Until then, toolmaking had been considered a uniquely human ability. The supersmart chimpanzees of the new movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes may exist only on the silver screen-but in real life, great apes are still brainiacs of the animal kingdom.Įvidence for ape intelligence got a major boost in the 1960s in Gombe, Tanzania, when Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees using a twig to "fish" for ants (pictured in a file photo)-the first documentation of wild chimps making and using tools. Until then, toolmaking had been considered a uniquely human ability.The "notion is requires higher intelligence, because it requires refashioning what nature has provided to achieve the user's goal," Anne Russon, an expert in ape intelligence at Canada's York University, said via email.Since the toolmaking discovery, scientists have discovered our closest cousins can use sign language, hunt with spears of their own making, and even beat college students in basic memory tests, among other skills.(Related: "Chimps Shown Using Not Just a Tool but a 'Tool Kit.'")-Christine Dell'Amore “The fact that such variables cannot account for our results – that is, chimpanzees do not have formalised education systems – reinforces the view that genes are important for human intelligence, but they illustrate this in a much simpler manner.The supersmart chimpanzees of the new movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes may exist only on the silver screen-but in real life, great apes are still brainiacs of the animal kingdom.Evidence for ape intelligence got a major boost in the 1960s in Gombe, Tanzania, when Jane Goodall observed chimpanzees using a twig to "fish" for ants (pictured in a file photo)-the first documentation of wild chimps making and using tools. “In the human IQ field, we know that socio-cultural and early social experiences can have an impact on the development of IQ and thus, whatever genetic processes mediate IQ can be modified or masked by these factors,” Professor Hopkins said. Professor Hopkins and colleagues hope that their chimpanzee research will offer a different perspective on human intelligence. To say that some animal has a mind, and that it can vary from one individual to the next as part of an inherited structure, acknowledges something far more daring by implication than simply saying they are cognitively complex.” A window into humansĭespite massive interest in the underlying mechanisms of intelligence, research on humans is frequently confounded by cultural factors such as education. We have evidence that some of those traits have become heritable. “And now here we have the first example where genes are put back into the picture. “The social intelligence hypothesis has in fact relied largely on social criteria in the past – a complex set of criteria but all of them social and environmental,” Kaplan said. Social interaction is a major component of primate intelligence. This emphasis on social factors meant that researchers often neglected the influence of genes, according to Professor Gisela Kaplan, an ethologist at University of New England. In fact, the social intelligence hypothesis suggests that primate intelligence evolved in response to increasingly complex social environments. The importance of genesĮnvironmental and social factors also affect an individual’s intelligence. Genetic factors were responsible for about 50% of variation in the chimpanzees’ intelligence, with the most heritable traits being those related to spatial cognition and social communication. Obviously you expect a human to be more intelligent than an animal that is not a human, and that’s because they have human genes.”īut in quantitative genetics, heritability has a more specific meaning: it does not tell us how much of intelligence is due to genes, but rather what proportion of variation within a population is genetically influenced. “From a species level, intelligence is absolutely inherited,” Associate Professor Andrew Lonie, a computational biologist at University of Melbourne, explained. The researchers then used quantitative genetics to measure the heritability of these traits. Performance across these tasks was combined to give a measure of underlying intelligence, known as the general intelligence factor or ‘g’ factor.
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