Were small-brained early humans intelligent? Row erupts over scientists’ claim
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
You need to compare the situation across centuries or millennia to really see the large changes, and humans without a writing system and some kind of stable authority to keep records are not really equipped for that.
Now, it’s impossible to voluntarily stop using a system without which most of humanity would starve. You’re again up against self preservation and each time humans will choose a solution that prevents them from dying.
So yeah, you can disapprove but it’s all academical as it was more or less bound to happen.
We are Coctivores more than Omnivores - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7EccYugxhQ
Boffins like Kurzweil seem to think it’s the end goal but even if you had an IQ of 500, or wouldn’t necessarily mean you enjoy life more by default.
Edit: Kurzweil also emphasis that love is an amazing thing, which is cool, I think the guy means well. I just wonder if we and people like him overemphasize it's importance.
And there is no escape, except through intelligence of a certain sort, which happens to be the exact sort humans have developed, which will enable our species to eventually spread beyond just this one planet. The awesome thing about human intelligence though is not only will we ultimately use our intelligence to ensure our own perpetuation, but I suspect there's no doubt we'll have a "Noah's Ark" working to perpetuate the lives of many of our cohabitants who will literally all go extinct, permanently, without us - or without some unbelievably revolutionary change in their own intelligences.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event#The_%22Big_Fi...
Why do these have to be in contention? I honestly find our world beautiful, same with space and the universe. Same with blackholes and quasars. But a grizzly bear can be majestic and beautiful while still capable, and likely, to rip you to shreds. Awe is probably a more apt word. Maybe the more archaic definition of awful or awesome.
I disagree. Climate crisis, pure ignorance for destruction of nature, and not even a backup colony of our moon.
If we really were that intelligent as a species, we would value the survival of our own much more than a fictive self-invented imaginary value called "money" which actually has no meaning at all in the universe.
Nevertheless, no other life has made it to the moon (let alone "and back") by its own design.
I would love for us to have a backup colony on the moon; but until Starship (or equivalent) actually gets rolled out enough to make that affordable — or, better yet, a launch loop etc. — we have to make do with the Terran backups in the form of having settlements in every continent from Tamanrasset in the Sahara to Yakutsk in Siberia.
Money is indeed fictional, but it's a very useful fiction that helps us make deals with each other and with ourselves at different times in our own lives. Just so long as we don't make the mistake of, for example, thinking we can feed people just by taking money from the rich without any extra thought given to where food comes from in the first place — as the saying attributed to some Native American tribal chief goes, you can't eat money.
Btw, we can conceivable move the earth or keep the sun from going red giant.
The means for these two are currently beyond our technology, but not beyond our science. (Basically, for the latter you need to remove non-hydrogen elements from the sun. Red dwarf stars can last trillion of years, and they are smaller than the sun. So removing the right material from the sun should get us there.
The project would be a gigantic undertaking, but we'd also have tens or even hundreds of millions of years to do it.)
If humanity survives long enough, we are bound to become extremely powerful as science and technology march on.
I think you are seriously underestimating or misconceptualizing how much energy that would take. Even in a very ideal timeline where we get FTL or near FTL travel technology there is no way conceivable way to do what you are talking about: both moving the earth or engineering the sun.
Just visually look at the size of the sun in comparison to Earth: https://www.universetoday.com/65356/how-many-earths-can-fit-...
And if we COULD (which again, very very unlikely) do those things we simply just wouldn't -- living on earth or in this solar system would be irrelevant.
No, I am not underestimating that. Yes, it takes a prodigious amount of energy to move the earth, but hundred million years is a long time, too; and the sun gives off a lot of energy.
Today, most of the energy that the sun gives off is wasted. We are not too far off the technology needed to build a swarm of satellites that catch an appreciable fraction of that energy. (It's called a Dyson swarm.) We could sacrifice eg Mercury to get the mass for that; the sun itself will deliver the energy needed to run the fabrication process. Ideally we figure out how to build self-replicating machines. But even if the process of building the swarm takes a few million years, that's fine for our purposes.
You could use the energy to eg run a crazy amount of ion drives on our moon's surface. You'd use the moon as a gravitational tuck to very slowly move the earth.
About engineering the sun, have a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cw20VbX1XCc
My sketch for how to move the earth is also inspired by videos from that YouTube channel. He has all the math that I didn't put in here. He also has some videos about how to move the sun. See also https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a10885/the... if you want to read rather than listen to a video. Or https://www.gregschool.org/gregschoollessons/2017/9/21/shkad...
If children survive long enough, they will surely grow infinitely tall?
Getting started on building a Dyson swarm of power satellites is already very possible, if we were to put say 50% of world GDP into it. They don't need to be any more high tech than what we already have, just more of it, lots more.
Of course, that's economically infeasible at the moment. But as we grow GDP everything becomes more feasible.
There isn't a nicer spot around for untold light years.
Earth is a beautiful utopia, without measure or equal. Shatner saw that clearly, on his trip off planet.
> ... when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
> I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
> Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.
> I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film “Contact,” when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, “They should’ve sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.
- https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldl...
We're the worst thing to happen to this planet in 65 million years. On that list of extinctions you posted, the only one caused by an 'intelligent' agent is the one we're in now; the one caused by us. And we're still doing it.
If ever a Noah's ark is sent into space, it's vastly more likely to be because we fucked up the planet somehow.
I'm not saying you're not wrong, but also what is an objective ontological premise with respect to intelligence. We've really been unable to define intelligence for thousands of years and I'm willing to claim that this definition is more complex than that of life.
You're making this up. There were/are human (as in homo sapiens) societies based on communal distribution; we don't think of those humans as less intelligent. No serious intellectual in the humanities or sciences does.
> Hubris which considers survival at all costs more intelligent than self sacrifice for the collective.
"Self-sacrifice for the collective" has been an earmark of some societies, believed by their thinkers. Explicitly articulated in words that way, it's squarely a human idea. Just like it's a human idea that self-sacrifice for the collective is just idiotic group-think; the individual is supreme.
Feels like No True Scotsman. Much of Western colonial policy for half a millennium was based on this very assumption, and their effects echo in their unreformed and unreparated posterity.
I am not so sure, especially about the "half a millennium" part. It seems you are extrapolating from specifically Anglo-Saxon justifications of slavery, where blacks were considered unequal-because-stupid. That's not the norm over the entire globe and half a millennium, though.
There isn't significant evidence that, say, the Spanish conquistadors considered the vanquished Amerindians stupid (and it would be indeed hard to pronounce the people who built Tenochtitlan or Cuzco stupid). Same with the English in India. Heathens, yes, stupid, no.
Obsession with intelligence, stupidity, heredity thereof and, subsequently, eugenics, mostly dates from post-Darwin times. It approximately matches the last century of colonialism, but not 500 years.
Prior to the 19th century, few people cared about sophisticated explanations of conquest and dominance. There just weren't enough intellectuals around for theoretical explanations to matter. You lost a war, you became someone's subject or slave, that was it. In Europe, in Arabia, in China, everywhere. If there was any theory at all in play, it was mostly theological ("the unbelievers lost, because God willed it so, or we lost, because we sinned and God wanted to punish us").
Blame Social Darwinism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism) for this. Even today a lot of people (mainly in the Western world) try to promote this pseudoscience under any pretext possible.
Note : Despite the fact that Social Darwinism bears Charles Darwin's name, it is primarily linked today with others, notably Herbert Spencer, Thomas Malthus, and Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics.
intelligence (noun)
(1) the ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations, the skilled use of reason
(2) the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (such as tests)
(3) mental acuteness, shrewdness
consciousness (noun)
(1) the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself
(2) the state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought
(3) the totality of conscious states of an individual
These two things are very different and entirely separate concepts. Thinking about them as the same thing has caused immeasurable amounts of confusion when trying to classify LLMs recently. Animals can be intelligent, plants can be too, even single celled organisms, or a single if statement as long as it encodes a decision based on reasoning. It has nothing to do with consciousness which is so loosely defined that it can't even be measured. And it's also the term that should've been used in the title, of couse any hominid or living being for that matter obviously makes intelligent decisions constantly to get food and evade predators.
I suppose it is a result of thinking in an anthropocentric way as you mention because humans typically make intelligent decisions using consciousness, but it's far from a universal requirement. People always assume that AI stands for 'artificial consciousness' and it drives me up the wall.
Dying trees literally distribute their resources to healthy ones, and trees that lack nitrogen get it from other trees whose roots and bacteria produce too much.
Bacteria use those highways to distribute themselves, where bacteria is needed for fertilization.
Plant life and natural intelligence is right in front of us, we are just too stubborn to admit it.
The more you research about fungi, the more you see how nature really works.
> Dying trees literally distribute their resources to healthy ones,
I'm struggling to imagine how such genes could possibly reach fixation.
Want to explain?
[1] and [2] are introductions to the mycorrhizal networks and how they work on a chemical and biological basis, [3] and [4] are really nicely presented talks about it, by renominated researchers.
It's so ridiculous that they even found evidence that the connections between seedlings and their mother trees are stronger and more reliant than to others; which seems to suggest that they recognize their own offspring once it grows up.
There's also a huge organization that focusses on research of mapping those vast networks, called SPUN (society for protecting underground networks) [5]
On a darwinistic level I'd argue that once there probably was a stage in evolution when plants could not survive on their own in harsh weather conditions, the ones that survived were able to communicate and exchange "goods" for their own benefits; like exchanging sugar against nitrogen in case you had too much of it that you wouldn't need anyways.
(I'm no biologist so don't take my advice on anything on the topic, I am only building algae-fungi based bio reactors to try to find a way to bind carbon dioxide and put it into proteins as a food source as a hobby project)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycorrhizal_network
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kHZ0a_6TxY
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un2yBgIAxYs
Do ‘we’ as a species think that centralisation do resources is more intelligent than ‘natural’ distribution, really? Do ‘we’ really think that personal survival is more intelligent than self sacrifice? Are alternative view and philosophies of life really not found in human society? You seem to have no problem articulating them.
You’re not even arguing for any particular view, just complaining that some extreme caricatures of opposing views do, or have ever existed by presenting them as the universal default. It’s just nonsense. There’s nothing to get any intellectual traction on here.
[0]: https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89106 [1]: https://elifesciences.org/reviewed-preprints/89106/reviews#t...
> I do not think that in its present form, the evidence presented in this study is as robust as it should be.
> the manuscript in its current condition is deemed incomplete and inadequate, and should not be viewed as finalized scholarship.
I mean they sound polite, but if you strip back the polite language and understatements they're pretty much calling the authors quacks.
The original paper is just garbage
Possibly they have more evidence and findings to be published?
The reviewers asked for more evidence. The authors say they will provide more evidence. Great, that's exactly what the reviewers want. "Be careful what you wish for" implies that getting more evidence would somehow be a bad thing.
> It was unclear how their remains got deep into the cave system, however. There were no signs that predatorsbrought them into the chamber or that underground streams swept them there. So Berger’s team concluded that the bones had been deliberately placed
Interestingly enough, even in the 60's people thought humans were the only animals with intelligence and emotions. Here's an excerpt from Jane Goodall's PIMA interview[0]
> GOODALL: Yes. And when these Cambridge professors told me that only humans had personalities, minds, and emotions, I knew they were totally wrong because I had this great teacher when I was a child. That was my dog, Rusty. You can’t share your life in a meaningful way with a dog, a cat, a rabbit, a horse, a bird, and not know that we are not the only beings on this planet who are sentient and sapient.
Later...
> GOODALL: When I started in 1960, nobody had studied chimps in the wild. No scientist, that is. If, at that time you had gone into some of the indigenous people living deep in the rainforest, they would’ve told you chimpanzees used to make tools. They knew it. But, of course, now we are back on the scientific bandwagon. ... But there’s a wonderful book written by a psychologist, called The Mentality of Apes, Wolfgang Köhler, and he studied this colony of captive apes, and he described so many innovative uses of objects. But at that time, the scientific community said, “Oh, well, these were chimpanzees in captivity. Therefore, our human characteristics had rubbed off onto them. It’s nothing to do with what they, as wild individuals, would be capable of.” ...
Even now there are a lot of people who believe that there is a certain magic when discussing brains. Quite a lot of people think it would be impossible to build one, theoretically. I'll say it loud and clear, unless there's magic, there's no reason we can't -- theoretically -- build a brain. It must follow the same principles of physics that the rest of the universe does. I'll also say that a fuck ton of life is intelligent, even my idiot cat. Just look at how they dream, you can tell that tiny dumb brain can simulate its environment (or else they wouldn't try to eat, run in their sleep, or wake up to nightmares). I know AI can do a lot of things right now, but boy is it not close to this incredible thing that the smallest and stupidest mammal is doing with magnitudes lower computational budget. It really is quite impressive. But this is also why AI research should be so interesting, because there's still so much left that we haven't even scratched the surface of. It is possible to be highly critical in one hand and hold curiosity in the other. The details are important though and we must not be tricked by statistics. But the area we're moving into now is going to get murky really fast and I'd warn anyone from trusting metrics as a way to measure performance more than a guide, because there's a lot we don't know. But that's the fun of it all, the puzzle, the draw to research in the first place.
[0] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/jane-goodall-changed-the-wa...
I don't believe there is magic, but I do believe that the amount we do not know about the brain dwarfs by a magnificent margin that which we think we know. I'd be surprised if our understanding of the brain is even at 0.0001% of what it is actually doing.
How do you prove that something that lived 300.000 years ago could communicate?
However I think it seems likely that our cognitive ability to reason about linguistic structures is an adaptation of our ability to reason about making and using tools. Tools leave physical evidence, so if we can figure out an evolutionary relationship with language development we might make traction that way.
I's not. I don't think any of the involved scientists reject the idea right away. But that is besides the point. The point is to try and prove it in a scientific process so that we can know it, not merely believe.
A scientist may struggle to rigorously define nebulous concepts like 'love' in an empirical manner, and will particularly resist applying such terms to the behavior of non-human animals. They call doing so anthropomorphism, and rail against it. It's not scientific to assume dogs have human emotions, so they need to be careful about incorporating such assumptions into their scientific work. But then you get laymen picking up on this and saying things like "love is a human emotion and dogs aren't human. what seems to be love to you is merely food-seeking behavior." But this is not the appropriate way for dog owners to think about their dogs. In everyday contexts, people should be making these sort of intuitive assumptions about the way other people and animals feel, even though they aren't necessarily scientific beliefs.
And the argument that goes like 'a scientist cannot use emotions (or whatever) because it cannot be scientifically explained' makes no sense. Could be that one key part you're missing is: when a scientist cannot easily prove something that doesn't make it non-existing nor unusable, but a scientist doesn't have to turn to belief for that: a scientist can simply admit to not knowing and not caring how something works yet use it, likewise scientists are allowed to make assumptions. It's just that they'll always realize it's an assumption.
I'm for instance very well aware that my pets seem to love me and I know that me providing them food plays a big role in that and that it's likely (likeley, because assuming certain animals have no emotions would be equally wrong plus by now proven false already IIRC) very different kind of love than the one between humans. I fail to see how that is in any way not appropriate though. Despite realizing that the enjoyment of interaction between me and my pets is based on certain hormones being released in my body when I'm around them, my pets give me great joy, I do a lot for them, and I'm grieving for days if not weeks if one of them passes away.
Avoiding the anthropomorphism of animals is important when you're actively researching animals. But otherwise, leave that attitude in the lab.
Not sure why you bring that up, because that is not really an assumption, it's almost the definition of a species. And otherwise: yes. But again: realizing that it would be an assumption is healthy, imo.
But otherwise, leave that attitude in the lab.
Sorry, but hard no. It's not even an attitude, it's realism. Can you please try to understand that it's perfectly possible to realize what anthropomorphism is at all times, yet at the same time take great care of pets and have a typical pet-human relationship?
Actually yes it is the way it works. If a single person has a worthy conflicting opinion or evidence or skepticism it very well can bring the whole thing down.
Science is not a democratic exercise. It’s the search for truth and any claim to truth that can’t stand up to scrutiny isn’t worth a dime even if 99% of scientists want it to be true.
I have a feeling many others here have also witnessed those actions in their natural environment.
It used to be used all the time. For instance, to defend the idea that women and asians weren't as intelligent as anglo saxons because they were smaller in stature. There's plenty of other ludicrous nonsense claims that were made based on this supposed principle.
We all agree that the conclusions are nonsense but somehow we hold on to the premise.
In computers, the basic building block, an individual transistor, has shrunk by orders of magnitude since 1957.
If we, theoretically, built a computer of the size of the SAGE computer from contemporary M2 chips, it would be very computationally powerful indeed.
It's reductionist and impossible.
All kinds of animals are far better then us at specific core brain functions with way smaller brains.
Mantis shrimps are way better at vision than we are and lyre birds are way better at vocalization. (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y)
You can find all kinds of vastly superior aspects of systems in the animal world. Ants, termites and bees for instance, are probably better at socializing.
Some supercolonies span thousands of miles with hundreds of millions of ants - rivaling the size of human countries. Ants, 0.25mg brains. So brain size doesn't seem that important in organizing or building complex networks. We're certainly not 5.2 million times better (which is our difference in brain mass)
Ants even "farm" with things like aphids and keep those colonies alive. Look it up. It's fascinating what they can do with 0.25mg.
We're the only animals that have built rocketships and computers - so there's certainly something there but it's fleeting and complicated. Reducing it to a single measurement is inherently inaccurate in the same way you cannot describe the material, color, shape and volume of 3 dimensional objects with 1 number. Brain size alone cannot be a complete or useful metric.
You could use any correlated metric then and make the same claim - people with more expensive shoes performed better - or bigger feet.
Demonstrating that people who grew up impoverished performed poorer than people who grew up wealthy, by using the proxy of the mass of their heads, isn't very convincing.
Have fun playing make believe.
Nutrition correlation? Yes. Access to education? Yes. Low stress from high income and fewer cognitive loads? Yes. These all lead to taller adults that then have "bigger brains" ... and that's it - that's why it's only detectable at all (and that's questionable depending on the metric), at very large population sizes, if any.
It's not like people who win the Nobel Prize and Fields Medals are 8 feet tall giants. We also don't see someone that's say 5'0" and 90 lbs and think "they can't possibly have anything intelligent to say! Look at their stature!"
You need to stop lying. First to yourself. Try having a factual basis for the words that you write.
Sure, in places like the US, or Apartheid-era South Africa, “race” might have enough of an impact on people's lives that controlling for it is a quick and easy way to clean up your data. But absent social factors, by itself, there's no reason to believe that it's something you need to control for; and if you have access to that information, there are always more direct factors you can control for.
To go from genes varying the amount of melanin in your skin to then divide humans into "races" is crazy. I've worked all over the world through all of my long career, with people from all over, and if there's one thing I have learned it's that people are people, everywhere, you find all kinds of personalities, but the thing is - it doesn't matter if you're looking in your neighbourhood street or somewhere on the other side of the globe.
So your reply is a complete non sequitor.
How does that mean there's nothing to compare?
Children with "bigger brains" perform better because they've matured faster and have better executive control than their peers.
That's why you can strongly correlate childhood academic performance on birth month. The ones that do better don't have "larger" brains as adults.
If you take people with equal economic opportunities and the same social advantages, you cannot stratify that population based on brain mass and correlate it with anything meaningful.
Besides, if this was true then, say the staff at MIT would be NBA sized giants working their big brains and little persons would all have severe cognitive impairments. None of this is the case.
Even on strict IQ, which is what these people like to use, it still doesn't work. The highest IQ scorers are normal sized, normal shaped people. They aren't walking around with giant deformed skulls
The logical implications of the hypothesis simply don't exist and every study I've seen that tries to demonstrate it gets criticized as actually just showing a proxy measurement for things like nutrition, age, economic status, etc
It's also why the phenomena only appears in large population studies. Taller people, on average, grew up with more advantages and access to resources which is why they're taller. As a population, they will do better then their disadvantaged peers. Duh.
Such a correlation is a very repeated finding in all sorts of data sets.
Maybe you could chase down some of the references at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_and_intelligence#... .
One interesting fact I found on that page right now is that the correlation has also been found in Chimpanzees.
The two population cohorts are 11-year olds and 17-year olds so regardless of what they say, we're still just measuring shoe size.
I'm guessing they published these two groups because their adult cohorts showed zero difference and that's not a publishable paper.
In fact, they admit it
"Two previous studies taking this approach, each with a sample size of about 35 sibling pairs, failed to find a significant correlation"
Right before they say "chill, let's cheat":
"We reexamined this empirical issue in a Human Connectome Project (HCP) (Van Essen et al., 2012; Van Essen et al., 2013) sample of 1,022 young adults"
^ it's a shoe size study from here out so of course they find something.
That must mean we have vestigial neurons.
It appears in larger populations because it's a weak proxy for other things.
It disappears in smaller populations because it's a weak proxy for other things.
The same relationship would exist with the MSRP of the car the test subject arrived in or the cost of their socks.
In a small population study you'd see no real correlation between how someone did a test and the price of their car.
But over say 100,000 people you would because the cost of someone's car weakly correlates with a number of things that are, in aggregate more advantageous for testing and so the confounding phenomena would arise.
In fact, the circumference of someone's head probably has about the same correlation with the price of their socks as it does with whatever intelligence metric your want to use because it's all measuring the same thing - social class, opportunities, economic arrangements, things like that.
It's a physical consequence of our unequal society that then gets used as if it's a biological reason for the perpetuation of the vary inequality that produced it.
Eugenicists called this biological determinism, it's an old idea that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Nicely put!
Now birds and octopodes etc. are a completely different story.
There's also correlations between brain size and various intelligence metrics, which, while certainly not definitive, is still strong evidence.
Of course it's not just a simple matter of size, particularly across species (e.g. a blue whale isn't smarter than a human). But it helps/enables.
As you say, corvids, octopi and others have recently been interacted with in such a way as to be shown to demonstrate unexpectedly complex behaviour. Brain size doesn't seem to be quite as important as you might think.
Note my brain is about a fifth the size of a blue whale's brain. Now I am absolutely useless at living within the sea and I have no idea how complicated it is but I suspect that based on our relative brain size, that it can be very complicated compared to what we land lubbers get up to. Evolution doesn't leave rubbish lying around unless it does not impair things.
I don'y know how much of the brain is used for "thinking", and I suspect science doesn't either.
(1) The scaling law. One might think brain size should scale as body size, if the key is simply weight, or number of neurons; or one might think brain size should scale as the 2/3 power of body size, if one takes into account the square-cube law. The research Dawkins describes found that the actual scaling was in between the two: brain size generally scales as the 3/4 power of body size.
(2) Differences between groupings of animals. This basically affects the constant that multiplies (body size to the 3/4 power) in the equation for expected brain size. IIRC primates have the largest constant, cetaceans have the second largest, but octopuses and squids also have a fairly high constant. I don't remember seeing any data on corvids.
All is not what it seems.
Most of the things I know came from other humans who died long before I was born. I get to benefit from all their brainpower indirectly. I'd be much dumber on my own.
Any animal that can move its body in a consistent way, make the same noise repeatedly, or do any other sort of repeated 'thing' has the ability to create an arbitrarily complex language. But they lack something enabling them to do that, and it seems whatever this something is - it probably wouldn't be terribly far from the same thing that enables meaningful, complex, and intricate tool creation.
You are as smart as you are because other humans taught you.
I would expect opportunities for any meaningful innovation to be very limited at such low densities. Anything “invented” would likely stay within your group and be lost in a few generations. Then it would have to be rediscovered several times until it caught on amongst a larger population.
Physical tools are more complicated, exist as discrete physical instances and knowledge depending upon skill to make it, component availability (needing flint for example), and mutation can occur seperately. Just because you used a partially burnt piece of wood to make a better spear doesn't mean you have the techniques for fire-hardening wooden weapons down.
With `s/humans/homo sapiens/g` in the above paragraph, I believe that H sapiens was around for approx 300k - 400k years, and thrived in a variety of environments that would have killed them off if they did not have fire or sharpened rocks (skin animals for rudimentary clothing).
This suggests, to me anyway, that your estimates might be erring on the side of caution.
[WARNING: pure speculation ahead]
Earliest H. sapiens remains in Africa date to approx 300k years ago. Around 150k years ago the climate was cold, dry and harsh (https://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercAFRICA.html).
If H. sapiens did not enter that climate already prepared, with generational knowledge of fire and sharp tools, they would have died out.
This makes me think that they had already had widespread use of fire and sharp tools, plus sophisticated enough communications to pass this knowledge down for multiple generations prior to the climate change.
If crows had hands at their disposal, they might have developed towards a civilized species earlier than us.
With advanced enough genetic engineering, we may yet see someone to actually try giving them hands. Not soon, certainly, but in 2050, who knows.
Edit: Look at this video.
https://www.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/comments/156yuj5/...
It took the guy longer to assemble the test than the raven to solve it. These are smart creatures, and they like to communicate and cooperate as well. With hands and somewhat more capable vocal chords, nothing would stop them from developing a civilization.
And of course there's the interesting question of size efficiency. Vacuum tubes are considerably bigger than transistors, which in turn are considerably bigger than ICs. Perhaps raw size isn't really an interesting metric for cross-architectural brains either?
Not quite; it is much more nuanced and not settled - https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/ask-neuroscientist-do...
To be honest, I find these correlation a bit unsettling. Clearly, there is more to intelligence than brain size, or classic geniuses like Albert Einstein, who had an average-sized brain, would have been out of luck! It is important think about how we should actually define intelligence, and to keep in mind that the studies cited above only show a correlation between brain size and a person’s score on an intelligence quotient test. Although IQ is historically the most widely used intelligence measure, by no means does it account for all aspects of human intelligence, nor is it an entirely consistent readout of cognitive ability between individuals. Furthermore, a closer look at the results of the gene-association study reveal that most of the relationship the authors found between HMGA2 gene variations and cranial size could be accounted for by the fact that the gene is also correlated with human height. Correlational studies have only established a weak to moderate linear relationship between brain size an intelligence, which is enough fuel to ensure that the brain size and intelligence hypothesis doesn’t burn out, but does little to explain the true basis of human cognitive capacity.
You might also want to look at the paper Decreases in Brain Size and Encephalization in Anatomically Modern Humans i have linked here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36833133
http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html
(If you like, skip to "Correlations explain g, not the other way around").
And of course intelligence is a real and observable thing. Some people really are considerably smarter than others. They have better recall, learn faster, and are able to reach correct conclusions either more quickly or with less information than less intelligent persons. Reducing that difference to a single factor almost certainly is a simplification, but just as we can usefully talk about height without getting caught up on difference in leg, torso, and neck length, we can talk about intelligence similarly.
As for the presidential fitness exam, well that’s true but quite facile. Much like how people who have taken the Wonderlic test are considerably more likely than the general populace to be or have been in the NFL.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if taking aptitude tests at all regardless of score predicts above average outcomes because of a selection effect.
Right. I don’t see how any statistical analysis can tell you if a mechanism exists or what it is. Quite the opposite. The better you understand the mechanism of the process that generates your data points the higher quality your statistical analysis will be. And in the case of intelligence we know there must be an actual real underlying factor because some people are observably smarter than others.
Mensa appears to select for high aptitude and low achievement, which is a really unfortunate combination.
Today we know better; Humans are highly adaptable and everything only exists in the context of a specific environmental/cultural/social context. Genetics vs. Epigenetics, Nature vs. Nurture, Nutrition, Economic strata etc. are all inputs when it comes to our "fitness" for a particular task. We play "roles" which are context-dependent from which you cannot generalize to the "whole person".
Psychometrics has been called a "Pathological Science" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_science
This article named The Myth of Measurement brings a bunch of research together to show why - https://paulenglert.com/the-myth-of-measurement/
And indeed, one can predict with accuracy better than chance how well someone will perform in a software developer job (for example) from an IQ test.
This same test may do less well in predicting the ability to hunt an antelope across the serengeti, but that still wouldn't make psychometrics pseudoscience.
Also, if there wasn't a g factor that would be fairly weird, as there are numerous little slightly deleterious mutations one could have that can minorly affect neuronal functioning. You'd genuinely expect there to be a decent correlation here.
Here is Nassim Taleb;
1) IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle - https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-...
2) Fooled by Correlation: Common Misinterpretations in Social "Science" - https://www.academia.edu/39797871/Common_Misapplications_and...
3) Correlation videos - https://nassimtaleb.org/tag/correlation/
See also :
a) The Pseudoscience of Psychometry and The Bell Curve - https://www.jstor.org/stable/2967209
b) Pseudoscience and Mental Ability: The Origins and Fallacies of the IQ Controversy. - https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED164662
I wonder how many Fields medalists score one or two standard deviations below average on the Stanford-Binet. If the measure is meaningless then roughly half should, right?
Also while I certainly respect Mr. Taleb's insights and the mass market appeal of his punchy authorial persona, based on various writings of his I conclude that he views intelligence very narrowly in the "good at trading options" sense, which coincidentally is an area where he has demonstrated ability. Funny that. And to be fair in my own trading I benefitted quite a bit from his maxim that the first goal is survival.
I'd bet that Fat Tony would probably score well above average on an IQ test too, he just wouldn't be caught dead taking one. And I don't blame him; the kind of people who mistake aptitude for achievement are generally insufferable.
Yes and No to both.
Simply put;
1) There is nothing called "General Intelligence" beyond what enables a Human to survive in his/her environmental niche (including cultural/social since we are social animals). Leaving aside obvious biological retardation, if Extraversion/Introversion, Agreeableness/Disagreeableness, etc. enables one to survive, they are equally "Intelligent". Trying to rank these attributes on a ordinal scale and do quantitative calculations on them is nonsense. See Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man) for convincing arguments.
2) Humans are highly adaptable and exhibit dynamic behaviour in different contexts. This "role" and hence the "exhibited intelligence" is specific to that context but if that adaptation subsumes the need for another related context then obviously one will be intelligent in both the contexts. For example London Taxi drivers actually grew their hippocampus and became more intelligent in both spatial navigation and memory recall - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/london-taxi-memor...
3) We know that gene expression can be influenced by the environment via Epigenetics over generations (see the documentary The Ghost in your Genes). Environment (cultural/social/nutritional/economic) now becomes of paramount importance and thus a person's "fitness" for a role is dependent on Nature, Nurture and his unique Family Past history. He will now be intelligent in certain roles not so in others.
4) Wrong understanding and misuse of Statistical methods in the above scenarios. This is where Taleb's writing/videos help one to separate the wheat from the chaff.
- Notes on Taleb's article - https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Taleb:_IQ_is_a_pseudoscientific_...
- IQ is a dismal measure of intelligence - https://supermemo.guru/wiki/IQ_is_a_dismal_measure_of_intell...
No thanks. Why would I refer to a source whose author either lied to get the results that suited his politics or was completely incompetent? From the NY Times[1]:
But now physical anthropologists at the University of Pennsylvania, which owns Morton’s collection, have remeasured the skulls, and in an article that does little to burnish Dr. Gould’s reputation as a scholar, they conclude that almost every detail of his analysis is wrong.
You did nicely restate Mr. Taleb’s novel redefinition of “intelligence” as survival ability though. No doubt then Taleb believes the humble tardigrade is one of the most intelligent creatures on Earth.
Read the section on Reassessing Morton's skull measurements and follow the links as needed.
Finally, you might also want to checkout the following;
1) Triarchic theory of Intelligence - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triarchic_theory_of_intelligen...
2) Theory of multiple Intelligences - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_multiple_intelligenc...
As for the triarchic theory, it’s not even wrong. I’m completely uninterested a non-empirical “theory” of intelligence.
I will end this with the following observation;
In this modern day and age anybody who believes;
a Bedouin from the Sahara, a Aborigine from the Australian Outback, a Chukchi from the Northern Arctic, a tribal hunter from the Amazon Rainforest, a nomadic herder from the Mongolian Steppe, a Sherpa from the Himalayas, a Xhosa from Africa and a Techie from Silicon Valley
can all be ranked on a single scale using a single metric of "General Intelligence" is ... manifestly wrong and unscientific! The absurdity is self-evident.
You may as well argue that height isn’t a scientific metric because some people have longer legs and others have longer torsos so clearly any single height metric is meaningless. It’s pure flimflammery.
In any event it’s pretty clear that your beliefs on the subject of intelligence are not evidence based, so I don’t think further discussion will be intellectually satiating for either of us.
In fact, one could taboo the word "intelligence" entirely and merely say "that thing we observe where people who do better at these tests seem to also do better at these jobs and are more likely to win board games[1].". While the tails do come apart eventually, the correlation is observable up to at least 130 (there was a strong correlation at my previous work place between those who did well at board games and those who got a lot of good technical work done, these people also tended to have +2sd test scores compared to the +1sd average).
Btw: I've read Taleb's charged essay before and found it rather unconvincing. Very much "given these particular papers it's possible high IQ scores correlate with nothing other than high test scores".
[1] I'm not just basing this off my own observations, good chess players seem to have 130 level IQs: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
I think the whole discussion around intelligence suffers from a lack of clear definitions. And people often tie it to other ideas like consciousness or moral personhood, which only muddies the water further.
Thereafter, it's just speculation. "We can imagine h. naledi has fire since other early humans did". They start a small fire in the cave to show what it may have looked like. Plenty of animations of what the scientists imagine may have happened there. Speculation how most societies have some kind of religious or spiritual leader so h. naledi, perhaps, definitely had one too.
The dark spots which were definitely maybe fire were also there.
Even for popular science it felt very flakey.
That said, unless the site is somehow staged or wildly misinterpreted, I think there is more evidence of potential use of fire than:
"We can imagine h. naledi has fire since other early humans did".
Even without finding evidence of fire in the cave, assuming the body was intentionally placed (big assumption) light would have been required to access that part of the cave.
The only alternatives I can think of are the species had more sensitive optics than modern human enabling them to see in a dark cave, or much more likely the body wasn’t placed there as part of a burial ritual but died down there.
Part of the problem is, if the evidence pointed to the later, they give off the vibe they would have created another spectacular narrative like this was evidence of an early legal system where someone was tried of a crime and sentenced to confinement in the cave, the “tool” and scratches in the cave wall being the first evidence of an attempted jail escape, demonstrating early hominids desire to be “free” just like modern humans.
So if their brains are, you know, only eleventy times the size of a crows, how could they possibly have mastered the supreme technology of "broken sharp rocks" or "sometimes you can keep a fire going from embers and use it to burn shit"? Our best geniuses with IQs of 140+ can barely manage those tricks.
The assumption should be, going forward, that if you deem them closely enough related to our own species that you're putting them in the same genus, they were probably at least as intelligent as the bottom quintile of H. sapiens, with exceptional individuals up above that. Anything else is just bizarre prejudice.
The relationship between brain size and intelligence it tenuous. The human brain is not the largest.
The smallest (known) woman in the world, Jyoti Amge, isn't noted for any intellectual disability. Her head is obviously tiny compared to the average adult.
The find is real and they have great footage of it, but for their presentation to ignore evidence against them and/or alternate explanations is disappointing.
It would seem odd to develop a ritualistic burial for pets and skip the burial for humans. Reaching the burial spot is extremely difficult for human bodies.
difficult to reach isnt impossible.
i think we would need to see evidence of parallel existence of feral, and domestic populations.
And if so.... well our food system is evil beyond measure....