All else being equal could one intelligence overpower one of equal intelligence?

Question

Is Man the highest intelligence on the planet earth? Has Man's intelligence acended or decended through evolution?

Answer 1

That's why the Antichrist, who will bring false hope for all humanity, will arrive on a UFO from outer space...

Answer 2

This is why the game of Chess was invented...

Answer 3

All else being equal could one intelligence overpower one of equal intelligence?

OK, so it's an evenly matched competition. Both competitors have equal brainpower, and equal physical. Who will win?

- The guy/creature who is smarter (oops! that isn't in the scenario!)

- The guy/creature who is stronger (oops! Not again! My bad!)

- The guy who pokes the other guy with a stick (wait! you didn't say anything about weapons! This implies unequal intelligence!)

- The guy who doesn't slip on a banana peel that some jerk in the audience threw into the ring.

I guess in a competition like this, it all comes down to having a big fan base who can fling their garbage around.

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He who drinks the energy drinks will be the winner!

Answer 4

Intelligence is believed to originate from our neocortex. And since this neocortex in human brain cover a lot of space in our brain, we can say that it has improved in size over past milleniums, but not really more so, since our first ancestor the sapiens sapiens has appeared 200000 years ago! So all in all, human still has to discover their brain potential, and the way we are now using it may also be quite different than the original way.

But you must be aware that intelligence is only a vector of human capabilities to survived. They are other mental skills that are even more important than intelligence, but are often discredits as they are very few studies made to measures those abilities.

Those are consciousness, wisdom (some say its experience or memory), imaginations and intuitions.

Consciousness is the most expensive things (energetically speaking) that allow our brain to process non procedural informations and actions. And humans are teach to become less and less state conscious in this society which make them tamer. And its not always funny or entertaining to be conscious, so now I could say that an average human is really conscious about 3 to 4 hours a day MAX!!

Imagination, is hardly teach at all in class, and some call those teaching arts, but its not only arts, its the way peoples are bring to learn things, by curiosity and on, which increase this skill over time. This is more important than intelligence, as it allow to use intelligence and applied or translate it into our world. And the last, but not the least, the intuitions. Some says you need experience to develop it, but I do believed that intuition is the most necessary tool to develop to ensure our survival, and sadly our way of life, force us to overlook this skill or marginalized it, while it is the most powerful skill of our brain!! Einstein was not the most intelligent, but surely has one of the greatest intuition of all time! Also, some precocious genius, that never read a math book, are capable to understand it all by reading it only once! Those are intuition skill at its best! Intelligence is only one among all those tools!

So yes, two similar intelligence can easily overcome the other if the other skills of the brain are balance in favor of one over the other. Some will say that luck will divide them, but I learn that in life, there is no such a thing as luck!!

Answer 5

at one time i would have said yes but i am not so sure anymore. experts are finding new creatures all the time that were thought to be extinct. so it is possible that eventually they could conceivably  be a smarter intelligence on the planet. it would be interesting what it would look like.  my personal opinion would be that mans intelligence is descending due to the fact that we are depending more and more on computers to do things for us. so we don't have to do the thinking that once we had to do for ourselves.

Answer 6

it is ascending but slowly so people don't know.

Answer 7

Intelligence is neither a goal of evolution, or first prize. Your question is incoherent.

Answer 8

well the fairies are gone, the gnomes, and all similar creatures like us, but we still endure..................

Answer 9

Man is not the most intelligent creature on this planet, women are much smarter than men, and that says a lot coming from a man with an elevated I.Q..Mans intelligence has ascended AND descended through evolution, our understanding of technology has improved whilst our application of Natural Instinct has diminished, also the gap between science and religion has broadened over the last several centuries, even millenia; while we should be closing the gap, we are broadening the effect of our understanding of astronomical/quantum knowledge vs. technological discovery. Think about this for a moment, if there were a world war between the men and women on this planet who would win. Furthermore, the country who always loses a war is always the country that generally has the least respect for their women and children.

Answer 10

How do we measure the intelligence of other beings on the planet?  We've done some studies, but there's really no way to know what another being is thinking - only our perception of their intelligence or what we believe they are (or aren't) thinking.  I think most of us believe humans are the most intelligent beings on the planet, as we're the only species we can look to as having achieved most of our indicators of intelligence (advanced technology, our relationship with the environment, dominion over other animals).

Cranial capacity (how large of a brain a particular skull could hold) is not indicative of intelligence.  Most anthropologists agree that even though Neanderthals had a larger cranial capacity, they were not necessarily smarter than modern humans.  Their brain shape was different, so they could have had different types of mental abilities compared to our own.  We don't really know.

If we look at evolutionary history, beginning about 5.5mya with Australopithecus then there is very good evidence that man's intelligence has continued to ascend.  

But, if we are to ask how mankind's intelligence has changed since, say, the time of Christ, the Middle Ages, or the Industrial Revolution, how do we really measure that?  We have technological advances, an advance in our scientific knowledge, a greater understanding of history, culture, and the universe around us, but what does that mean?  I'm not sure myself, but I think it's not entirely useful to try to decide whether or not we've increased our intelligence in those short time frames compared to evolutionary time frames of a few hundred thousand or million years.

Answer 11

You need to think about it for a moment if we are of equal intelligence one couldn't overpower the other unless you take in to account chance. As for evolution of intelligence man has always had the choice to increase his intelligence thus making him more so as time goes by.

Answer 12

I tend to believe that the human family tree has far more branches than the fossil record suggests.  It is the extreme rarity of fossils and also the limited numbers of locations that exist of the proper age that makes me think that is likely.  The vast majority are fragments of jaws or teeth or something similar so a closely related animal would appear to be the same species.  

My opinion is also that humans were not necessarily the smartest lineage.  We have other characteristics that would likely overwhelm any competition.  We learned to use weapons and attack in mass.  Our social system probably got much larger and more complex to deal with the increasing competition of our neighbors.  We have a very high potential birth rate.  We were primed for warfare against our fellow hominids and that is why we are apparently all that is left.  

I don't think we are the smartest intelligence on Earth but we are the smartest confirmed animal ever known.  Neanderthal did have a slightly larger brain but how smart it was is an open question.