If you were to rank plants, whales, and humans based on their intelligence - who would win
the Most Intelligent Species on Earth Award?
One of the biggest questions humans have ever asked is: Are we alone in the universe?
There’s a field of science dedicated to this question known as the Search for Extraterrestrial
Intelligence - or SETI.
In order for SETI scientists to do their job they had to agree on what makes certain life
Intelligent, so they’d know what to look for.
SETI scientists came to the consensus that intelligence is associated with the ability
to create technology.
Some of our best technologies emit radio waves and so SETI has concentrated their work on
searching for radio waves in the universe.
But if we’re only searching for life like us, we may be overlooking species that are
intelligent in other ways.
There are many different types of intelligent life on our own planet.
For example, plants.
That may sound ridiculous, but if you grade intelligence based on a species’ communication
system and their ability to populate a planet, plants would be considered by many scientists
as an intelligent species.
Charles Darwin - who passionately studied plants for most of his life - thought of them
like upside-down animals where their thinking organ was at the root and their sexual organs
were on top.
And - he may have been more right than he realized.
Recent studies have shown that plant roots not only have the ability to sense soil characteristics
like water, nutrients, and the availability of oxygen, but they also change their behavior
based on this information.
Instead of just one big brain - or root - most plants have millions of individual roots,
each working together like a complex network - no one root necessary to survive.
Because of this, plants have a remarkable ability to survive catastrophic events.
Trees, for example, can live on even after losing 90% or more of their roots.
With this unique ability, it’s no wonder why plants dominate animals on land with more
than 1,000 times the amount of biomass.
So - if world domination was a numbers game, plants would beat animals a thousand to one.
But animals eat plants so maybe there’s more to intelligence.
Like brains, right?
Humans are known for their uniquely large brains.
To compare this to other species, scientists came up with something called the Encephalization
Quotient, or EQ.
An EQ for a given species is calculated using their average brain to body mass ratio compared
to other similarly sized animals.
It’s thought of as sort of a proxy for intelligence.
On the higher end, humans have an EQ of around 7.8 - which means our brain is about 7.8 times
larger than would be expected for our body size - the bottlenose dolphin is at 5.3, chimpanzees
are at 2.5, and dogs are around 1.2.
And what about whales?
Whales are considered to be reasonably intelligent And certain species like the Sperm Whale the
heaviest brains in the animal kingdom.
But interestingly, the sperm whale has a measly EQ of 0.58That’s because the EQ equation
doesn’t work as well for animals that are extremely large or extremely small.
To get a more accurate understanding of whale’s intelligence - we’d have to compare how
complex different species’ communication systems are.
Humans are thought to dominate the animal kingdom in this category, but whales may not
be that far behind.
Humpback whales, for instance, are known for their remarkably complex songs - their mating
calls, for example, are the most complex acoustic displays in the entire animal kingdom.
And interestly enough, a recent study suggests that prairie dogs may have a communication
system that’s even more complex than whales.
One researcher who studied the prairie dog for three decades found that their calls contained
different barks, squeals, squeaks,and frequency modulations, and each animal called out in
unique tones.
The prairie dogs had different calls for different predators and the same “words” could be
understood by all the members of the colony.
The universe just may be filled with intelligent prairie dogs, whales, and plants -andddd we’d
never know it.
SETI couldn’t find them because they don’t create radiowave emitting technology.
But maybe in the future we’ll think of a better way to search for all possible forms
of intelligent life... for now we’ll have to stick to the kinds of aliens that act like
us.
If you want to know more about whether brain size matters, check out this video here.
What about you?
How would you define intelligent life?
Let us know in the comments, subscribe and come back here for more DNews every day.