Your Man Friday’s Ideas: Defining intelligence
When people try to define intelligence they often seem to make a number of questionable assumptions. One that certainly hasn’t stood the test of time is that it is a characteristic only humans possess. Still, descriptions of someone who seems to lack this characteristic often reference non-human things. They include “bird brain” for people who do dumb things (like the guy who recently used a bat to try to rob a gun shop), “a vegetable” for some unfortunate person who shows no evidence of higher cortical activity, and “thick as brick” or “blockhead” for someone who can’t seem to understand simple instructions (such as the fellow who insisted to the cop that he really was only going one way on that one-way street). But is it possible other animals, even plants or inanimate objects have something that could be considered intelligence?
Links here at Man Friday site: http://kenstange.com/yourmanfriday/?p=1425
