Reassessing relative temporal lobe size in anthropoids and modern humans
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Provide an alternative title for "Updated imaging and phylogenetic comparative methods reassess relative temporal lobe size in anthropoids and modern humans" so that layman people would understand.
"Reevaluating Brain Size in Humans and Primates: New Techniques Show Surprising Results"
"How Modern Imaging and Comparative Analysis are Helping us Understand the Evolution of Brain Size in Humans and Primates"
Phylogenetic seems safe to remove.
Where do you disagree?
I am not a biologist, and my knowledge in the field is limited to what I learned in high school plus afterwards self study out of curiosity. I did know what "phylogenetic" refers to but I do not remember ever encountering the word "anthropoid". Yet I was perfectly able to infer what it means based on the meaning of the base and suffix.
If I don't know a word I look it up. Have people stopped doing this?
You should feel lucky that you are surrounded by curious people because it's not the norm for the world - though it's a great thing obviously. The process you describe is only done by an extreme minority of people.
I'd challenge whether most ever did it.
Not-wrong in the sense that in practice most adults are not curious about 99% of topics out there.
Wrong in the sense that humans are naturally curious. I've seen it now with kids.
It seems to me that what happens through childhood is that not only are neural pathways pruned for efficiency, but curiosity is actively stifled and arguably totally destroyed in most kids, by adults. Coupled with adulthood time/money pressures, I'm not surprised that a large number of adults become completely intellectually inert, or worse, fully anti-intellectual.
Humans are by nature curious - but agree that the social systems we've built just ablate curiosity
"the primary use of the site should be for curiosity"
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "
Ironically, you ought to look up the definition: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/layman%27s%20term...
> Provide an alternative title for "Updated imaging and phylogenetic comparative methods reassess relative temporal lobe size in anthropoids and modern humans" so that layman people would understand.
Submitters: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize" (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) If a title doesn't fit HN's 80 char limit, please shorten it in a way that preserves the meaning of the original title. If you do need to change it because the original title was misleading or linkbait (not the case with this submission), please do so using representative language from the article itself (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
(Submitted title was "Newer data once again shows: the human brain is just a scaled up primate brain".)
But there are huge differences:
* Primates can not sweat and self regulate body temperature through perspiration.
* Primates can not fast, most humans can go 40 days without eating, chimps would starve to death after couple of days.
* Primates can not run for several hours and outrun a horse!
Scaling up brain is not a problem, but keeping it supplied with energy is.
It is actually remarkable how quickly we can go from “untrained, can barely go down to the shop on foot without a racing heart” to running being barely a problem (unfortunately to many — it really is hard to burn more energy than what you normally eat with even quite long runs, we are that energy efficient at that).
But the actual point is that people before the agricultural revolution was more than fit enough for that, and evolutionarily speaking that is no time at all, so.. yes, not even being trained from childhood, just deciding to train for that hard, most people could definitely do that.
In death marches, such as in WWII, even many starving prisoners, walking from dawn to dusk, with beatings, lasted for days on the trail.
The Americans and Filipinos on the Bataan Deathmarch are one example:
>The total distance marched from Mariveles to San Fernando and from the Capas Train Station to various camps was 65 miles long.
For the British there was The Burma Rail: >Camp Nong Pladuk was initially used as a transit camp from where the prisoners were transported or had to walk to work camps along the Burma Railway.
And of course, the Jews and other victims of the Nazis were often force marched.
My great great grandmother returned to her Volga German village in Russia after the rise of the Soviets, was arrested, sent to Siberia, where she worked in a camp for 7 years until her death from malnutrition and other neglects. And she was a grandmother at the time.
I'm not disputing this, but the response was that humans can't generally outrun a horse. Which is true. The average human will not be able to outrun the average horse.
The average human can't fix a toilet.
Because we specialise so much, average human can't do anything, but a trained human cam do everything.
Whereas a horse is mostly always a horse.
> How long does it take to train for marathon? Most marathon training plans range from 12 to 20 weeks. Beginning marathoners should aim to build their weekly mileage up to 50 miles over the four months leading up to race day.
So even untrained couch potatoes could learn in 4 month to run a marathon. (And indeed many do and test themselves that way.)
Training plans do last that long but jumping into a marathon training block from nothing is a very quick path to being injured.
It's also covered in this very nice episode of Radio Lab: https://radiolab.org/episodes/man-against-horse
If we take a look at the numbers of humans doing a 24-hour-run[1], and compare it with Endurance-Riding[2], then humans seem to be able to run far longer, at peak even significant longer. Though, to be fair, it's possible that the numbers are skewed for the horse's safety, and riders are not going all out till the possible mile.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_run [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_riding
But can you?
And now consider this from the perspective of a wild horse: a strange being approaches, your instinctual neophobia tells you to flee. At a safe distance, you stop, only for the being to arrive again and the cycle to continue. You sleep, only to be awoken by its approach. Finally, too exhausted to run any further, you wait for the inevitable… only for the being to feed you a carrot, brush you mane, and wander off.
Look up details for horse marathon. Horses need several breaks and veterinary supervision. And that is just a few miles!
Sounds like humans' sweat capability is also scaled up.
I'd be very curious if there are any studies on time sensibility across species. Obviously, it varies even among humans (cue children with candy experiment here). My hypothesis would be that the ability to delay satisfaction is quite vital for the development of a species. On a completely tangential note, I'd also be curious how it relates to "procrastination". Anecdotally, I fell like people who need everything "right now" struggle a lot less with procrastination.
Edit: spelling
Humans can build complex societies and use weapons in organized way.
investing isn't just storing "wealth" (ala, a storage of foods). Investing is using the time that such wealth affords you to invent new tools, to make more efficient methods/machines for making wealth! Animals are, currently, missing this part.
Learning and passing knowledge is much rarer, I believe, and I can’t really think of any non-mammal example.
People really did believe even just a few hundred years ago that animals were just “animatronics”, and let’s be honest, plenty of animals don’t disprove it too well.
All predators need the ability to fast.
All non-ambush predators, like wolves or hyenas or humans, need adaptations that ensure enough endurance to pursue their prey for hours, without overheating or becoming too tired.
From walking to a tree to grab some fruit to a complex network of farmers, merchants, machines, oil drills etc From fighting with fists over simple basic things to intercontinental ballistic missiles and autonomous drone fights over issues we don't even understand anymore. The most complex mating dance on this side of the galaxy.
I'm happy we didn't lose our monkey sense of humor[1.4.42]
[1.4.42] - https://youtu.be/FIxYCDbRGJc
What a blinder of an specious insight.
We don't even understand scaled up LLM let alone brains to make a meaningful inferences here.
It's also a disingenuous title for the linked article.
We are on track to potentially learn there's no deep mysterious secret to human cognition. If and when we crack that, this planet will experience the technological singularity.
I thought the singularity was a crackpot idea not much different from string theory in how it tries to sell itself. We were stuck in the post WWII, post globalization, smartphone incrementalism age. Now we're moving on to something exciting again.
What I'm getting at is that you'll not only see more articles like this, but that collectively as a species we're going to start feeling a whole lot less special.
If that's the case, expect a massive backlash from the spiritual types, which basically means every other person. The centrality of man is essential to the abrahamic religions that dominate the planet, and other ones too will struggle to come to terms with seeing ghosts in the machine. I suspect organized religions will find ways to officially ostracize Machine Learning over the next decade. They'll form an alliance with people whose jobs are threatened, and pass laws to smother or ban research and deployment.
I am not a believer in an "AI revolution" or singularity, I think they're still one step up from parlor tricks, and anyway the world can evolve as fast as it can devolve (a nuke or two and we're in the ancient world again), but it feels inevitable that we're going to experience some significant neoluddite movement very, very soon.
Check back in 12 months.
I bet my entire life -- not just the sum total of my earnings -- that this the moment humans duplicate the spark that makes us who we are. And from there, God only knows what is possible.
Every day it improves. And it's not stopping.
A few different kinds of dystopia, mainly.
I would hedge that bet.
Which, regardless of the existence of god or not (which is irrelevant) sounds very smart. Basically a great evolutionary defense mechanism!
Hopefully the non-spiritual types wont doom themselves and everybody else to AI-slavery or annihilation...
Do they really dominate? They're big and all, but both economically (and to an even greater extent by population) China + Japan + India are also pretty substantial, and not predominantly Abrahamic. And even in the west, religiosity is in decline.
> inevitable that we're going to experience some significant neoluddite movement very, very soon.
Absolutely agree, the discourse from those artists who vehemently dislike AI art speaks to this.
How powerful they are, I do not know. But they are there, they don't like what they see, and they have already turned the counter-arguments into bingo cards.
What’s there to understand?
They are nowhere near close to human intelligence.
May sound like an ignorant meme, but if they’re really so smart and similar, why can’t they build cities or create cultures or do anything better than just survive?
I stop listening most times people use the "99% similar" as the basis for an argument on phenotypes
Similar to how GPT finally crossed a size threshold where its responses are actually useful to us now rather than just random words. The models are just bigger.
It’s worth noting that a human living in caves and hunting 20k years ago would’ve been perfectly capable of being a modern-day software developer hanging out on the internet. So it’s not even the cities part that matters, it’s something more fundamental, something that must be impossible to achieve without that extra 1%.
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The hope I have is that we actually do create something that is "actually" really intelligent in the we like to think of ourselves and not the way we actually are.
Do you think unchecked locusts, would not eat the planet bare? Goats, with no predator, would do the same, destroying all vegetation.
Cats torture their prey for fun. Hippos attack with little provication. Even male beavers, during mating season, are deadly and attack without cause.
Everything on this planet expands endlessly, without predation. Apex predators only die off due to starvarion, see prey/predator population cycles for more info.
Humans are perhaps the most benevolent species, for we actually try to reduce our impact!
Heck, even vegetation cares not for anything but itself. Vegetation changed the entire atmosphere of the planet!
It is our imperative for self-preservation that drives destruction. Everything else is just human psychology corollaries of the same thing (aggression, deceit, greed). Human drive for destruction doesn't originate in human intelligence, intelligence just amplifies the ability to destroy.
Arguably this is true for all reproducing mammals (whose intelligence is not comparable to humans). If you trap most mammals in a cage and threaten them, they will destroy whatever comes at them to the best of their ability.
So probably more relevant would be to make AGI without a sense of self or at least without an imperative to self-preserve or reproduce, rather than just fearing the development of something that happens to matches human intelligence.
Humans have the ability to drive dolphins to extinction, while the reverse is not true.
If they were so smart, dolphins should have invested more in defense.
I think it is an important distinction to make in every similar discussion - certain animals just have some behavior “hard-coded”. Humans realized the need and the how of building cities/homes.
We are social animals to the greatest degree.
A genetically modified octupi that lived far longer may well become something we would have to coexist and collaborate with. Right now we’re just taking advantage of children, who may be far more intelligent than our own children.
I've found a lot of people use the similarity of the latter to imply the similarity of the former
Some genes express themselves more than others (often dramatically)
Watch: "Are We Really 99% Chimp?" https://youtu.be/IbY122CSC5w
The parameter count thing appeals to people believing in linear scaling per parameter.
I think it's a degrading and disrespectful way to speak, not so much that I'm offended, but I think it's actually a non-intelligent way to view the world. Also probably not very healthy.
Feels like there is a little bit too much of this self-degrading language used in science and technology circles now.
I truly feel things are about to get a lot worse for most people (.i. Those who don't control the systems) and it won't be pretty. Sadly I don't think those who do do this stuff care one bit. The whole 'Did it because we could without asking whether we should' type problem.
I'm proud to have the brain I have, even if it's like an Ape brain. It's not "just something".
[0] Which was probably just take against nihilism that sometimes occurs in current AI discourse.
Watched recently on the Applied Science channel how to "identify chemicals with radio frequencies - Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance" [4]: just the universe as it is is more impressive than one could ever imagine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timaeus_(dialogue)
[2] Michael Levin, The collective intelligence of cells during morphogenesis as a model for cognition beyond the brain, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSNasSsiTlY
[3] Even this expression, "to be damned", is a remnant, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
Human history has always been tumultuous, and now we get to the present day, where we have extreme inequality, world-ending weaponry, and destabilizing global climate, contracting resources, and social upheaval as a result. There's no pretty solution to be found. Now we have the latest zeitgeist of AI, already threatening the economic wellbeing of the multitudes if you believe Altman & co.
The rights of humans throughout history has been predicated on the idea that humans are special somehow, deserving of dignity. Get enough people to really lean into the idea that they're just a meaty LLM and the foundation of human rights crumbles. You can get away with quite a lot of evil if you take care to dehumanize those you want gone.
It was just most probably a nurture thing — there was not as much accumulated knowledge to “bootstrap” a more advanced civilization (or perhaps, no will to do so. Why change when your system works just fine?). It’s not like Einstein could have achieved much back then without “standing on the shoulder of giants” before him.
On that note, maybe in the future we will discover some neural architectures that are able to "algorithmically think", who knows.
Then there're some nasty little contradictions like FOXP2.
(:
Distributed autoadversarial algorithms have honed our minds over millions of years.
You may be able to show that something is largely a scaled form, but you're leaving out optimised mass/volume/energy scaling optimisations that have one hell of an impact.
Feedback loops of minor advantages tend to cascade and the propagate across the entirety of breeding populations.
(Some advantages are more aggressively curbed, such as the sickle cell trait.)
Then it's missing things like FOXP2 - weird shit happens to language capabilities when you break it.
Not only that, but:
Three amino acid substitutions distinguish the human FOXP2 protein from that found in mice, while two amino acid substitutions distinguish the human FOXP2 protein from that found in chimpanzees,[17] but only one of these changes is unique to humans.[10] Evidence from genetically manipulated mice[22] and human neuronal cell models[23] suggests that these changes affect the neural functions of FOXP2.
Topological theory has its limits.
Humans are primates. And those scientists know it.
The submitted title was "Newer data once again shows: the human brain is just a scaled up primate brain". I've HN-ified it now :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experimen...