Really on it's own intelligence does not change much. You need both long term food storage and fire to really advance.
But no other (non-extinct) species can start a fire.
1. https://srfoundation.blogspot.com/2009/01/other-animals-with...
In particular it’s accepted in the field (I believe) that animal languages are not generative, which is to say they do not provide for production of new forms over time. Anything an animal speakes has already been spoken before because the possible set of valid sentences is strangled by lack of variability in the syntax. Intuitively, and this is where I’m going off the rails, I feel that generativity and Turing-completeness are near the same thing - they can describe something that is yet to be. Non generative language can only describe what has already been. That is constructing a new world requires description of the machinery operating that new world, whereas describing an old world you can lean on prior knowledge of the speaker and make do with a much poorer descriptive facility.
There was a linguist who brought up those five key attributes of human language as being crucial, I can’t find his name right now :(
And I did not say that animals don’t use language. Or did I?
What I mean to say is that there is a dramatic difference in expressive power, in particular in being able to convey a plan of action. Animal language can convey “there is a tiger south-south-west 15 meters, run for your life”. But it can’t express “if there is a tiger run left, if there are two tigers run to the right” unless the animals have previously encountered that situation and survived unwittingly executing this plan of action.
To me this is akin to the difference between Turing complete and subturing languages, in that the expresssive power is so very different.
Do the skills get more advanced with each generation?
Note it's not unique to dolphin as some cat species for example are known to bring back wounded prey for their young to practice with.
What would be interesting is if we found intelligent (or any!) life that evolved completely independently from our own origins.
Are you sure?I seem to recall watching random youtube videos a few weeks / months back and saw something on octopi I vaguely recall it saying they developed intelligence differently. Although probably I have got it muddled with something else :)