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Correlating brain size to intelligence or complexity is a common amateur mistake. Let’s for a second pretend all animal’s brains are black boxes, and we can nei
by michaelvoz 7y ago
Correlating brain size to intelligence or complexity is a common amateur mistake. Let’s for a second pretend all animal’s brains are black boxes, and we can neither see nor measure them. Instead, let us say we can only judge brains by their impact on the world. Would you then not put humans so far above the other animals as to make it almost silly to compare?
- sandworm101 7y ago>> can only judge brains by their impact on the world. So bacteria? Plankton has a massive impact on the world too. Insects ... the planet is arguably dominated by insects. Mammalian brains are, plus or minus a few percent, equally as dense/complex. There are aspects of dolphin brains that are far more complex than ours. A dog's brain has far more connections dedicated to smell than ours. There is some evidence that Orca brains have similarly more connections dedicated to emotions. Each brain is tuned slightly differently, ours perhaps more to vision and problem solving, but our biology isn't any more evolved or complicated.
- objectivetruth 7y agoSo you went from "actually, lots of animals have brains that are as neurologically and chemically complex as humans" -- which is true, but pedantic and not the point -- to "bacteria," which definitely don't have brains. We get it, yes, all mammal brains are complex... But note that we have anthropogenic climate change and the Anthropocene, NOT the "cetaceopocene" or whatever the dolphin equivalent would be. There's no saurian moon lander rusting away on the moon, and the crows haven't built a corvid Internet to post their own "Well, actually" screeds... yet. I mean, you KNOW the parent wasn't trying to argue about neurons per gram in various Earth species, right? :-)