Small Minds, Ancient Wisdom: Rethinking Intelligence Beyond Humanity

For centuries, humanity has claimed intellectual superiority over the other species with which we share this planet. We have traditionally allowed only a narrow concession to a select group of animals: primates, dolphins, elephants, crows and octopuses. These species are often admitted into the privileged circle of “intelligent life” because, in certain ways, their intelligence resembles our own. They solve problems, use tools, recognise individuals, communicate, remember, plan and adapt.

But perhaps the deeper question is not simply which species are most like us. Perhaps the better question is this: what is intelligence?

Is intelligence merely the ability to memorise information, manipulate symbols, solve abstract problems or recognise oneself in a mirror? Or is it something far older, stranger and more deeply embedded in evolutionary history? If intelligence is not merely a performance of human-like cognition, but a living system’s capacity to endure, adapt, communicate, respond and remain viable across time, then our hierarchy of minds begins to look dangerously narrow.

From that perspective, the ancient horseshoe crab, part of a lineage that has shown remarkable continuity across hundreds of millions of years, and the jellyfish, drifting through evolutionary time without anything we would recognise as a centralised brain, become deeply unsettling challenges to our assumptions. If intelligence is the long game evolution plays to keep life present on Earth, then perhaps survival itself is a form of wisdom.

This is not to say that a jellyfish thinks as a human thinks, or that a horseshoe crab philosophises beneath the tide. Rather, it is to suggest that intelligence may not be a single ladder with humans at the top, but a vast branching tree of solutions to existence. Human intelligence is one expression of life’s problem-solving capacity. It is not necessarily the final or highest expression of it.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the study of insects. For much of scientific history, insects were treated as instinctive machines: reflexive, predictable and simple. Yet recent research increasingly reveals behaviours that complicate this view. Insects learn, remember, communicate, recognise, adapt, play, make trade-offs and, in some cases, appear to display emotion-like or pain-like states. These discoveries do not prove that insects are conscious in the same way humans are, but they strongly challenge the idea that they are merely biological automatons.

One of the most striking examples comes from Lepidoptera. Research on the tobacco hornworm, Manduca sexta, showed that caterpillars could learn to avoid an odour associated with an unpleasant stimulus, and that this learned avoidance could persist into the adult moth stage after metamorphosis (Blackiston, Silva Casey and Weiss, 2008). This is extraordinary because metamorphosis is one of the most radical transformations in the animal kingdom. The body is reorganised, the ecological role changes, and yet some form of memory can survive the transition. In poetic terms, the moth may carry a trace of the caterpillar’s experience.

Honeybees also force us to reconsider the intellectual lives of insects. Their waggle dance is not a crude reflex but a sophisticated system of spatial communication, encoding direction, distance and resource information for other members of the colony. More recent work has shown that young honeybees improve the accuracy of their waggle dances through social experience, suggesting that even this iconic behaviour contains a learned component rather than being entirely hardwired (Dong et al., 2023). Further research has shown that waggle-dance-recruited honeybees can combine communicated information with expectations about landscape structure, implying that the dance interacts with a form of spatial memory or map-like representation of the surrounding environment (Wang et al., 2025).

Their visual and numerical abilities are equally remarkable. Honeybees have been shown, under experimental training conditions, to discriminate and recognise images of human faces, despite having no evolutionary need to recognise humans specifically (Dyer, Neumeyer and Chittka, 2005). They have also demonstrated an understanding of zero as a numerical quantity, placing “nothing” within a sequence of number-like values, a level of abstraction once assumed to be limited to a small number of large-brained animals (Howard et al., 2018). In other studies, bees have learned symbolic rules for simple addition and subtraction, showing that their tiny brains are capable of surprisingly flexible cognition (Howard et al., 2019).

Bumblebees provide some of the most compelling recent evidence. In a 2024 study, bumblebees learned to open a complex two-step puzzle box by observing trained demonstrators, even though naïve bees failed to solve the task independently (Bridges et al., 2024). This suggests a form of social learning in an insect, where behaviour too difficult to discover alone can nevertheless spread through observation. This is especially significant because social learning is often treated as a hallmark of advanced cognition.

Bumblebees also appear capable of play. In a 2022 study, they repeatedly rolled small wooden balls without training or food reward, and the behaviour met established criteria for animal play: it was voluntary, repeated, apparently rewarding and not directly linked to survival (Galpayage Dona et al., 2022). This is difficult to dismiss as simple instinct. Play is often associated with positive internal states in animals, and seeing such behaviour in insects forces us to reconsider the emotional boundaries we draw around small-brained life.

Other studies suggest bumblebees may experience emotion-like changes in judgement. Unexpected sucrose rewards induced optimistic decision-making in bumblebees, and this effect was linked to dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with reward and motivation across animals (Perry, Baciadonna and Chittka, 2016). Conversely, physically stressed bees were more likely to make pessimistic choices in ambiguous situations, behaving as though they expected a lower reward after stress (Procenko, Read and Nityananda, 2024). These findings do not mean bees feel happiness or sadness as humans do, but they do suggest that their internal state can alter how they interpret the world.

The question of insect pain is equally provocative. Bumblebees exposed to noxiously heated feeders showed motivational trade-offs, tolerating unpleasant heat when the sugar reward was high enough (Gibbons et al., 2022). This matters because simple reflexes are usually inflexible, whereas trade-offs suggest central processing: the animal is weighing competing motivations. More recent work on house crickets found that, after noxious heat was applied to one antenna, the insects preferentially groomed the affected antenna for longer, a form of flexible, site-directed self-protection consistent with pain-like states (Manzi et al., 2026). Again, this does not settle the philosophical question of subjective experience, but it makes the old assumption that insects cannot suffer increasingly difficult to defend.

Even wasps complicate the picture. Paper wasps are capable of specialised face learning associated with individual recognition, a skill linked to the demands of complex social life (Sheehan and Tibbetts, 2011). This is particularly fascinating because it suggests that sophisticated recognition systems can evolve in small nervous systems when social pressure demands it. Intelligence, in this sense, is not a possession granted by brain size alone, but a response to ecological and social need.

Taken together, these examples reveal something profound. A moth may carry memory across metamorphosis. A honeybee may communicate a landscape through movement. A bumblebee may learn by watching, play without obvious reward, make optimistic or pessimistic decisions, and weigh discomfort against desire. A cricket may protect an injured body part. A wasp may know another wasp by its face.

These are not trivial behaviours. They are evidence of nervous systems doing far more than reacting. They suggest interpretation, integration and adaptation. They suggest that intelligence exists not as a single human-like property, but as a spectrum of evolved strategies.

The danger has always been that we mistake difference for absence. Because insects do not think like us, we assume they do not think meaningfully at all. Because their brains are small, we assume their inner lives, if they exist at all, must be negligible. But evolution is not sentimental about size. It is efficient. A honeybee brain contains fewer than one million neurons, yet it can navigate landscapes, communicate locations, recognise patterns, learn from others and solve problems. This should humble us.

Perhaps true intelligence is not domination, nor abstraction, nor even self-awareness in the human sense. Perhaps intelligence is the ability of life to continually negotiate reality: to sense, learn, remember, adapt, cooperate, avoid harm and persist.

If that is true, then insects are not lesser beings operating beneath the threshold of intelligence. They are ancient specialists in survival, perception and adaptation. Their minds may be small, but small does not mean simple. It may simply mean that evolution has achieved elegance on a scale we are only just beginning to understand.

Humanity may still possess a rare form of intelligence: symbolic, technological, reflective and planetary in consequence. But that does not make us separate from the rest of life. It makes us one expression within it. The more we study other species, especially those we once dismissed, the clearer it becomes that intelligence is not a throne occupied by humanity alone. It is a living continuum, written into wings, antennae, compound eyes, dances, memories and ancient bodies that have survived long before us and may, perhaps, survive long after us.

Reference list

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