False Knees

I echo this, I was truly astonished by how much empathy and connection I had with alien creatures.

I’ve not got round to reading the third book but this has nudged me to go get my e-reader out.

Yep, especially the alien species in the second book. Which was basically The Thing, but much more interesting.

Have you ever been to an asda?

Awesome!!!!

I mean, they do have an appendage to manipulate things, but a species that breaks our expectation is ants. In the plural, that is. We typically assume intelligence to be an individual trait. That you need to use tools, because you are an individual. Meanwhile, ants exceed our ability to collaborate in many ways. As such, they even build bridges, not with tools, but rather with more ants.

Personally, I think a definition of life can be boiled down to whether something can record and then selectively rebroadcast information patterns in a different medium. Intelligence is a function of how long a delay there can be between recording and rebroadcast in addition to how much information is transcribed.

Transcribing DNA/RNA into peptide chains obviously meets the criteria.

Wildfires are ruled out since, although wildfires can propagate themselves, information in fuel is almost immediately lost during combustion; if wildfires are alive, it is only in combination with other life forms that can selectively preserve and sacrifice parts of themselves through fire, such as pine cones requiring fire to clear away undergrowth for new sprouts.

A computer meets the criteria, but the selectivity of information storage has historically been tightly controlled by humans. It's more accurate to say humans and computers form an augmented hybrid lifeform.

Birds can use tools.

Or telekinesis.

I would call something intelligent if it can smelt and cast metal, maybe