Expert: John Shea - 6/10/2011

Question
QUESTION: Hi John, I am not sure if my question is your field of expertise but here goes! Compared to other animals, I feel humans rate very low on physical attributes. Do you agree with this; if not the rest is irrelevant! I have great difficulty thinking of other species of animal that are slower/weaker etc than ourselves. If you agree, we rate low on physical attributes, then is it mere coincidence we are the most inteligent animal? Could these facts be linked or is my first statement not really true at all? Thankyou for your time.

ANSWER: Dear Richard
I'll give this a try....If you look, sense by sense (smell, hearing, strength, etc.) there are always other animals who are better than us (unassisted by technology, that is).  On the other hand, if you keep in mind that we humans are obligatory tool users (we need to use tools to survive, even in the environment of our evolutionary origins) and that we are also obligatorially social, then a fair test would have to allow us to use tools.  By that standard, no other animal comes close to us in any test. Running cheetah vs. human in a Maseratti?  Humans = winning.  Elephants can hear and send low-frequency signals over tens of kilometers, but I can send messages, like this one around the world with a keystroke.  Lions can see at night, but we can change night to day with fire. A pissed-off bison powerfully strong, but no match for a human with a rifle.  The reason we appear so weak, physically, is that we have, over the course of our evolution devised technological and solutions to problems that other animals deal with either physically or by themselves.  Failing to take our social and technological "handicap" into account in such comparisons is kind of like giving a standardized writing test to an illiterate.
Keep in mind that it is not always the case that we are inferior in these physical contests.  Chimpanzees and bonobos are ridiculously strong, but not especially quick compared to humans.
Cheers,
John Shea

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thankyou very much for your prompt answer John. I understand your last point-humans in comparison to another particular species may not be worse off in every physical attribute. I just felt we are very low generally. I feel your answer suggests there may be a link between lack of physical attributes and inteligence-as tool-makers we didnt need to increase strength to crack a nut, we could use a rock. Is this a fair conclusion? Has lack of physical attributes been the price to pay for inteligence? I do understand that it isnt a price if you consider we always 'win'. I just feel that the 2 aspects are linked. 'Ancient' man is always portrayed as stupid but strong! If our strength has declined because our inteligence developed, would it be fair to say most animals physical attributes have been, to some degree, shaped by their inteligence levels? Or are their levels of inteligence so similar to each other (much lower than ours) that any effect would be negligible? Thanks again.

Answer
Dear Richard,
There is certainly a trade-off with tools, they can lead to a situation in which our ancestors did not need to be as physically strong than formerly.  This release from selective pressure for strength would likely have increased survivorship among the more gracile ancestors, but, being big and strong in an environment where such robusticity was not necessary for brute survival would have had benefits, too.  Maintaining a robust physique is energetically costly.  Showing that one was able to be that way might have functioned as a kind of "costly signaling" -a way of advertising one's value as a mate or social ally.  (Think stockbrokers running "Iron Man" triathlons today.)
This notion that there is a kind of opposition between physical strength and intelligence is a very recent notion in Western Thought.  It is kind of a product of the Industrial Revolution, where one was able to separate labor from intellect.  In Classical civilizations and in many extant non-western ones, being intelligent and physically strong are viewed as complementary -"sound mind in a sound body".  Early humans were probably both strong and smart.  The option to be smart, but not-so-strong is probably an evolutionary novelty.  It might have come about when people domesticated plants and animals, creating a niche for specialists in agriculture, or other trades.  There probably never was a time in prehistory when it was safe to be strong, but significantly less intelligent than one's conspecifics.  In prehistoric times, reproductive isolation was the penalty for stupidity, and lions and wolves were its cure.  (Don't know if you had those GEICO Caveman commercials in the UK, but to many of us who do human origins research here in the US (where the commercials aired), the intelligent, articulate Cavemen had the ring of truth.
For a critical discussion for non-specialists of this notion that early humans were cognitively inferior to us, have a look at my paper, "Refuting a Myth of Human Evolution" in American Scientist (Feb. 2011 issue, I think) it is free-access on that journal's website.
As to intelligence vs. strength in other species, it is hard to say.  The further you get from us, phylogentically, the more complicating variables come into the picture.  Chimpanzees use tools, and bonobos do too, but to a lesser degree.  My sense of it is that they are both intelligent, but in different ways.  Chimpanzees are very clever, but bonobos seem to have an edge in terms of using symbols and in social intelligence.  Both are, of course, ridiculously strong by our standards.  Don't know if there are strength-related differences between them, though.  I don't really know enough about intelligence of non-human primates or other species to comment authoritatively.
Cheers,
John Shea