The humanoid body - wierd design, but the only way to become truly intelligent

[megaplayboy]

Once we get to land cultivation (agriculture and livestock ), we get to a point beyond the Dunbar number, groups of hundreds or thousands of people living in close proximity to each other. A common language is not enough to sustain a larger group like this. It requires a sense of empathy.

[Lucius]

You're applying the Dunbar number concept universally, not just to primates?

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Would a palindromedary have two Dunbar numbers?

[procyon]

Once we get to land cultivation (agriculture and livestock ), we get to a point beyond the Dunbar number, groups of hundreds or thousands of people living in close proximity to each other. A common language is not enough to sustain a larger group like this. It requires a sense of empathy.

I'm not sure that would be universally true.  If there was an 'insect/hive' type creature which was 'intelligent' - it might not apply.

But I would suspect that social/group creatures would advance more quickly.  Solitary creatures are likely going to spend a lot of time duplicating efforts.

[megaplayboy]

You're applying the Dunbar number concept universally, not just to primates?Lucius AlexanderWould a palindromedary have two Dunbar numbers?

Well, that's a fair point, though if socialization

and empathy are evolutionary adaptations enabling the formation of larger social groupings, then some form of Dunbar number may be a commonplace across sapient species. Some may evolve beyond it, or develop in an environment where there was no clear delimiter.

[massey]

I am sure what you are trying to say is true, but the analogy probably isn't accurate.

Discovering a way to adapt unguided bombs into guided munitions is great.  But the folks who did that were not likely 'more intelligent' than Newton.  Or Copernicus.  Or many other individuals from antiquity.

 

The development of language, and ways to record and pass on our discoveries, is a huge advantage.

Lots of primates can use a variety of tools.  But if they have never directly observed another member of their species using it - they are unlikely to 'discover' it.

The same was true for humanity.  We likely 're-invented' the wheel/fire/spear/etc over and over.

Until we found better ways to pass that knowledge on.

 

That would be one of the hallmarks (to me) of intelligence.

 

I'm talking about group vs group, not individual vs individual.  We hit the point where it didn't matter nearly as much who was bigger and stronger -- a tribe with spears was going to beat a tribe without.  The Isaac Newton of the stone age probably figured out how to farm land, or reliably start fires.  That was a huge advantage for his tribe over someone without that knowledge.

[procyon]

I'm talking about group vs group, not individual vs individual.  We hit the point where it didn't matter nearly as much who was bigger and stronger -- a tribe with spears was going to beat a tribe without.  The Isaac Newton of the stone age probably figured out how to farm land, or reliably start fires.  That was a huge advantage for his tribe over someone without that knowledge.

And that is what I assumed you were saying.  It just didn't sound exactly like that when I read it.

But yes, as the base of knowledge expands, even an unexceptional member of humanity has access to knowledge and tools that were unavailable to prior generations or eras. 

So was John Browning 'more intelligent' than Copernicus.  Probably not.

Did he have access to a MUCH larger base of knowledge to work from.  Oh yes.

[Ragitsu]

[薔薇語]

I don't think the Human form is all that necessary for intelligence nor the various other characteristics bundled up with intelligence. Nor do I think the human thumb is somehow a needed component. Having a way to do moderately fine crafting will certainly help but I do not think it is the end all be all for marking advancement. Just look at how clumsy humans really are compared to the world we live in. No human could manipulate tools fine enough to create a computer. Rather we created larger tools that would let us scale our manipulation down to ever greater degrees.

 

I do think that language is a necessary feature for dynamic culture to be produce. Language as defined by most linguists, not language in the general "dogs can speak to each other" sense. The advancement of language is a hallmark of certain other intellectual traits that I think would be necessary for real sapience. Things like a having an acute theory of mind - something that even human children have to grow into. I don't know if any of our Ape cousins or Dolphins have been shown to actually possess this. To the best of my knowledge the answer is no, but I accept that "the best of my knowledge" on this subject in regards to them is quite limited. One creature that has been shown to possess this in initial tests is the common Crow / Raven. They have been shown hiding products at one time and then returning to those products to hide them once more. This, along with some other research, seems to indicate that Crows recognize that they are not the sole perspective. That there are creatures that can and will have different perspectives than itself.

 

Language also shows that one can recognize things in an abstracted sense. Such that things not physically or temporally present can also be reasonably discussed. Thus the ability to be forward thinking and not act on pure instinct but to actually plan is possible. The ability to reflect on past events for the sake of planning rather than using ingrained emotional triggers to adjust future behavior. The ability to understand communications coming towards you that don't necessarily have a visible component and still being able to understand. That allows for the rapid transmission of knowledge needed to help maintain group cohesion.

 

As to why humans are upright vs being on all fours like other mammals - including our ape brethren, there are several reasons. I believe it is accept that our distant ancestors used our hands to walk on the ground. But having detailed and strong grips allowed us to better grasp Threes, Vines, and other such things located off the ground. And those creatures that developed better and more articulate grips were able to survive longer, eat better, and thus breed more.

 

Then as our forested homes gave way to a more savannah like locale; we found the need to grip things with our articulate hands being transferred. Before being able to grasp a vine or reach out for more distant fruit was useful. Now being able to trow rocks, grasp sharp rocks and such became the order of the day. Likewise, standing upright, while once a luxury became a staple because it made us more capable of long distance running. Sure, our ape like fellows could probably outrun us in short distances by using their long strong forelimbs to help propel them, it would tire them out faster and open their hands and arms up to greater stress and wounding. Humans were able to avoid this drawback and gain an advantage. One that is very useful as a predator going after antelope and such. We had no hope of 'outrunning' one like a cat, but we could 'outlast' one over distance and kill. Plus having language would allow us to coordinate with each other more swiftly so that we could arrange traps that let us kill an animal with even less energy loss.

 

We find that a quirk of our previous life (detailed gripping) help us transition in an unrelated way to an environment change. We see that the need to be upstanding hominids made our already altering arm and hand system even more awkward. But that awkwardness gave us an advantage. Then our need to hunt in the savanah but meant we either needed to compete in the niches better filled by cats or adapt to a new a unique niche. And obviously rather than evolve us to run 70mph, it was simply an easier transition to go to long distance-coordinated attacks. A behavior that emphasized the language trait and probably gave a distinct advantage to those who could use language. Thus those who lacked it (if anyone did by that time) were likely starting to be weaned out of the population by natural selection.

 

But, while that may have been the reason we evolved the way we did, it is hardly a limiter to how other species could reasonably evolve. This is nothing stopping Crows (about the only bird I like, btw) from matching us in intellect. They are living in a world where complex problem solving is a distinct survival advantage since they must interact with humans. Crows in Japan have been shown using humans and cars as ways of cracking hard to open nuts and then picking up the edible parts afterwards. That takes a strong sense of awareness of one's environment to indirectly manipulate it. And that advantage and others like it mean that those birds can eat better. Plus, crows are not without enemies. So developing more complex systems to counteract them might correlate to them developing actual language (if they don't have it already). It is a necessary development as their are other survival tactics open to them, but it is hardly an unthinkable adaption. And while they have no arms, they have the ability to finely manipulate objects with their claws and beak. It is not unreasonable that they could be the next sapient species forerunner on Earth.

 

Foreign Orchid.

[massey]

 This is nothing stopping Crows (about the only bird I like, btw) from matching us in intellect. They are living in a world where complex problem solving is a distinct survival advantage since they must interact with humans. Crows in Japan have been shown using humans and cars as ways of cracking hard to open nuts and then picking up the edible parts afterwards. That takes a strong sense of awareness of one's environment to indirectly manipulate it. And that advantage and others like it mean that those birds can eat better. Plus, crows are not without enemies. So developing more complex systems to counteract them might correlate to them developing actual language (if they don't have it already). It is a necessary development as their are other survival tactics open to them, but it is hardly an unthinkable adaption. And while they have no arms, they have the ability to finely manipulate objects with their claws and beak. It is not unreasonable that they could be the next sapient species forerunner on Earth.

 

Foreign Orchid.

 

Crows would have to go through a lot of changes to match humans in intelligence.  Their bodies are optimized for flight.  Light weight, hollow bones, etc.  Their brains simply aren't large enough or heavy enough to match human brain power.  They'd be far less efficient as a flier, to the point where it might not be possible any longer.  Crows are also hatched from eggs.  In humans, stable temperature during gestation is very important for mental development.  I would doubt that a nest full of eggs will have the temperature regulated well enough to let the brain develop appropriately.

 

Theoretically, complex tool use aids in abstract thinking.  Humans can't build circuit boards by hand, but we can build relatively complex machinery.  No other animal has shown the ability to build a tool.  A monkey might use a stick to clean its teeth, but it doesn't tie a rock to a stick to use as a better club.  Our hands were useful enough that it allowed complex tool construction, which gave our more intelligent ancestors a distinct survival advantage over their peers.

[Zeropoint]

 

No other animal has shown the ability to build a tool.

 

Funny that you should say that in the same post where you belittle the intelligence of crows.

[薔薇語]

Except, Massey, you are wrong on two fronts. First is assuming that size matters when it comes to brains. While it seems rather obvious that larger brains allow for a certain expansion of cognitive abilities, having a large brain is not actually an indicator of intelligence. If that were the case, elephants should be smarter than people and wildly smarter than a crow. But in reality, humans are rather more intelligent. And the problem solving capacities and cognitive awareness of Crows puts them on par with young human children - which is is already higher than the capacity of elephants.

 

Second, while to my knowledge crows have never forged a new tool in the way we take rock, crystals, and sticks and forge a spear, they have been shown to grasp complex arrangements and been able to utilize a variety of less than clear concepts to achieve goals. One example was grasping human intersections / crosswalks, understanding the weight difference between a crow, and a car, and using all that knowledge to crack open shells. A more clear example of abstract tool use is in the video below. They have been show to 'figure out' problems like using water displacement to achieve goals. They have shown the ability to utilize vending machines. And beyond all that, they have been shown to convey learned knowledge from one crow to the next in systematic manners.

 

The fact that a crow today and a sapient crow of tomorrow might not look exactly the same is not the same as saying that the crow must in anyway come to resemble a human in order to achieve full sapience. One example is in how much of our brains we actually need. Children who suffer major brain damage have been able to grow up with command of all their faculties. That tells me that the human brain has been designed to be more resilient. Why? Could it be because humans take so long to develop and have limited litters? We need to have safety measures / back up measures ready just in case of injury. But a Raven might evolve a way to combat this differently than us. Perhaps simply by having larger litters, the need for more resilient brains is lessened because it reaches, as a poster put it above, a "good enough" threshold. And there is nothing actually stopping a crow in their modern physical form from building ever more complicated tools. The only thing limiting them is their brain. While an important limiter, it is not a limiter beyond evolution's grasp.

 

One advantage that Crows have over humans in terms of gestation is that crows don't have to be passed through their mothers 'fully' formed. They can do so while still in their gestation period in the egg. And from their they can start to grow their brains without worry of it causing them to block up the exit path. Heck, maybe crows could evolve and develop a two brain system like some of the larger dinos were claimed to have had. They could have a brain located in their abdomen / rear that regulates bodily functions and a primary "sapient" brain in their head. This would let them have a variety of options for development. The body focuses on the secondary brain that takes care of second to second concerns of controlling the body and slowly develops the primary brain after attending to the basic needs of the bird. Such a setup would likely require greater sources of food so as to maintain itself, but if crows use their rather large intelligence to provide that extra source of food, then over the course of a few generations the larger two brain versions could come to dominate the species.

 

 

I have yet to watch the following documentary but saw the title and thought it might work well here. I will be watching it following my posting of this.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrapIttS9qg&list=WL&index=25&ab_channel=VariousDocumentaries

 

Foreign Orchid.

[薔薇語]

Funny that you should say that in the same post where you belittle the intelligence of crows.

I forgot about the wire hook experiments. Thanks for the post.

 

Foreign Orchid.

[Cancer]

Probably the biggest evolutionary advantage that humans on Earth possess is that we routinely raise young in parallel rather than series. Human breeders often have several young, of differing ages, in the social unit at the same time, and raise them all at the same time. Almost no other species does this; instead, either they do little or no tending of young at all, or they raise young in series, not birthing a new one until the previous one has left the nest (or whatever). This astonishing innovation lets humans beat the r/K reproductive strategy limit by having it both ways, sort of.

 

It can be argued that the biggest evolutionary limit on humans now (other than their incipient annihilation of liveable environments on Earth) is the size of the birth canal. Human gestation periods are too short (and the young too underdeveloped) for animals their size, because of the extreme brain size and the size of the pelvis. Birthing a human is traumatic for both mother and child, and that either one "routinely" survives is the direct result of high cooperation among individuals, both related and not, in human communities. Social behavior is a crucial part of the evolution of humans. We are not unique in this: the extreme reliance on social behavior is the stock in trade for the successful primates, and none of them do it as well as humans. It has allowed the parallel young raising strategy to work, where the community supports the mother and infant while both are incapacitated for the few days after birth. Solitary species cannot possibly survive the sort of birth trauma we humans have, which has arisen because the brainpower we employ has given us environmental supremacy.

 

I have seen arguments that humans really took off when individual lifetimes became long enough that most social groups had more than a couple of post-breeding individuals, individuals who have no real use in nonsocial species, but in a social creature these serve as reservoirs of skills and support workers and so on, which makes human social groups that much more robust. The source I read put it that humans really started winning big when we invented grandparents.

 

Humans do some things better than any other vertebrate species, and one of those is throw. There was a recent paper in Nature (I think) comparing the shoulders of humans and chimps, and there are a number of structural differences that make sense if throwing things was potent ability to have and the human shoulder has developed under the pressure that throwing let individuals and groups survive better. Contrary to things I read as a kid, the other great apes are nowhere near as good at throwing as we are because their shoulders aren't set up for it, despite what you might guess from their superior strength and proportionately longer arms. But throwing is again a social strategy: until you're really really good at it, lots of relatively poorly thrown projectiles beats the output of a single perhaps more skilled thrower. Add tactics and you win even bigger.

 

I am very far from convinced that the human body plan is "the only way"; I think the extension of Stephen Jay Gould's argument, that randomness has a much greater role in evolution than appreciated, is correct. It is easy to see how and why humans won on Earth. I do not accept that a humanoid body plan will always win. That assertion seems to me very much like 19th Century logic about why Western Europeans were supreme on the world political scene.

[Zeropoint]

 

I forgot about the wire hook experiments. Thanks for the post.

 

You're quite welcome. I happen to think that corvids are pretty cool, and don't like to see them disrespected. When you combine the confirmed scientific knowledge of their abilities and behaviors with some of the anecdotal evidence, it seems like they're teetering on the edge of sapience already. I've placed corvids (along with squids, octopuses, cetaceans, and parrots) on my personal "do not eat" list for that reason.

 

Also, I find it amusing that in watching the first of your clips, the crow's behavior reminds me strongly of myself playing a Portal level.

 

Edit: Maybe that's why I like them so much. There's probably a lot of anthropomorphizing going on, but with some of these animals, it's easy to see a person looking back.

[Marcus Impudite]

One question, and forgive me if someone else already addressed it: What (other than limited lifespan) would prevent a species of squid- or octopus-like creatures from developing higher-order intellect?

[Zeropoint]

I don't think that we, as a species, know enough about intelligence and its development to properly answer that question at this time.

[Cancer]

At the moment, the cephalopods seem to spawn once and die. I don't know if this is inherent to the mollusc life cycle, but it definitely limits the propagation of knowledge from one generation to the next.

[薔薇語]

Cancer, your comment about humans having larger dynamic groups for child rearing I think is good. But since I.am already on a raven trip, I'd like to point our that crows have an extrenely similar system. They have babies and 'teens' along with parents. The 'teens' are non breeders who help provide for their younger siblings.

 

 

Foreign Orchid.

[megaplayboy]

One question, and forgive me if someone else already addressed it: What (other than limited lifespan) would prevent a species of squid- or octopus-like creatures from developing higher-order intellect?

Perhaps something as simple as a stable environment where little benefit is derived from possessing slightly greater intelligence, therefore there's no "favor" to it and higher order intellect never evolves because it's never needed in order to best fit the ecosystem?

[薔薇語]

I think that it is less about preventing the development of intelligence than it is about promoting the development of intelligence. for example there is nothing preventing a parrot from developing higher levels of intelligence but there is hardly anything promoting it. But for crows that live largely off human civilization (among other factors) there is strong encouragement to develop intelligence.

 

Foreign Orchid.

[Ragitsu]

It is true that, as a life form, you just need to be "good enough".

 

After all, musca domestica is the cham-peen of the insect world precisely because it has locked into it's niche with a (seemingly mundane) tenacity. No need for higher cognitive development there.

[dmjalund]

i wonder what it would take to bring up the more intelligent animals of this planet to full sapience

[sinanju]

Perhaps something as simple as a stable environment where little benefit is derived from possessing slightly greater intelligence, therefore there's no "favor" to it and higher order intellect never evolves because it's never needed in order to best fit the ecosystem?

 

I was going to say more or less the same thing. Intelligence isn't a goal, it's a tool. If it's not the right tool for the job, it's a waste of effort and resources. If some other tool works as well (or better) at less cost, that's what you're going to get more of. The human brain consumes something like 25% of the energy our bodies need--that kind of drain on the system won't evolve if it's doesn't carry its own weight and then some. Intelligence is our competitive advantage as humans, so we tend to think it's the most important thing. But alligators and crocodiles have survived essentially unchanged for vastly longer (by orders of magnitude) than humans have existed. They're not smart, but they fill their ecological niche so perfectly that they've changed little in millions of years. Is getting smart a better strategy than theirs in the long run? Maybe. But the jury won't be in on that for a very, very long time.

[Old Man]

i wonder what it would take to bring up the more intelligent animals of this planet to full sapience

 

You mean like humans?  I don't think there's any hope for them really.  I'd start with the dolphins.

[massey]

Except, Massey, you are wrong on two fronts. First is assuming that size matters when it comes to brains. While it seems rather obvious that larger brains allow for a certain expansion of cognitive abilities, having a large brain is not actually an indicator of intelligence. If that were the case, elephants should be smarter than people and wildly smarter than a crow. But in reality, humans are rather more intelligent. And the problem solving capacities and cognitive awareness of Crows puts them on par with young human children - which is is already higher than the capacity of elephants.

 

(snip a lot of stuff)

 

At the end of the day, they're still very simple tool users.  While I'm impressed that one might learn how to bend a wire, you're still looking at some variety of "stick".  I knew about them dropping stuff in water to raise the water level, and dropping stuff in the road so that cars run over them to crack them open.

 

It's all quite impressive, for a bird.

 

But really aren't we talking about human-scale intelligence in this thread?  Brain size isn't solely determinative of intelligence, but it does play a large part.  Crows can't develop larger brains because everything else about their design prevents it.  They're at a dead end as far as intelligence goes.  Problem solving skills?  Sure.  Simple tool use?  Sure.  But they can never develop more complex tools, because they don't have the ability to manipulate them.  They can't communicate complex ideas, because they don't have the vocal chords for it.  The changes necessary to make a crow have a higher intelligence would be so significant that it would likely decrease their ability to survive before they ever saw any benefit.