Elizabeth says...
7) What causes different intelligence levels
among primates?
Most people think it is a combination of brain size, developmental
speed, complexity of the social environment, and complexity
of the foraging enviroment. It is important to distinguish between
the "how" and the "why" when thinking about
these factors. How are some animals smarter? Having a big brain
relative to your body size surely helps, though the precise
relation between brain size and intelligence is complicated
and not fully understood.
Why are some animals smarter than others? We don't really know,
but people argue that factors such as social complexity, difficulty
of foraging tasks, longevity, prolonged development, and high diet quality
favor the evolution of high intelligence. In other words, chimps may
have large brains and be smart due to the fact that they eat mostly
fruit, which is patchily and seasonally distributed (and therefore takes
intelligence to find and process). They also have very complex social
relationships (which take intelligence to learn how to deal with), and
so they are dependent on their mom for a long time (slow development)
in order to learn all of this crucial knowledge. Different people think
that some aspects are more important than others, but most agree it
is a combination of several factors.
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