So a while back I was reading this book by one David Brin. An Enjoyable Sci-fi romp it is too.
However one of its themes has stuck with me. To whit, that humans will genetically modify certain animals, chimps and dolphins are the examples given in the book, increasing their intelligence until they are pretty much on a par with us humans brain wise.
So what are the chances that I will have a conversation with a fully self aware a dolphin say, who’s every bit as smart as myself in the next 50 years or so?
Now I reckon that’s one dream I won’t live to see, but does anyone know of any research in the field or reasons it won’t happen?
Providing we stick around as a species I would like to think we’ll one day give our neighbours in the animal Kingdom a little shove to Sentience but I am waiting to be corrected.
The single biggest barrier is that we have no idea what makes humans inteligent. We can’t just modify brain and skull architecture, which might be possible with genetic tinkering. Animals with larger skulls and brians are less intelligent, while humans with mental problems are less intelligent depite normal sized brains with all areas functioning.
We need to work out what it is in the wiring that causes intelligence and then work out what genetically causes tah and then try to trasfer it. It’s really up there with cloning dinosars- potentially feasible but highly unlikely given what we have to work with now.
Since there is no immediate likelihoodof success, no economomic reward even if one did succeed, a likelihood of major protests and plitical and social baklash for even trying and some serious ethical problems with the project I doubt it will happen while industrialised society remains fundamentally the same as it is now.
Our best bet at this point would be to simply attempt to breed animals for intelligence. We can test the intellignce of an animal reasonably well, and can breed the smartest ones together, so there’s no technological barrier. The only problem is that it may take millions of years to get satisfactory results.
Years ago, the late Tom Rainbow wrote an excellent article on intelligence in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine which covered this. (Sadly, I know longer have the issue and am going to have to go from memory.) There seems to be a ratio of neurons to body mass, with humans having the highest ratio of neurons to body mass of any animals. Elephants, for example, have roughly the same number of neurons as humans, but they’ve got a much larger body than humans do, so the theory goes that the reason elephants haven’t developed the same level of civilization that humans have is because more body takes more brains to control. So, in theory, if one increased the neuron/body mass ratio in animals to that of humans, animals would be as smart as us.
Philip Jose Farmer had something similar in his Dark Is the Sun.
Tuckerfan, does that apply across all animals? Elephants are fairly intelligent, do they have higher brain/body mass ratios than rabbits or horses? Do dolphins have comparitively larger barins than cats? Do wolves have a higher ratio than dogs?
I’m thinking that just because humans have a lare brain:body ratio and happen to be inteligent, that doens’t necessarily make a significant correlation unless it also applies to other mammals.
IANABE (I Am Not A Brain Expert) and I don’t really remember the article as it’s been something like 15 years since I read it. But, the article was dealing with sentient life forms and IIRC, he ran through various life forms animals, starting with rats and ended up with elephants.
Dolphins and whales are supposed to have brains larger than humans, but they’ve also got much larger bodies.
Wish I still had the article. Rainbow was one funny guy.
Intelligence was an evolutionary anomonly. We have no idea what happened to start it. It seems to have first been an adaptation that allowed humans to survive better, then split off into a bunch of other things that had nothing to do with survival at all. Replicating that in animals would be nearly impossible. You would have to selectivly breed and genetically modifiy then watch for any signs of intelligence at all. And even then, we aren’t sure if intelligence is a result of what we see as intelligent behaviour, or just the result of some mutation that occured along the evolutionary cycle. Oh my I’ve gone cross eyed… Time to go…
Well, truthfully, there’s no good way to measure intelligence, other than civilization. Every definition of what separates man from the animals has been thrown out or revised. Remember what Douglas Adams said about it all? That humans thought they were the most intelligent species on Earth because they were the only specis that caused wars, pollution, etc., and that the dolphins felt that they were the most intelligent for precisely the same reasons.