文章探讨了动物智慧与其大脑皮质神经元数量之间的关系，并尝试通过这一关联为动物和人类建立一个共同的智慧等级。研究通过调查问卷，收集了人们对不同动物道德价值的直观评价，并与其神经元数量进行对比，以期发现其中的相关性。

🧠 文章首先回顾了动物智慧与皮质神经元数量相关的研究，提出可能的智慧等级划分，用数据列出多种动物的神经元数量，尽管有些数据是基于估算。

🐄 研究中提到，动物权利活动家讨论不同物种的相对价值，如牛和鸡，暗示非素食者应考虑食用对动物道德影响较小的肉类。

📊 作者通过在线调查，收集了50名参与者对不同动物相对人类道德价值的评估，其中包括21名素食者和29名非素食者，结果差异显著。

🔍 通过对这些数据的分析，作者试图找出人们对动物道德价值的直观感受与动物皮质神经元数量之间的关联。

🎯 文章最终指出，尽管大多数人对不同动物的道德价值有不同的看法，但这些看法并不一定与动物的皮质神经元数量成正比。

[EDIT: No longer confident in this post, see edit note at bottom. May formally partially-retract it later.]

Yesterday’s post reviewed research showing that animals’ intelligence seemed correlated with their number of cortical neurons. If this is true, we could use it to create an absolute scale that puts animals and humans on the same ladder.

Here are the numbers from this list. I can’t find chickens, so I’ve used red junglefowl, the wild ancestor of chickens. I can’t find cows, so I’ve eyeballed a number from other cow-sized ruminants (see here for some debate on this).

Some animal rights activists discuss the relative value of different species of animal. You have to eat a lot of steak to kill one cow, but you only have to eat a few chicken wings to kill one chicken. This suggests nonvegetarians trying to minimize the moral impact of their diet should eat beef, not chicken. But any calculation like this depends on assumptions about whether one cow and one chicken have similar moral values. Most people would say that they don’t – the cow seems intuitively more “human” and capable of suffering – but most people would also say the cow isn’t infinitely more valuable. Different animals rights people have come up with different ideas for exactly how we should calculate this.

I wondered how people’s intuitive ideas about the moral value of animals would correspond to their cortical neuron count. I asked Tumblr users who believed that animals had moral value to fill out a survey (questions, results) estimating the relative value of each animal, in terms of how many animals = 1 human. Fifty people answered, including 21 vegetarians and 29 nonvegetarians. Their numbers ranged from 1 to putting their hand on the 9 key and leaving it there a while, but when I took the median, here’s what I got: