools, a different kind of cognition might be called into play as a measure of intelligence.
