By: N. George
Worth Noting:
- According to anthropologist and researcher Dr. Authur Saniotis the belief of human cognitive superiority became entrenched in human philosophy and sciences. Even Aristotle, probably the most influential of all thinkers, argued that humans were superior to other animals due to our exclusive ability to reason.
- An Anthropological and Comparative Anatomy scholar at the University of Adelaide, Australia Professor Maciej Henneberg opines that animals possesses different abilities which are usually misunderstood by human beings
- “The fact that they may not understand us, while we do not understand them, does not mean our ‘intelligences’ are at different levels, they are just of different kinds.
There are, in effect, two things, to know and to believe one knows; to know is science; to believe one knows is ignorance .………. Hippocrates
There are people who argue that human beings are smarter than animals due to the fact that the brain structure is more important than brain size, and human brains with their highly folded and complicated cortex can do things no other brains can. In addition, the relative size of the brain to the body is more important than absolute size and the human ratio is about 1:50.
On the part of animals they have their own attributes for example goats are known for their excellent long-term memory, dolphins can recognize themselves in the mirror, chimpanzees are better than humans in some memory tasks, parrots can reproduce sounds of the human language and new Caledonian crows understand cause and effect relationships while elephants have good ability of working together.
Believing that you know something makes you to take it lightly and see no need to have a critical look at it. With such attitude you become a pro status quo as you get comfortable with the way things are rather than seek to know what is around you and why it is there.
If Isaac Newton thought that an apple fall from a tree towards the centre of the earth is just a normal happening he could not have bothered to research on the forces contributing towards that action, and he could not have discovered the force of gravity.
When Covid-19 broke out in 2019 and reached its peak at 2020 if the world just thought it is a common flu and took no further action probably it could have spread far and wide causing havoc. The deliberate steps of acknowledging its presence and researching for a vaccine have resulted to invention of several vaccines like AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer among others. All these have played a major role in discouraging its spread.
In most dynamic industries like those dealing with fast moving consumer goods and service industry employers prefer to hire flexible quick learners compared to conservative experienced staff reason being they want to remain relevant in the face of fast changing market environment and only those ready to change will make them so.
One of the reasons why it is easy to inculcate a certain culture in a baby at a faster rate than in adults is the open mindedness of the kid compared to the conservativeness of the adult.
Not knowing and believing that you know is lack of intelligence or common sense. This is what an American science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein talked about while he said that ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
At personal level I do believe in the existence of God and further know that whatever is physically manifested comes from the spiritual realm. There is cause and effect relationship in both spiritual and the physical worlds.
However, there are those who misuse religion and claim that whatever they know that it exists but they are not interested with the reasons behind its presence or use should only be explained as miracle.
We need to be able to research about the meaning of whatever manifests physically in the spiritual world thereby appreciate its existence and be able to effective use it.
Below are some notes about research on comparative anthropology from Adelaide university news site on relationship between humans and animals and how the former think about the animals.
According to anthropologist and researcher Dr. Authur Saniotis the belief of human cognitive superiority became entrenched in human philosophy and sciences. Even Aristotle, probably the most influential of all thinkers, argued that humans were superior to other animals due to our exclusive ability to reason.
An Anthropological and Comparative Anatomy scholar at the University of Adelaide, Australia Professor Maciej Henneberg opines that animals possesses different abilities which are usually misunderstood by human beings
“The fact that they may not understand us, while we do not understand them, does not mean our ‘intelligences’ are at different levels, they are just of different kinds.
When a foreigner tries to communicate with us using an imperfect, broken, version of our language, our impression is that they are not very intelligent. But the reality is quite different,” remarks Professor Henneberg.
“Animals offer different kinds of intelligences which have been under-rated due to humans’ fixation on language and technology. These include social and kinaesthetic intelligence. Some mammals, like gibbons, can produce a large number of varied sounds – over 20 different sounds with clearly different meanings that allow these arboreal primates to communicate across the tropical forest canopy. The fact that they do not build houses is irrelevant to the gibbons.
“Many quadrupeds leave complex olfactory marks in their environment, and some, like koalas, have special pectoral glands for scent marking. Humans, with their limited sense of smell, can’t even gauge the complexity of messages contained in olfactory markings, which may be as rich in information as the
Mary Karau Ngethe