Koalas' brain cases are only about 40% full of brain, the rest is fluid and fatty tissue. Their brains themselves are completely smooth, lacking most of the cortical structure normally associated with higher cognitive functions in mammals. A crocodile's brain is more highly structured than a koala's, and there are lizards that outperform them in problem solving and learning ability. They understand context so poorly that they don't recognize an eucalyptus leaf as food if it's been plucked from the branch.

But no koala has ever claimed that filling static floating-point numbers into a high-dimensional matrix is just like how a human child learns.

@datarama heh, I got "koala" as my nickname in university. Lately I'm more into capybaras, but a critter that sleeps seems so much more intelligent than us.

To make it fair, maybe you should have included in the list animals that hurt severely their peers, if there are any...

@dl2jml @datarama @coder hahah, but I'm pretty sure ants and bees have better reasons than programmers :)

Yeah, I meant adding other species that can compete with humans in being dumbest :)

@coder @dl2jml I think humans have mastered some specific kinds of self-destructive shortsighted stupidity that no other animal on the planet can aspire to.

Komodo dragons sometimes cannibalize their young. But I'm pretty sure that no komodo dragon has ever thought it was a good idea to build a nuclear stockpile. And no komodo dragon has ever asked ChatGPT to write its blog.

@coder @datarama Several animals cannibalize their young (rabbits or bees come to mind). There are several evolution scenarii where it makes sense (like replacing someone's else offspring by yours).

@dl2jml @coder In komodo dragons' case, it's a lot simpler: They're hungry and don't have kin recognition. Anything that's small enough to easily take out in a fight is food.

This isn't to say that komodo dragons are dumb in general - they're definitely not. They can count, recognize familiar individuals (though they don't have a concept of "kin", hence they'll readily eat their own children), they hunt strategically rather than rely on simple brute force, and they readily learn how to interact with humans. When they're small, they adapt to living in treetops and masking their own scent to avoid being eaten by their parents. They almost certainly outsmart both ostriches, koalas, cane toads and programmers!

But, well, there's the cannibalism. They'll eat their own kids because they're just prey to them! That seems like a pretty self-destructive impulse.

(This isn't universal to monitor lizards. Timor monitors, for example, only very rarely cannibalize each other, apparently only if they're starving. Nile monitors will lay eggs in termite mounds and return 8-9 months later to make an escape hole for the hatchlings (but provide no further parental care). But to a komodo dragon, one's own young are just food.).

@dl2jml @coder (And lest we forget, no komodo dragon ever shared a thinkpiece about the AI-powered future of work on Hacker News.)