Intelligence

All animals are intelligent. They all can learn from their mistakes and from their successes. They are constantly trying new things:

• • a new path in the forest

  • a new refuge

  • a new tool

If something new provides more food, more security or an easier way of doing a job, they will repeat it in the future. But if the new thing do not improve their lives, they will not repeat it in the future and will try something else. An intelligent animal is an animal that is constantly evaluating its behavior, and it is ready to change it depending on the results. A dumb animal is an animal that does not change its behavior: it does the same things all the time.

Animals (and people too) are intelligent in some ways, but they are dumb in others. Take for example the bees. Bees are remarkably intelligent since they are constantly learning new places where flowers grow. A bee is capable of collaborating and communicating with other bees living in the same beehive. But how do bees build their beehives? Always in the same way. All bees build their beehives in the same way, and they do not experiment new ways of building them: they just do it the same way one time after another. So bees are intelligent when they learn and cooperate, but they are dumb when they build their beehives.

The example of the bees shows us that intelligent behavior involves several factors:

• • Be able to change according to successes and failures

  • Be able to cooperate with others

  • Be able to communicate your findings to others

  • Be able to learn from others

  • Be able to think a plan, a project

  • Be able to coordinate your efforts with others

Some animals can do some of these things but not other ones.

Some animals can do some of these things faster and better than other animals. For instance: they do not need many repetitions in order to learn a new way of doing things.

In summary, some animals are more intelligent than others. We can order them in a ranking of animal intelligence:

Human intelligence

How to increase our intelligence?

When we are babies we are not very intelligent: we can not do most of the things that intelligent people do. As we grow, we get smarter.

The adolescence is the period of our lives when our intelligence increases most. Depending on your habits and on the decisions you take, you will become more or less intelligent in your adult life.