The way most of us learned about evolution, intelligence developed more or less linearly. Vertebrates ended up smarter than invertebrates. Bony fishes grew larger brains than cartilaginous ones. Land animals evolved a greater intelligence than sea dwellers. Mammals developed more intelligence than birds and so on. It’s an elegant model. Unfortunately, for those who like simple answers, it isn’t even remotely true. Intelligence in the animal kingdom is not a product of linear evolution.

It turns out that an octopus, an invertebrate, is smart enough to have a sense of play. They have long and short term memory and can learn. They can learn behaviors by observing other octopuses. Octopuses even exhibit play behavior and different “personalities.”. While it’s impossible to directly compare intelligence between such widely different species, it may be that an octopus is more or less as smart as a house cat.

As for mammals having a more evolved brain than birds, well it turns out that having a bird brain doesn’t always equate with being stupid. Crows use cars to crack nuts. On the Pacific island of New Caledonia, the crows demonstrate a tool-making, and tool using, capability comparable to Palaeolithic man’s. Their tools are actually better crafted than those that chimps make. Crows and their relatives (corvids), ravens, jays, jackdaws, magpies and so on are veritable animal geniuses. When compared to dogs and cats in an experiment testing the ability to seek out food according to three-dimensional clues, corvids out-performed them. Corvids have roughly the same brain to body mass ratio as great apes and dolphins.

Alex the parrot learned thousands of words, expressed understanding of numbers, could identify objects, colors, shapes. Alex’s accomplishments indicated that parrots may be able to reason on a basic level and use words creatively.

It seems that there is a lot we don’t know about animal intelligence. Who knows, in studying them we may learn more about our own. It even appears that some animals exhibit traits like compassion and fairness that we once thought were solely human. We once believed that only people made and used tools but that’s not true. Maybe we’re not as unique as we thought.

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