Secondly the question is not well-posed enough to answer accurately. What is intelligence, in this case?
The cytoarchitecture of brain parcels/regions varies significantly. If you have a giant cerebellum you are not going to seem very smart to us, but you may have a very large brain. At the other end, people have lived normal (if perhaps internally simpler) lives with tiny fractions of a typical neocortex. [0]
0 : https://www.sciencealert.com/a-man-who-lives-without-90-of-h...
Human: 7.4 - 7.8
Dolphins: 5.3
Chimps: 2.2 - 2.5
Ravens: 2.49
Dog: 1.2
Cat: 1.0
Mouse: 0.5
Rat: 0.4
eg 0 Currently the best predictor for intelligence across all animals is [forebrain]neuron count.[[5]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient#cit...)
1 In a meta-analysis, Deaner et al. (2007) tested ABS, cortex size, cortex-to-brain ratio, EQ, and corrected relative brain size (cRBS) against global cognitive capacities. They have found that, after normalization, only ABS and neocortex size showed significant correlation to cognitive abilities.
2 The notion that encephalization quotient corresponds to intelligence has been disputed by Roth and Dicke (2012). They consider the absolute [number of cortical neurons] and [neural connections]as better correlates of cognitive ability.[[16]](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalization_quotient#cit...)
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=corr...
This is the most up-to-date meta-analysis on the topic:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.211621
> Brain size and IQ associations yielded r = 0.24, with the strongest effects observed for more g-loaded tests and in healthy samples that generalize across participant sex and age bands.
let's run with that idea.
I have more muscle in my legs so I must be faster than a rabbit?
Various hypotheses on how a larger brain is actually used to control a larger body and thus doesn't translate into specific "brain power" usable for intelligent activities are unsound.
For example, a very weak correlation between GPA and job performance exists. In some disciplines, like law, the correlation is strong. In other fields, like extreme medicine, there is no correlation.
Twins are great for ruling out genetic factors. It may still be the case that neonatal nutrition drives both head size and adult IQ.
(And how much education did they have? The field includes people who have and haven't gone to medical school, I assume.)
Extreme medicine, which includes field, mountain, and battlefield medicine, is a specialization of general medicine. You can study it as a part of various programs. I studied it as a specialization in a general practitioner's MSc program in Central Europe. Depending on the region, it is probably possible to specialize in extreme medicine as a nurse or an EMT.
There was a wide range of GPAs in that program because success was measured by a narrow range of criteria that did not include things usually considered "academic aptitude" - mainly the ability to follow resuscitation algorithms in simulations precisely. Some of the things we were scored by automatically were time to ECG, time to defibrillation, correct callouts to the team, intubation depth and time, and chest compression depth and rate. And failing to execute a particular algorithm meant immediate failure. Every other imperfection immediately meant a reduced score, and scoring was entirely metric-based in simulators, not open to human interpretation.
Scoring just 45% of the possible grade on tests was considered excellent. You had to demonstrate very high competency to pass. Mediocre knowledge of algorithms or skills in resuscitation was unacceptable because that would severely worsen the outcomes of actual patients.
If you either cared about your GPA or were primarily motivated by your GPA at school or university, it was clear that this would be a very difficult specialization for you. It was more for people who excelled in algorithm following, composure under stress, and perseverance; and those who wanted a high skill ceiling.
There are a few factors and that post gives a nice overview.
See: the spatial packing problem in human brains
Bigger bird brains ~= smarter birds. Bigger dog brains ~= smarter dogs. But you can't directly compare dogs and birds in that way.
"Brains matter, bodies maybe not: the case for examining neuron numbers irrespective of body size" https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-...
"No relative expansion of the number of prefrontal neurons in primate and human evolution" https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1610178113
"The human brain in numbers: A linearly scaled-up primate brain" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/
"The elephant brain in numbers" https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnana.2014.0004...
Neural architectures are very similar between closely related species, and differ wildly between birds and whales.
The book Deep Thinkers: Inside the Minds of Whales, Dolphins, and Porpoises is quite good.
Not really, otherwise whales and elephants would be way smarter, than us.
Well, some people say, they are, but it does not show in our intelligence tests.
And birds brains evolved differently than those of mammals, so maybe they are more efficient with their relative small brain? Because yeah, they are definitely smarter than dogs, who have a bigger brain.
And this is not further explained in the book, but it likely sounds like technology. And when you want to have and use technology, you have to do more than just splashing around..
Well, when you consider that we react to global crisis like a pandemic with more confrontation, than cooperation (there was no real exchange of technology between west and east and patents and licencing were still more important, than producing enough vaccines) and to the climate crisis rather with more wars over whats left of the ressources, than to unite and solve the problems - no, we are not.
We are smart enough to see, what could be possible, but unable to overcome primitive power struggles.
And cherrypicking, well climate change is the current problem, affecting the whole earth, so a smart species by my definition would act globally and coordinated and not only talk about it. But sure, by comparison we still seem to be the smartest around.
How do you know that? I mentioned this in another comment, but dolphins and orcas have more folds in their brain than we do, and folding is associated with greater processing power and higher function. Additionally, the areas of their and whales' brains associated with emotional intelligence are much larger relative to the rest of their brain than the same areas in our brain are. Their brains are very, very interesting. For example, they keep one brain hemisphere active during sleep since they are conscious breathers, and they actually alternate which hemisphere is kept awake.
Whales, dolphins, and orcas are damn smart, and I think there's evidence enough that we cannot conclude that they aren't more intelligent than us. Although they lack technological development, this is due to their living environment and physiobiology and not due to their intelligence. Orcas in particular have achieved complete dominance of their environment, aside from human activity, and are geographically widespread with diverse cultures. There are many cases where orcas actually use humans as tools, even training humans to help them in hunts (and not the other way around).
Humans existed a long time before proper technology development, and those humans were just as intelligent as modern ones. The ability to create technology is not a requirement for higher intelligence.
Even then, orcas do use tools, what they have access to. Without technology, humans stand no chance against an orca, and that goes for any animal in the ocean, from blue whales to great white sharks.
We see dialects, to an extent, in orcas, but we do not see the human behaviors we might expect.
The problem, I think, is in the pure consideration of it as intelligence. This is a limited view.
Why? But nonetheless, they have. They pass on locations, routes, hunting techniques, etc. vocally and behaviorally down through generations.
You and some of the other comments bring up a lot of things that don’t really have much to do with intelligence. They really only have anything to do with a human-centric view of intelligence.
Isn’t it more intelligence to convey all the information that you need to with the highest efficiency?
We rate a poet who can convey tremendous meaning in few lines as superior to someone who is long winded and their writing is full of bullshit and tropes conveying nothing but using many words.
One person alone is without language and without advanced tools, no matter how big their brains. See feral children.
It is possible that cetaceans pushed long ago pushed past complex verbosity into communication via wisdom and are all enlightened beings. Maybe they communicate electrically. Maybe they are in a local maximum of telepathic connection. I hope so.
Is that actually true? In cases of feral or severely neglected children who lack any exposure to human language, isn't there an impediment that prevents them learning more complex language later in life that exceeds anything that could be attributed to reduced brain development due to nutrition?
World wide hasn't intelligence been increasing, and while part of that is due to better nutrition, another part is due to better childhood conditions to enable intelligence? Exposures to the technology of language, written language, and similar at a young age seem to lead to an increased capacity for intelligence later in life.
I’m not for sure what feral or neglected children has to do with this.
To address your later point, intelligence does not equal knowledge. Any increase in intelligence in a person’s life seems to be intralifetime and doesn’t spill over to further generations. Increasing intelligence through diet and behaviors and such are just mechanisms for exposing the underlying intelligence that’s already there.
This is just one of the many paths to the fundamental question that plagues this sort of topic, what is intelligence. Is intelligence the capacity for gaining knowledge or having actually gained knowledge? Or maybe not directly related to knowledge at all, though the previous question was more about the capacity to gain vs the gaining than it was about knowledge.
It is known that the capacity a single individual changes based on what they were exposed to (feral/neglected children being the extreme negative cases, I'm not as well read on extreme positive cases). But perhaps we aren't talking about an individua's capacity and instead we are talking some baseline genetic average capacity for a larger group that doesn't take into account environmental cases pushing it to either extreme? But in such a case have we not defined intelligence so that technology's impact is excluded a priori?
I do not know it. I am not an expert and had only limited, (but fascinating) contact with them.
But I would assume, if they would be "way smarter", than they could and would find ways of communicating with us. As far as I know, the research shows that they can communcicate towards each other quite well, but not towards us beyond very basic things.
But of course that reminds me of an old joke:
A donkey and a dog on a farm are talking to each other in the evening and the donkey complains that he has so much work to do, but would like to become a writer. The dog asks: why don't you tell the farmer? The donkey answers, are you crazy? If he finds out, I can read and write, I will also have to do his bookkeeping.
Meaning, maybe whales and co. could communicate with us, but choose not to. But if this would be the case, their reasoning would have to include some very astonishing things, as whales are still hunted - which they likely could almost completely stop by telling us exactly that.
That’s a human centric approach and a little strange, because how do we communicate with them? We can’t understand them or communicate with them any more than they can with us.
Old Tom was an orca off the Australian coast who, with his pod, trained humans on how to efficiently catch whales. Old Tom demanded the tongues of the whales, which was given to him by the whalers.
Where's this evidence? What exactly does "more intelligent" mean to you? Do you think a dolphin can learn to play e.g. Chess? I doubt you can teach them to play even tic-tac-toe.
https://pumpkinperson.com/2019/08/15/increasing-u-s-head-siz...
Last link has a formula to calculate cranial volume.
Animal intelligence is vastly underplayed. Ants seem to be a very intelligent creature but they're little more than part of nature to us. We're similarly adapted to our environment, and those animals are adapted to our patterns and mentation by virtue of millennia of close contact / purposeful genetic pushes (eg, dogs)
City birds like crows and pigeons have puzzles they can play with like getting food out of garbage bins and so on. City birds tend to be more intelligent than countryside birds, even within the same species.
I always felt like cats are actually smarter than dogs in a lot of ways. Dogs have a lot of their brain power dedicated to manipulating and communicating with humans, as well as trainability. But untrained dogs just seem kinda stupid and helpless to me whereas cats can learn to be almost completely independent with next to no training. Dogs are evolved from pack animals of course which explains a lot of this.
I do love dogs though, just to be clear.
As so, larger animals have bigger bodies, and hence typically have bigger brains in order to handle/control their larger bodies.
They clearly have a different 'instructions per cycle' ratio from mammal brains.
If society collapsed I think it would be more beneficial to be ADHD than not.
They persist because not enough time has passed to mutate them out.
Different architectures, like in tech, have different specs.
More is not always better, as a bigger brain is costly, and the price is only sometimes justified - as with buying more GPUs.
the interaction between DNA and polymerase class nucleo-polymers result in assembly of sequence conservative polymers.
for the most part this is RNAclass material, but includes DNA during replication and error correction events
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-i...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662732...
"Unfortunately, it’s currently impossible for neuroscientists to record the full input-output function of a real neuron, so there’s likely more going on that the model of a biological neuron isn’t capturing. In other words, real neurons might be even more complex."
these are histeretic, programable, and dynamic.
the neuronal body state, the electro-osmotic environment, the past history of state are primary effectors of structure,and function resultant in the logic.
I didn’t expect this topic to be so controversial to be honest. I’m not surprised though.
For information on the modifying DNA expression in neurons that's under epigenetics and not as well studied.
Don't let my negative attitude keep you from doing research- I just think that epigenetics has been a bit overblown as a functional mechanism, or its just too hard to prove anything useful with experiments. Personally, if I was working on this I'd focus much more on neural differentiation during neurogenesis, rather than self-modification during "runtime".
I’m focusing on the epigenetic aspect of neurons due the possibility of the ME/CFS/LongCovid family of conditions being due to silencing of certain genes. The brain is closely linked with the immune system and I think the so while these present as immune conditions I believe it starts out more as a neural condition, maybe microglia. In addition it makes sense to focus on this area more as I can’t consciously restructure the neurons in my brain but I can introduce peptides that change gene expressions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-performance_liquid_chroma...
isolation,and analysis are two different activities, many instruments are capable of both modalities, depending on technique.
the problem is selecting a procedure that will not induce confounding artefacts of chemical, or physical interaction w the subject molecular entity.