If you are like me, you have never heard of cuttlefish or know almost nothing about them. Turns out that these little cephalopods have three hearts, green blood, and (in view of their football size) very large brains. Moreover, they demonstrate quite remarkable cognitive capacities. Give them a choice of an immediate easy to access a meal, as opposed to a tastier meal available at some time in the future: lo and behold, these cephalopods will reject that immediate snack and instead wait expectantly for the tastier food that is likely to come some time in the future.
Those familiar with the psychological literature will say “Aha, the cuttlefish can pass the marshmallow test.” Like more precocious pre-schoolers, they will refrain from eating a single readily accessible marshmallow if they have reason to expect that they will receive two or more marshmallows in the future.
Cuttlefish have other surprising capacities—for example, they will not continue to take identical routes to a target. Rather, like children who favor exploring, they remember how they navigated the terrain in the past and can “choose” to follow a different path as they seek rewards in the future.
But my goal here is not to glorify cuttlefish. I might just as well celebrate songbirds who can hear a new melody a few times and then reproduce it, or dogs who will alert soldiers to imminent attacks and help rescue wounded soldiers.
Rather: as conveyed by my title, I think it’s a fool’s errand to conclude that the fish, or the dog, or the bird is the smarter animal. Rather, members of each species exhibit different intelligences. If we want to engage in comparisons at all, we should compare them to other members of their species or to species that are closely related (song birds who can learn new melodies to ones who can only chortle their species songs; varieties of domesticated dogs to varieties of wolves; cuttlefish to octopi or squids.)
May I suggest a link to human beings? We should stop asserting or concluding that one person is generally “smarter” or “dumber” than another. Rather, we should examine the various ways in which human beings can succeed at a wide range of tasks. And then we should give each person credit for the kinds of problem solving, pattern recognition, or creativity that draws on that form of intelligence.
To be clear, life is not fair. Some individuals will excel over a range of intelligences. But those persons are the anomalies. Much better to recognize at least the relative strengths and weaknesses that each person exhibits, and work to strengthen those that are most useful or most desired.
Reference
Greenwood, V., 2021. Did a cuttlefish write this?. The New York Times, [online] Available at: <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/science/cuttlefish-cognition-cephalopods.html> [Accessed 23 July 2021].
Photo credit Francis Nie on Unsplash