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One of the most beautiful, amazing things about parenting a child is thinking about “where would this child be at this age if it were another animal.” A three

One of the most beautiful, amazing things about parenting a child is thinking about “where would this child be at this age if it were another animal.” A three day old horse can walk. A three year old tiger is often a MOTHER to her own cubs already. But then by six years-old the human child can do things mentally which are orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done. It’s really amazing.

lupire 11mo ago
It really is strange how slowly humans grow to full size, and then stop. Other animals grow in under a year or two, or never stop growing until they die. How closely is physical size related to mental maturity? Do other animals mentally mature approximately when they reach full size?
- rsynnott 11mo ago
  I'm not sure it's all _that_ unique. Elephants are physically mature at 15 to 20, say, so not that different to humans. Other apes are also similarish to humans in this.
  - retrac 11mo ago
    Many cetaceans show similar dependency on their parents. They're also some of the few species where the females undergo menopause, like humans. (Elephants might have menopause, too.) Perhaps not coincidentally, maternal elders are very important for these species, often helping their children and grandchildren for decades after they are born.
- begueradj 11mo ago
  Example of an animal which keeps growing until it dies ?
  - skmurphy 11mo ago
    goldfish, lobster, crocodile, crab, python, shark to name a few. It's referred to as indeterminate growth.
MangoToupe 11mo ago
> orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done. I can't be the only person to find thinking about cognition like this to be a little odd. It's like the biological myth of progress. It's true we can reason about the world in ways many animals can't, but we're also biased to view reason (and recursive language, which is its engine) as "more advanced" as that's primarily what distinguishes us from other animals (and even then certainly to a lesser extent than we are able to know!), and obviously we are extremely attenuated to how humans (our own babies!) mature. Meanwhile ants in many ways have more organized society than we do. Why is this not considered a form of advanced cognition? I think we need more humility as a species.
- LPisGood 11mo ago
  I think it’s pretty fair to say humans have advanced cognition. There is no myth here, other animals barely use tools, change the world around them, create and pass on information, etc
  - MangoToupe 11mo ago
    > There is no myth here The myth is in reducing complex behavior to a single dimension and calling it "advanced" rather than, well, more human-like. I'm skeptical of the utility of this "advanced" conception. There's no objective reason to view tools, language, etc as particularly interesting. Subjectively of course it's understandable why we're interested in what makes us human.
    - pyridines 11mo ago
      Animal intelligence is often underestimated, (e.g. there's a famous test that shows that chimpanzee working memory is better than ours) but our use of language is qualitatively different from other animals. Some animals have rudimentary communication, but no other animal is capable (as far as we know) of recursive, infinitely variable language structure like us.
    - rolisz 11mo ago
      Objective reason: humans have done the most change to the planet (and have put stuff into space). No other species has done that.
Der_Einzige 11mo ago
The whole "3 year old tiger is already a mother" thing makes perfect sense when you think about relative life spans. I don't expect my dog to wait to have puppies until it's past 18, because many dogs don't even live that long!
- Retric 11mo ago
  Scaling for lifespan they are having kids at ~14 which humans can do, but the average first time mother in the US is 27.5.
  - lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
    And something human beings used to do.
    - Retric 11mo ago
      The average was significantly higher than 14 even in hunter gatherer societies. Women in studied hunter gather societies had their first kid around 19 with a mix of teens and early 20’s being common.
      - micromacrofoot 11mo ago
        Biologically this may simply be because it's safer to give birth when you're fully grown
      - pfannkuchen 11mo ago
        Wasn’t puberty later back then too? Like people weren’t waiting around post puberty saving themselves for whatever, puberty just happened alongside full adult body maturation, not before as often happens today.
        micromacrofoot 11mo ago
        actually the later puberty ages may have been a temporary side-effect of malnutrition common during industrialization, there's some evidence that hunter-gatherers (and even people during medieval times) had good access to animal protein, fats, and other necessary vitamins and minerals from plant life (nutrition plays a big role in puberty onset)
lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
> But then by six years-old the human child can do things mentally which are orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done. It is amazing. I would make a stronger claim, however. That is, I would qualify these comparisons as analogous. When people say that adult members of some species are "smarter" than a human child of age X, because they can do Y while the child still can't, then this is an analogous comparison. Many intellectual errors are rooted in the false dichotomy between the univocal and equivocal. So, if I ask, if an animal of species X doing Y is doing the same thing as a human being doing Y, some people will take the univocal position, because there is an appearance of the same thing going on (few will take the equivocal position here and deny any similarity), but it is more accurate to say that something analogical is happening. A dog eating is like a human being eating in some sense, but they are not univocal, nor are they totally dissimilar.
thomastjeffery 11mo ago
What if a 3 day old human knew how to walk? I don't think that would look any different, because they physically can't do it anyway. The first couple years of human development completely change the structure of the body. Walking is only possible after a significant amount of that process has happened, and the body keeps developing even after you learn how to walk. A three minute old horse is both structurally and mentally prepared to run. A three year old horse will be taller and heavier, but not structurally different enough to change what walking is to their brain. What a horse can never do as well as a human, is to learn a completely new behavior. Our brains are unmatched for flexibility in learning. Infant humans don't need to be born with the knowledge or the structure for waking. Both can develop together over time because our brains are able to develop new behavior. The mystery here is the difference between a horse thinking "legs go" and a human thinking "legs that are just ready to hold me up, do what I see other people do, and don't fall over". We only have a vague linguistic model to express our understanding of the underlying complexity.

lupire 11mo ago

It really is strange how slowly humans grow to full size, and then stop. Other animals grow in under a year or two, or never stop growing until they die. How closely is physical size related to mental maturity? Do other animals mentally mature approximately when they reach full size?

rsynnott 11mo ago
I'm not sure it's all _that_ unique. Elephants are physically mature at 15 to 20, say, so not that different to humans. Other apes are also similarish to humans in this.
- retrac 11mo ago
  Many cetaceans show similar dependency on their parents. They're also some of the few species where the females undergo menopause, like humans. (Elephants might have menopause, too.) Perhaps not coincidentally, maternal elders are very important for these species, often helping their children and grandchildren for decades after they are born.
begueradj 11mo ago
Example of an animal which keeps growing until it dies ?
- skmurphy 11mo ago
  goldfish, lobster, crocodile, crab, python, shark to name a few. It's referred to as indeterminate growth.

MangoToupe 11mo ago

> orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done. I can't be the only person to find thinking about cognition like this to be a little odd. It's like the biological myth of progress. It's true we can reason about the world in ways many animals can't, but we're also biased to view reason (and recursive language, which is its engine) as "more advanced" as that's primarily what distinguishes us from other animals (and even then certainly to a lesser extent than we are able to know!), and obviously we are extremely attenuated to how humans (our own babies!) mature. Meanwhile ants in many ways have more organized society than we do. Why is this not considered a form of advanced cognition? I think we need more humility as a species.

LPisGood 11mo ago
I think it’s pretty fair to say humans have advanced cognition. There is no myth here, other animals barely use tools, change the world around them, create and pass on information, etc
- MangoToupe 11mo ago
  > There is no myth here The myth is in reducing complex behavior to a single dimension and calling it "advanced" rather than, well, more human-like. I'm skeptical of the utility of this "advanced" conception. There's no objective reason to view tools, language, etc as particularly interesting. Subjectively of course it's understandable why we're interested in what makes us human.
  - pyridines 11mo ago
    Animal intelligence is often underestimated, (e.g. there's a famous test that shows that chimpanzee working memory is better than ours) but our use of language is qualitatively different from other animals. Some animals have rudimentary communication, but no other animal is capable (as far as we know) of recursive, infinitely variable language structure like us.
  - rolisz 11mo ago
    Objective reason: humans have done the most change to the planet (and have put stuff into space). No other species has done that.

Der_Einzige 11mo ago

The whole "3 year old tiger is already a mother" thing makes perfect sense when you think about relative life spans. I don't expect my dog to wait to have puppies until it's past 18, because many dogs don't even live that long!

Retric 11mo ago
Scaling for lifespan they are having kids at ~14 which humans can do, but the average first time mother in the US is 27.5.
- lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
  And something human beings used to do.
  - Retric 11mo ago
    The average was significantly higher than 14 even in hunter gatherer societies. Women in studied hunter gather societies had their first kid around 19 with a mix of teens and early 20’s being common.
    - micromacrofoot 11mo ago
      Biologically this may simply be because it's safer to give birth when you're fully grown
    - pfannkuchen 11mo ago
      Wasn’t puberty later back then too? Like people weren’t waiting around post puberty saving themselves for whatever, puberty just happened alongside full adult body maturation, not before as often happens today.
      - micromacrofoot 11mo ago
        actually the later puberty ages may have been a temporary side-effect of malnutrition common during industrialization, there's some evidence that hunter-gatherers (and even people during medieval times) had good access to animal protein, fats, and other necessary vitamins and minerals from plant life (nutrition plays a big role in puberty onset)

lo_zamoyski 11mo ago

> But then by six years-old the human child can do things mentally which are orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done. It is amazing. I would make a stronger claim, however. That is, I would qualify these comparisons as analogous. When people say that adult members of some species are "smarter" than a human child of age X, because they can do Y while the child still can't, then this is an analogous comparison. Many intellectual errors are rooted in the false dichotomy between the univocal and equivocal. So, if I ask, if an animal of species X doing Y is doing the same thing as a human being doing Y, some people will take the univocal position, because there is an appearance of the same thing going on (few will take the equivocal position here and deny any similarity), but it is more accurate to say that something analogical is happening. A dog eating is like a human being eating in some sense, but they are not univocal, nor are they totally dissimilar.

thomastjeffery 11mo ago

What if a 3 day old human knew how to walk? I don't think that would look any different, because they physically can't do it anyway. The first couple years of human development completely change the structure of the body. Walking is only possible after a significant amount of that process has happened, and the body keeps developing even after you learn how to walk. A three minute old horse is both structurally and mentally prepared to run. A three year old horse will be taller and heavier, but not structurally different enough to change what walking is to their brain. What a horse can never do as well as a human, is to learn a completely new behavior. Our brains are unmatched for flexibility in learning. Infant humans don't need to be born with the knowledge or the structure for waking. Both can develop together over time because our brains are able to develop new behavior. The mystery here is the difference between a horse thinking "legs go" and a human thinking "legs that are just ready to hold me up, do what I see other people do, and don't fall over". We only have a vague linguistic model to express our understanding of the underlying complexity.