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Author Topic:   Cosmos with Neil DeGrass Tyson
Dogmafood
Member (Idle past 349 days)
Posts: 1815
From: Ontario Canada
Joined: 08-04-2010


Message 127 of 206 (724442)
04-17-2014 8:29 AM


Inner Fish
I caught a bit of Your Inner Fish last night. They were talking about the size of the mammalian brain. I thought that it was peculiar that they would say that the fact that mammals were processing so much information caused their brains to grow.
Is that right? If I do lots of calculus will my children have bigger brains?

Replies to this message:
 Message 128 by Omnivorous, posted 04-17-2014 9:23 AM Dogmafood has replied
 Message 129 by NoNukes, posted 04-17-2014 9:27 AM Dogmafood has replied
 Message 135 by onifre, posted 04-19-2014 9:26 AM Dogmafood has not replied
 Message 138 by RAZD, posted 04-25-2014 5:58 PM Dogmafood has seen this message but not replied

  
Dogmafood
Member (Idle past 349 days)
Posts: 1815
From: Ontario Canada
Joined: 08-04-2010


Message 130 of 206 (724564)
04-18-2014 6:29 AM
Reply to: Message 128 by Omnivorous
04-17-2014 9:23 AM


Re: Inner Fish
But even very good scientists slip into teleological shorthand explanations;
I suppose in passing conversation but I wouldn't expect it to make it past the editors. It seems a pretty fundamental difference in the description of a process.
I wonder as well what would cause the mutation for a slightly larger brain to keep showing up again and again. In fact wouldn't an increase in brain size require simultaneous mutations in many genes and given that the increases would be small it would mean that the same combination of mutations happened many times. It seems likely that there would be some driver that was causing the sustained incremental increases.
Bigger than what?
Just bigger than my lizard brain.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 128 by Omnivorous, posted 04-17-2014 9:23 AM Omnivorous has replied

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Dogmafood
Member (Idle past 349 days)
Posts: 1815
From: Ontario Canada
Joined: 08-04-2010


Message 131 of 206 (724566)
04-18-2014 6:36 AM
Reply to: Message 129 by NoNukes
04-17-2014 9:27 AM


Re: Inner Fish
I think it is a mixture of sexual selection and the fact that math skills are valuable life skills.
I can see the sexual selection for intelligence as opposed to head size.
Have our brains gotten any larger in the last 200k yrs and is brain size proportional to intelligence?

This message is a reply to:
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Replies to this message:
 Message 136 by 1.61803, posted 04-23-2014 2:47 PM Dogmafood has seen this message but not replied
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