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> Certainly the human brain is the most optimized (so far!) for being a human and the elephant's the most optimized for being an elephant. But... if you put a
by nothrabannosir 11y ago
> Certainly the human brain is the most optimized (so far!) for being a human and the elephant's the most optimized for being an elephant.
But... if you put a human brain in an elephant, wouldn't it be "better" at getting food, killing competing elephant bulls, and passing genes around?
I'm not sold on the self-evidence of elephant brains being the best elephants...
- shasta 11y agoMaybe this isn't enough data points, but I just tested this and the elephant with the human brain just lies there on the ground.
- xiaoma 11y agoThose neurons not in the pre-frontal cortex are probably helping with things like controlling the complex trunk which contains over 40,000 muscles (compared to the only six hundred and some muscles in the entire human body).
- gumby 11y agoI think you need to have a better understanding of how evolution works. It's not the Victorian model where the human is more evolved much less more perfect than any other animal. In fact animals that reproduce faster have more opportunity for evolutionary impact -- the cockroach is far "more evolved" than a human. Consider it a big parallel hill-climbing problem with each animal being a local optimum for its environment. A human, including its brain, is the best general-purpose device for transmitting genes, but the human brain lacks structures that would be useful to an elephant, and vice versa. Brains are not general-purpose devices. Consider my dog: the surface area of his nose is probably about the size of a football field and I would bet his olfactory cortex is about the size of his visual cortex (in some breeds, it's probably even larger). Of course our visual system is more dominant than our olfactory system. So that's a simple example...would you really call one of them "inferior" to the other? [Edit: fixed the amusing typo "hill-sliming" -- we are not snails!]
- tetrep 11y ago>...would you really call one of them "inferior" to the other? I think I would consider the dog brain to be generally inferior, sufficiently so that I would simply label it as inferior. With sufficient general intelligence, you can delegate tasks that your brain is inadequate to accomplish to technology (or possibly other entities, like dogs!), something dogs cannot do and something that makes the human brain clearly superior. You can argue against human brain superiority without access to technology, but then we're comparing the two in more specific scenarios. Without any particular constraints, the human brain has sufficiently superior general intelligence to make it superior overall.
- gumby 11y agoYou have a solipsistic view: you consider the human brain "superior" because it's good at things you want to do. That simply says it's better for humans. That doesn't mean a dog, whale, elephant or nematode wants to do those things. In fact the "superior" human brain would be useless for a nematode since that brain has support for organs (i.e. peripherals) the nematode doesn't have and requires a lot of energy and other resources the nematode also doesn't have access to. And the mass of nematodes far exceeds the mass of humans on this planet, so who's more successful? Humans are simply more successful at being human and nematodes at being nematoda. You wouldn't argue that an i7 would be "superior" in a phone (much less an A9 in a laptop!!) so why is the human brain unequivocally better than all others? I revel in my human brain and would not want to be an animal without opposable manipulators. But hell, seals and narwals have senses I do not and, Asimov aside, I am sorry I'll never know what those feel like.