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...
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!]
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.
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.
I think the kind of things people can do have more value than the sort of things a dog can do and further that it's only the dogs limitations that prevent us from appreciating it. Our abilities are nearly a superset of theirs.
Finally survival beyond the scope of your biosphere ultimately requires intelligence of the human sort and that is certainly worth something.
You have raised a very important point. Sadly I can't upvote it more than once.
Nowadays the political correctness is forcing people to shun from passing on any sort of such judgments. In fact, it has sort of become politically incorrect to call dogs and other animal species to be intellectually inferior to human beings. [1] Please correct me if I am wrong.
>>Finally survival beyond the scope of your biosphere ultimately requires intelligence of the human sort and that is certainly worth something.
Thanks for pointing this out.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness
Being superior and being more optimized for a niche are not the same thing.
This view of evolution seems to be surprisingly widespread in my experience, even among those who consider themselves scientifically minded.
It's a common pattern around here. :/ I'm probably guilty of it myself.
In colloquial terms, think we'd find few who'd argue humans flying around in helicopters shooting elephants with high power rifles are not more evolved than said elephants.
> Consider it a big parallel hill-climbing problem with each animal being a local optimum for its environment.
There is rarely "its" environment. Because environment is shared. Especially shared with humans, who have great ability to manipulate said environment (usually for the worse). They will polute it, introduce other species which would end up dominating the food chain, completely change the physical form (built a dam and alter the course of a river), end up enslaving species in order to provide food for themselves. Would you say chickens have evolved and got to an optimal point? Or have they been evolved by humans so they can turn into dinner.
> Consider my dog: ... would you really call one of them "inferior" to the other?
I would call the organism which types on the computer, connected to an artifically created world wide network, and who is able to contemplate the fate of the universe, evolution and other concepts, a bit more evolved ;-)
You should try to understand what evolved actually means. What that shows is that we have gained a higher level of tool use than the elephants. Intelligence is not a sign of being more evolved, it is purely a sign of intelligence.
This is like a bird saying that they are more evolved than a human because they can fly without artificial aids.