Despite rampant anthropomorphizing—or, partially because of it—civilized humans are convinced that they are a species apart, that they are superior to the other animals, that they are somehow the apex of evolution and possess qualities that are unique in the animal kingdom. The most frequently cited of these qualities is intelligence. Human intellect is superior to that of other animals by orders of magnitude.
There is a basic logical problem with drawing such a conclusion, however, considering that humans are the ones who have set the criteria for intelligence to begin with.
For example, a knee-jerk argument for human intellectual superiority is what could be called the argument from technological prowess. Human technology clearly stands out as something far, far beyond what any other creature is capable of. Human technology has cured pandemic diseases and delivered people to and from the moon. Some other animals make and use tools, but nothing any other animal does can come close to the simplest human appliance.
A major problem with this argument is that it assumes that the creation and use of advanced technology is evidence of intelligence rather than evidence of its opposite.
A simple survey of the negative consequences that have fallen from a lifestyle based around advanced industrial technology should be enough to show that it is not a very intelligent way to live on the planet. Also, how is it, exactly, that helpless dependence on external devices demonstrates intelligence to begin with? The ability to fashion a crutch does not make you walk better than someone who has two strong legs, and the fact that a crutch is needed is direct evidence that something isn’t working right. Other animals are able to figure out how to do things for themselves. Other animals are able to function in the world just fine without external mechanical aids. To offer technology as evidence of human intellectual superiority reflects a narrow human-centric—check that: civilization-centric—definition of intelligence that simply can’t be generalized to the rest of the animal kingdom.
It is unlikely that any set of criteria for what counts as intelligence could be applied across species because what counts as intelligence is relative to the opportunities and demands of life as it is experienced. What might count as intelligence for a bee is something altogether different from what might count as intelligence for a dog, for example. The claim that humans are more intelligent than other creatures demonstrates a lack of understanding of other creatures—when it’s not simple chauvinism.
And it’s simple chauvinism almost always.
A further nail in the coffin of the technological prowess argument is the fact that humans themselves have lived technologically “primitive” lifestyles for millions of years, in conjunction with the fact that there are no meaningful brain differences between modern humans and those who were around 50,000 years ago, with the exception that human brains were on average a bit larger in the distant past due to a cooler average global climate.
It turns out that there is strong continuity among all vertebrates, and humans are not so distant from other mammals in terms of any major aptitude. Even language is not a defining human capacity. Other primates demonstrate all of the various characteristics of linguistic communication to one degree or another. And it is likely that the human ancestral tree is speckled throughout with creatures in possession of variations on the language capacities of homo sapiens—perhaps even superior variations. The fact that modern humans are the last surviving hominid that can talk doesn’t make them somehow superior to the ones no longer around; going extinct is an inevitability in a world with dynamic climate and geography, not a sign of general inferiority. Besides, humans show every sign that they are going to have a comparatively short run on the planet—and language might in the end prove to be an important reason for that.
Language and the ability to conjure fictional symbolic worlds has likely been an important part of the human condition from the very start. But there is something about life in civilization that subverts these adaptive human capacities, reappropriates them, and directs them in ways that makes civilized humans think that they are distinctly different from all other forms of life on Earth.
This is delusion, of course. But it is a particularly pernicious delusion. It is a delusion that is possible only in a mind that can conjure symbolic worlds, but the ability to conjure symbolic worlds did not create this delusion. Humans have existed as non-delusional symbolic-world conjurers for a long time before civilization came along.