Too often, they are thought of as the inert backdrop to animal life. Because these organisms don’t look like us or outwardly behave like us-or have brains-they have traditionally been allocated a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale. According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans are always at the top of the intelligence rankings, followed by animals that look like us (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.), followed again by other “higher” animals, and onward and downward in a league table-a great chain of intelligence drawn up by the ancient Greeks, which persists one way or another to this day. Classical scientific definitions of intelligence use humans as a yardstick by which all other species are measured. “Whether one calls slime molds, fungi, and plants “intelligent” depends on one’s point of view.
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