ABSTRACT
Intelligence, as Fowler's Modern English Usage expressed it in 1926, is what most of us flatter ourselves that we can find in the looking glass. And at least when it comes to species intelligence, we would be right. Species, or biological, intelligence concerns the differences between animal species in mental or behavioral aptitudes. In all other ways, however, its meaning is parasitic on the everyday human usage. For example, the aptitudes that cause us to label some species of animal as relatively intelligent are almost inevitably human ones—and would still be, even if the nonhuman species were to possess the aptitudes in greater measure than we do, though usually they display only a pale shadow of the human level. We simply wouldn't recognize intelligence if it were not “our sort.” Also, like human intelligence, species intelligence is inherently comparative: “better than some other species” is always implied. Finally, and once again just as with human intelligence, there is a long-standing and unresolved debate as to whether the intelligence of an animal species is best described as a single, general purpose attribute, an all-pervasive “g” factor, or as a set of special purpose skills, or modular “intelligences” (Rozin, 1976; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). The former accords well with people's everyday preference for distinguishing between clever and dumb animals, whereas the latter makes it easier to make contact with the biological approach to animal form (morphology), in which a particular function is sought for each specific adaptation.
