What's the Difference Between Intelligence and Language Conceptual Ability?

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Animals have alarm calls that stand for something else. What makes humans human is we can combine those in ways that allow us to represent any anything we can think of. And even if you try and teach like a chimpanzee or a dolphin to potentially put symbols together, they don't do that. It's not because they're bad with symbols. It's because they probably don't have those thoughts to begin with right? Right. Well, that gets us to your new book because we often conflate intelligence and language conceptual abilities and so on as some kind of mark of, well, I don't know what intelligence,. But you know, what you're getting at is in the thesis of

All our unique gifts like language, math, and science do not make humans happier or more “successful” (evolutionarily speaking) than other species. Our intelligence allowed us to split the atom, but we’ve harnessed that knowledge to make machines of war. We are uniquely susceptible to bullshit; our bizarre obsession with lawns has contributed to the growing threat of climate change; we are sexually diverse like many species yet stand apart as homophobic; and discriminate among our own as if its natural, which it certainly is not. Is our intelligence more of a curse than a gift?

Shermer and Gregg discuss: • intelligence • stupidity • dolphins • artificial intelligence • language • rationality • moral systems • comparative thanatology • “causal inference” vs. “learned associations” • humans as “why specialists” • death awareness • why narwhals do not commit genocide • “prognostic myopia” • our “shortsighted farsightedness" as "an extinction-level threat to humanity” • consciousness and sophisticated consciousness: animals and humans • free will • determinism • pleasure vs. happiness vs. purposefulness.

Justin Gregg is a Senior Research Associate with the Dolphin Communication Project and an Adjunct Professor at St. Francis Xavier University where he lectures on animal behavior and cognition. Originally from Vermont, Justin studied the echolocation abilities of wild dolphins in Japan and The Bahamas. He currently lives in rural Nova Scotia where he writes about science and contemplates the inner lives of the crows that live near his home.