Can recommend watching this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shc9aOdWJ-g

This is as good a spot as any to inform the crowd that female elephants have shockingly human-like breasts. Go ahead and look it up.

Thank you.

I'd happily add birds to the list. I had a budgerigar which lived for ~12 years. She had very personal traits. For example she always sat silent until she saw my eyes open, regardless of the hour. She always knew that I was the one I opened the door and sang very happily, again regardless of the time of the day. She liked to troll me and my parents. She ate the corners of my lecture notes, esp. if I didn't pay attention to her (exam periods), flicked a single CD from the stack, grabbed and threw down, studied how it fell, and chirped at me head sideways, trying to tell "look, I did something".

I could write tons and tons of things where she was very aware of my emotions and responded to it, or communicated with my parents in their own way.

So, I don't think it's limited only to "more complex" animals like dolphins, dogs, and elephants. Cats and birds (oh, look at cockatoos, crows magpies, etc.) are also in that group as well.

Cockatoos raid trash bins and find ways to open even the blocked ones if their strength allows.

Lastly, here's a parrot which trolls its owner and laughs about what it did! Oh boy, it's aware of what it did [0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLNSaQCDl8E

> I wonder though if generalizing to most/all animals really makes sense here.

What's the downside to just assuming all animals are intelligent and treating them as such?

I think it's less about a general truth and more about a general capacity for this behavior.

Add cats to the list as well.

From my experience, you can add sparrows, pigeons, and other birds to this list.

And if you include things I've read on Facebook, even jumping spiders.

This is a plot point in one of my favorite sci-fi series: Schlock Mercenary.

Elephants are one of the races that have been "uplifted" to sophistry. Some (Neophants) have been engineered further and now have hands.

Check out the notes below the following two comics for some of the musings that make these stories so compelling to me:

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2009-06-16

https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2014-05-07

> It is entirely possible that if elephants could speak and had versatile hands like we do, they would build a developed civilization.

How much intelligence is needed? Using a hose is an accomplishment for elephants. People in this thread are amazed that elephants can remember events, even traumatic ones like the death of a child. Has an elephant ever created a structure of any sort?

> if elephants could speak

I don't think they'd have much to say ...

The hands would be crushed.

They probably intercepted communications between those other houses and the target, and determined they should also pay the price.

I did say "minimal", not "none". If I see a herd of a dozen elephants coming in a neighborhood, I'm sure expecting more than 1 house demolished with malice and 3 others damaged as collateral.

It's possible that the signal alerting them to where she lived, had also been present in the other homes (smell, visible trails, decorations, etc). Statistically, this a large number of rare events that coincided.

Why, what makes you think there’s any connection? Molecule handedness doesn’t affect animal handedness, they are completely independent things with completely independent mechanisms, and the materials in between animal and molecule (shell, bone, skin, nerves, vasculature, etc.) don’t have any known handedness. We already know that not everything has that problem.

It goes deeper than that. Fundamental forces have chirality. This was a little controversial when first discovered.

I beg to differ: all creatures are here to breed. I’ll be surpised to ear about creatures that kill as an end instead of a mean but hey, there’s still to discover.

I remember a video from a camera someone set up in their home to see what their dog -- who was not allowed on the furniture -- did when they were gone. It may not be surprising that the video depicted the dog rolling around and rubbing itself on all of the furniture.

It's a small wonder whether the dog did that when the owner was home!

Nobody saw it when it was submitted 3 days ago, most likely because the title smelled of pop sci clickbait and didn't get up votes.

At the time of writing that post has 7 votes and one comment—"This is just so cool". This one has 154 votes and many substantive comments. That's quite the difference.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42089532

They may know that particular fox.

Crows can identify singular persons, hold grudge against them and disseminate the information around to make sure that particular person has a hard time [0].

Magpies are also very smart birds, aggressively protecting their nests and offspring from cats and other threats. So they may have identified that fox somewhere else.

Also, IIRC, magpies and crows are somewhat related.

[0]: https://urban.uw.edu/news/crows-hold-grudges-against-individ...

In my hometown, sometimes birds (I think they may have been crows) swoop across real close to cars along a straight stretch of highway. I've had to slow down sometimes thinking I might hit one.

I like to imagine they go back to their group of bird bros and say: "Ha! Made him flinch!".

Humour often involves saying something that isn't true (why don't ants catch colds? Because of they have anty bodies - great joke but not true on a number of levels). A surprising number of humans don't have the mental cycles available to consider counterfactuals, hypotheticals or entertain ideas that aren't directly rooted in reality. I suspect that means they can't process humour and they just laugh if the crowd is.

It goes beyond humour, you can see it in a lot of scenarios and it ruins politics. There are people who appear literally unable to consider hypothetical scenarios. Not in a nasty way, they're sometimes wonderful people to have on hand. They simply only deal in reality as they see it. You can walk them slowly through a "and what if ... happens?" and they can't do it.

Just because you don’t understand the Germans’ humour doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist ;)

> Animals (and humans) evolved play because it has evolutionary benefits

I know the turn of phrase is popular even amongst biologists but I still think it’s weird to put it this way.

Evolution is a dynamic feedback loop on a multi-generational time scale. Plenty of neutral things can be transmitted for a long time without being culled out by evolutionary pressure and social behaviour can remain for a long time without being genetic at all.

Or it could be an unintended consequence...

We have no evidence that plants have consciousness, but then our only evidence that even other humans have consciousness is that they are somewhat similar to ourselves. We cannot detect it directly. If there were consciousness in the world that was significantly different to our own then we likely would be ignorant of it.

Consider the slime molds, which have no brain, specifically Physarum polycephalum and Dictyostelium discoideum (you'll forgive me for conflating them a bit in this brief comment):

It can solve mazes. [0]

"They remember, anticipate and decide." [0]

They practice primitive agriculture: "they carry, seed and prudently harvest their food" (though no cultivation - what dummies!). [1]

And here's the kicker: "P. polycephalum ... spends most of its life as a single cell containing millions of nuclei, small sacs of DNA, enzymes and proteins." [0], but "When prey bacteria become scarce, Dictyostelium discoideum amoebae aggregate by the tens of thousands and produce a multicellular migratory slug that becomes a fruiting body in which about 20% of cells die to form a sterile stalk. The stalk aids the dispersal of the remaining cells, which differentiate into spores in a spherical structure called the sorus ..." [1]

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11811

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature09668

Why do they have to have brains? Is it impossible that another structure could serve a similar purpose? Like, how long did it take us to figure out what brains are for?

Well,

https://www.sciencealert.com/plants-really-do-scream-weve-si...

The deeper darker question is what will they do to get a stone to throw: https://www.penguinworld.com/features/prostitution.html

I think that largely depends on how you look at it. As with any topic, Greek philosophers had widely different opinions across schools of thought and generations. Many highlighted rational thinking as the line between humans and animals, while still thinking animals intelligent and emotional. I do agree with your point on Darwin, but why that point works is exactly because his work contrasted with the rest of his peers. His work was also far from being widely accepted at first, and was met with heavy skepticism on many, if not most fronts. It was only later that this became a widely accepted part of science.

Ancient romans were already conscious about not killing species off to not make them extinct.

Thanks for denomering my misnomer misconception. Joking aside, I appreciate you correcting me, I'm not a native speaker, so these small issues pop up here and there, and it helps when you point them out.

That's a good point. For a sufficiently young human it would be considered sophisticated.