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

Yesterday\\u2019s post\\xa0reviewed research showing that animals\\u2019 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\\xa0this list. I can\\u2019t find chickens, so I\\u2019ve used red junglefowl, the wild ancestor of chickens. I can\\u2019t find cows, so I\\u2019ve eyeballed a number from other cow-sized ruminants (see\\xa0here\\xa0for 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\\xa0eat 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\\u2019t \\u2013 the cow seems intuitively more \\u201chuman\\u201d and capable of suffering \\u2013 but most people would also say the cow isn\\u2019t\\xa0infinitely\\xa0more valuable. Different animals rights people have come up with different ideas for exactly how we should calculate this.

I wondered how people\\u2019s 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,\\xa0results) 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\\xa0took the median, here\\u2019s what I got: