Ants then. They are 6% brain, which easily trumps humans in terms of EQ.
That doesn’t fly either, I’m afraid. EQ is not a straight brain-to-body-mass ratio; the expected brain mass in the formula scales sublinearly against body mass, giving smaller animals a tendency to have proportionally larger brains. This is motivated by the fact that some nervous functions (diaphragm contraction, for example) are relatively constant in complexity but still have to be handled by small animals’ brains, so the smaller an animal is the more nervous overhead it has to deal with.
The formula this works from was only designed to apply to mammals; different body plans have different neural requirements, and arthropod nervous systems are very different from mammalian. If we ignore that and apply the mammalian formula Ew(brain) = 0.12w(body)^0.66 to something ant-sized, it gives us an expected brain mass of about three milligrams for an ant weighing four milligrams (obviously absurd, but we knew the formula was bogus) and an encephalization quotient of about 0.08 if your 6% value is accurate. Human EQ is about 7.5.
That doesn’t fly either, I’m afraid. EQ is not a straight brain-to-body-mass ratio; the expected brain mass in the formula scales sublinearly against body mass, giving smaller animals a tendency to have proportionally larger brains. This is motivated by the fact that some nervous functions (diaphragm contraction, for example) are relatively constant in complexity but still have to be handled by small animals’ brains, so the smaller an animal is the more nervous overhead it has to deal with.
The formula this works from was only designed to apply to mammals; different body plans have different neural requirements, and arthropod nervous systems are very different from mammalian. If we ignore that and apply the mammalian formula Ew(brain) = 0.12w(body)^0.66 to something ant-sized, it gives us an expected brain mass of about three milligrams for an ant weighing four milligrams (obviously absurd, but we knew the formula was bogus) and an encephalization quotient of about 0.08 if your 6% value is accurate. Human EQ is about 7.5.