Human exceptionalism is real. We think we’re special because, well, we are. No other living thing on earth can code a computer or build a business. We are smart hominids. We evolved especially large brains because that’s what helped our ancestors survive. Every member of our human species has this special form of intelligence that uses high cognitive processing to engineer solutions to complex problems.
But IQ and EQ measure very different spectrums of intelligence, so why can’t there be another form? There is: it’s called extra-olfactory intelligence (“olfactory” means “smell”). Think about it–dogs sniff the urine of other dogs. Why? Because that urine holds signals, messages from one dog to another. These pheromonal messages indicate who’s ready to have puppies and who isn’t.
That’s right, dogs don’t need Tinder. They don’t swipe, they just sniff.
Other mammals do this, too. They’ve evolved to do this. Evolution is the process in which “nature” chooses traits that will help a particular population survive in a given environment. It acts by selecting genes in a population that increase reproductive fitness, that is, the ability for an individual to pass their genes on to offspring. Evolution is about selecting the traits that help that species survive continuously over thousands and millions of years.
As we learned in high school biology class, evolution is not optimization. Were you paying attention?
Homo sapiens are alive. We’ve gotten here through millions of years of evolutionary pressures, all in an effort to make the most reproductively successful species. Homo sapiens became their own species about 250,000 years ago.
But you know who else is here? Jellyfish. Jellyfish first arose 500,000,000 years ago. They’ve been on earth for 2,000 times as long as we have. And they’ve hardly changed. They are as reproductively successful, if not more, than human beings.
Evolution is not optimization. Evolutions is about survival of the reproductively fittest organisms.
Dogs and jellyfish are smart, just in a different way than we are smart. Evolutionarily speaking, they’re both tremendously successful. And they don’t worry about paying bills or saving for retirement.