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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (246525)	8/18/2005 9:59:11 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572503

"that intelligence is nothing more than just another random trait in the genome that is available for the picking and choosing by an organism;" Pretty much. Larger brain mass can be acquired pretty easily through neoteny, which is keeping of early development characteristics to maturity. In general, larger brain mass to body mass ratio correlates with intelligence. Given that most animals have proportionately larger brains as juveniles, it doesn't take much to carry on brain growth to a later stage of development. But brains are biologically expensive, a substantial fraction of human metabolism goes to keeping the brain turning over. Bottom line, we are smart because we had to be. We have an average IQ of 100 because that is what we needed. We didn't need an average IQ of much more than that, so we aren't smarter. And no, I am not saying that porpoises are smarter than humans. But they do seem to like us for totally unfathomable reasons. Not only have they rescued humans, there also has never been a recorded attack on a human. So either they have never done it, or they only do it when they can't get caught. I think it is possible that humans interacted strongly with porpoises during our early development. Maybe we even domesticated them to a limited extent and they still respond to us because of that. "I had a dog who always knew when I was depressed and would do the funniest things to cheer me up." Dogs have been bred to be responsive to humans. They are sensitive to their owner's emotional state and it matters to them. This can cause some to over-estimate their intelligence. Neoteny doesn't get the credit it should as a driver of evolution. Forget the mutations, they help over the long term, but neoteny carries the heavy loads.