6 ms·

It's fascinating that intelligence exists in different clades & phylum of animals: crows, octopus, apes etc. It suggests intelligence is not very progressive, i

by netcan 7y ago

It's fascinating that intelligence exists in different clades & phylum of animals: crows, octopus, apes etc. It suggests intelligence is not very progressive, in evolution. It advances & recedes, and evolution can find multiple paths to it from various starting point. It doesn't take a mammalian brain. Who know what other animal intelligence exists today, or in the past. The current crop of species (us excepted) may not be the smartest to have existed, problem solving intelligence like the crow's could have existed 500 mya as easily as it can now. You don't need mammals, or even necessarily vertebrates. The first thing I found fascinating in YNH's "Sapiens" was his "start of history" debate. When did people start really standing out from the faunal crowd. He puts this at just around 40 kya. That is, people were walking around with modern sized & equipped brain hardware for hundreds of thousands of years. They were obviously extremely intelligent. They would have performed as well as us on such intelligence tests. If sapiens had gone extinct before 40kya, they would have left no indication that their intelligence such potential that it did. They would have just been a smart animal.

londons_explore 7y ago
Intelligence might be easy to evolve, but have a high energy cost. In many environments, the extra intelligence wouldn't allow you to find enough extra food for the trait to be worthwhile.
- vintermann 7y ago
  There's a huge flock of crows gathering near a golf course where I live every winter. I looked it up, and apparently this species live pairwise in summer but in huge flocks in winter. I honestly wonder how they can find enough food, there are so many of them.
  - kyuudou 7y ago
    Humans make a LOT of trash and much of it is discarded food that they can scavenge. I suspect that the variety of animals such as crows and rats and their large population sizes is directly correlated with the growth of humanity. I don't think they would exist in such large numbers without us, basically.
TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
A wild untrained human animal isn't that bright. We can probably operate above the crow level, but maybe not by much. What makes us special is persistent collective learning and abstract communication. Unlike animals, generations of humans don't have to keep re-solving the same problems. As a species we have cumulative persistent memory for techniques and abstractions. That's the real game changer. But it took a surprisingly long time - tens of thousands of years - for our brains to make this ability central to culture. And there's no guarantee that if we re-ran history we'd do it again on the same scale.
- jdck1326 7y ago
  It seems like you're suggesting that there aren't massive biological differences between a wild human and a crow. This is false. Humans have many biological faculties that crows simply do not have. For example, the wild, untrained human still has the biological faculty of language. That is, there is a reason why no animal other than a human has been shown to be able to learn a language. The reason is that they do not have the biological faculty of language. You suggest that "generations of humans don't have to keep re-solving the same problems/" This is correct, but in many important ways it is not because of our culture or because we learn from our elders. But rather it is because of our genetics. An example of this is that children who are not taught a language will spontaneously create their own. Normally this won't happen, because children can't survive without adults, and adults will teach the children language. But something very close has happened a few times, an example, in itself far from conclusive, but still illustrative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
  - carokann 7y ago
    This whole story is extremely interesting.
  - hchasestevens 7y ago
    That's a little misleading. An individual child will not be able to fluently acquire language if not exposed during the so-called "critical period"; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child for plenty of examples. _Groups_ of humans with no common means of communication will form pidgins ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin ) as an (essentially grammarless) means of communication; children then raised in an environment where they are exposed to this pidgin will transform it into a true language. Nicaraguan Sign Language has actually proven to be a fascinating example of this in action; many of the first speakers of the original pidgin are, now that successive generations have learned and adapted it, unable to competently produce utterances in the now-language.
usrusr 7y ago
It's an interesting perspective to think of pre-agricultural (the 40k line is admittedly before that) humans as not standing out amongst other fauna, but on the other hand there is no reason to imagine them standing out any less than groups that stayed hunter-gatherers into modern times and those certainly do/did. They would not have left many traces identifiable after tens of millennia though, not now, not then. General intelligence, by itself, appears to be just one possible strategy for adapting to the environment, not inherently superior considering that many species get along just fine with survival tactics "hardwired" for their environment. But it sure gives faster adaptability and humans had expanded into very diverse environments deep in the stone age. What eventually set the human brain apart is the old cliche distinction of opposable thumbs. Back to topic, few things illustrate the value of our hands better that watching a crow headbutt an object with its beak, stop to ponder the results, then headbutt again because what other option does it have?
jbattle 7y ago
Counterpoints: - Cave art from 44kya https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/440000-year-old-cave-art-depicts-earliest-known-mythical-beasts/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/440000-year-old-cave-art-d... - 'Venus' statues - some possibly as old as 300k years!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines I agree that the fact intelligence has arisen in wildly separate parts of the 'tree of life' probably indicates something about the likelihood for intelligence to develop elsewhere. Like you said, it's not a fluke, but it's also not something that only arises under very specific progressive conditions. I'm not sure whether it recedes or not - that's an interesting and slightly terrifying question

by netcan 7y ago

londons_explore 7y ago

Intelligence might be easy to evolve, but have a high energy cost. In many environments, the extra intelligence wouldn't allow you to find enough extra food for the trait to be worthwhile.

vintermann 7y ago
There's a huge flock of crows gathering near a golf course where I live every winter. I looked it up, and apparently this species live pairwise in summer but in huge flocks in winter. I honestly wonder how they can find enough food, there are so many of them.
- kyuudou 7y ago
  Humans make a LOT of trash and much of it is discarded food that they can scavenge. I suspect that the variety of animals such as crows and rats and their large population sizes is directly correlated with the growth of humanity. I don't think they would exist in such large numbers without us, basically.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago

A wild untrained human animal isn't that bright. We can probably operate above the crow level, but maybe not by much. What makes us special is persistent collective learning and abstract communication. Unlike animals, generations of humans don't have to keep re-solving the same problems. As a species we have cumulative persistent memory for techniques and abstractions. That's the real game changer. But it took a surprisingly long time - tens of thousands of years - for our brains to make this ability central to culture. And there's no guarantee that if we re-ran history we'd do it again on the same scale.

jdck1326 7y ago
It seems like you're suggesting that there aren't massive biological differences between a wild human and a crow. This is false. Humans have many biological faculties that crows simply do not have. For example, the wild, untrained human still has the biological faculty of language. That is, there is a reason why no animal other than a human has been shown to be able to learn a language. The reason is that they do not have the biological faculty of language. You suggest that "generations of humans don't have to keep re-solving the same problems/" This is correct, but in many important ways it is not because of our culture or because we learn from our elders. But rather it is because of our genetics. An example of this is that children who are not taught a language will spontaneously create their own. Normally this won't happen, because children can't survive without adults, and adults will teach the children language. But something very close has happened a few times, an example, in itself far from conclusive, but still illustrative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
- carokann 7y ago
  This whole story is extremely interesting.
- hchasestevens 7y ago
  That's a little misleading. An individual child will not be able to fluently acquire language if not exposed during the so-called "critical period"; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child for plenty of examples. _Groups_ of humans with no common means of communication will form pidgins ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin ) as an (essentially grammarless) means of communication; children then raised in an environment where they are exposed to this pidgin will transform it into a true language. Nicaraguan Sign Language has actually proven to be a fascinating example of this in action; many of the first speakers of the original pidgin are, now that successive generations have learned and adapted it, unable to competently produce utterances in the now-language.

usrusr 7y ago

It's an interesting perspective to think of pre-agricultural (the 40k line is admittedly before that) humans as not standing out amongst other fauna, but on the other hand there is no reason to imagine them standing out any less than groups that stayed hunter-gatherers into modern times and those certainly do/did. They would not have left many traces identifiable after tens of millennia though, not now, not then. General intelligence, by itself, appears to be just one possible strategy for adapting to the environment, not inherently superior considering that many species get along just fine with survival tactics "hardwired" for their environment. But it sure gives faster adaptability and humans had expanded into very diverse environments deep in the stone age. What eventually set the human brain apart is the old cliche distinction of opposable thumbs. Back to topic, few things illustrate the value of our hands better that watching a crow headbutt an object with its beak, stop to ponder the results, then headbutt again because what other option does it have?

jbattle 7y ago

Counterpoints: - Cave art from 44kya https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/440000-year-old-cave-art-depicts-earliest-known-mythical-beasts/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/440000-year-old-cave-art-d... - 'Venus' statues - some possibly as old as 300k years!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurines I agree that the fact intelligence has arisen in wildly separate parts of the 'tree of life' probably indicates something about the likelihood for intelligence to develop elsewhere. Like you said, it's not a fluke, but it's also not something that only arises under very specific progressive conditions. I'm not sure whether it recedes or not - that's an interesting and slightly terrifying question