this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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I mean, they do have an appendage to manipulate things, but a species that breaks our expectation is ants. In the plural, that is. We typically assume intelligence to be an individual trait. That you need to use tools, because you are an individual. Meanwhile, ants exceed our ability to collaborate in many ways. As such, they even build bridges, not with tools, but rather with more ants.
Okay, how then would you generalize this trait? We would expect an intelligent species to be social to some degree? It's hard to imagine how a species could evolve the capacity to achieve technological advances without cooperation between individuals.