Cabinet of Geniuses

‘Homo Sapiens’: (hoh-moh say-pee-uhnz)
The biological classification of modern humans. Homo sapiens is Latin for “the wise human” or “the clever human.”

In our search for intelligence in other animals, we were looking for human qualities, using human measures, based on a human perspective of the world. Which is strange…

Intelligence has evolved in such a way that it fits perfectly in the environment of the animal. A squirrel can’t count to ten, but that is something she doesn’t need. A squirrel can hide thousands of nuts in the forest and find them back during the cold winter, while I can’t even remember where I left my keys.

And that’s okay. Just like a squirrel doesn’t need our numerical system, we don’t need its extraordinary memory. The intelligence of one species isn’t better than the other because we all have different challenges in our perspective of the world.