Proposed connection between intelligence and gestation time | Hacker News Reader

Proposed connection between intelligence and gestation time

nautil.us

48 pointsdnetesn43 comments

> “find the distinctive cries of premature infants actually aversive—not exactly what we would expect after a deep history of premature babies being correlated with better outcomes.”

This is given as a argument against the main point, but I'd argue it's in favor of it... We're hard-wired to address the aversive stimuli, hence caring for the needs of the crying baby! If there's a difference in response time or level of care, then the premature baby wins over the full-term baby since the full-term baby's cry doesn't spark the same inherent level of urgency.

I have a hard time believing this. The correlations they point out aren't enough to support the conclusions they're drawing. While it makes sense that evolution would select against brains that are too large to pass through the birth canal, shorter gestation is just one of multiple adaptations that could address this.

Yeah, BUT i was two weeks premature and i'm SUPER DUPER smart. Science!

Anecdotally, my sister and I had pretty straightforward births but my younger brother had a devil of a time getting out. He did seem to get the lion's share of the attention but I always chalked that up to him being the last in line and also my parents actually having the time/money to spend.

You got the point, we have an oversized brain size compared to our body, so we have to get birth early to pass through the birth canal. If you take the brain size (compared to the body) as proxy for intelligence of course bigger brain imply early birth. Now, does a bigger brain mean more intelligence?

So they constructed a computer model of evolution and it validated their conclusions? Do tell.

Any time you read something that claims, "We evolved Y because of X", just hit 'close tab', because it is crap.

EDIT: Come on, people, this article is clearly bullshit. Everyone knows that what really made people smart is cooking fires.

Yeah, this is clearly not good science. I actually hate this article.

I agree with you.

People that are otherwise intelligent always seem to inject pre-conceived notions into the idea of evolution. As if evolution is a "path" instead of mostly unrelated tweaks/optimizations. I suppose it's not as easily digestible to frame it in that context. The following just isn't as sexy:

- "At some point in history, immediately capable offspring stopped being an evolutionary advantage for humans."

- "Women who produced smaller babies less likely to die in childbirth, augmenting their ability to procreate."

- "Infants able to survive at a smaller birth-size more likely to pass on their genes."

I think the bias you're criticizing is teleology. [1] I suspect we have something akin to a Purpose Co-Processor. Further that I'm using said co-processor to annotate it as such. The inclination to trust these annotations is intuitive and automatic. To be valuable they only need to be optimal and not necessarily true. Resisting this urge should be part of the instruction for any epistemic discipline. Like evolutionary theory. The problem with most "people that are otherwise intelligent" is that they're optimality junkies.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleology

I believe you were looking for this?

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2713

You can read the details of the simulation in the original paper.

https://colala.bcs.rochester.edu/papers/piantadosi2016extrao...

Any time you read somebody saying "Everyone knows...", question that claim.

>> The fact that our infants are helpless requires us to be intelligent,” says Celeste Kidd, the study’s co-author. Or you could also turn that around: Our infants are helpless because humans are intelligent.

Yes, but why intelligence in particular? Why don't we have some other advantage, like huge size, humongous teeth, a face like Godzilla? Why are we the smart-arses of the animal kingdom and not just another T-Rex?

"We're smart 'cause our babies are born early and our babies are born early because we're smart", incidentally, sounds like a totally unproductive instance of cyclical thinking.

> ...sounds like a totally unproductive instance of cyclical thinking

Or a positive feedback loop of the kind that is known to drive evolutionary change

Exactly. Something gives an advantage, is selected for, the organism starts to mould its other attributes around that advantage, and a feedback loop starts. Colloquially, evolution will take a new advantageous feature and 'run with it'.

Because if we were the T-rex, we wouldn't be wondering why we are one, lacking the brains to do so. Meanwhile, other ape species have filled that niche.

Basically, it's just another manifestation of the anthropic principle.

> each with a random combination of brain size (which the authors used as a proxy for intelligence)

There is no evidence for this. Yes, there is evidence that a larger brain relative to body size correlates with intelligence, but the fact that a small brain is able to be smarter than a larger one (human vs whale) means that size is not the only way to get smart. (Or even a dwarf or small human vs a large one.)

Since it's possible to get smart in other ways, the study is based on a false premise, so its conclusion is not supported.

Preemies are premature babies, apparently.

That must be some kind of insular slang.

Anecdotal, but I believe it's very common, nearly ubiquitous, among medical professionals and people who have interacted with preemies.

Yes, it is, at least here in Canada. Source: father of a preemie, had never heard the term before.

In the U.S., as well. I knew the term before my son was born, but honestly, I'm not sure where from.

At hospitals in northeastern USA too.

It's a very common abbreviation.

...in the US.

UK here, pretty sure everyone in the country knows this one. Think there was a memo...

In the UK, the only person i've heard use it was an American.

I was prem, and my step kid was prem, I spent a month living in the special care unit with her at Sheffield hospital and I've never heard it.

Single mention on BBC.co.uk (and that's from an American).

There's 72 mentions on the Guardian website, except when you go to the actual stories to search most of them don't use the preemie word, and search was helpfully subbing a word.

There are 2 hits on the Independant.co.uk website.

It's just not very common over here.

Preemie or premmie is used in Australia too.

> It's a very common abbreviation.

...which I have never in my entire life heard before, or seen written down.

Were this valid I would expect marsupials to be smarter than humans based on ratio of birth size to adult size. Or is a pouch considered an exo-womb?

My understanding is marsupials have the problem that when they're born they need to have a solid enough skull to grasp onto the teats in the pouch, which ends up limiting the potential final brain size the skull can grow to.

Are there any guess for Neanderthal gestation periods?

Thirteen months

Neat. I wonder if this has something to do with a looser level of neuroplasticity or similar. (IANANS and didn't RTFA)

> Sure enough, they found, the smarter the primate, the less the time its baby spent in the womb.

Interesting.

When I had ZX Spectrum, it booted instantly. You just pressed reset button and voila, BASIC prompt. It takes couple minutes to boot up a modern PC to a usable state. Does that mean ZX Spectrum is a better computer?

Primates apart, the reason for exceptionally fast "boot" for ZX-Spectrum (and most of hobby/home/game-console computers from that time) was that software was stored in the ROM that CPU was able to execute directly from. Also hardware was much simpler and did not require arcane initialization for SDRAM [1] and such. So power-on initialization was literally something like "set stack pointer and few global variables; clear the screen; print prompt; done"

Nowadays, everything is on external media (external as in "outside of CPU's memory address space"), so executable code should be loaded into the RAM first (and likely assembled from 100s of DLLs or .so's in that process). And before that, you need to initialize at least 3 hardware components (SDRAM, mass storage controller and mass storage device itself; often this list is much longer).

That said, embedded systems booting in under 1 second were available 6 years ago [2]. Not many seem to be interested.

[1] http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/96831/sdram-i...

[2] http://www.slideshare.net/andrewmurraympc/elce-the

> Also hardware was much simpler and did not require arcane initialization

That was exactly my point. Similar issues can affect brain development as well. For example, we have things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childhood_amnesia

Nope, it wasn't literally that simple. The ZX Spectrum did a lot of RAM tests to determine if the RAM was faulty or not, and how much memory that was installed.

The price of ZX Spectrum was kept low by using low quality RAM.

No. You need to compare boot times with how quickly a primate acquires skills after birth. As TFA states, one-year old chimp kids are as good as three-year old human kids at numeric tasks. However, after that they don't get much better, whereas human kids do. Similarly, your ZX Spectrum in the end has less capabilities than a modern PC.

Roughly speaking, in the womb, our wetware is built. After birth, it is initialized.

Likewise, you can post instantly if you don't read TFA. Does that mean you're a better poster?

And you can downvote instantly if you don't think about what the comment is saying. Does that make you a better moderator?

I did read TFA before I posted. That's why I made a point in my post which is missing from TFA, IMHO. Specifically: more complex hardware/software (that can do more) can require more complex initialization, and it can be an engineering trade off that applies to computation systems in general.

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