Fun Fact: Brain Size & Evolution

[Joseph Tracy]

I think it is GALAPAGOS where Kurt Vonnegut argues the downsides of the human brain and it’s role in planetary and human self destruction. Funny in a “laughter from the grave” kind of a way.
 We don’t really know what and how whales and dolphins communicate. Might there be other kinds of communication based for instance on something like sonar’s ability to portray a terrain? Might there even be a poetry and mathematics of  sound waves? What about   telepathic communication? What about subtle emotional communications that are more like music than words?  I love words, but there is a sense in which they are all abstract lies, and that objectifying others through language is as much a disease as an insight. 

I am reading and listening to work by Jaime De Angulo who knew 15 California Indian languages and told tradition-based stories with talking animals and the occasional talking tree.

Right now the most  globally important human structure invented from language and record keeping is debt, where some people hire or coerce other people to protect their power measured in debt counters. Fork over your time, your land, your children, the air you breathe, the water, the ground you stand on, the stored energy of ancient forests. Everything is owed to this black hole of the human imagination. Clever.

Perhaps there is another approch to communication that is more friendly, humble, inclusive. Perhaps the ability to label everything before we kill it is not so great.


> On Dec 8, 2017, at 2:31 PM, Arthur Fuller <fuller.artful at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> While not being a scientist, merely a philosopher and more specifically a philosopher of science, I must dispute the notion that brain-size is equivalent to quantity of intelligence -- which, I admit, depends upon your unit of measure. Squirrels cannot play piano; but they can navigate trees and hydro wires far better than you or I. Whales can communicate over 1000 miles. Wolves hunt in teams, isolating the most likely victim. This last is a double-edged sword; it may be that the most vulnerable deer sacrifices him/herself for the sake of the herd. That's a difficult proposition to prove, but I've seen similar behaviour in birds when attacked by hawks or falcons. I have seen this more than several times. One bird flies off from the rest and sacrifices her/hiself  for the sake of the rest.
> 
> There is a school of thought, originating from B.F. Skinner I think, that supposes that all species act in their individual self-interest. Abundant evidence contradicts this thesis. Similarly the proposed correlation between brain size and intelligence. Taken literally, whales and porpoises and elephants would top the scale, but none of them has invented written language, and further, they are not very good at transmitting knowledge from generation to generation -- a little I grant, but not much.
> 
> The evidence, insofar as my limited education reveals, is that there is no relation between brain size and intelligence. That also applies to the ability to navigate a maze.
> 
> Arthur
> 
> On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 10:23 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Efficiency, yes.  But the rest is a maze. But the maze is fascinating.
> 
> On Thu, Dec 7, 2017 at 9:11 PM John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've heard that the number of folds (I'm sure there's a proper word
> for them) is really important too, not just the overall size. Using
> that thing more efficiently, as you say. I mean, computers have gotten
> slightly smaller in the last half century too.
> 
> On Fri, Dec 8, 2017 at 2:01 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Fun fact: domesticated animals have evolved to have smaller brains than
> > their wild species cousins.  No pain, less brain (size)?
> >
> >
> > We humans are also mostly domesticated.  Are our brains smaller than those
> > of our earlier cousins?
> >
> >
> > It is also a fun fact that more intelligent species consistently have
> > smaller brain-to-body size ratios.  So counter intuitive, right?
> >
> >
> > Maybe brains become more efficient and smaller as intelligence grows.  Maybe
> > intelligence grows with domestication.  But whales and elephants are on the
> > smaller brain, more intelligent scale, and are not "domesticated."  Are
> > there species (us) that have self-domesticated, therefore becoming more
> > intelligent?
> >
> >
> > "Domesticated" in this context does not mean under subjection of another
> > species.
> >
> >
> > Just a thought...
> >
> >
> > David Morris
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Arthur
> 

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