To be fair, I've seen large brained mammals exhibit (homo walmartus) completely inane and stupid behavior.
I have a feeling many others here have also witnessed those actions in their natural environment.
I have a feeling many others here have also witnessed those actions in their natural environment.
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.
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!
So your reply is a complete non sequitor.
How does that mean there's nothing to compare?
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.
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.
Now birds and octopodes etc. are a completely different story.
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.