• Question: Why are we the most intelligent species known? why couldn't it have been a snail or a big cat? Is it possible to modify animals to make them become as intelligent as us? like take their brain out and put one of ours in?

    Asked by anon-182782 on 25 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Hannah Farley

      Hannah Farley answered on 25 Jun 2018:

      Probably not – we don’t fully understand what makes us the smartest, but it is probably to do with how folded the surface of our brains are. This means we can have more complex nerve connections, and gives our brains more computing power. It would be hard to just transplant a brain and keep all the connections with the rest of the body intact (ignoring the human/snail size issue).

    • Photo: Claire Donald

      Claire Donald answered on 27 Jun 2018:

      There were early-human ancestors before us (like Neanderthals) but they are all extinct now. We share about 99% of our DNA with our closest living relatives- bonobos and chimpanzees. What makes us different from them is that we have bigger brains although we not sure what led to that. Our big brains gave us complex reasoning and language but there is no evidence of this with other early-humans. Something happened to make us stand apart form our ancestors but we aren’t quite sure what that was. As for giving our big brains to an other creature- given that we haven’t worked out how to transplant brains within a species, I think we would be a long way off cross-species brain transplantation!

    • Photo: Lauren Burns

      Lauren Burns answered on 29 Jun 2018:

      Every species evolves a key characteristic to try and be the ‘best’ – or at least survive. Cheetahs are fast, crocodiles are well-armoured and almost unchanged since the dinosaurs, owls have soundless flight, and humans have evolved to survive through problem-solving. Even if you were able to put a person’s brain in a panther’s, you wouldn’t end up with a super-smart panther, you would just end up with a person in a body they did not know how to work. The brains of animals aren’t necessarily worse than ours, they are just designed for different tasks.

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