But… What’s the point of intelligence if there’s nothing to be intelligent about? I mean, if we speculate that suddenly a proto human got a bit brighter than the rest, then natural selection would’ve favored it and others like it. But it seems to be more a question of *emergence *rather than something that suddenly was, which resulted in tool making.
Wouldn’t the act of making tools actually increase intelligence? And wouldn’t the more intelligent individuals be better hunters and gatherers, thus invoking natural selection again?
Sorry, no cite, but I’ve read in a number of places that one of, if not the, first thing we became more intelligent about was relationships. The smarter one was able to more easily dominate his/her fellow apes and have more descendants.
Depends. Brains are very expensive organs to maintain, so you need to improve nutrition considerably (and reliably) to keep that big chunk of grey matter going. If the tool use does that, then great. If not, then the bigger brain could be more of a detriment-- especially over many generations when food supplies are going to vary.
Yeah, that’s the stuff I was thinking of in my first post. Good book. Still, it’s important to keep in mind that the research is very new and I don’t think it’s widely accepted yet.
A guy by the name of (I think) Devlin wrote a book about this very topic called The Math Gene.
There was actually very little about math in it. Enough to back up his assertion that math is a type of language and that it uses the language circuits in our brains. He then discusses when and why we evolved language. ‘When’ was settled on around 200,000 years ago. (200,000 years ago wasn’t the actual beginning of language. He compares it to the huge growth in complexity and abstraction in human speech between the ages of about 2 and 3.)
‘Why’ was because humans became more social and needed to keep track of all the relationships in their families and societies. I’ll paraphrase: “When trying to find out why a trait evolved to begin with, it is often useful to study what it is used for now. Many uses for language have been proposed; art, education, warning others of danger, recording history, etc. But linguists can estimate what proportion of language falls into which category, and overwhelmingly language is used for one thing: Gossip.”
The archaeological record of the past 40 000 years or so tells me human intelligence has been at it’s peak for at least that long. The lack of social safety nets and a high dependence on individual capabilities to even survive, let alone reproduce, has been used for an argument for greater average intelligence among prehistoric people compared to modern ones.
It’s possible that even if there have been no genetic changes to the brain in hundreds of millenia, the modern “mind” is vastly different than those of the ancients.
Philosopher Dan Dennett has made this claim - essentially that the mind is a “virtual machine” running on the brain hardware, to put it in programming terms. The “software” has allowed people to use their brains with greater power and efficiency. A very simple everyday example would be using mnemonic devices to increase the power of you memory.
Gov. Patterson of New York, who is legally blind, memorizes all his speeches. Why? Because he feels he needs to. (Memorizing a speech is harder than memorizing a song or poem, which were deliberately written to encourage memory cues. And you can make up new verses whenever you forget the old ones.)
As a society, we have the muscles we need to do our work, and the brains we need to our work. That’s always been true. If people needed more strength or endurance or memory in earlier years, then they worked to develop those skills. If we as a society were to need to do so, we’d develop them just as well. I don’t see that anything has changed.
I agree that we can’t say that intelligence has evolved in any significant way since the Out of Africa explosion, at minimum. For example, there is no discernible difference in intelligence between Australian Aborigines, whose ancestors appear to have arrived on the continent some 40-50kya, and Europeans. Granted, there was likely trade and intermarriage between the Australians and the wave of Asian immigrants 2500ya, but it seems unlikely that the newcomers’ “intelligence genes” would have swept through the Australian population like wildfire during that time, and brought all of their intellects up. So, it seems like not much has happened in 50,000 years.
That is highly unlikely. Everything we know about our ancestors tells us that we started eating meat long before we started cooking it. And there is no indication that we ate only forest fire-cooked meat early on. We were probably (mostly) scavengers first, then hunters later.
I read that early man scaveneged bones, using tools (rocks, I guess) to open them to get at the marrow. Other predators, for the most part, weren’t equipped to harvest that marrow. These peoples continued to eat the marrow after they became hunters and learned to cook.
Can’t say I blame them.
I think people are starting to take some aspects of his theory seriously.
Daniel Dennett was an early proponent of Jaynes who cites Jaynes in all of his books and is in agreement with Jaynes on the language-dependency hypothesis, at least.
