Even through all of the Fridays when I stayed up late writing them after procrastinating during the week, writing these blogs has been one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in an English class. I learned a lot by reading others’ blogs and seeing an interest or side of them that I hadn’t seen before. I truly believe that the lit blog is one of the things that made this semester enjoyable.

 

Throughout the semester, my favorite blog to write was the “Animal Intelligence” blog. I wrote about the intellectual advantages that animals have over humans, especially in emotional intelligence, along with showcasing different animals’ abilities with communication and problem-solving. What I liked the most about it was being able to reflect on humanity in general. When I was younger, I heard a lot of things that separate humans from animals — the ability to believe in God, the ability to use thumbs, having to worry about taxes, but foremost intelligence. But if animals could attain high levels of intelligence, then what really separates humans from animals on a level other than just being a different species? Are humans special? Through the post, I also got to reflect on the animals in my life. My dog, whose picture I put in the blog post, had been dealing with arthritis for two years at that point (I think her arthritis medicine was visible in the picture) and finally passed away almost a week after I wrote the post. Writing the post got me to think about how much value pets, with their emotional intelligence, add to our lives, and now that my dog has passed away. Furthermore, I was able to consider questions about learning. The average bonobo knows zero words, yet Kanzi the bonobo learned over three thousand. He shows that we can learn a lot if we put our minds to a particular subject. However, I admit that I didn’t research that blog post well, and widely overestimated animals’ intelligence. For example, as Krishna told me later, an octopus, who I pointed out as having exceptional problem-solving abilities, can solve a maze, but can it create one? Regardless, this blog made me think more about many existential questions and prompted me to look further into animals even after submitting the post, even though I’d never been a huge animal person before.

By reading other people’s blogs, I feel that I learned how to make top five lists about everything. Many of the blogs showcased a person’s favorite five of something. While I thought these were repetitive to see over and over again, I think that these types of posts were some of the most insightful posts of the whole class. They showed insight into the writer’s personality and interests, and after reading, I could go buy the products or watch the movie that they said was good, knowing that it would be high-quality. Furthermore, writing a good top-five list takes skill in not only having a decent understanding of what you’re talking about but also persuasion. People make a decent amount of money sidehustling by submitting top ten lists to different websites, so having that skill is not entirely invaluable.

I think that the most important lesson that I’ll take away from this semester is to check my work. This semester, there have been frequent times when a lapse in concentration caused me to lose points and sleep. From not having a defensible interpretation on a timed writing, to forgetting to put “approximately normal” instead of “normal” in Stats, to reading one line of code wrong in AP Comp Sci. This obviously isn’t just a problem for me this semester, as it has been a recurring theme throughout my entire academic career. Since first grade, I’ve gotten much better at double checking and eliminating silly mistakes, but I want to eliminate the stress over them once and for all second semester before I go to college. Truthfully, I will probably not be successful in being perfectly mistake free at any point in my life, but at least striving towards that goal will put me in a much better spot in life than if I let all my mistakes slide. 

I had heard about the blogs before from seniors of years past, so I was looking forward to it a little bit, but writing them was more fun than I thought it would be at first. I learned a lot about my classmates that I wouldn’t have known otherwise, and hope to continue blogging second semester.

In the early 1900s, there was a horse named Clever Hans, who was famed for being able to solve arithmetic problems by stomping his hoof the same number of times as the answer to a math problem on a board that his handler wrote. However, what actually happened is that the owner would involuntarily relax a little when Hans reached the answer, and Hans took that cue to stop. Most people of the time thought that this was all a scam because the horse couldn’t really do math. But while the horse couldn’t do math, he could notice the minute differences in his handler’s face, which is arguably more impressive. He just changed the game to get the same desired result. Can we really say that Hans was unintelligent?

Often when people are asked what separates humans and animals, they say intelligence. After all, how is a jellyfish supposed to be a Mensa member? But at the same time, like Hans, animals have many strong suits that circumvent our common measures of intelligence like IQ tests. To see whether humans are actually at the top, I’ll see how humans compare to animals in three main fields: communication, emotional intelligence, and problem solving ability. Obviously, not all animals have the same intelligence, so for each category, I’ll compare the best animal examples with the average human.

 

When it comes to communication, it’s pretty safe to say that humans take the cake. The main thing that humans have over animals is called displacement, where beings can talk about events that are not spatially or temporally present. This includes talking hypotheticals, recounting events from a long time ago, or expressing wishes for the long future. These are important for all human innovations because they allow us to create goals, debate, extrapolate from previous experiences, and collaborate, letting us use and grow our intelligence. Although animals like ants can do incredible things under collaboration, their scope of communication is ultimately confined to the recent past and basic things like food and appropriate building sites, which works for them, but doesn’t demonstrate advanced capabilities like that of a human. Probably the best evidence that human levels of communication aren’t unique to humans is the communication between the two bonobos Kanzi and Panbanisha. Both bonobos were raised by humans from an early age, and were spoken to in English, with both of them being taught Yerkish, a form of communication made by pressing keys on a keyboard. They actually reached a point where they could understand roughly 3000 English words and communicate with each other complexly in Yerkish. To some, it seemed that the only thing separating them from a human child is not having a throat that can produce all of the sounds of spoken languages. 

Many animals don’t have emotions on a complex level, but ones that do seem to have them can sense emotions at a higher level than humans. Clever Hans is a prime example. He sensed the involuntary relaxation of the handler, which most humans probably couldn’t do. Similarly, the reason that dogs are common support animals is because they can sense human emotions and act in a way that comforts them. Furthermore, animals have an ability to control their emotions, a clear sign of emotional intelligence. An example is my own dog, who sometimes clearly wants to eat human food, but restrains herself from biting my hand to eat it because she knows it’s wrong to bite people.

Overall, humans are pretty good at problem-solving. Even opening a door might be impossible for some species, so the fact that humans can get through each day with different challenges and difficult solutions is comparatively impressive. However, one class of species rivals humans: cephalopods. Including octopi and squids, octopi show incredible situational awareness, generally gathering information with their eight tentacles before processing that information to solve a problem. Ever since I saw the Mark Rober video with an octopus seamlessly going through a tough maze as if it was casually strolling through, I realized that they could probably be more intelligent than humans but just didn’t have the chance to create a complex civilization.

Seeing the above comparisons, humans are more intelligent than animals in many areas. However, animals can be superior to humans, and shouldn’t be underestimated. Regardless of species, we’re all trying to survive, and all species have done their best to find areas to excel in. Just as we can’t judge a human by its ability to fend off predators, we can’t judge a porcupine based on its ability to do complex tasks, as long as both species live long enough to create a second generation. Furthermore, there is a heavy human bias to any measure of animal intelligence, as we are basing them off of the ways humans express intelligence. I just think that it’s fascinating how often beings that we regard as “simple” can understand us better than we understand ourselves.