A question of intelligence Great debate with NYCboy,Mike the Wiz and NosyNed

This is actually a darned good question. But there are a colossal number of similar questions we can ask:
Why can squids change their skin color in such amazing patterns. They make our blushing 'pale' by comparison.
Why are some whales so darned huge?
Why can a peregrine falcon reach 200 miles an hour but an ostrich can't fly at all?
Why can a cheetah run 70 miles an hour but my cat just lays there?There is a huge amount behind an answer to this question so we either give you a quick summary and leave you hungry for more or we leave the answer until you understand how the evolutionary model of life's development is stated to work.I'll have a quick go now. It may take a few passes.There are a huge number of different niches for an animal to fit into. If the shuffling of mutations and the selection of some individuals happens to tune one animal to fill a niche very well then it offers significant competition to any one that might follow along.All of the traits I mentioned in the questions above are amazing things. No less amazing than what our brains are capable of.The simple answer as to why they are there at all is that they work. They happen to work for the animals that are alive today (us included). Once they arise if they work they hang around for awhile.So that is why we have brains - they were helpful to our grandparents many times removed. There are lots and lots of suggestions for why ours got so darned big and it will probably be difficult to pick the 'right' one. However, while we might not be sure of the why we are starting to get a good idea of the how. That is we are learning what changed in our genes to allow for our big, fat brains. But the simple answer remains: some of our grandfathers did a bit better than the neighbors because they had bigger brains.Now why does only H. sapiens (that's us) have such a ridiculously over done brain?One reason is obvious from history. Both very, very long ago history and recent history. We were not once the only animals with pretty good brains. At various times our very great grandparents had to compete with a number of animals with brains of comparable size. And recently (very recently actually) some close cousins (but NOT us) had brains a bit bigger.So why only us now?Well, give a thought to very recent history. The last 3000 years will do nicely. What do you think we would have done over that time if there had been a bunch of land-grabbing,resource-using intelligent birds that were just as smart as us?We know exactly what we would do. We'd do what we did to members of our own species who dared to be in our way. We killed 'em. And we probably killed our cousins H. neanderthalis too. There is clearly only room for one hyper-trophied brainiac species on the planet. The niche is full.

Why is it important to know these details?Dophins may be "different" smart is all. Why is technology the only measure of how smart an animal is?This business of picking a viewpoint that is totally biased to human qualities is called "anthropocentrism". Google it.Being smart has proven to be a pretty good survival trick for as much as a couple of million years and as little as 10,000. The jury is (as it is with all adaptations) still out. There are signs that we are either too smart or not smart enough for our own good. If this is true we will, like the vast majority of animals become extinct.As a species we are pretty well certain (but technology might have an override on this) going to be extinct sometime. The only question that is interesting evolotionarily is while we have decendant species or not.This is, I thought, supposed to be about evolutionary models. The reasons why dolphins are or are not as smart as we are is probably part of neurophysiology. We don't know enough about their brain or ours to say yet. What does that have to do with biological evolution?

Yes, we may well run into questions we can never answer. We are doing very darned well so far. And we've really only been working effectively at it for maybe 500 years. Sorry yes I mean "will". It is true that with such a large population and broad interbreeding there may not be any speciation by the splitting off of a population. This is called allopatric speciation.However, over a very long time -- a small number of millions of years the the gene pool could still wander especially if there are changing selective pressures (I'm not sure if this is sympatric speciation or not). In that time it could be that the population as a whole would or could not breed with current humans. We would, as a species, have become extinct.Again, so what? What does this have to do with anything?

NYC will have to tell us what he means and why it matters.From a biological perspective the interesting questions are how such levels of intelligence can be selected for; what genetics is involved and from that how the full range of intelligence can be explained.Unlike NYC I don't see any magic dividing line between us and other animals. More and more we see our capabilities in them; just at a much lower level. No different than a minke whale having less pure size than a blue whale.Of course, we are particularly interested in NYC's questions for at least three reasons:1) it's us!! Vain we are.2) The nature of our intelligence and how it can arise from the nature of our brain is a VERY hard question. So it is fun to tackle.3) Understanding ourselves at a very deep level may help us from a health perspective (both mental and physical).Edited by NosyNed, : spelling again

from: http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=2023558

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A long-term collaborative study by palaeolithic archaeologists and cognitive psychologists has continued in its investigations into the stone tool-making and tool-using abilities of a captive bonobo (a 180 pound male, named Kanzi, aged 12 years at the time of experiments reported here). A major focus of this study has been examination of the lithic reduction strategy over time and detailed analysis of the artefacts Kanzi has produced in 2 years of experimentation since our original report. Kanzi has exhibited marked improvement in his stone-working skills, although to date the artefacts he has produced still contrast with early hominid-produced artefacts in a number of attributes. Statistical analysis revealed that Kanzi is clearly preferentially selecting larger, heavier pieces of debitage (flakes and fragments) for use as tools.

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From: Tool Making

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The chimpanzee of all other living species is our closest relation, with whom we last shared a common ancestor about five million years ago. These African apes make and use a rich and varied kit of tools, and of the primates they are the only consistent and habitual tool-users and tool-makers. Chimpanzees meet the criteria of a culture as originally defined for human beings by socio-cultural anthropologists. They show sex differences in using tools to obtain and to process a variety of plant and animal foods. The technological gap between chimpanzees and human societies that live by foraging (hunter-gatherers) is surprisingly narrow at least for food-getting. Different communities of wild chimpanzees have different tool-kits and not all of this regional and local variation can be explained by the demands of the physical and biotic environments in which they live. Some differences are likely to be customs based on socially derived and symbolically encoded traditions. This book describes and analyzes the tool-use of humankind's nearest living relation. It focuses on field studies of these apes across Africa, comparing their customs to see if they can justifiably be termed cultural. It makes direct comparisons with the material culture of human foraging peoples. The book evaluates the chimpanzee as an evolutionary model, showing that chimpanzee behavior helps us to infer the origins of technology in human prehistory.

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Did NYC lose interest?

The idea of mesopotamian floods being the base for the Biblical flood story is not new at all. It was an explanation that I first heard decades ago.What is new (less than 5 years) is the idea that the stories orginated with the flood filling the black sea about 7 or so 1,000 years ago. Google something like "black sea flood" and you will get some discussion of it.see National Geographic - 404However, I've seen a bit of mention here of other ideas that I know little about. The concept is that it is a metaphor. That the "waters" were the orgin out of which the world and all was formed originally. That the waters would "cleanse" the evil in a symbolic way and return it to start over again.I suspect that some combination of the two ideas is as good as any.Certainly, I don't think the idea of a great flood would be used in the stories of a culture that had not experienced flooding. There are many flood stories around the world. As far as I'm aware they all are in locations where catastrophic flooding occurs once in a life time or three.All the details of Noah being a merchant and desert rains for months on end do not sound very credible to me -- but I know nothing about it ; it is just the way its sounds to me. I suspect these are very speculative things made up to fill a bit of TV time.