Evolution of Intelligence More Complex Than Once Thought 453
palegray.net writes "According to a new article published in Scientific American, the nature of and evolutionary development of animal intelligence is significantly more complicated than many have assumed. In opposition to the widely held view that intelligence is largely linear in nature, in many cases intelligent traits have developed along independent paths. From the article: 'Over the past 30 years, however, research in comparative neuroanatomy clearly has shown that complex brains — and sophisticated cognition — have evolved from simpler brains multiple times independently in separate lineages ...'"
Re:You kid, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
. as if following some pre-determined path to a completed, human state.
Or, as if there are a limited number of adequate solutions to the problem 'control a bunch of muscles in order to survive in a three dimensional environment in which other organisms are trying to do the same thing'.
It seems like what we're seeing is that *if* a species randomly goes down the brain route, it'll either die out, or develop a brain very like other brains. Note that many organisms survive very nicely with no brain at all. Where's their "pre-determined path to a completed human state"?
Re:You kid, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
No, it is not. Things of the same type evolving separately, only shows that those traits are successful.
It is also not new. It is pretty obvious that cephalopod and vertebrate brains evolved separately, and that bird and mammal advances over reptiles evolved separately.
What's the difference? (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, even a spider can do quite tricky maths in order to work out how to spin a web between arbitrary fixed points, yet is completely flummoxed by even the simplest general knowledge quiz.
So what I want to know is, what was it about human beings that caused us to develop the capacity to drive cars, build computers and walk on the moon?
Re:Wow, evolution (Score:2, Interesting)
Christians do not deny MICRO-evolution. For example, when two different breeds of dog mate, they form something different.
However, we deny that species evolve into other species. For example, fish do not become horses and cats do not become giraffes.
Now I have heard an example of modern evolution that defines a new species like this: suppose you have a fish that is normally green, but occasionally a mutation occurs and a blue fish is born among the green fish. Suppose these fish live near some green coral where the green fish blend in and thus survive more than the blue fish. Then, say that several of the green and blue fish migrate away from that area several miles to where there happens to be a lot of blue coral. Now, the green fish die off and the blue fish survive. Over time these two populations no longer breed amongst each other. By my understanding, evolution defines them as two separate species and state that MACRO-evolution has occurred. I call that a convenient definition to suit evolutionist agenda. Utterly ridiculous.
I have a hard time accepting evolution in general due to the wild leaps it makes. For instance, Ben Stein asked Richard Dawkins about the origins of life in the universe and the possibility of intelligent design. The best answer that a practiced scientist and atheist can give on the spot is that some higher form of life evolved and then populated the earth with life. That is, aliens evolved & put life on earth. But, the aliens themselves would have had to evolved through some natural process. THAT is his answer to intelligent design. He answered NOTHING, but merely moved the issue to another planet. It is circular reasoning. I simply do not understand this die-hard attitude towards something that many reputable scientists have abandoned and continue to abandon to this day.
For reference, the interview with Mr. Dawkins is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlZtEjtlirc&feature=related
Turn It Around (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's try the alternative:
Comparative neuroanatomy findings indicate that all the various animals have identical brains that evolved identically, and that they all operate on a single function through a single pathway.
I could go on but I'm not going to page through the article to pick at it more, and in so doing satisfy their click-through quota.
I used to really like the old, stodgy, stuffy SciAm. It said what it meant clearly and didn't end up with an oral-pedal inversion by trying to say more than was warranted, or that it felt it had to pump up with hype in the name of market share.
I like the new SciAm too, but I liked it better when it was called OMNI.
Re:What's the difference? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think the spider is doing any maths. It's a bit like us when we can simply immediately point to an intercept between two curves on a graph. Finding the intercept mathematically is moderately hard, but just looking and seeing where it is is no effort at all. The spider's brain is just looking and seeing where to place the silk - it's no effort at all and he certainly won't be breaking out the spidery slide rule.
Re:What's the difference? (Score:5, Interesting)
One observation I made many years ago led me to realise that we mostly underestimate what even small brains routinely do. I was watching a hovering seagull while waiting at some traffic lights. It was scanning the road surface below for a few seconds, then swooped down and picked up the tiniest speck of food from the tarmac. This was on a busy city street with lots of litter and other debris on the road, such as small stones and gravel, cigarette butts, etc. The tarmac itself presented a "noisy" image background and yet the gull picked out that speck as being worth expending its energy on from a height of 30 or so feet while maintaining balance in flight in a gusty high wind with a lot of moving traffic around. The image processing required to do that boggles my mind! So much for bird-brains.
It's not such a leap to suppose that intelligence, whatever it is, is far more common than we assume. What counts as intelligent for a dog, cat or even a bright bird like a Magpie is probably not something we'd really recognise. Every creature's intelligence is uniquely its own.
What inhibits intelligence, then? (Score:2, Interesting)
If creatures have evolved enough intelligence to use tools and anticipate the future, then why aren't all animals intelligent? As some of them have been around for longer than us, why aren't they smarter than us? Some adaptions, such as flight, or vision, or a poisonous bite might seem to have to happen all at once, but intelligence can come by degrees - adding a few more brain cells here and here until you have the right balance, until you reach some natural limit where the head becomes too heavy or uses too much energy.
There has to be a payback for having intelligence. If the animal has something that can grasp objects, then it can use tools and do things that it would not normally be able to do. If you are a shellfish then there is not much you can do with your deep thoughts, so a smarter shellfish is less likely to survive.
This is guesswork, but maybe extra weight in our head makes us clumsier and vulnerable to neck injuries. That, and the energy requirements of the larger brain. But it's not really that much larger, is it? Birds have very compact brains - if this was an issue, then our brains would be smaller too. No - I think there has to be something else, but I can't see what it is.
Any ideas?
Re:Wow, evolution (Score:4, Interesting)
# C - Whole chromosome extra, missing, or both - see chromosomal aberrations
# T - Trinucleotide repeat disorders - gene is extended in length
Anyway, I will ask you a simple question if we build a device to directly view the past and you can watch over billions of years as life evolves as scientists thought it did, and see the most interesting thing Jesus did was starting a cult. Would you still believe in God?
Re:Wow, evolution (Score:1, Interesting)
Many Bible-believing Christians are evolutionists.
Nobody interprets the Bible entirely literally. So, it is simply a matter (albeit a very important one) of where to plant your feet on the slippery slope of allegory. Did God literally lift up Israel with his strong right arm? I'm sure you'll agree not.
Please read Francis Collins' The Language of God
http://www.amazon.com/Language-God-Scientist-Presents-Evidence/dp/0743286391
Re:Wow, evolution (Score:1, Interesting)
Point being, modern fish resemble the common ancestor of fish and horses about as much as horses do.
Re:What inhibits intelligence, then? (Score:3, Interesting)
More intelligence isn't always useful to reproduce better, which is what matters for evolution.
A bird that is born with a better brain that allows it to realize that it can pick a sharp rock and bash it against an egg with a hard shell to break it has an advantage: it now has more food available to it. It will be healthier (or survive) and will be more likely to reproduce.
A cat born with a brain that allows it to realize that if it could perform the necessary operations it could build mousetraps to catch mice isn't any better off. In fact it's probably worse off due to being depressed after realizing that an improvement is possible but it physically can't do what would be required due to cat paws being useless for the job, and having a larger brain that takes more energy for no benefit.
Same thing for humans. A brain that makes you a supremely good programmer isn't terribly good at attracting women, especially when using that extra ability involves withdrawing from society to get things done.
Re:Wow, evolution (Score:1, Interesting)
The "classic religious position" probably refers to pre-enlightenment religious doctrine, which is echoed in today's Religious Right. The Catholic acceptance of evolution is largely the result of an especially moderate Pope. By and large the religious elite of today are still hostile to evolution, in spite of the more moderate "flocks" they tend to.
You're correct that many people who identify themselves as religious have a worldview that includes evolution. These people either go to small liberal churches or quickly learn to keep their opinions to themselves.
Re:What inhibits intelligence, then? (Score:3, Interesting)
Same thing for humans. A brain that makes you a supremely good programmer isn't terribly good at attracting women, especially when using that extra ability involves withdrawing from society to get things done.
If you have to withdraw from society to get things done, then perhaps you're not as great a programmer as you think you are. The qualities that make a good programmer are in no way incompatible with getting on in society.
The qualities that make a good programmer - abstract thought, application, problem solving, general geekery - have always been useful in society. People look to you for inventions and solutions, and are willing to pay for it.
The 'programmer' in a prehistoric tribe, might be the guy who realised you could throw spears further by flinging with a curved stick... or the guy who realised you could herd mammoths into a gulley to trap them. Their tribe would definitely be interested in keeping that person around, so they'd be high up in the pecking order when it came to sharing out food, drink and shelter.
So being useful tends to keep you alive, healthy and wealthy. All terrific things to look for in a mate.
Once you do reproduce, your kids are more likely to survive and reproduce themselves, because you've earned privilege which you pass on to them. Better food, better education.
(I'm imagining all this in a prehistoric setting - but I think it applies right up to the present day.)
Geeks are not extinct. Guess why not? Because being clever is a good survival strategy.
Other good survival strategies include being physically strong, or just breeding a lot. Homo Sapiens exhibits those too. I'm not judging!
Re:Wow, evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm atheistic/apatheistic/agnostic, whatever you want to call it, but I've never understood why anyone would say that proving evolution (via your device to view it in action) would prove god/gods doesn't/don't exist.Likewise, I don't understand people on the flip-side who think that somehow believing in evolution is contrary to believing in god/gods.
The only thing proof of or belief in evolution would indicate is that the literal interpretation of the Bible is false. That's it. Trying to push it and say that evolution disproves god is illogical - it just disproves a particular tale of how a god or gods might have created things. A particular tale, I might add, that only *recently* has been believed by anyone to be anything but a bunch of metaphor and allegory for various events, concepts etc.
The whole "evolution denies god!" or "evolution disproves god!" argument is just flat-out stupid. It's like saying that the existence of apples demonstrates conclusively that super-string theory is false, or that Newton's laws of motion prove conclusively that unicorns don't exist. The two arguments have nothing to do with each other, except that some people use tortured logic to try and connect them in some kind of meaningful way.
By the way - Georges Lemaitre, the father of the big bang theory (though he didn't call it that)? Catholic priest and, one imagines, quite the believer in god in addition to being a half-decent physicist. I guess he didn't get the memo about the bible being literal truth...
Re:Wow, evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
The Council that put together the Bible 200 years or so after Christ's birth, debated hotly which books went into it. The whole Old Testament was included for chiefly two reasons*
1. Some (not nearly all), wanted to include any OT book that seemed to have a prophecy of Jesus's coming, so that Christians could see that He met all the tests.
2. Some wanted all the Jewish laws in every copy of the Bible, so that Christians could see what laws Jesus was talking about when he spoke about living not by the law but by every breath which comes from the Mouth of God, and other such things.
While there were some people who favored a third reason, genuinely believing that God wanted all Christians to keep to all the OT rules, they actually were far, far short of a majority. Paul's writings on circumcision seemed to have already clarified that point to most.
Some of the council didn't want parts or even any of the OT. The resolution to cut it to just the five books of the Torah narrowly failed. Some felt that any Christians who wanted copies of what became the OT for their church should just make those on their own, as they were of the opinion that only churches with a large Jewish convert membership would want to go to the extra expense.
This same process happened with the New Testament. Some Gospels were excluded because they seemed to disagree with others, some were taken as true but left off the list just because they didn't add all that much to the first four. There was a debate about whether four was enough, or too many, and it ended up being settled by an argument that four was the number God must have wanted, since He made so many 4's in nature, such as the four classical Greek elements. (And half a dozen attendees wrote home saying that the argument was silly, but since enough people bought it that the council could move on to the next point, it was probably OK). There were lots of Revelations, and the council picked one that seemed best, but some of the ones they left out were believed to be doctrinally OK, just too long to add to an already huge book that the council was going to urge every church to get a copy of.
I have tried to keep the two commandments as Christ gave them, and I hope that Paul was right when he said 'the greatest of these is charity', for those times that faith and hope have seemed far away. I do not see how it is possible to be a Christian while denying the existence of God, but I have every hope that, if the first AC has tried earnestly to love his neighbor as himself, he just might make it through the needle's eye.
*As various of the members themselves said, in letters back to the churches that had sent them. These are letters of record, both ones found by modern archaeological digs and ones that have been in the Vatican's collections for centuries. Even if the latter may include forgeries and such, the people who have studied these have done real science to weed most of those out. It's extremely unlikely, for example, that anyone planted a forged letter in the Vatican's collection in, say, the 12th century, and then bothered to plant copies with the Ethiopian Coptic Church or the Eastern Orthodox churches too.
Re:My cats are little people (Score:2, Interesting)
So, if given the right, who would they have voted for in the previous election?
Re:Wow, evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
"Now I have heard an example of modern evolution that defines a new species like this: suppose you have a fish that is normally green, but occasionally a mutation occurs and a blue fish is born among the green fish. Suppose these fish live near some green coral where the green fish blend in and thus survive more than the blue fish. Then, say that several of the green and blue fish migrate away from that area several miles to where there happens to be a lot of blue coral. Now, the green fish die off and the blue fish survive. Over time these two populations no longer breed amongst each other. By my understanding, evolution defines them as two separate species and state that MACRO-evolution has occurred. I call that a convenient definition to suit evolutionist agenda. Utterly ridiculous."
Personally, I'd liken that to breeds in dogs, rather than species, if the only thing that's changed is the color to suit an environmental issue. But, it's a helpful jumping off point, so let's push it a bit further and perhaps you'll get a visit from the clue fairy.
The two populations of fish have split off - green and blue. Let's fall them family 1 and family 2.
Family 1 stays by that coral - green fish survive, blue ones die. Family 2 moves off to the blue coral where blue fish live, green ones die.
Now, let's say there is some kind of infestation/earthquake/algal bloom or whatever that ruins family 1's coral, kills it off. F1 now splits again - F11 and F12. F11 is comprised of members that try to make a go of it staying at the coral, and let's say that F11 is mostly made of individuals who are big enough to make predators think twice about attacking them. F12 is mostly made of smaller members who move to a new environment, one in which their small size is an asset to avoiding predators, let's say it's a cave system.
F11 members - the biggish ones that resist predators through size - continue to "breed for size" (of course, they don't know this, it's just that the ones that live long enough to breed are the bigger ones). Over time, they become substantially larger than their old F1 ancestors - and food becomes scarce by the coral source. So some members of F11 - the ones who can range over larger distances for food, let's call them F112 - start to spread out over larger and larger distances to find food. The ones maybe some are more efficient at hoovering up plankton or algae (bigger mouths, maybe slightly more efficient stomachs, whatever) - they become F1121. Others are maybe a little more aggressive and instead of going after nutrients from plants, they actually go after smaller fish that eat plants - so they swallow those little fish and their guts rip up the little fish, releasing the plants the little fish ate (let's call these predators F1122). The F1121's keep on getting bigger, more effective at hoovering up plankton and stuff like that, and more able to just roam for VERY long distances to get their daily meal. So we have F1121 - gigantic vegetarians capable of covering huge distances.
The aggressive ones, the F1122's, something interesting happens to them... One batch (F11221) has a bit of a less discerning gut, one that happens to derive nutrition not just from the plants released from their prey, but also maybe a little bit from the blood of that prey that gets released. At first it's not much, but the ones who are able to do that trick well wind up being just a little more efficient than the ones who can't, and soon F11221's have gotten to the point where they're also able to digest the meat from their prey which is MUCH more efficient than digesting the plants. So F11221's have become basically carnivorous.
The F11222's are the F1122's that aren't as maneuverable. They prefer shallower waters like those nearer to land. They still eat plants, but lots of the plants are on the surface of the water, and some of these guys, it turns out, are able to pull some oxygen from air (not a lot, just a little, just enough to let them stay on the surface eating plants a little longer
Re:Linearity in Complexity???!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure that first claim was tongue in cheek, so I won't bother to disabuse you of the notion that you're an expert, but you asked a smart question so:
As a classical mathematical concept, Markov Chains are considered stochastic processes (with the word stochastic meaning damned near exactly what the average guy means by random).
Evolution is a non-random process. (Evolution has two major aspects, Mutation and Selection. Mutation itself is random, but Selection applies a pressure that should be mathematically treated as a non-random vector.).
From that alone, it would seem you could have a Markov Chain like process only to the extent there was no selection pressure. Imagine it's the Ediacaran, and there are no predators for sea pens yet. In fact, the seas are mostly empty, not just of predators, but of niche competitors. Sea pens have all evolved to the point where they have minimal anchor feet because they need them to resist occasional current surges from mud slides, but with no other real selection pressures, sea pens might develop in very exotic ways, expanding into what is effectively a vast, empty morpheme space. As the Ediacaran gives way to the Cambrian, some Sea Pens might end up completely dwelling under the mud, others become free swimming, some become incredibly diverse from their ancestors of only a few dozen generations, etc.
Parts of what is called the Cambrian Explosion would look like Markov Chains, at least approximately (as they do). Most times, evolutionary processes don't look like this, and the lack of Stochasticism explains why nicely.
Note there's one other problem with applying a Markov Chain model. It's assumed for actually deriving a Markov Chain's formula, that the probabilities for each step are a. known and can b. be independently calculated, and that's not a completely safe assumption in Biology.
Re:Wow, evolution (Score:3, Interesting)
The fish that had descendants that were some fish and some amphibians were very different from both sets of their descendants. (This isn't required, but that's how it happened.)
During the evolution of amphibians into reptiles, there existed many intermediate species, that if they still survived today would cause classification problems. That one was a transition with lots of intermediate steps. Lots of the transition species still survive, but they tend to get grouped into "amphibian". Salamanders aren't that similar to frogs... But then consider the Axotyl, which is almost an intermediate between an amphibian and a fish. (It generally never passes from the "tadpole" stage to the adult stage...but instead becomes a sexually active "child". So it never turns into an air-breather, even though it looks more like a lizard.)
If you doubt evolution, then you are merely displaying your evidence unless you have a different explanation for millions of disparate pieces of evidence. You could be displaying skepticism, but only if you also doubt all competing theories.
Re:Wow, evolution (Score:2, Interesting)