RE: Humans Are Not Smarter Than Other Forms Of Life, Just Different
Being the most superior being entails being able to (consciously) do everything yourself. To even approach that, of course, we'd need substantially larger brains with much greater capacities etc.
again you are comparing human deeds with another species. what a cat might call intelligence does not relate to your own term because we both have different physiologies.
But between a cat that grows its fur unwittingly, and a person who grows fur because he made a pill that makes him hirsute, I'd say the latter is the more intelligent, because he's understood the process.
Understanding the process is irrelevant. Evolution has pushed you to understand aka develop that capacity because you were inefficient to begin with. its an extra step anyway you want to see it. the harsh truth of life is survival....not understanding, not building, not being smart . if you have to measure intelligence you have to draw your parallels from this harsh cold fact.
Not everything needs to be related to survival, otherwise it's just "might makes right". I don't care how many stones a religious zealot will throw at me, it doesn't make him right just because he's overpowered me, and I would claim the same goes for "intelligence" (whatever it might turn out to be): I don't think the most intelligent creature is the one that's better at surviving. The creature that's better at surviving is just that: better at surviving. Some words are indeed bs, but there's no need to collapse the entire dictionary into this single 's' word.
it is might makes right. look around you.
overpowering another individual or species is the epitome of life. the pinnacle of existence. Just because humans are romantic doesn't mean their petty moral justifications reflect in any way on nature's doings.
intelligence needs to have a definition. the broad universal definition is learn through habit or repetition in order to ensure owns survival. Every aims towards there. whether it is done through RNA or epigenetic processes (aka environment) is irrelevant because it all ends up to the same purpose from the same exact parameter.