Intelligence and mitochondria

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mistermack
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Re: Intelligence and mitochondria

Post by mistermack » Tue Jul 17, 2012 5:43 pm

MiM wrote: The first part "The thing with evolving greater intelligence is that there has to be a survival benefit for every tiny incremental increase, otherwise it won't happen.
Evolution has no way of working towards future benefits that might happen, once you get to a certain standard." Is standard textbook stuff, and mostly ok (although there are things like genetic drift, and pure chance playing in too).

But it's your conclusions I think resemble creationist shit. Many species have evolved some sort of intelligence. How did the Buffalo learn to make a ring, if that would be unlikely for the Water Buffalo. I see no barrier (except, perhaps the pre-existence of humans) for chimps or parrots to develop human like intelligence.
Well, I deliberately said "might". I certainly wouldn't claim anything certain for the future. I was really pointing out that a constant increase in intelligence is by no means inevitable for any species. In fact intelligence can easily go into reverse, if an increase doesn't bestow any benefit on the individuals chance of reproduction.

That exact process could be happening to the human species right now.

You might be right that there is no barrier to chimps and parrots evolving intelligence to match ours.
I'm sure there isn't a physical barrier. But that's kind of assuming that intelligence always increases, which is not necessarily true.

The "barrier", if there is one, would be the lack of a higher survival rate for the more intelligent.
Simple as that. It's not a physical barrier, but it would still mean that intelligence would stall.

That's happened for crocodiles, and compared to us, it happened to chimps and bonobos, who had the same ancestor as us, have had the same length of time to evolve, and yet have not evolved any noticeable increase in intelligence.

As far as Buffalo go, I don't think they consciously form a ring. they just stand side by side, and the front ends are wider than the rear. But they don't have the brains to keep that formation. Predators can usually break it up, or they just lose patience.
The problem is that a little extra intelligence would not solve that problem. So there would have to be some other benefit that came from each small increase in intelligence, to get the level up to a point where they could work that kind of thing out.

It's just a fundamental principle. For something to evolve, it has to have a route all the way. Dawkins explains it well, with a mountain with various peaks. If you go up the wrong peak, you can never get to the top of the mountain, without going backwards, downhill.
Maybe Parrots and Chimpanzees are stuck at the top of a lower intelligence peak, or they may be on the lower slopes of the highest. It's impossible to tell.
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Re: Intelligence and mitochondria

Post by JimC » Tue Jul 17, 2012 9:27 pm

MiM wrote:

But it's your conclusions I think resemble creationist shit. Many species have evolved some sort of intelligence. How did the Buffalo learn to make a ring, if that would be unlikely for the Water Buffalo. I see no barrier (except, perhaps the pre-existence of humans) for chimps or parrots to develop human like intelligence.
I think that mistermack is suggesting that a human-like intelligence is a relatively low-probability event; that is, that the type of intelligence that uses and manipulates symbols and abstract concepts. There is certainly no way of knowing for sure, without examining many independent examples of evolution on life-bearing planets, but it would not surprise me if that were the case...
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Re: Intelligence and mitochondria

Post by Blind groper » Tue Jul 17, 2012 10:10 pm

Of course, a human level intelligence is of no use at all without a means of manipulating the environment. The largest brain of any animal is the sperm whale. Much bigger than the human brain. Human brain is about 1300 grams versus 9000 for the sperm whale brain.

It is doubtless a smart animal, but does that big brain mean human level intelligence? We cannot judge, and if it had such a level of smarts, it would be pretty much useless without hands or other ways of making and using tools and weapons.
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Re: Intelligence and mitochondria

Post by mistermack » Tue Jul 17, 2012 11:57 pm

Blind groper wrote:Of course, a human level intelligence is of no use at all without a means of manipulating the environment. The largest brain of any animal is the sperm whale. Much bigger than the human brain. Human brain is about 1300 grams versus 9000 for the sperm whale brain.

It is doubtless a smart animal, but does that big brain mean human level intelligence? We cannot judge, and if it had such a level of smarts, it would be pretty much useless without hands or other ways of making and using tools and weapons.
No, it's likely that the big whales are not very intelligent. The big brain of the sperm whale is largely there because of it's massive size. A big body needs a big brain just to control it's biological functions.
There is a rough rule that gives a guide to intelligence. It's the ratio of brain mass to body mass.
For animals of roughly the same size, it's a fairly good guide to intelligence. But it's not so good, if you compare animals of vastly different sizes.

A human has a ratio of about forty to one. A Chimpanzee about eighty to one. So as you would expect, the human is much more intelligent.
But a mouse also has a ratio of about forty to one, like humans. Because the smaller the species, the lower the ratio. So it doesn't mean that mice are anywhere near humans.

So it's complicated. A house cat has a ratio of about 100 to 1. A tiger about 500 to 1. But the intelligence is about the same. It's the body size that causes the difference.

Whales have a VERY big ratio, even though they have huge brains. Because their body weight is so enormous. The ratio for whales is thousands to one.

There is a formula called the encephalisation quotient, that corrects for this effect of overall body size, and this gives a fairly good guide as to how intelligent a species is.
On that scale, humans are about 7.5 and mice are 0.5, Dolphins are 4 and Chimps are 3.

It's only a rough guide though. Whales don't fit too well into it, because a lot of their body mass is blubber, which doesn't need extra brain mass to keep working. It would be hard to judge the intelligence of a whale anyway, as we don't have much of a clue about their lives.
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Re: Intelligence and mitochondria

Post by Blind groper » Wed Jul 18, 2012 12:21 am

On the encephalisation quotient, the smartest animal is the shrew. About 10% of its body mass is brain - the highest EQ of any animal. Yet shrews are pretty damn stupid! The kea parrot I mentioned earlier has a brain half the size of an adult man's thumb, but has an EQ higher than human. Birds break the rules.

However, among primates, it has been discovered that total brain mass is a better predictor of intelligence than EQ.
The elephant has a relatively small EQ, but has a big brain in absolute terms, 13 to 23 kg, compared to 1300 g for human. The elephant is highly intelligent.

The stegasaurus was about the size of an elephant, but had a brain a tiny fraction of the size of the elephant's brain (perhaps about 80 grams - the size of a walnut), which indicates that big body does not require big brain.

All of this makes it very likely that the sperm whale, with the largest brain in existence, like the elephant, is also very intelligent.
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