What Is Sapience?

[painted wolf]

In a very broad sense I suppose. Our brain and behavior evolve in sync with one another. Behavior is driven by the mind and the brain evolves under selective pressure.

Our brains reflect, at least in part, the selective pressures that we were under. Highly complex social structures and tool use require pretty hefty brains... but our brains are also the result of non-selective genetic drift.

The evolution of the hominid brain is fairly complex.

wa:do

 

[challupa]

The evolution of the hominid brain is fairly complex.

wa:do

I imagine it is. Thanks for your answers.

 

[logician]

Early mammals (dinosaur era) had larger brains than their reptilian ancestors.
Brain size increase is well documented in many lineages of mammals and birds.

As for pre-dinosaur big brains, the metabolism needed to fuel a large brain requires endothermy. This type of metabolism doesn't appear until the mammals and the dinosaur/pterosaur clade arrive on the scene.
Brain size still increases over time in the cold blooded lineages but not to the degree it does in warm blooded ones. Low metabolic rates can not sustain gratuitous brain mass.

wa:do

I think the point here is evolution of brain sizes and intelligence of human order millions of years ago. There were never ANY animals reptile or mammal that the brain size to mass ratio that humans and Neandertal had or have.

 

[painted wolf]

Some birds beat us in brain to body mass.
Dolphins equal us and Whales beat us.
Mice tie with us.

There is more going on than brain to body mass.
Brain and Body Size... and Intelligence

Truthfully no one mentions brain size as a factor in intelligence beyond gross generalization in human evolution. You simply can not judge intelligence by e/s ratio alone.

wa:do

 

[logician]

Some birds beat us in brain to body mass.
Dolphins equal us and Whales beat us.
Mice tie with us.

There is more going on than brain to body mass.
Brain and Body Size... and Intelligence

Truthfully no one mentions brain size as a factor in intelligence beyond gross generalization in human evolution. You simply can not judge intelligence by e/s ratio alone.

wa:do

Number one I said land animals, 2, I said with intelligence approaching or beyond homo sapiens. Smaller animals, where the brain size itself is minscule to begin with don't really count. I agree there are other things going on, but there really never were animals like ourselves and recent ancestors ever on the scene before in evolution.

 

[painted wolf]

So dolphins and birds just don't count?

Neither do little animals with big brains for their body size? Either B/M works for everyone or no one. You can't have it both ways.

You seem to be stretching things to make humans exclusive with no real logical reason.

I've never said there was anything else "like us". However your statement that we have the highest B/M ratio is flat out false.

I've also stated why cold blooded animals have an upper limit on brain size that mammals and birds do not.
I've also shown that increasing brain size is a general trend in mammal evolution and that includes all mammals not just hominids.

wa:do

 

[crystalonyx]

So dolphins and birds just don't count?

Neither do little animals with big brains for their body size? Either B/M works for everyone or no one. You can't have it both ways.

You seem to be stretching things to make humans exclusive with no real logical reason.

I've never said there was anything else "like us". However your statement that we have the highest B/M ratio is flat out false.

I've also stated why cold blooded animals have an upper limit on brain size that mammals and birds do not.
I've also shown that increasing brain size is a general trend in mammal evolution and that includes all mammals not just hominids.

wa:do

The original point was why didn't animals with large brains with human intelligence evolve long ago, if large brains offer such an evolutionary advantage. It seems to have been lost in the shuffle. If there was a "trend" towards larger brain size in dinosaurs,for example, it was a very slow and erratic one, so the idea that there is always a trend towards large brain size in warm-blooded animals is not particularly valid. It took a billion years for life to develop human intelligence, a very slow trend.

 

[painted wolf]

Mammals have only been around for 125 million years. Not billions.

We started with very small reptilian brains. From 125 to 65 million years that brain size and complexity increased by more than double. In addition the exact nature of early mammal metabolism is questionable. "warm bloodedness" is not a clear line between hot and cold.
The Tenrec for example has a highly variable body temperature. Night and day can swing the body temperature more than 10 degrees.

Naturally not all Dinosaurs are quite the same, the exact nature of their metabolism is unknown for many groups. For those groups who are known to have high-metabolisms there is a trend in brain size increase over time.

In mammals post 65 million years brain size fairly explodes in most lineages. Humans exaggerate this trend but not right away. We have slow growing brains for more than half our history. There were two 'growth bursts' likely tied to mutations, one seems to have rid us of our saggital crest (though this one mutation alone is not enough).

To step away from "warm blooded" animals, one can hardly argue that the modern cuttlefish and octopus has a brain remotely like the brain of basal mollusks like clams.

Big brains are very expensive in terms of metabolism. If you only need to eat once a month you can only 'afford' too much of a brain. And you only have to be smarter or more patient than your prey. Considering how much the 'cold blooded'/'small brained' animals still dominate this planet, truly big brains are frankly not all that needed.
We use our brains mostly to have highly structured complex social lives and to imagine new tools. What does a croc need that for?

One last point, that I made early on. It isn't simply about brain size. It's about brain complexity. Please look at my point on the Tenric and the Marmoset. The Tenric has a brain more than twice the size of the first mammals, but its organization is roughly the same. The Marmoset uses the same brain volume for very different tasks. This is what causes the vast difference in "intelligence" between the two.

Much of human evolution isn't all that adaptive, but other forces like Biased Gene Conversion.
PLoS Biology - Hotspots of Biased Nucleotide Substitutions in Human Genes

wa:do

 

[logician]

Again, the question I have, is if large brains give such an evolutionary advantage, why didn't animals approaching human intelligence evolve hundreds of millions of years ago. My contention is that ancillary traits must evolve first - opposable thumbs for tool making, a voice box for finer communication, before really intelligent species can evolve. These ancillary traits may themselves not have been selected for various reasons, until the age of mammals came into full swing. Dinosaurs did very well with their basic equipment - size, speed, strength, and heavier armor for herbivores, and survived well with those strategies- not needing to evolve larger brains to survive.

 

[painted wolf]

Brains are expensive and take time to evolve. They don't appear out of nowhere.

Hundreds of millions of years ago there were no animals around who could pay the metabolic price for a large brain. That is like expecting a turtle to suddenly gain wings and fly.

Dinosaurs did evolve bigger brains over time, certainly in the groups that we know had higher metabolisms. Toodon had an EQ of just about 6. Croc's have an EQ around 1. That is more than double the brain size of the ancestral "cold blooded" state.
Modern birds (realy just modern dinosaurs) have brains much higher than that. Some have EQ ratings higher than humans.

I think you need to clearify what you consider 'intelligent'.

wa:do

 

[TerranIV]

Is it simply sufficiently advanced intelligence? Is it dependent upon the presence of a soul? How would we know whether another species of animal, or our own AI had achieved it? Is there a hard line separating sapience from non, or is it a gradual process?

What do you think?

I think there are a few things which we would look for in an animal of similar intelligence to us.

- An "advanced" language - or more precisely the ability to use an advanced language. Even though apes can be taught sign language and parrots can memorize words and short phrases, their abilities are extremely limited compared to humans. Humans don't require special training to pick up a language, a human child just "picks it up" with little effort by adults around it (other than to talk a lot to each other and the baby). My cat recognizes a few words I speak to him, but it is pretty clear he doesn't get much out of our conversations. I suspect the amount of cooperation which humans can achieve through our language must seem magical to other species who's communication is fairly limited for the most part.

- An ability to use tools to enhance abilities and senses. A naked human is not that formidable as far as most animals go. When you factor in our brains though all the sudden any rock or stick becomes a weapon. Trees become shelter, other animals fur becomes our clothing. We are not the dominant species on this planet because we are stronger or faster than other animals. Our dominance has come from our creativity and ability to enhance our natural abilities with tools and machines.

- I think self awareness is a key aspect to what makes us unique. Not only are we self aware, but we are aware other humans are self aware too and have similar needs and emotions which we have. This special ability allows us to feel love and apathy with others - which it some of the most precious and unique qualities about our human species.

- Even though our hands and thumbs are very important for interacting in the world, the loss of our hands doesn't seem to make us feel any less human. The loss of brain activity, however, reduces people to being compared to vegetables.

It seems odd there are not other human species still alive. It seems from ancient records (like the bible) there may have been a time not so long ago in human history when there were other species of humans besides us sapiens (like erectus and neanderthal) but they were either killed or assimilated. It would be facinating to find a lost tribe of one of those species some day, if only to see how similar or different their ways of thinking were!

I am hopeful we will continue the acceleration of evolution we have started with our brain's ability to learn and get new skills by advancing our species toward robotic enhancements as well as advancing our machines to a point where we could call them "alive" (and hopefully our friends).

 

[painted wolf]

- An "advanced" language - or more precisely the ability to use an advanced language. Even though apes can be taught sign language and parrots can memorize words and short phrases, their abilities are extremely limited compared to humans. Humans don't require special training to pick up a language, a human child just "picks it up" with little effort by adults around it (other than to talk a lot to each other and the baby). My cat recognizes a few words I speak to him, but it is pretty clear he doesn't get much out of our conversations. I suspect the amount of cooperation which humans can achieve through our language must seem magical to other species who's communication is fairly limited for the most part.

Humans need to be trained to speak non-native language. Why suppose that an animal with human type intelligence wouldn't need to learn a language as non-native as what humans use?
Parrots are all the more impressive as they don't have many of the physical structures for producing human language. They have no voice box or larynx or lips.

- An ability to use tools to enhance abilities and senses. A naked human is not that formidable as far as most animals go. When you factor in our brains though all the sudden any rock or stick becomes a weapon. Trees become shelter, other animals fur becomes our clothing. We are not the dominant species on this planet because we are stronger or faster than other animals. Our dominance has come from our creativity and ability to enhance our natural abilities with tools and machines.

Tool use is quite common in nature. New Caledonian Crows for example make and use a decent variety of tools for different situations. Dolphins have just begun to experiment with tool use and chimps use spears to hunt. The only thing that sets us apart is the massive degree with which we rely on tools and their variety.

- I think self awareness is a key aspect to what makes us unique. Not only are we self aware, but we are aware other humans are self aware too and have similar needs and emotions which we have. This special ability allows us to feel love and apathy with others - which it some of the most precious and unique qualities about our human species.

This is not unique to humans. The corvid family (jays, magpies, crows) have been experimentally proven to be self-aware and to be albe to "put themselves in anothers shoes" so to speak. Empathy has been demonstrated in Chimps.

- Even though our hands and thumbs are very important for interacting in the world, the loss of our hands doesn't seem to make us feel any less human. The loss of brain activity, however, reduces people to being compared to vegetables.

I think this goes for any animal with a brain.

Just some points for you to consider.

wa:do

 

[challupa]

Humans need to be trained to speak non-native language. Why suppose that an animal with human type intelligence wouldn't need to learn a language as non-native as what humans use?
Parrots are all the more impressive as they don't have many of the physical structures for producing human language. They have no voice box or larynx or lips.

Tool use is quite common in nature. New Caledonian Crows for example make and use a decent variety of tools for different situations. Dolphins have just begun to experiment with tool use and chimps use spears to hunt. The only thing that sets us apart is the massive degree with which we rely on tools and their variety.

This is not unique to humans. The corvid family (jays, magpies, crows) have been experimentally proven to be self-aware and to be albe to "put themselves in anothers shoes" so to speak. Empathy has been demonstrated in Chimps.

I think this goes for any animal with a brain.

Just some points for you to consider.

wa:do

I saw an interesting video the other day and would like to share it if I can get the link to work.
YouTube - Hero Dog Tries to Help Mortally Wounded Dog - Chile

 

[painted wolf]

I've seen this clip, it's very interesting!
I wish we knew more about the dogs. Where they pack mates? Siblings? Is this behavior common or rare among the population?

I'm not sure if any studies have been done of urban feral dog populations. I guess I have something new to research when I have some down time.

wa:do

 

[challupa]

I've seen this clip, it's very interesting!
I wish we knew more about the dogs. Where they pack mates? Siblings? Is this behavior common or rare among the population?

I'm not sure if any studies have been done of urban feral dog populations. I guess I have something new to research when I have some down time.

wa:do

Yes I would have liked to know more about it too. I almost question it's authenticity but I suppose it's possible. If it is, it raises many questions. I know dogs have been known to save humans, but other dogs I have never heard of.