Azure Spark
Newbie
- Mar 22, 2019
- 47
- 17
This exactly. Dogs are cute and all... but it's too hard to avoid drawing comparisons with humans.
You could view dogs' adaptiveness as a sign of their intelligence too, though. The fact that dogs learn to do a wide range of things for their owners, and bend to their owners' wills has proven to be the more successful strategy, evolutionarily, as they're a much more popular choice of pet than cats. Maybe cats are so stuck in their ways because they aren't smart enough to learn anything else, like herding sheep or tracking prey (whatever the cat equivalent of those activities would be).
Anyways, the intelligence of those animals largely evolved long before their brief, 10,000 or so year sojourn with humanity. The dominant theory of intelligence is that it develops to help creatures navigate social relationships, and that cooperative animals are more successful with bigger, more neuron-dense brains. Most 'intelligent' animals, such as dolpins and chimpanzees, are highly social.
