CICASP | Center for International Collaboration and Advanced Studies in Primatology

A lot of scientific experiments have been conducted that demonstrate how intelligent chimpanzees are, but what about other animals? One method that has been adopted for assessing intellectual ability is relative brain size. Although the common perception is that apes, elephants, and whales are quite intelligent because they have a large brain size and complex social systems, Fred Bercovitch has questioned this inference. In a recent note published in GIRAFFE, Vol. 7, Issue 1, he demonstrates that giraffe relative brain size is quite comparable to that of elephants and some cetaceans. Although such a finding does not mean that giraffe are as bright as elephants, it does mean that if one is using relative brain size as a proxy for brain power, then giraffe are not much different than elephants.