Intelligence is indeed not magic. None of the behaviors that you display that are more intelligent than a chimpanzee’s behaviors are things you have invented. I’m willing to bet that virtually no behavior that you have personally come up with is an improvement. (That’s not an insult, it’s simply par for the course for humans.) In other words, a human is not smarter than a chimpanzee.
The reason humans are able to display more intelligent behavior is because we’ve evolved to sustain cultural evolution, i.e., the mutation and selection of behaviors from one generation to the next. All of the smart things you do are a result of that slow accumulation of behaviors, such as language, counting, etc., that you have been able to simply imitate. So the author’s point stands that you need new information from experiments in order to do something new, including new kinds of persuasion.
Intelligence is indeed not magic. None of the behaviors that you display that are more intelligent than a chimpanzee’s behaviors are things you have invented. I’m willing to bet that virtually no behavior that you have personally come up with is an improvement. (That’s not an insult, it’s simply par for the course for humans.) In other words, a human is not smarter than a chimpanzee.
The reason humans are able to display more intelligent behavior is because we’ve evolved to sustain cultural evolution, i.e., the mutation and selection of behaviors from one generation to the next. All of the smart things you do are a result of that slow accumulation of behaviors, such as language, counting, etc., that you have been able to simply imitate. So the author’s point stands that you need new information from experiments in order to do something new, including new kinds of persuasion.