Glenn-Peter Sætre is a biologist and researcher on evolution – that is, how animals and plants have evolved on Earth.
“Animals can be very smart, but not necessarily in the same way as us,” he says.
They cannot read and do math, but to survive in a world that can be dangerous and difficult, they must be smart in other ways.
How will they find food? How can they avoid danger?
“I think we often underestimate and look down on animals. They are not dumb, just different,” Sætre says.
“Does evolution make species smarter and give them higher IQs?”
“Both yes and no. It is not always intelligence and IQ that lead to evolution,” Sætre says.
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“There are species with larger brains than us. For example, the blue whale. But we are still smarter,” Sætre says.
“Why is that?”
“The reason is that our brain is very efficiently packed. It is knotty like a walnut. How it is packed is more important than the size,” he says.
According to Sætre, the human brain requires a lot of energy.
The brain accounts for about 2 per cent of our body weight. Even so, it uses around 20 per cent of our energy when we are completely relaxed.
