Ideas - Is human intelligence overrated?

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

Our brains tell us that our intellects make us superior to animals. But after years of studying dolphins and other marine creatures, Justin Gregg has come to the conclusion that the human brain isn’t as great as it thinks it is. His research led him to a shift in his view on our much-vaunted intelligence. *This episode originally aired on June 22, 2023.

I'm Joshua Jackson, and I'm returning for the Audible original series, Oracle, Season 3, Murder at the Grandview. Six forty-somethings took a boat out a few days ago. One of them was found dead. The hotel, the island, something wasn't right about it. Psychic agent Nate Russo is back on the case, and you know when Nate's killer instincts are required, anything's possible.

This world's gonna eat you alive. Listen to Oracle Season 3, Murder at the Grandview, now on Audible. This is a CBC Podcast. ["Want to Swing on a Star"] Would you like to swing on a star? Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayed. Bing Crosby, crooning his Oscar-winning song, Swinging on a Star, for the 1944 movie, Going

My Way. But his brain is weak, he's just plain stupid with a stubborn streak. And by the way, if you hate to go to school, you may grow up to be a mule. Or would you like to swing on a star? Carry movie... But while moviegoers were being told to smarten up or they'd be stupid like mules, scientists were using their intelligence to build a nuclear weapon. While moviegoers were being told to smarten up or they'd be stupid like mules, scientists were using their intelligence to build a nuclear weapon First record of the dome of Nagasaki, targeted for atom bomb number two

And begin a new era where humanity would now have the capacity to annihilate itself with the push of a button. But if you don't care a feather or a fig, you may grow up to be a pig. This episode asks, is human intelligence overrated? It's a simple question, but deeply disturbing. For a guy like me, a lady person, I found it fascinating. Yeah, yeah, good. I'm really glad. Well, that's what got me thinking about let's do a documentary on this.

Howard Goldenthal's documentary explores the complex relationship between human and non-human animal intelligence and why our hungry minds may be the worst thing ever to have happened to our species and the rest of the planet. Consider the cattle grazing as they pass you by. Switzerland in the 1870s. The brooding German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has a lot on his restless mind. In this case, the minds of cows. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today. They leap about, eat, rest, digest, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored.

This is a hard sight for man to see, for though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness. He wrote that he envied animals sometimes because they were too stupid to contemplate the meaning of life, too stupid to contemplate existence. of life, too stupid to contemplate existence. Justin Gregg thinks a lot about the thoughts of Nietzsche and animals. In fact, he wrote a widely claimed book called If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal. Nietzsche didn't really write about narwhals all that much, or even in fact about animals

at all. But when he did talk about animals, he had a couple beautiful passages, which is what I used for the book. So he envied them, but he also pitied them because they couldn't contemplate existence and life and the meaning of life. And so I found that sort of juxtaposition of those two thoughts at the same time in his brain, a perfect jumping off point to talk about the nature of human and animal intelligence.

Justin Gregg is an adjunct professor at St. Francis Xavier University in Antikinish, Nova Scotia, where he's senior researcher with the Dolphin Communication Project. So the research I conducted with dolphins was all about communication. I wanted to know how dolphins were communicating

with each other and specifically how they might be using their echolocation in a kind of social context. And throughout my research and working with the dolphin communication project, we had a lot of contact with the general public and people were always asking me questions about dolphin intelligence because I'm always talking about animal intelligence and dolphin intelligence and people are often asking are dolphins as smart as humans or maybe smarter than humans? And so one of the major points I'm making in the book is that, hey, maybe it's a bad thing if dolphins were as smart as humans because maybe human intelligence isn't all that great.

Then people might appreciate dolphin and other animal intelligence more by realizing that maybe human intelligence isn't the thing we should be comparing every other animal's way of thinking against. I think that Nietzsche probably didn't know very much about animal cognition. Well, I'm Kristin Andrews. I'm a professor of philosophy at York University. I'm the York research chair in animal minds, which means I spend a lot of time hanging out with scientists and hanging out with animals and studying animal minds. If you think about cows being stuck in the moment and so only being happy, you're not recognizing that cows learn, that cows have relationships. So take for example

dairy cows. Mothers and infants are separated after infants are born. The mothers are not stuck in the moment. When the infants are taken away, they express a lot of pain and discomfort. The infants explain pain and discomfort. This suggests that they have memory. There's associative learning in all non-human animal species we've studied, really. Philosophers from the ancient Greeks have been interested in the minds of other animals.

I'm not sure what it was that Aristotle saw in the non-human animals, but presumably he was hanging out with a lot more animals than we do today and looking at them the way he might look at the other humans that he lived among. Animals also differ from one another in regard to character in the following respects. Some are good tempered, sluggish,

and little prone to ferocity as the ox. Others are quick tempered, ferocious and unteachable as the wild boar. Some are intelligent and timid as the stag and the hare. Others are mean and treacherous as the snake. And so when he was writing his texts and giving his lectures and discussing biology and mind and nature, he said, we've got to look at non-human animals as well as humans. Further, some are crafty and mischievous as the fox, some are spirited and affectionate

and fawning as the dog, others are easy-tempered and easily domesticated as the elephant, others are cautious and watchful as the goose, others are jealous and self-conceited as the peacock. But of all animals, man alone is capable of deliberation. Many animals have memory and are capable of instruction, but no other creature except man can recall the past at will. Aristotle, History of Animals. And I think ever since Aristotle, we saw some real engagement with other animal minds until it got to be the kind of Christian medieval tradition in philosophy when folks started saying things like animals don't have minds, animals are machines with humans

almost on top, angels are above humans and then you get God and then the animals are at the bottom because they don't have souls and Descartes took this to be that animals don't have rationality, beliefs, or minds. And this kind of dualist tradition continued into through modern philosophy and into contemporary philosophy. Even in the 1970s and 80s, you saw analytic philosophers like Donald Davidson argue that animals don't

have beliefs and that they are basically just machines who are acting but don't have minds that are worthy of investigating. And I think it's only since philosophers started engaging with scientists of comparative cognition that we've been able to correct this problem that started with the medieval turn in philosophy and then was really solidified during the modern period with Descartes. After years of studying dolphins and other marine creatures, Justin Gregg has come to the conclusion that the human brain isn't as great as it thinks it is.

It has been said that the advancement of human intelligence is the worst thing that's happened to the planet. And I think if you look around at the moment, that's undeniably true. Not just that there are a lot of humans, which is difficult on resources, but just the way that we've expanded. The pollution that we've caused, the carbon dioxide issue, the global warming that we're dealing with, or just the loss of biodiversity, you know, clear-cutting forests or just ravaging the land. A lot of species have gone extinct thanks to human activities and at a rate that we've never seen in history

other than, you know, an enormous asteroid hitting the Earth. Humans are on track at the moment to be more destructive than an asteroid when it comes to loss of biodiversity. And that's only really thanks to our technological feats, our cultural ability to transmit information and create these amazing cities that we live in. So that's all thanks to our intelligence. So in that sense, our intelligence has been really bad for the planet and the animals

that live on it. Is the worst thing that ever happened human intelligence? Well, that makes us the protagonist, you know, in the driving seat of world history once again, but just in a negative sense as the most fallen creature. My name is Thomas Moynihan. I study the history of ideas. I'm currently a researcher at Cambridge University's Center for the Study of Existential Risk and this goes back to you know Saint Augustine and the idea of original sin. The current form of human intelligence

is potentially an awful thing for the rest of the biosphere. I would say it actually evidently is. Intelligence is free. Intelligence is potentially an awful thing for the rest of the biosphere. I would say it actually evidently is. Intelligence is free, intelligence is plastic and flexible. And so we can become intelligent in different ways and we can become intelligent in ways that might reverse or repair or rectify some of that damage that we've caused upon each other and the rest of the world. That might be naive, but it's something that I hope is possible. From Princeton, New Jersey, the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists headed by Dr. Einstein

has issued an urgent appeal for funds with which to educate the public. We scientists who released this immense power... Following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some scientists, including Albert Einstein, tried to rectify that damage. In this world, life and death struggle, we ask your help in this fateful moment that we scientists do not stand alone.

I agree. Is our intelligence the best or the worst thing that's ever happened to this planet? It's certainly novel. My name's Melanie Challenger. I'm a writer on environmental history and philosophy of biology and a bioethicist. And I'm the author of the book, How to Be Animal.

I think we can look at different stages of what we have done with our minds, and that's what it really all comes down to. We have got these extraordinary minds, we know this, and they're extraordinary in cooperation with one another. Sometimes we get individuals who have remarkable intelligence and will kind of really run off on one on their own. But as a general rule, we stand on one another's shoulders and we stand and hold hands. That our intelligence works both on inheriting the smarts of the prior generations

and on sharing the smarts collaboratively with one another. So that aspect, that affiliative aspect of our intelligence, if we turn it for good, is a wonderful problem-solving, flexible, highly plastic and deeply creative, enriching capacity. But of course, we're killing billions of animals a year. I mean billions. With the most inventive, extraordinary forms of slaughter that you can come up with, we also have abused one another and justified it through imaginative narratives that convince us that what we've

done is okay. All the Dakos must remain standing. The Dakos, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzers. All of them. When we turn our minds to the industrialized cruelty towards others and when we turn our imaginations towards justifications for that, then we're seeing that wild kind of mind running loose in a much more negative way. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience.

And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. During the European Enlightenment, there was a lot of triumphalism about humanity as this rationalizing animal, able to give and ask for reasons and follow the tribunal of the right reason, etc. But then after the horrors of the 20th century particularly, you get a lot more suspicion around that claim. So instead of us being reasoning animals, we're often cast now as needy rationalizing animals who just invent these made up, unjustifiable reasons for their actions and oftentimes atrocities. Humans like a lot of primate species, including chimpanzees, are sometimes violent species.

The animal kingdom is red in tooth and claw. It's filled with violent acts. But what makes humans different from other species, including chimpanzees, is that we can use our intellect to create terribly effective ways of killing absolutely large numbers of people. And so that just bumps us up to a level of death and destruction that you don't see for other species, which makes us more dangerous. And because of our ability to

Rationalize why we do things from an ethical perspective we can justify our actions for sometimes murdering millions of people And that is something that animals can't do either if they're violent It's usually in response to an immediate issue But humans can decide in the future to just eradicate a million people for some moral reason. And that really sets us apart from other animals and not in a good way. ... ...

... The attack is on. ... To intimidate their opponents, the aggressors scream and drum on butter fruits. I think it's really dangerous to romanticise other animals and think that they're just very nice and aren't going to build gas chambers or do horrible things to one another just because they don't have the technology to do it right now. Several males corner an enemy female. It's a ferocious attack and she's lucky to escape

with her life. Chimpanzees have been observed to encroach the territory of other groups, to kill the infants, kidnap the females, castrate the males so they can't have more infants, and then take over that territory. Why do they want the territory? So they can hunt more monkeys. This is kind of a jerky thing to do, right? This is a sort of thing that we don't really like in other human groups, but it's a thing that chimenses just do. Others are not so fortunate. We can talk about rape in other non-human animals as well.

I've seen this before in dolphins. I've seen this in orangutans. This is not sweet and gentle at all. Animals can be horrific to each other as well. That phrase, horrific to each other, implies some kind of ethical standard that non-human animals live by. And ethics, like our intelligence,

is something we think sets us apart above every other species. So usually people are very fast to deny morality to animals because they think of it of morality in very intellectually demanding ways and in ways that amount to what I called in my doctoral thesis the amalgamation fallacy which is the idea of sort of taking together as a whole moral behavior, moral judgment, and moral responsibility and treating it all as one. My name is Susana Monzó and I'm a philosopher of animal minds and an animal ethicist. I am currently based in Madrid at the National

Distance Education University where I'm an assistant professor. I work on the social cognitive capacities of animals and their ethical implications. People hear of cases of dogs or chimps or elephants performing heroic actions, empathic actions, scaring for others, etc. And they're very quick to dismiss it as amoral behavior because they think, well, these these animals they don't know right from wrong they don't have moral concepts or they cannot be praised or blamed for what they do so it doesn't make sense to say that this behavior is moral. Moral behavior and moral responsibility are actually different things and so is

moral judgment they are different capacities and they they can be treated as different things and the question be treated as different things. The question that we're asking when we ask whether animals can be moral is whether their behavior can be described as moral. That is, whether they ever act on the basis of moral reasons. And that doesn't necessarily mean asking whether they can perform moral judgments. with them. I guess you might say they just joined the human race. You're listening to Ideas, where a podcast and a broadcast, heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca

slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. I'm Joshua Jackson and I'm returning for the Audible original series Oracle season 3, Murder at the Grand View. Six 40-somethings took a boat out a few days ago. One of them was found dead. The hotel, the island, something wasn't right about it. Psychic agent Nate Russo is back on the case. And you know when Nate's killer instincts are required,

anything's possible. This world's going to eat you alive. Listen to Oracle, Season 3, Murder at the Grandview, now on Audible. Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday.

It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers, you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Specsavers.ca to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. This episode by producer Howard Goldenthal poses one short but deeply unsettling question. Is human intelligence overrated?

Why do you deny the one faculty of man that raises him above the other creatures of the earth? The power of his brain to reason. What other merit have we? The elephant is larger, the horse is swifter and stronger, the butterfly is far more beautiful, the mosquito is more prolific, even the simple sponge is more durable. What does a sponge think? I don't know.

I am a man, not a sponge. What do you think a sponge thinks? If the Lord wishes a sponge to think, it thinks. Do you think a man should have the same privilege wishes a sponge to sink, it sinks. Do you think a man should have the same privilege as a sponge? Of course. This man wishes to be accorded the same privilege as a sponge. He wishes to sink!

The courtroom showdown from the movie Inherit the Wind was based on the Scopes Monkey trial in 1925 about whether evolution could be taught in Tennessee schools. Part of the anti-Darwin sentiment then and now is that we like to see ourselves as unique. So the scene suggests that maybe it's our way of reasoning and not just the capacity to reason that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. For a long time we assumed that what we call intelligence was what made us humans unique in the animal kingdom. And that it wasn't just a kind of advanced reasoning, but there are all of these different elements of our thinking that made us unique. I'm David Robson,

I'm a science writer and author. My books are The Intelligence Trap and The Expectation Effect, things like theory of mind, you know, being able to understand what other individuals might believe. Creativity, metacognition, which is this ability that we can actually reflect on what we're thinking and we can kind of estimate our own confidence in what we believe. So we might be more confident that one thing is right and less confident that another choice is correct. I'm aware from the research is that actually we can find traces of all of these abilities in other species. So it's very difficult to find a single particular trait that makes us unique. But I think looking at the evidence, it is

clear that for each one of these things, whether it's the creativity and invention that comes with tool use, whether it's that metacognition, whether it's theory of mind, is that humans just are a bit more sophisticated in what we can do. So we've expanded on all of those skills. And then we have things like language, you know, mathematics, that do seem to be uniquely human. So I think we are unique in the animal world. And I do think there is something to be said for human intelligence. But whether that makes us a more successful species, I think that's what's really a matter of debate, because actually, using their far simpler cognitive skills, lots of animals have been able to,

you know, inhabit the whole of the planet, they've managed to reproduce, their existence as species have lasted much longer than human existence so far. So yeah, it makes you wonder whether our intelligence is really as important as we believe. I don't think we know yet. I don't think there is a thing that is human. I think we, a long time ago, some of our ancestors invented this strange, interesting theory that internal states exist and they might explain outward behavior. What I mean by that is that humanity is in some sense this transgenerational project going all the way back to our earliest ancestors of figuring out how things work and what we can do.

But I don't think that means there is an essential human. And this is an idea that goes back deep into Western philosophy that, you know, one of the things that might make humanity unique is that we lack a rigid, inherited nature like the other animals, and this is what makes them stable and happy. Whereas humanity is kind of this creature of deficiencies, this creature of deficient instincts, but this confers upon us this massive flexibility. You find this in Renaissance philosophy, you find it in the tradition of philosophical anthropology and continental philosophy, but you also find it in contemporary science. There's an idea that one of the things that contributes to human uniqueness is that we have very extended childhoods.

and uniqueness is that we have very extended childhoods. So we look more like the babies of other primates well into adulthood. And that also means that we retain the plasticity of childhood for, you know, throughout our lives basically. So we remain learners forever. We never reach of being fully learned. And so I think that means there isn't an answer to the question, what is the human? We're figuring it out as we go. And we're producing more interesting, more sophisticated answers, but it's also an act of invention. And I think that gives us something that I would like to think of as freedom. In the nine decades since the Scopes Monkey Trial, there's been a lot of research done on what separates and unites humans and nonhumans.

And the results, as Kristin Andrews points out, are surprising. The famous discovery of Jane Goodall was that chimpanzees make and use tools. And it used to be thought that it was only humans who could make or use tools. And when Louis Leakey was supporting Jane Goodall's research, read her letter reporting these observations of chimpanzees using tools to fish for termites and gather ants, he said, well, we're either going to have to redefine human or redefine tool or admit that chimpanzees are humans. There's something along those lines. So this was the first kind of, I think, pushback, showing that, ah, these things we thought were uniquely human are shared with other animals.

Aristotle defined human as the rational animal, but now we're asking, what is rationality? What's involved in that? I'm reading a paper right now that suggests that animals are able to revise their beliefs and that revising your beliefs is a definition of rationality. There's been research on logical reasoning in non-human animals. Animals' ability to solve problems that philosophers call the disjunctive syllogism problem. So if you have two choices and you know that one of those choices is wrong, then you can immediately infer that the other choice is right if the answer has to be one of these two things. Chrysophis' dog is a famous example in ancient philosophy of this idea that dogs can reason logically. So Chrysophis was chasing a hare down a path and then the path merged into three different paths. The dog had lost track of

the hare. He sniffed the first track, he sniffed the second track, and then he ran down off the third track without sniffing it because he was able to infer that the rabbit had gone down that third path. As scientific research into animal minds has progressed, the debate over what divides humans from the rest of the animal kingdom heated up. For some, the idea of a non-human being viewed as a person is absurd. But that's happened in India, Argentina, and parts of Spain where non-humans are legally considered to be persons. Justin Gregg. So the idea that animals could be considered persons

under the law is not so crazy really. This idea of personhood doesn't have anything to do with being a human or not, because companies have personhood under the law in many cases. So a company like Starbucks would have certain rights. It can sue you, you can sue Starbucks, it has legal standing.

So the question is, well, would an animal also have legal standing? Because an animal is not just a thing, although legally animals are often considered things, but certainly we know from their intelligence and their cognition, it's strange to consider them things. So if they're not things, then what are they? Well, maybe they're persons.

Maybe they have personhood like Starbucks has. So they have certain rights. So what are those rights? How is it different from humans? How would legal rights be different for an animal versus a corporation? These are interesting legal questions, and it's based on the idea that animals are not things.

News outlets from around the world making the trip to Albany, packing into a courtroom for something that lasted only a few short minutes. What brought them all here, an argument over whether a chimpanzee could be considered a person. The case for animal personhood came before an American court in 2014. I guess we call it an unusual case, Amy.

John, certainly a first of its kind lawsuit. We came here to Mayfield to speak with the owner of that chimp. Pat Lavery says he's given him a good home. This group is arguing that your chimp should be treated as a person under the law. What's your reaction to that response? Well, he's a wild, dangerous animal. And how can you treat a wild, dangerous animal?

York University's Kristen Andrews was one of a group of philosophers who wrote an amicus brief which made the case for releasing the chimp, whose name was Tommy. The argument is based on the reasoning that Tommy is a person. What is a person? A person is a metaphysical category that refers to an individual that has interests, that has basically a mind, memory, goals, things that they like, things that they don't like. A person might have relationships with other people that they care about, and they might be able to make choices about what they do with their time.

Now when a person is locked away, they lose all of the ability to exercise these capacities they have to form relationships, to choose what they do with their time. If the courts were able to offer a writ of habeas corpus for Tommy, then there could be a decision that Tommy's rights as a person were being violated under U.S. law. And if animals are considered persons, should they be subject to the same laws as other persons? Well, at one time they were.

In medieval Europe, it was not uncommon for animals that, say say killed a child, say a pig killed a child, to be brought in front of a court and tried for their crime and sometimes found innocent. People would testify on behalf of the animal sometimes and say, oh, this was a really good pig. This was really out of character for this pig. We should let them go this time. And other times they were found guilty. It's a really interesting phenomenon because it does suggest a certain degree of

responsibility and intentionality on behalf of these animals. Because of course, trying humans in court, one of the things we're interested in is whether the action was accidental or intentional. And if we're saying that animals are responsible for their actions, that means their action was an intentional thing that they did, that they caused it from their personhood, not that it was just an accidental or mechanistic thing that they did as a little machine and they couldn't have done otherwise. did as a little machine and I couldn't have done otherwise. And around the world, different cultures view the moral standing of animals differently. You can see different relationships between humans and animals in different indigenous

thoughts, where animals aren't seen as other or lesser, but are partners who should be engaged with. When hunting happens and animals need to be used in this way, there's an appreciation of the sacrifice of the animals. It's very different from the relationship that one might have in a city going to a supermarket and buying a plastic-wrapped piece of meat where we don't think about the animal that gave up that flesh. So I think it's really important to recognize that a lot of the ideas about non-human animals that you might have, whoever you are, is coming from your culture. And there are other cultures that think about animals differently from the way your culture

thinks about them. Don't call me stupid. Oh, right. To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people. I've known sheep that could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs, but you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape? Apes don't read philosophy. Yes, they do, Otto. They just don't read philosophy. Yes, they do, Otto. They just don't understand it.

I really hope apes understand the philosophy that they read because I read philosophy and maybe you read philosophy and we understand it. Humans are apes. We're one of the five great ape species. If the point of the clip is to suggest that humans are smarter than other animals and you're putting someone down by calling them a chimpanzee. Yeah, we see this all the time. Can chimpanzees read philosophy?

No, of course they can't read philosophy. Why? Because they can't read. Can they do philosophy? That's an interesting question. What does it mean to do philosophy? It means to think and to ask why. Do chimpanzees seek explanations? Do they

try to understand their world? This is another thing that we're just beginning to ask. One of the ways that our struggle with being an animal affects us is in how we both perceive one another and how we relate to other life forms. As I started to really look at that in finer detail it seems to me that what we're often doing is actually de-mentalizing. So we are trying to see other humans as less intelligent, as less valuable, as individuals who have feelings that we don't need to care about or pay attention to, or minds that somehow are lesser than ours. This is used to override our positive aspects of our social cognition. It's used to override those impulses that we have to

connect to one another, to understand one another and to care, and instead to turn those off or to manipulate those in such a way, even to inspire aggression, when we're in a relationship with another human that's going to be exploitative or that's going to be aggressive potentially. So what does this have to say about the minds of other animals? Well it seems to me that while we do this kind of dementalization if you like with other human beings when it suits us, that's also very widespread in how we're relating to other animals and the reason for that is we either fear other animals, they either compete with us or create problems for us within our environment sometimes,

or we're wanting to use them. So we're wanting to eat them, we're wanting to wear them. And what we see is that we use a similar kind of mechanism with other animals, that when we want to use them, we tend to de-mentalize them again, we infer that they have less mind, less feeling, even no mind or no feelings that these are, that other animals are machines. So it would make sense that they would be somewhere out here. One of the mysteries locked inside the skulls of non-humans is how they understand death. And do they feel bereavement the way humans do? In 2018, the world watched the heartbreaking drama

play out in Canadian waters, which made people wonder, do whales experience grief? This is how Taylor Shedd has spent most of his waking hours for the past week, navigating through the Salish Sea to keep watch on a mother in mourning. The Southern resident killer whale known as J-35 has been pushing and carrying her dead calf with her since July 24. This report is from CBC TV's The National. Stress and this pain that she must be going through. It doesn't really hit me until

I get back to the office late at night and I'm going through the images. That you're still going through this eight days on. Yeah, I mean I catch myself at random times like tearing up. As part of his work with the dolphin communication project in Florida, Justin Gregg has researched the behavior of whales and refers to call J35 by her other name, Taliqua. Taliqua's story is both fascinating and unique. You see in killer whales and other dolphins that after a calf has died Sometimes the mother will carry the calf on her rostrum on her on her beak or nose for a few hours Sometimes a day but in her story, she just keeps carrying the calf for days on end weeks on end. It's really quite Heart-wrenching to watch believed to be part of a grieving process that scientists don't fully understand,

but to carry it for this long is unprecedented. Which is why teams from the US and Canada are working to keep watch on the whale and other boats back. It's probably a lot more difficult for her to forage while she's doing all this as well, so we are concerned a little bit about her body condition. The whales are tracked by boaters calling in sightings and by audio recordings like this. Picked up when the pod moves past sound equipment underwater. Southern resident whales are already closely monitored because they're endangered. There are only 75 left.

You see other species, a lot of primate species will carry around a dead infant for a while in similar fashion. The question is, are they carrying around their infant because they are grieving the loss of their infant? Or are they just confused because they don't understand that the infant has died? Shedd and the rest of his crew say they will try to track the orca as closely as they can to help a mother who for some reason is not ready to let go. So basically the idea is that in the study of animals relation to death we can find two forms of anthropocentrism that sort of pervade all of this field of study. Susanna Monceau. One of them is what I call intellectual anthropocentrism, which is the idea that the only way of understanding

death is the human way. So animals either have our concept of death or none at all, which is of course wrong because there might be different ways of understanding death and in fact our Western way of understanding death is not universal even among all humans. But also in comparative thanatology we can also find another form of anthropocentrism which is what I call emotional anthropocentrism, which is the idea that the only emotional reactions to death that are worth our attention are those that are human-like, which has led researchers to focus excessively on grief as a reaction to death and also on sort of affiliative interactions with corpses or with dying individuals.

Susana Monso believes there's been a lot of hesitation to study how animals grieve, especially when it comes to our pets. A very, very common reaction in pets to their owner's disease is for them to consume the bodies. This is actually something that happens in a very large number of cases, cases in which pets are left alone with human corpse. And very often this consumption happens very fast. So there was a very famous case, for instance, of a German shepherd who consumed his owner, the human that he lived with, 15 minutes after he had died and with food still in his bowl. So dogs, even though we think of them primarily as pets,

in reality, 70 to 80% of dogs are free-ranging dogs that don't live in households. And these dogs are not only hunters, but they're also scavengers. When they feed on a corpse, what they usually eat from is the torso because that's where all the nutrient-rich organs can be found. When they feed on their owners, what they usually eat is the face of the owner. This is what happens in like three quarters of cases. And this is very interesting and very meaningful because the faces of humans are our communicative center. And it's what our dogs pay the most attention to when

they look at us, when they interact with us. So the story behind these cases probably has to do with attempts on behalf of the animal to get some kind of reaction from their owner. And when they don't get this reaction they get frustrated and this can lead to them licking the owner's face, eventually drawing blood and eventually consuming it. So the motivation behind them eating their owner's face could actually be the fact that they are very distressed by the lack of response.

So this would be sort of a form of grief, a manifestation of grief that is very different from what Western humans usually do and so it can seem very alien to us. I think the question really to be asked is how much does it matter? We want to pick out these things about ourselves and use them as justifications for why we have a unique moral standing. There does seem to be some awareness of death among elephants, for instance, certainly among chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, and others in our family, other primates who have some awareness of death from what we can see and how they behave. Almost certainly I would say you're going to find something like this across mammals. For

sure and any animal that is highly social or has any extended period of time raising their offspring, there's going to be something akin to grief and awareness of death. But oftentimes the question really is what is grief there raising their offspring, there's going to be something akin to grief and awareness of death. But oftentimes the question really is what is grief there for? It's there because it matters to that animal that its child survives. It matters to that animal that they can persist into future generations and I think we don't pay enough attention to that underlying necessity. He's been depressed. All of a sudden he can't do anything. Why are you depressed, Harvey? I think we don't pay enough attention to that underlying necessity. While the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart and that will be the end of everything.

What is that your business? He stopped doing his homework. What's the point? What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding. In the 1977 Academy Award-winning movie Annie Hall, Alvey's anxiety about his own eventual death may just be part of being human. We won't be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvey. And we've got to try and enjoy ourselves while we're here, huh? So this was one of the problems Nietzsche was talking about. Would he be better off not having

to worry about the fact that he was one day going to die and that animals don't think about that, so would he be better off as an animal? That is the greatest error ever committed. The most disastrous error on earth. Believing that in the forms of reason, we had in our possession a criterion of reality. Whereas, we had them in order to gain mastery over reality in order to misunderstand it in a shrewd way. And behold, the world became false precisely because of the qualities which constitute its reality. Change, becoming, multiplicity, opposition, strife, war. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power.

And we humans face this problem all the time. We know not just about our own inevitable deaths, we understand that that's going to happen, but we understand this concept of extinction, that we are engaging in behaviors that might make us extinct. And so would we be better off knowing that information or would we be better off ignorant of our own deaths? And that is a very difficult question to answer because that's a very personal answer to it. It's a double-edged sword, this death wisdom. But this death wisdom doesn't necessarily make us wise. And I could give a good example of that, which is Arthur Conan Doyle, who was, you know, he was a man of science. He

studied medicine. He showed with his character Sherlock Holmes that he perfectly understood all of the principles of logical deduction. But unfortunately, he had this very strong belief in the paranormal. So he was fooled by lots of fraudulent mediums. He was even fooled by this kind of schoolgirl hoax where these two teenagers claimed to have taken pictures of fairies and he fell for that hook line and sinker. And what you saw was with his correspondence with other people who were very skeptical of all of these claims. He just, he found very intelligent ways of disagreeing with them and with proving to himself that he was right. And often this was drawing on new scientific theories such as the new idea of electromagnetic fields that was becoming popular at the time and he just, you know, used that knowledge, that understanding to try to

justify his beliefs, whereas other people were much more rational when they were appraising the evidence. There's actually a term for this kind of trick we play on ourselves. Is that prognostic myopia? Yeah, that's it. Prognostic myopia is this idea that the human mind, just like all animal minds, is designed to solve problems in the present or the immediate future. So, you know, most of my thinking every day is, you know, how to get a coffee, what time I might want to go to bed. These are my everyday problems. And yes, as a human, I have this extra ability, which is I can think about 20 years down the line, so I can start saving for retirement.

But the prognostic myopia is that even though intellectually I understand about the distant future, my brain and the emotional responses of my brain are really tuned to the present, which makes it hard to make good decisions for the future because those are simply intellectual. They don't have a lot of emotion behind them because all of our emotion is about satisfying our present conditions, our present problems. Everything that we can create with our knowledge of how the world works and why it is the way it is can be used to destroy it. And so that is the problem with being as smart as we are. Which brings us back to Nietzsche and his cows. Which brings us back to Nietzsche and his cows. Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by. They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today.

They leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see, for though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness. So was Nietzsche too smart for his own good? The answer I think and maybe even Nietzsche would agree was possibly. He certainly suffered from a number of disorders psychiatric disorders probably that caused him some undue suffering but

it was compounded for sure by the fact that he spent a lot of time thinking and contemplating existence and nihilism and his own death. So had he been less thoughtful, maybe he would have lived a happier life. But would it have been more fulfilling for him? Probably not. I think he enjoyed his misery, thinking about things. I believe that, you know, despite the kind of suffering that comes from our kind of existential angst, that that's also accompanied by so many beautiful things about being human and about that come directly from our awareness. And, you know, a cow sitting in a field isn't going to be looking up at the stars and feeling that kind of awe and wonder and questioning, you know, where we came from, like what happened at the Big Bang, like where are we going to? And to me that is a bittersweet

experience, but it's not something that I would want to sacrifice. In 1874 Nietzsche wrote about his existential obsession with cows. In 1964 Don Notz and the incredible Mr. Limpit did the same thing with fish. Well with the war in Europe and new weapons being invented all the time, why, what if men were actually foolish enough to destroy themselves completely? Then you see the fish in the ocean would develop into a new race of men and, well, this time they might turn out better, you see? I wish I were a fish. Fish have a better life than people. I wish, I wish, I wish I were a fish.

Cause fishes have a better life than people. They don't have all the care and strife of people. A fish can swim, that's all they ask of him. Do you ever wish that you were some other kind of animal that didn't have that kind of stress? When I'm having a bad day, sometimes I do wish I were an animal that wasn't thinking so hard about the world, that I was less miserable because I had fewer thoughts in my brain. So yes, sometimes I wish I were more like Mr. Limpit.

And then there are other days when I just really enjoy being a human. I enjoy music and comedy and just talking with my friends and that's something you can't do as an animal. So depending on the day, I wish I were Mr. Limpit, but usually I don't. I'm quite content being a human. There's been a tradition going back the longest amount of time that's regarded animals as happier, more stable, more natural. And humans is actually this diseased animal that's diseased because it has this curse of being free and it has to invent things

to survive. It's weak in the face of nature. And that tradition, it goes back to the ancients, at least as far back as Anaxagoras and Diogenes, Democritus. These people all discuss this idea that maybe animals are happier because they're more stable and they live in the world in a more unreflecting way. You know, it goes all the way through English literature. One of my favorite poets, John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, he wrote some lines that I can try and recite. He said, where I, to my cost already am, one of those strange, prodigious creatures, man, a spirit free to choose for

my own share, what case of flesh and blood were I to wear? I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, anything but that vain animal who is so proud of being rational." So I think those are great lines. But yeah, it shows that people have always had this idea. And so there's something clearly attractive about it. So yeah, I think being in our world would be great but I also think that we should be suspicious when we're projecting our desires and wishes onto other animals because What we're often doing is we're actually just being self-obsessed and thinking about ourselves and projecting our own ideas of what we are and not allowing those animals to be themselves in their pure independence and autonomy as

these other brilliant life ways and forms of life. So yeah, that's how I would answer that. Being a narwhal is great, but let the narwhals be narwhals rather than vessels for our own shame and strange complexes. So maybe it's best if we end here and give the last word to the narwhal. You were listening to an episode by producer Howard Goldenfall called Is Intelligence Overrated? Readings by Matthew Lason Ryder. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of Ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Nikola Lukcic is the senior producer.

The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.