> This does stimulate my curiosity about what came first here, speech or cognitive ability?
This is the question I thought about all evening before I fell asleep. I have two ways to answer it.
1. Let's take the well-known Feline and Canine. All my friends who spend a lot of time with animals will call dogs smarter than cats, but why?
Dogs have a more developed communication system: they have more varieties of barking than cats have varieties of meowing. Dogs are playful, they know how to smile, they know how to feel guilty and actively show it, they are capable of paired activities under the supervision of a person. From what most of dogs can't, cats can only chase prey without visual or odor contact, purely by sound (but polar foxes can do even this).
Conclusion - the level of communication correlates with the level of intelligence.
2. Let's take the most primitive organism, the prokaryote (sorry for not naming some precise specie, let's consider some abstract prokaryote with the requirement to be the simplest). Google tells us:
> All organisms, from the prokaryotes to the most complex eukaryotes can sense and respond to environmental stimuli.
But also Wikipedia tells us that prokaryotes are able to interchange some information using DNA:
> These are (1) bacterial virus (bacteriophage)-mediated transduction, (2) plasmid-mediated conjugation, and (3) natural transformation.
These two examples make me confident in the opinion that communication and cognition are two different words for describing the same idea from two different points of view.
This is the question I thought about all evening before I fell asleep. I have two ways to answer it.
1. Let's take the well-known Feline and Canine. All my friends who spend a lot of time with animals will call dogs smarter than cats, but why? Dogs have a more developed communication system: they have more varieties of barking than cats have varieties of meowing. Dogs are playful, they know how to smile, they know how to feel guilty and actively show it, they are capable of paired activities under the supervision of a person. From what most of dogs can't, cats can only chase prey without visual or odor contact, purely by sound (but polar foxes can do even this). Conclusion - the level of communication correlates with the level of intelligence.
2. Let's take the most primitive organism, the prokaryote (sorry for not naming some precise specie, let's consider some abstract prokaryote with the requirement to be the simplest). Google tells us: > All organisms, from the prokaryotes to the most complex eukaryotes can sense and respond to environmental stimuli.
But also Wikipedia tells us that prokaryotes are able to interchange some information using DNA: > These are (1) bacterial virus (bacteriophage)-mediated transduction, (2) plasmid-mediated conjugation, and (3) natural transformation.
These two examples make me confident in the opinion that communication and cognition are two different words for describing the same idea from two different points of view.