From TED. Our ancestors must have been very like these creatures. I hadn’t realised how well they can understand full spoken sentences. They have also learned to write in a symbolic script. There is surely a moral duty for us to leave their habitat alone and allow them to develop unhindered. And medical experimentation on such creatures is unconscionable.
UPDATE: An afterthought. It’s occurred to me that rather than being the only species on his planet to develop an advanced intelligence, we are merely the first to do so. These might seem equivalent but the former is generally taken to mean we’re the only species capable of developing like this, that there’s a category difference between us and other species (often this is a religious view but it’s not exclusively so), and that’s what I’m contradicting.
There’s a measure of a developed species, perhaps, that concerns not its own ascent to intelligence, but whether or not it permits any other species to develop to an advanced stage. I wouldn’t bet that we’ll pass that particular test.