Reddit mentions of Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?

Other mammals have been evolving for as long as we have, as has brain function. I'm reading a really interesting book on animal intelligence, by Franz DeWahl, "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are"

The answer seems to be, not until we gave up expecting to measure animal intelligence from a human POV, and instead started looking at the world from the given species' POV.

Turns out, animals are just as smart as we are when researchers stop expecting, for instance, chimpanzees to pass a facial recognition test--for human faces instead of chimpanzee faces.

The bias? Thinking that human faces are so "distinct from one another" so any other species should be able to recognize human individuals, right? Turns out, wrong!

Chimps recognize their own species' faces every bit as easily as we recognize other humans'.

And even then, think how often humans have tried to claim that "all Asians look alike" or "all Africans look alike" or "all Europeans look alike." No, they've just been "othered" the same way other species' individuals are "othered,"--other species "other" us, as well.

So, yes, it's obvious that adult animals that live around humans recognize when that human is a baby and act accordingly. After all, they've been raising their own young all those millions of years, too.

It seems likely that it would. I think so for a few reasons, which I will discuss in greater detail below.

1. Animals appear to have consciousness.
   
2. Human beings were around before human languages evolved.
   
3. Human beings can do things that rely on consciousness without making use of language.
   
   Consider a squirrel. It makes some weird noises but doesn't have a language on par with anything like human language. When I put out a bird feeder with bird seed, some squirrel eventually figures out how to get the bird seed from the feeder. This requires the squirrel to have an understanding of its goal and the ability to come up with a plan for reaching its goal. I've recently read a book called Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal. In this book, he goes over the results of various experiments into animal intelligence. One of these experiments involves placing a piece of food into a suspended tube that has a trap in it. A chimpanzee can look at this tube and immediately figure out which end to put a stick in to get the food out without it falling into the trap. But when this experiment was tried with some species of monkey, the monkeys would have to experiment until they got it right. This showed that the chimpanzee had a greater ability to work things out in its mind. Another experiment with chimpanzees involved hiding pieces of food with only one chimpanzee as a witness to where the food was hidden. Instead of going straight to the hidden food, which would alert other chimpanzees as to where it was, the chimpanzee would wait until it could uncover the food in secret. Notably, this same experiment was done with two different chimpanzees in the same compound years apart. It was first done with a male chimpanzee, and he was still around when it was done years later with a female chimpanzee. The male chimpanzee noticed the behavior of the female chimpanzee, and he realized that she was acting the same way he had acted when he was the only one who knew where an apple had been hidden. So, he kept an eye on her, and when she uncovered the apple she had seen hidden, he came and took it from her.
   
   I am now reading Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought Our World to the Brink by Richard Currier. He covers these technologies in chronological order, and he gets to language in the 5th chapter, "The Technology of Symbolic Communication." The first four chapters are:
   
   
4. The Primal Baseline: Tools, Traditions, Motherhood, Warfare, and the Homeland
   
5. The Technology of Spears and Digging Sticks: Upright Posture and Bipedal Locomotion
   
6. The Technology of Fire: Cooking, Nakedness, and Staying Up Late
   
7. The Technologies of Clothing and Shelter: Hats, Huts, Togas, and Tents
   
   I would argue that all of these require some degree of consciousness. To make tools, weapons, clothing or shelter before using them requires some idea of what they are to be used for and how to make them. Following a tradition requires some consciousness that others are doing the same thing. Controlling fire without consciousness would be a very risky business. Fire can easily get out of control if someone isn't keeping a conscious watch over it.
   
   Once human beings evolved symbolic communication, they started forming larger groups, they started having tribal identities, and they started spreading around the world more rapidly. Currier maintains that it was symbolic communication that gave homo sapiens sapiens the edge over homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Since the use of language allowed homo sapiens sapiens to form large armies, they began to wipe out other human species and take over the world. Given what the use of language allowed modern humans to do, it looks like this wasn't around for a long period of earlier human evolution. Yet the human technologies that predate symbolic communication provide good evidence that humans already possessed consciousness.
   
   Let's now turn to some things that contemporary human beings do. They play sports, ride bikes, dance to music, and play video games. It is possible for people to engage in these activities without verbalizing what they are doing. In fact, continually verbalizing what we do is sometimes a way of slowing it down or making it more difficult. For example, when I'm keeping my balance while riding a bike, I have to be conscious of my body's position. But I'm not thinking about it verbally. The main value of symbolic communication is that I can share ideas with other people much more easily than I could without it. It also allows me to think about ideas I might not think of otherwise, such as God or communism. So, I expect that consciousness came first, then the need to communicate with others led to the development of language. Language helped us refine our thinking, but it was not what was responsible for making thinking or consciousness possible.