By that argument no animal, dolphin, porpoise, dog, gorilla, elephant can be as intelligent as a 2.5 year old baby because none of them have evolved a tongue and vocal apparatus capable of making the correct sounds.

> because none of them have evolved a tongue and vocal apparatus capable of making the correct sounds.

And the neurological development to process and produce speech. I'm no cognitive scientist but I think verbal speech and reasoning is a huge amount of what we call "intelligence" in humans and goes beyond simple communication of immediate facts or commands. I suspect babies do have similar problem solving abilities compared to those animals, but I think it's disingenuous to throw out speech just because a dog hasn't evolved vocal chords. They're also missing the brain to use them, with whatever that means for reasoning.

>And the neurological development to process and produce speech.

I put gorilla in there specifically for this reason - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koko_(gorilla)

Gorillas can't produce speech but they can process language at about the level of a 2-3 year old human. Which is roughly the level of intelligence that dogs were being described as having in the article I linked earlier.

>I'm no cognitive scientist but I think verbal speech and reasoning is a huge amount of what we call "intelligence" in humans and goes beyond simple communication of immediate facts or commands.

well I'm no cognitive scientist and I think differently than you do!

>but I think it's disingenuous to throw out speech just because a dog hasn't evolved vocal chords.

and I think it's disingenuous for out cephalopod overlords to claim I lack the ability to reason about potential threats because I don't shoot ink out of my fingers when in danger.

I mean I don't actually know or care that dogs might be as smart as a three year old or that any of the other animals I named might be; I just accept the findings of experts in the manner as being more likely to be correct than what I might think is the case. Still I am supposing none of the named animals are as smart as I am so I am certainly not threatened by the concept.

I'm a cognitive scientist. Intelligence is such a badly defined concept, it's almost useless to reason about "intelligence".

In humans, intelligence is often defined as "what is measured by an IQ test", which obviously doesn't work for either babies or animals.

So while you can say "some dogs can learn to understand hundreds of words, just like most babies", you can not really say "being able to tell words/people/emotions apart means an organism is intelligent"

I know a dog that sings along when his humans sing. It's obviously not a human voice, but the little thing is trying his best and totally nails the pitch and rhythm.

Our dog will howl along with some of the emergency vehicle sirens. Remarkably similar to the particular siren that is sounding outside. (We live on a 4 lane parkway an easy walking distance from a major hospital, so we get different sirens from many different jurisdictions. She'll sing (edit: said sign before) along or in back-and-forth with about 1/3 of the distinct sirens.)

She also can sign? That's amazing!

The comment history of this username really checks out!

I take zero offense and thank you for the correction, but it's somewhat amusing to think that someone presumably has two accounts and switches between them to make comments when a post is inadequately proofed.

dogs sign walls and trees all the time

Dogs can also talk in simple (<4 word) sentences: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=AHiu-EDJUx0