Humans tend to put our own intelligence on a pedestal. Our brains can do math, employ logic, explore abstractions and think critically. But we can’t claim a monopoly on thought. Among a variety of nonhuman species known to display intelligent behavior, birds have been shown time and again to have advanced cognitive abilities. Ravens plan for the future, crows count and use tools, cockatoos open and pillage booby-trapped garbage cans, and chickadees keep track of tens of thousands of seeds cached across a landscape. Notably, birds achieve such feats with brains that look completely different from ours: They’re smaller and lack the highly organized structures that scientists associate with mammalian intelligence.
Yes, this is cool, but imagine if you will the octopus, evolving intelligence from inside phylum mollusca, whose common ancestor with us (and all chordates) is an ancient worm.
Their brains might as well be alien compared to chordate intelligence.
Yes, it’s at least 3 times, that intelligence evolved.
The premise of most of these type of arguments is that intelligence is something we can measure. Meanwhile, nobody knows what’s going on inside their own brains, never mind other species.
Until very recently we just assumed that animals don’t have a complex inner life because it doesn’t superficially resemblance our own. It’s also convenient to make that assumption if you’re going to industrially farm those animals or destroy their habitats, etc.
“at least twice” says the jokers who have picked an arbitrary human concept of “intelligence” to try to measure.
That’s not science because they don’t have any reasonable or reliable definition of the constraints of what they’re claiming to measure (“intelligence”).
It’s intellectual supremacist bullshit. They always shift the goal posts away from the term intelligence - for the same reason IQ tests measure a relativistic “quotient” of score (relative to others tested) rather than being able to measure anything going by “intelligence”.
“Intelligence” is essentially just a brand they slap on research because they all think they’ve got it in spades.