• Question: How similar do you think humans are to animals?

    Asked by Ella to Ben, Sam, Kirsty, Maggi, Rose on 16 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Kirsty Miller

      Kirsty Miller answered on 16 Jun 2017:

      I think @Ben is probably the best person to answer this one as I know he’s worked with animals! I’d love to, but haven’t had the chance yet. Although I don’t want to step on Ben’s toes, I think it really depends what types of animals you are talking about. Some chimps and apes for example, are incredibly similar to humans, but even other species show intelligence and skills that are similar to humans.
      One way I think we differ is in terms of our knowledge of our own and others’ minds which is obviously better than animals!
      I’ll leave him to give you more detail though because I know he’s done some really interesting stuff! 🙂

    • Photo: Rose Turner

      Rose Turner answered on 16 Jun 2017:

      Just to hop in quickly – there’s been lots of research on crows in recent years, who have been found to have some very advanced problem solving skills! Here’s a video: https://youtu.be/JY8-gP3Sw_8

    • Photo: Ben Kenward

      Ben Kenward answered on 17 Jun 2017:

      That’s a coincidence! The video Rose posted shows my good friend Alex Weir for the first few seconds. I use to work with these crows in fact – Alex and I raised baby New Caledonian crows to find out how they learnt to use tools. There is no doubt they are quite impressive tool users, but there’s a lot of disagreement about whether they can really think like humans to solve problems in the physical world – for example, how well can they imagine about what might happen if they were to do something, without actually doing it? Can they mentally simulate what is going to happen, like humans can, or are they more acting by just following simple rules? Personally I am not convinced they are really good at this.

      Generally what you find with animals is that they are often good as solving specific problems, that they need in order to survive – often even better than humans are – but they are specialists, good at just a couple of things, whereas humans have a good general intelligence for solving lots of different puzzles. For example, animals that store seeds in the autumn, so they have a source of food for the winter, can remember the locations of literally thousands of hiding places. No human can do that.

      But remember, we are after all animals ourselves!

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