This is Alex the Parrot; from a planet located in one of the spiral arms of whirlpool galaxy..

http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=fw4ilrwvfm

SO a parrot and an ape can use, when taught, what might be considered intelligent language. Considering how many millions of other species there are, I still say its rare and special. Unique? Possibly no, but definitely still special.

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Intelligence is a concept that's hard to define in an absolute; the border is rather fleeting.
Tool use? Repetition/learning of behaviour? Self-conscience (aka recognising yourself in a mirror)? Planning and teamwork? Sacrifice of the individual for the good of the tribe? Religion? Language/Speech? Writing/Art? Mathematics?

All of that can be found in various degrees and configurations over most of the animal kingdom. We've specialised in all of those, true; but compared to what might be, I'm not sure if we're even now truly intelligent.

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

Earlier I googled "Aliens in the bible."
The first hit convinced me that we, as a species, have yet a very very long way to go...

The ability to learn, perhaps? (Still very broad, I know...)

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I don't know, dogs/wolves are pretty good learners for example...

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

Plenty of animals display intelligence, and learning. It not a unique an ability as some would have you believe. I'm thinking of primates especially and to a lesser extent dolphins & cephalapods.

A more unique ablility that we have developed has been described as extelligence, the ability to write down ideas in order to communicate across time. Art is another form of this. When you think about it, it is truly remarkable that we are privy to the thought processes of people from thousands of years ago.

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The most important mental attribute anyone can have is the ability to recognize when one's own comprehension of a topic is insufficient. Without that, one's knowledge simply becomes tautological: it is "impossible" for there to exist wisdom one does not already possess. - JayUtah

There is no light in space. - Moon Man

I love threads like these =)

Humans can survive alone without instinct, we are self-aware. We know we are self-aware. We can study our brains, our conscious mind, we can sit here on computers that convert electric pules into 1s and 0s to discuss this very subject. A 2 year old has more intelligence than many animals. Keep in mind I said intelligence, not educated knowledge.

Dogs are educated. We had to teach them do do tricks. We discovered and retained all this information, passing it down orally, creating written languages and using them as well. hell we decoded the human genome and are using genetic engineering to unlock innate parts of other genomes in birds to bring about properties from Dinosaurs.

The social network we have is also in another class entirely. I'd say we are pretty unique and special. When a monkey or dolphin create fire or go to the moon, I'll be impressed =)

Before this century is out, I think we might find a way of increasing the capacity for certain species to communicate with humans. Whether that will be achieved through genetic engineering or neurotechnology I don't know. But I suspect that one we can communicate with those species, which might include dolphins, dogs, various apes and quite probably the African Grey, we will find that they have much greater intellectual capacity than we give them credit for.

We might even find that their minds are qualitatively different from our own in many ways, so that even if we can communicate using a language that is mutually understandable, we might find their thought processes inscrutable. African greys, dolphins and dogs are very different in lifestyle and behaviour to humans- we might find that we have little in common.

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Orion's Arm . The Starlark . Voices: Future Tense . OA Flickr set

I agree seems strange to me that intelligence developed very quickly in humans yet lots of other animal species have been around much longer. The argument for, this "superior intelligence" evolved for survival does not ring true to me. We could have continued to evolve physically to adapt without an increase in brain size to survive. I think our technological superior intelligence is quite amazing and certainly unique to our planet compared to the millions of other more mature species that have evolved on the earth.

Well a "monkey" did create fire and go to the moon.....

We aren't monkeys, and the ones who went to outer space were trained by us.

I watched an interesting show on Discovery covering how early mammals starting evolving parts of their brain which allowed better eyesight, and larger brains which led to them becoming carnivores to support them. That ultimately led to mammals becoming a dominant force.

A proficient, continually expanding, technical competence is the key, and humans have it to varying degrees. I expect that we will find it throughout the MW.

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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

I think at a certain point (the point where our social and tool complexity begins to increase from generation to generation without bound) we have grounds to point out a qualitative, as well as a quantitative difference.

Wolves may be intelligent animals, but I don't anticipate wolf packs ever developing anything more than other wolf packs on significant timescales. Ditto with chimpanzee tribes - they may have hands, but they're a long way from having the same kind of technological build-up that humans had. First they would need a language of some bare minimum complexity. Then they would need to pass it on.

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http://amssolarempire.blogspot.com

There are some significant features about humans and our past.

Geology and Climate history suggests that we had to adapt to a new environment or contract or become extinct. We had to transform from being a tree dweller into a ground dwelling animal. The fossil record now suggests that there were a number of different branches of hominid that started to evolve this way. Some got bigger and stronger some stayed small. Some evolved to eat tough foods that would be difficult for humans like us to cope with and some followed a more diverse diet.

All of this suggested that evolution did what it always does allow variations to try and fill new environmental niches and those variations that make a success of it go on those that don't die out. Very often it is the most highly specialised species that are the first to become extinct, it is the generalists that are more versatile that go on. Evolution has never been the survival of the fittest but the survival of the most adaptable.

The one thing you can say about the human physical form is that it is pretty useless at a lot of things other animals with different body forms do much better. We cannot run as fast as most ground dwelling animals but we can climb trees and rockfaces better than most of them, though not as well as apes or monkeys. We can swim on the surface of the water and we can dive below the surface much better than most other mammals save those that have specifically evolved for an aquatic life (how many dogs, cows, horses or monkeys can swim down to a depth of 20 feet on one lungfull of air, humans can do this). The human is the classic "Jack of all trades (except flying) and master of none". However there was a price for all this versatility and this is we were fairly vulnerable to any more specialised predator that happened to be around. The only things we had to ensure our survival were hands which were freed from walking and our brains to make our hands do some new. If ever there was an evolutionary incentive to develop intelligence to make full use of those adaptable devices on the ends of our arms that was it. And once we started to do that the rate of progress towards improving our survival was far faster than any evolutionary change through bodily adaptation could deliver.

Put simply when the first hominid found that a well aimed rock hurled at a leopard and striking it on the nose was a good way of not becoming catfood you can be sure lots of other hominids picked up on that example and it would deliver positive results far quicker than waiting for generations of hominids to evolve with longer legs to outrun leopards. The brain hand combination combined with need to survive in an environment not suited to a slow moving tree climber would have been a powerful force.

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Note 1. All requests for planetary demolition must now be submitted in quadruplicate on form UX-565/B4 and be counter-signed by the assistant administrative officer for interstellar traffic calming - department QG-7. Subject to approval by the chief planning officer and the infrastructure development coordination sub-committee.

Huge quote >.< But I think humans have good bodies. Go to the X games, or watch a professional musician, or any Olympic event. Pure brawn no, we don't compare to other animals. But when people push themselves they can do some incredible things. And what other species has a Karma Sutra book?

Humans are specialists - we specialize in intelligence and tool use. No other life form we know about can come close to matching us in those two arenas.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

I think it would be better to say that particular speciality developed from utilitarian bodies being not much good at any one other thing and the need to survive given what we had.

We started off with two basic features - Hands that which at first were probably not very dexterous but which with the right controlling software had the potential to do delicate things. A Brain with a powerful memory compared to most other mammals, the basic brain configuration was something our ape ancestors needed in the complex social groups along with the need to remember the locations of diverse food sources.

All that then happened was for that animal to be placed under some environmental stress that forced it to break out of established instinctive behaviour and start doing things differently. From then on the feed-back loop between brain and hands became an increasingly powerful combination. We were not specialist tool users by design we simply became so through necessity and our bodies which were unspecialised for other things simply had the right potential to go in that direction.

As to the earlier post about humans having very good bodies! It depends how you look at it. In one sense we do. We are capable of doing just about what every other animal can do except fly. We have a good sense of balance (how many animals can balance for any length of time on one limb). When we fall over we can somersault and right ourselves very quickly (another useful ape legacy. Our upright posture enables us to turn on the spot in tight places and if needed face any threat quickly. In many respects the very instability we have through being an upright biped is something we have drawn on by developing good balance ability. However that said when it comes to climbing things we do not compare to Orangutans our running speed is fairly pathetic compared any other ground living mammal, though our running endurance is fairly good we can run for longer without over-heating than any mammal that does not sweat. We can dive and swim better than most land animals but do not even remotely compare with seals. In many respects we can do remarkable things given the body form we have but we are still a utility animal - If Tigers are the tanks of the animal world and Cows are the buses then the human being is a sort of amphibious Jeep.

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Note 1. All requests for planetary demolition must now be submitted in quadruplicate on form UX-565/B4 and be counter-signed by the assistant administrative officer for interstellar traffic calming - department QG-7. Subject to approval by the chief planning officer and the infrastructure development coordination sub-committee.

It's a chicken-and-egg argument - we have the bodies we have today preicsely because our strength is intelligence and tool use instead of being able to run away the fastest or fight the best - we use intelligence and tool use instead, and so don't need to be superlative at more phsyical approaches to solving survival problems.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky