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Scientists Postulate Extinct Hominid With 150 IQ
Hugh Pickens writes "Neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger have an interesting article in Discover Magazine about the Boskops, an extinct hominid that had big eyes, child-like faces, and forebrains roughly 50% larger than modern man indicating they may have had an average intelligence of around 150, making them geniuses among Homo sapiens. The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to 'alien abductors' in movies. Naturalist Loren Eiseley wrote: 'Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain.' The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the almost irresistible idea that evolution leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessor, yet the existence of the Boskops argues otherwise — that humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens — that is, ourselves. 'With 30 percent larger brains than ours now, we can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149,' write Lynch and Granger. But why did they go extinct? 'Maybe all that thoughtfulness was of no particular survival value in 10,000 BC. Lacking the external hard drive of a literate society, the Boskops were unable to exploit the vast potential locked up in their expanded cortex,' write Lynch and Granger. 'They were born just a few millennia too soon.'"
Increased brain size means more intelligence? That's just as silly as that other correlation we always hear about.
Oh, and in before "IT'S... IQ OVER 9000"
Mmmmmmmm Brains
Evolution may favour the most clever and the most adaptable, but this homonid suffered from one utterly fatal genetic flaw: it was delicious.
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
"His brain was bigger than your brain." Lies, my brains are huge! Lets mob rush the little prick.
-1 is for flame bait and trolls, not because you disagree with someone.
If it was their average intelligence, it wouldn't be a 150 IQ, now would it? It would be 100.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Does a bigger brain necessarily mean they had a higher IQ? Does it really work like that? I get there could be the _potential_ for a higher IQ, but just because someone has more gray matter doesn't necessarily mean they are smarter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boskop_Man
The Discover article is a bunch of garbage. the idea that this was some sort of homonid species has been debuniked over 50 years ago.
What if they were just goofy looking people? Gheez....
If I recall my Carl Sagan reading, Broca's Region is very important to our intellectual prowess among the animal kingdom. But from reading this summary it would seem that a blue whale would be the most intelligent thing ever. But it's not and that's because things like the proteins that make up our neurons, the spacing of the synapses, the quality of the electric shielding (white matter), etc are also important to defining our brain functions above that of an animal with comparable brain size.
I'm in now way a biologist but it is odd to me that they would suggest this metric for intelligence unless they can also prove that they are recent enough in our history that the above factors I mentioned have to be close or match our own that we know a lot about. I don't think that's a safe speculation though.
I would also like to point out the nature versus nurture paradigm in how a brain develops which will show you that in our idea of what an IQ test is, parental nurturing can sometimes have just as large if not more important result than our genetic make up.
My work here is dung.
some might say that the brutes are still in power.
"To stop the terrorists."
We only know our history back 5000 years, humans have been around for a 2,000,000 . Homo Sapiens for at least 200,000.
and there is lots of evidence around the world for advanced civilizations in the past that did things we can't even begin to phanthom with our 'modern' technology. Of course, you are not going to find that in the mainstream media. Just as you will not find anything of relvance there.
So let's see, what is more probable. Smart people from prehistoric past faded away because they were "Lacking the external hard drive of a literate society", or we don't have any understanding or mainstream knowledge about very advance but different civilizations of the distant past? :).
Talking about "Lacking the external hard drive of a literate society", the current society is anything but litterate
Maybe Avatar is no that far form reality after all...
Maybe intelligence can't reliably be measured by weight?
I am no neuroscientist, but since when is intelligence directly related to the size of the brain? There are many animals with brains much larger than a human's, but we're undoubtedly smarter than they are (or at least have greater opportunity to demonstrate our intelligence). Maybe I'm missing something though, like inconsistencies of the brain-size/intelligence ratio between species.
It is well know that the size of the brain little to do with IQ. Like that other organ its not the size that matters. Its how you use it.
I'm not dead yet!
They noticed all of us dummies moving in so they invented space travel or dimensional shifting and moved away...
Isn't the law the same even today?
The higher IQ (*geeky*) individuals are in general more awkward towards the opposite sex. Simple, no sex, no offspring.
A population with a brain size twice the size of the 'Boskops' would have an average I.Q. of:
100.
Were some disaster to occur in our civilization that resulted in the total loss of all individuals
with an I.Q. of 100 or higher, the resulting I.Q. of the population would be:
100.
tkjtkj@gmail.com
The smarter people will invariably be the minority overridden by the less smart masses for a variety of reasons in a variety of ways. One only has to look at the dark ages to see that in action. And every time we see politics manipulate science we see more of the same.
If 10,000 years ago a bunch of rock throwers witnessed the "magic" of these smarter people, they too might have believed they were evil or a threat to be destroyed.
With all that said, the premise of the discussion is completely guess-work. Big brain doesn't mean big mind.
I had read that around the time Man domesticated dogs, the size of their brains changed.
The theory being that since we always had dogs with us, we didn't need large parts of the brain dedicated to smell anymore.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Dullard - n. a member of the reigning dynasty. The Dullards came in with Adam and being both numerous and sturdy have overrun the habitable world. The secret of their power liies in their insensibility. They are immune to blows physical and metaphorical. They originate from Breotia whence they were driven by starvation, having bored their livestock out of existence. For some centuries they infested Philistia, and many of them are still referred to as Phiistines. After the Crusades they spread across Europe occupying high places in politics, art, literature, science, theology, commerce, and finance. There was a contingent aboard the Mayflower and many more have immigrated since. Their numbers in the United States today are considered to be in excess of one hundred fifty million. Their intellectual center and mecca is Wheeless Oklahoma.
That is wrong on so many different levels.
Boskop is the german name for a specific sort of apples. :-)
I knew it. Apples do have a brain.
http://lepetitcadeau.typepad.com/.a/6a010535cfb36d970b0120a5de6516970b-800wi
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3573/3323907067_8113d65bc5.jpg
harhar
The skull was found in the early 1900s. There's been speculation about them for years. And NOW Discovery is writing about them? I think the better story to link to is about the giant snake they just found in a mine in South America. 40+ feet long, weighing in at over a ton, lived about 60 Million years ago, indicating that the temperature was significantly higher than it is now in the Equatorial Rain Forest.
humans with big brains... they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens
A triumph of wedgies and swirlies paving the way for the modern day high school.
all of the swoll-belly waterheads with the flies buzzing around them that Sally Struthers used to cry about are also geniuses? Dirt farmers who poop in their drinking water? I think not.
Homo Sapiens' brains are as large as they can get without being a significant disadvantage. The large cranial size causes problems in birth, reducing the number of individuals that survive the process and reduces the reproduction rate. A hominid with a larger brain size but not major other physiological changes would reproduce even more slowly and would be easy to kill off as a species, even if the adults males were harder to kill individually (the adult females would die in childbirth a lot more frequently than their smaller-skulled equivalents).
If, on the other hand, the rest of his skeleton was proportionally larger, then this would not have been a problem. He would have been stronger, but possibly less able agile, and would have required more food. In times of relative food shortage, the smaller-skeletoned variant would have had an evolutionary advantage. He would be able to keep his muscle mass sufficient to move around quickly on a much more limited diet.
There is quite a bit of evidence that skull sizes have been shrinking over the last few thousand years, but there's no evidence that this correlates with reduced mental ability. Humans are far from having the largest brains of any modern mammals (whales win that one by a long way). You can't jump straight from brain size to IQ, you need to also look at how the brain is divided. Dogs, for example, have a huge amount of their brain devoted to controlling their noses. Dolphins have about as much brain tissue just devoted to turning sonar returns into a coherent picture of their environment as humans have in total. It's possible that a hominid with a 50% larger brain had an average IQ of 150, but it's also possible that it had an average IQ of 200 or of 50. It's impossible to tell just from the skull.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
is that those who adapt quickest to a changing environment survive (not the biggest, quickest or strongest). maybe thats what happened the Boskops couldn't adapt.
Yo momma's so smart...
C-x C-s C-x k
So there you have it. There wasn't an extinct hominid with an IQ of 150, it was just the fallacy of selection bias exhibited by some anthropologists more than 70 years ago.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
http://www.scientificblogging.com/mark_changizi/why_doesn%E2%80%99t_size_matter%E2%80%A6_brain This has been proven over and over that size doesn't relate to smarts. An elephant's brain is just over 3 times larger than ours and yet I didn't see any elephants walk on the moon or develop great civilizations.
so we found the Ancients now where is the stargate?
I knew TV was not a new technology
Oh my goodness, what a surprise... The linked article on SA was one for a question that I had submitted 10 years ago to "Ask the Experts"!!
Assume the hypothesis is true.
Those big brains would not have evolved without an evolutionary advantage of some sort, lack of literary hard drives or no. Now, their relative fitness against homo sapiens is another matter - that could depend on things like population size, climate change, and the accidents of history. ("The race is not always to the swift" and all that.)
I bet that, if this is true, someone starts looking for these genes in the current human population. They should be able to get some DNA from those 10,000 year old bones to compare against.
They did after all become extinct. How smart can a species be to let that happen? But then again, intelligence and smart are not necessarily equal. There is more than one specific type of intelligence if you will.
Some people have excellent abilities to retain knowledge (photographic Memory) yet consistently prove that they are not able to properly utilize that knowledge in any meaningful way. Some people can't seem to remember anything, but if you place them in front of a puzzle they will figure it out in record time. And then there are autistic people that really stand as shining examples of extreme intelligent yet that intelligence is primarily focused in one direction like Math (Rain Man) or a particular art skill like Music where they can hear a song once and accurately reproduce it without need for sheet music, guides, or assistance.
Smart people are generally able to effectively utilize Intelligence, and being smart is more adaptively valuable than being extremely intelligent.
It was probably just a Sleestack. They failed because they only used logic and couldn't talk plain.
Evolution says the species that adapt to change easier than others will survive. Sometimes it is being bigger or being smarter that gives a species an advantage over another. But not necessarily one or the other. A larger brain may mean that a species has the potential to be smarter but it comes with a cost. A larger brain also means more energy requirements. It also may mean a longer time to develop (longer childhood).
If the environment changes and food becomes scarce, a larger brain might be a disadvantage if having more smarts does not lead to more food.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The dolphins. They were assumed to be similar IQ to man, until they figured out that they have 6x the glial cells that man does. So what it comes down to is that size != IQ.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
A population with a brain size twice the size of the 'Boskops' would have an average I.Q. of:
100.
I think the article interpreted IQ with respect to a hypothetical population including the 'Boskops' and all 6.odd billion modern humans. What would the average IQ of the 'Boskops' be among such a population?
Can you imagine a civilization with only Sheldon Coopers? Is the kind of things that ends with a big bang.
"My kid beat up your honors student"
dave (who was usually on the receiving side of such efforts...)
Once we started reading, writing, living in cities, etc., it was all downhill.
If that is the case, then Americans are the most intelligent people on the planet.
What if they didn't really go extinct? What if they really are the "aliens" we keep hearing about? Cue the "time machine" storyline.
Maybe they built the Pyramids and took off to another planet, leaving inferior creatures like us behind
Even in the pre-frontal cortex. "Intelligence" can get fairly specialized. They may have been savant-like geniuses at ad-hoc weather prediction, predator evasion tactics and great outdoor barbecue. It doesn't mean they would have made good mathematicians, software developers or doctors.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Unfortunately for Boskops, he may have had a 150 IQ, but only had a little dick. So chicks dumped Boskops for neathanderthal, who was not only bigger and stronger, but better in bed. Thus, the old adage is proven. Darwin was a sexist - women really are to blame for everything.
This is my sig.
With 30 percent larger brains than ours now, we can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149,'
Hey dude!
You don't really need 1,750 cc. I have a smaller brain than that and they stopped measuring my IQ around 165.
For a moment of clarity, go look at the size of Einstein's brain. It wasn't that big. It still rocked.
"evolution doesn't have a goal, so there's no way to say which entity is more and which less evolved".
Well evolution is a concept, but organisms have a goal of survival, and species of passing on their genes, so therefor, the better organism does more of it. So, you have to swallow your pride and admit that some cultures and people are just better than you. For example, we may deplore Islamic sexual repression of women, but evolutionarily speaking, unless we nuke them, they are going to take over the earth. Therefor, from an evolutionary perspective, Islam is better than liberal western culture, and women that have less babies and men that father less babies are not as good as ones that do.
This is my sig.
Actually, the idea of a "Boskop race" or "Boskop Man" is long discredited. The hypothesis occurred by actively selecting the larger skulls from the available set, and misclassifying them as a distinct population.
It turns out that by examining the whole set of preserved skulls, cranium size distributions are similar in South Africa, Europe, and China for the period in question. Skulls of that era with rather large crania (comparable to the Boskop specimens) can be found in all regions.
Cranium size distributions are similar between those regions today also, but the distributions have shifted to slightly smaller sizes than they were around 10000 BCE (probably due to agriculture & civilization). http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/paleo/lynch-granger-big-brain-boskops-2008.html
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Being intelligent is only one of the skills needed to survive, strength, speed, and available resources are other key factors. If the Russians accidently cause an asteroid hits earth and our society is thrown into anarchy, it’s not necessarily the smart ones that will survive. The ones with guns and lots of ammo who live out in an area that is self sustainable will survive where as city folks ain’t going to make it no matter how smart.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I think the better story to link to is about the giant snake they just found in a mine in South America. 40+ feet long, weighing in at over a ton, lived about 60 Million years ago... indicating that the temperature
Either that, or the snake got lost, and wound up in a cold spot, and that's why it died.
This is my sig.
Boskop is, at best, an example of a statistical outlier being blown out of proportion. The vast majority of skulls from that region and that era are of equal size to contemporary skulls found elsewhere on the planet from that period.
Sure, it's on a "blog". But, it is a blog backed by Discovery. Frankly, it lends credence to a widely discredit theory without even bothering to engage in due diligence. In fact, it uses the higher-end reported skull sizes to compile an "average" brain volume.
Lazy for Discovery. Lazy for Slashdot.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
which is why they died out. What does that say about the future of the IT profession?
Question must be posed: If dude were so smrt, why he eks.. exs... ecstin.. not round no more?
TIMMAH!
Live a lie!
Fueling a large brain takes lots of calories. So could enough calories been able to be harvested and processed?
The Colonials and Cylons were equally tasty to the animals on the African plains.
Sounds like manga characters to me (^.^);
People are saying they probably looked like little grey aliens, I'd like to think they were far prettier than the typical big-eyed grey slimeball alien.
Then again, I'm pretty biased towards ink and paint, so there =oP
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Finally, a being capable of figuring out Java API's!
Table-ized A.I.
Reading the article and then jumping over and making use of "Google Scholar" it seems that the Boskops are not seen as a separate species or genus, but more of a grouping of larger skulls from the extant population of the time. John Hawks, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison has a fairly in-depth blog on the subject (http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/paleo/lynch-granger-big-brain-boskops-2008.html).
The other part of the picture, is fairly clear, and that is survival. As much as we seem to know of the "Boskops" they may have been an offshoot of the population of the time (but within the the larger envelope of homo sapien sapien). These larger skulled individuals, regardless if they were a population to themselves, faded. One of the points mentioned regarding brain size, is that they are "expensive" in the sense of the food and nutritional requirements. In considering their situation at that point in geologic time, they may have simply been a Formula 1 car showing up at the Baha 1000. Intelligence, like horsepower is but one aspect of survival (or winning) and whether their larger brain simply required too much "fuel" to finish, or that they were simply too specialized to be reflected in modern man, is open to speculation.
At some point in time we may collect enough comparative (fossil) evidence to look at DNA comparisons, between the "Boskops" and their contemporaries and then compare this to "modern" man and be able to fit these individuals into the larger evolutionary picture.
It turns out that repeated wedgies led to population reduction below sustainable levels.
They survive in Anime
So, they were the Beta to our VHS?
It's because their ship got stranded over Africa. These were just the worker bees that were left behind.
An important change for education.
... would be expected to have an average IQ of 149,' write Lynch and Granger. But why did they go extinct? ...
Easy, with such an IQ, they didn't have sex.
If they lacked the ability for language, then everything would have to be done by memory. Elephants have rudimentary language, and rely upon memory. Big is not always better.
EXACTLY!
What I remember from high school was that jocks leveraged their bigger body to inflict the meaness cooked up by their smaller IQ. Can we get a Youtube edition of the prehistoric prequel to Revenge of the Nerds now?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Its obvious. They were so smart, they invented contraception before us.
The average human brain is 1.5 kg. The average Asian elephant brain is 7.5 kg. Are Asian elephants 5 times smarter than men?
More data here: http://www.highnorth.no/Library/Myths/br-si-bo.htm
"It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on -- whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons."
There are sciences, and then there are stuff like psychology and economics. This story is of the latter kind, and confuses our ignoramus.
maybe they spent too much time with thinking about the meaning of life ... instead of fuc***** O_o
Evolution would have done her in, just as evolution would have insured that these creatures had large enough reproductive organs to survive.
Except evolution doesn't work that way. It doesn't work to assure survival. It does what's easiest given the array of choices that arise through mutation - including selecting a dead-end.
It's more likely that a significant jump in infant cranial size would have resulted in a significant jump in failed births unless the mutation for the large brain coincided in the same individuals who have the wider hips and reproductive organs.
That would be like someone winning two lotteries on the same day - it's extremely unlikely. Not impossible, but way less likely than winning only one lottery.
Putting moderation advice in your
The Blue Whale's brain is around 6kg. Following this groundbreaking research by Discover Magazine, this must mean Blue Whales have an IQ of 430!
I, for one, would like to welcome our genius blubbery overlords.
I've never, ever heard a woman purr with delight about a guy having a big head/brain.
Apparently, the Boskop women--like a lot of modern Homo Sapiens women--preferred men with larger wedding tackle.
So nothing's changed in 10,000 years.
I have a large cranial capacity (hat size: 8 1/8) and I'm over 6 feet tall. I'm sure that my ancestors interbred with the Boskop, leading to me, a mentally AND physically superior humanoid! I began to make plans to rule the world, if not the known universe. But my wife pointed out that the simplest explanation is often the best and that I'm probably just a big fathead. Rats!
I understand how geeks get excited about big brains, but in the absence of tool-using or any evidence of actual utility, the Boskops brain == Mensa minimum is a phony conclusion. What did these big brained apes do all day? Sit around and sing complex rhythms with bad lyrics while their females died of childbirth?
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Most cetaceans have brain sizes much bigger than ours. For example, a "killer" whale's brain is about 6,000 cc or 400 percent larger than ours and even the lowly bottlenose dolphin has a brain 7 percent larger than ours. Maybe it's time to recognize the superiority of our cetacean masters.
"The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the almost irresistible idea that evolution leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessor, yet the existence of the Boskops argues otherwise..."
Evolution does *not* imply that things ordinarily increase in complexity. They can do so, but there is no expectation that they must. Besides the fact that "complexity" is a fiendishly difficult thing to measure anyway, there are many times when "simplification" is more optimal, and "simplification" trends often show up over evolutionary history. "Simple" creatures are enormously successful today. If there is any trend to evolution, it would be more accurate to say that the "complexity" of creatures broadens over evolutionary history, with plenty of "simple" creatures living alongside more "complex" ones. Life diversifies.
Biological systems always involve tradeoffs, and while a larger brain in some environments might be of benefit, there would be associated costs (e.g., the challenges of maintaining bloodflow to that increased volume, greater difficulty of childbirth, slower development, etc.). Worse, because of the relationships between different systems during development (i.e. the growth that occurs from conception to birth, and even afterwards) tweaking the genetics of one feature might have surprising side-effects on other systems that could be undesirable. Maybe increased brain size didn't pay off sufficiently, or maybe the environment in which it did pay off went away over time, thus causing extinction of this variety. Finally, perhaps brain size decreased over recent human history because evolution has been simultaneously pushing brainsize to increase "intelligence" (whatever that is), while optimizing the way the brain works and other systems to be more efficient about it -- i.e. maybe it has tweaked things to get better intelligence out of lesser volume, thus lowering some of the costs of a large brain. A slightly smaller brain may be more optimal for the whole system.
All of this assumes that the original observation of "larger brain size" of these skulls is valid, which as other people have pointed out, it probably isn't.
No, we only found an old Asgard colony. Where do you think the Norse got their myths from?
"The history of evolutionary studies has been dogged by the almost irresistible idea that evolution leads to greater complexity, to animals that are more advanced than their predecessor, yet the existence of the Boskops argues otherwise" Doesn't this assume the questionable idea that being smarter is somehow more 'evolutionarily complex'?
Never forget that Darwin's whole theory of evolution rests on the simple principle of survival to reproduce and thus influencing change. That is if most big eared penguins are able to survive long enough to copulate and have children, then over time the trend will be to produce big eared penguins and the poor small eared penguins slowly die out.
This goes a number of different ways. Being smart may be an advantage, but like anything it is more dependent on fscking than anything else.
So you could be mind blowingly smart, and only have a few kids, or an idiot but breed like rabbits. The key would be that balance of smart enough to gain survival advantage, yet be able to breed like the wind. So perhaps Darwin's theory likely moderates intelligence to a certain extent.
I believe there was a movie based on this principle, which stared Brendon Fraser, which surely in of itself shows that god may be an ironic jerk.
So you judge all possible moves and make one based on ... what? Can each move be cleanly ranked on the value of the odds of the outcomes that might follow from it, against some distinct set of measures that fully define a creature's goals, satisfactions and fears? Doesn't it require a particularly impoverished set of goals to do any such calculation as to the odds of their satisfaction following certain moves by oneself? Given the hypothesized more intelligent mind, whose pleasures in walking a Parisian boulevard might, this article also suggests, be far beyond our own in complexity, why should we presume that its satisfactions, like its pleasures, might also be far beyond our own? If the range of desirable goals becomes correspondingly more complex with a more complex brain - which is obviously the case when comparing Mozart or Einstein with the amoeba or your local gas station clerk - then the solution of the problem of the optimal path to what correspondingly becomes less certain.
If your choice of roads merely consists of one where you eat and one where you starve, it's pretty easy to model that under an assumption of determinism. But if on one road you perform a powerful piece of music, on another make an incredible scientific breakthrough, and on another simply watch a beautiful sunset - and you've got a mind fully capable of this range and far more - assuming that all these roads leave you well-fed, well-fucked, and pleased with the outcome, being smart doesn't so much simplify the solution of what to do as vastly complicate the choices to solve among. This "problem" isn't at all advanced by considering the free will implied by it an "illusion."
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Its an interesting question .. how does one go about the task of computing brain size for a distinct species assuming DNA was still avaliable. Obviously the size crackpottery doesn't fly.
Roughly half of the information stored in our DNA is devoted to the brain. Most of that is so dizzingly compressed providing just a sort of scaffolding or attractors for local growth that any computation or simulation seems infeasable given current technology. Maybe we could compare with humans and reverse engineer the deltas somehow to get an idea.
Anyway as others have pointed out bigger brains does not equal bigger intelligence... Although it is very true whales have themselves a very nice secret moon base they keep cloked from prying eyes on the far side of the moon. If you mind meld with them and feed them several buckets of fish they'll even tell you how to get there.
I'm not extinct!
I was just resting!
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
And brain SIZE has nothing to do with "intelligence", otherwise whales would have invented space travel a long time ago. Male brains are roughly 150cc bigger than female brains, however no studies can show that females (given the same chances at education) are 10% "dumber" than their male counterparts.
The claim is sensationalistic BS that is absolutely meaningless, unless we can actually analyze the brain TISSUE and see how many ganglia per unit volume and how many fibers it consisted of. THEN we can have an estimate of "intelligence".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The Boskop skull shown in the Discover article is strongly dolichocephalic with a high forehead and no significant jaw protrusion, similar to the East African (Ethiopian, Somali) / Iberian (pre-Roman Iberian; Basque; Georgian (Caucasus, not United States); Classical Greek; Welsh) type of skull. I'd be interested to see whether any DNA analysis of Boskop remains revealed Y-haplogroup R1b and mtDNA haplogroup H...
arent we rather arrogant and self indulged in expecting that any form of 'civilization' should exist by our standards ?
how do we know exactly whether they used decomposable material in their technological tools and all the equipment went back to nature after they disappeared ?
how do we know that whatever remains we find from their bodies are not from people who were buried in their 'burial grounds', or deposed of according to whatever tradition they have ?
how do we know that what population we were able to find were not the victims of some kind of disaster, natural or unnatural that caused their demise apart from their brethren around the world, whose remains we are not able to find yet ?
you are talking about average iq of 150 here. AVERAGE iq. not maximum iq. einstein's iq was estimated in between 160 and 180. this is basically saying that every single individual in this society was an practically an einstein. this aint no joke - since iq is a measure of the cognitive ability of recognizing relations and interactions in between the concepts and elements present in our nature, it would be utterly stupid to say that these people were not able to cope up with their natural environments. even early humans, which were unimaginably stupider compared to these, were able to cope up with nature by residing in caves and using clubs and simple spears to hunt and gather. if a comparably stupid early human was able to conceive a spear and hunt with it, leave aside realizing to collect food from the bushes, its a given that these species should have been more than able to do much more better in using tools to cope up with their environment.
there are underground cities which consist of more than 7 levels deep down, which has upper levels that can accommodate more than 50.000 people in western anatolia. its not know what lies even below, because beyond a certain level is rather dangerous to venture forth, due to various gases accummulated over millenium. tourists are only allowed to visit upper levels, lower levels are sealed. it is guessed that there is space for 250.000 people or so, and all the scattered complexes around a huge zone is interlinked at some level. it was said that these underground complexes were constructed by early christians escaping roman persecution, however recently it became evident that their numbers and technological means would not be able to create such a huge underground complex in the period they have been forced to escape persecution of society. (basically like from 50-100 AD to 250 AD or so).
then there are rumors and legends of even bigger complexes in various parts of the world, one being around tibed.
so then, how do we know exactly that those species died out ?
or rather, isnt it beyond stupid to assume that what we found merely by scratching the surface of our planet can paint us a surefire picture of what happened back in distant past ? the world is such a huge place, and there is much more stuff buried underground that we couldnt find yet, than we did.
Read radical news here
Just so people know, there is skepticism over the existence of some ancient race of geniuses based on this skull.
The measure of brain computational power is not the volume or size of a brain. Cortical surface area is the important factor. The human brain is folded with gyri and sulci making up the ridges and the valleys of the folds. This folding allows for much greater surface area to be packed into our smaller by volume brains. So just because a hominid skull is found that is larger does not necessarily mean that hominid was more intelligent. How complex was the brain in that big skull.
...that spoiled their tree-of-life crop, apparently.
species which have destroyed themselves through a possible disaster ? i mean, look at us, we have been at the brink of totally annihilating our own species since 1945. its a miracle it didnt happen, intentionally or by accident.
who says progress has always been forward ? who says the civilization wasnt blasted back to bits, and then again risen ? who says that what we have been able to find, arent the last remainders of a civilization/society which destroyed itself ? if wwiii happened, im sure there would be surviving small communities of humans around the world, only to die off eventually.
Read radical news here
My brain is 2/3 the size of a normal brain yet I have 130+ IQ. If my English part of the brain was gooder it would be over 140 if not 150 (Yes I excel on all parts of the IQ test except the language part). Smart but lack the full ability to articulate my smartness.
Brain Size does not equal intelligence. They may have had potential but it would appear they where never able to exploit it. It makes sense to me that stupid human would kill the potentially smarter species just compare how geeks are treated by jocks – it just how humans are wired.
The soft tissues have not been preserved, how do you know what their faces looked like?
If we have complications from our "normal" sized skulls (requiring caesarean sections) how much more difficult would childbirth have been for these Boskops? This is a much more likely reason they failed to survive, rather than a purely social one like not being literate.
I think I'm going to have to go with Douglas Adams on this one.
Humans think they are smarter than the dolphins because all the dolphins do is play and swim around all day.
ironically the Dolphins believe they are smarter than humans for exactly the same reasons
Clearly these guys never read Kurt Vonnegut's "Galapagos"
"Thanks a lot, big brain"
Both Lynch and Granger are experts in neuroscience, with a long list of publications on memory, cortical organization, and chemical regulation of brain activity. Neither of them is an anthropologist or archaeologist. Simple research on "Boskop", and you will discover that this has not been a going topic in human evolution for nearly fifty years. Most intellectual effort on the topic of "Boskopoids" happened between 1915 and 1930.
The supposed "Boskop race" was named after a South African skull found on a Transvaal farm in 1913. The skull is a large one, with an estimated endocranial volume of 1800 ml. But it is hardly complete, and arguments about its overall size have ranged from 1700 to 2000 ml. It is large, but well within the range of sizes found in recent males.
This concept of a "Boskop race" did not emerge from any clear understanding of the South African past. What provoked the racial category was a confusion about the relationships of recent and historical southern African remains. Anthropologists had attempted to apply primary racial categories such as "Negroid," "Bushman," etc corresponding to extant or recent tribes or other groups. However the distinctions between these categories did not appear to extend far into the prehistoric past. So anthropologists looked for the origins of these racial types within the sample of prehistoric crania -- constructing a "Boskopoid" type for those with later "Bush" or "Strandloper" resemblances.
This category became untenable as further information about the archaeology of South Africa came to light. Ronald Singer (1958, Singer R. The Boskop "race" problem. Man 58:173-178.) reviewed the "Boskop race" evidence as it existed by the 1950's. He concluded that there was no reason to maintain that any "big-headed, small-faced group" had existed in prehistory, separate from the current biological variability of "Bushman, Hottentot and Negro." But that view is unsupportable. This selection was initially done almost without any regard for archaeological or cultural association. Later, when a more systematic inventory of archaeological associations was entered into evidence, it became clear that the "Boskop race" was entirely a figment of anthropologists' imaginations. Instead, the MSA-to-LSA population of South Africa had a varied array of features, within the last 20,000 years trending toward those present in historic southern African peoples. Singer ends his paper thusly:
"It is now obvious that what was justifiable speculation (because of paucity of data) in 1923, and was apparent as speculation in 1947, is inexcusable to maintain in 1958."
Why would two neuroscientists, after going to all the trouble to write a book about the evolution of the human brain, use completely obsolete anthropological information without doing a simple research to see if the facts have stayed the same as in 1923?
Please Slashdot, file this story under category "science fiction"!
Their work here has already been discredited in academic circles. Stop misinforming the public by giving it traction in the popular press. Had these neuroscientists had the sense to review their hypotheses with current scientists in anthropology and evolutionary biology they would have saved themselves a great deal of embarrassment.
There is no science occurring here. There is no new discovery here. This is simply two scientists in a completely unrelated field (neuroscience), looking at very old, discredited data, and pulling a headline grabbing book and promotional magazine article out of their asses. However well meaning they were, they failed to do their footwork here, and the result is embarrassing. I guess we should ask snopes to start writing an article on this now before this nonsense spreads.
As most Slashdotters already know, a higher IQ is a great way to die a virgin.
Brainy guys don't get the girls and therefore don't proliferate.
He just ripped off John Hawks' blog posting verbatim:
http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/paleo/lynch-granger-big-brain-boskops-2008.html
Probably a spammer trying to build karma.
It's only 10,000 years there must be some intact DNA kicking around somewhere out there.
This video shows how they looked.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Obviously computers from the 1970s were much more powerful than the ones we have today. Just look at how fscking big they are! I'm forced to apply their method and conclude that these guys have really small forebrains ;-)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Saturday Night Live had a brilliant sketch back in the 70's or 80's that perfectly illustrated why the large-brained tend to go extinct. The sketch had a small band of caveman hunters gathered around the campfire at night after the hunt. Brutus, the leader of the band was a muscular and stupid jock who kept walking through the fire and burning his feet while boasting of his hunting prowess. One of the others, a proto-nerd played by Bill Murray, decided it would be a good time to bring up an idea he had about how they could catch more game if, rather than just chase after their prey, they could surround it and close in on it from all directions, making it harder for it to escape. The other cave men seemed to begin to grasp the concept until Brutus walked around behind the Murray character and dropped a boulder on his head. It remains my all-time favorite SNL sketch.
I would agree more intelligence is almost always useful - but how much?
From what I learned in Med school - brains use about 20-30% of our caloric needs. The Boskops with their larger brains probably would have used more.
So what is the cost of supporting such a large brain? Is it useful to have a Porsche turbo, that can go 200 MPH, when all that is available are dirt roads with potholes? - No, it's a waste.
The amount of human knowledge at that time was meager, and the excess brain matter may have been overkill, and wasteful, and thereby a poor evolutionary survival strategy at that time.
..........FULL STOP.
A nuclear exchange would suck beyond belief, but it would most certainly not be the end of the species. We'd end up at an 1850's level of technology and lifestyle, with a few modern anachronisms that made it through.
Learn about Photography Basics.
At least I learned that in Med school. A quick Google search will yield that answer too.
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=brain+calorie+consumption&aq=0s&aqi=g-s1&oq=brain+caloric+co&fp=b36c7832dbb01be6
..........FULL STOP.
the Boskops were probably all murdered by the kind of apes we have running around today
So, if I bench 225 lbs it means that I'm a nerd only when in countries that use metric?
END
Acutally, to be born with a big head, in those days, would mean that the woman would have to give birth.
The head size during birth is the issue. Big head, small hole means no birth, and most likely the death of the mother as well.
We are assuming that these were an indigenous hominid species in Africa that went extinct 10,000 years ago.
However an alternate hypothesis is that a Sectoid scoutship on a research mission got stranded in South Africa 10,000 years ago for whatever reason (mechanical failure?) and the crew died there, leaving their skulls behind.
Sadly, in spite of their great intelligence, these creatures (known to Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons as "Ugh-Geek") spent their lives in the back of their parents' caves, seldom venturing forth to engage directly in life. As a result, they seldom had contact with the female of the species and died out.
They were, however, responsible for some spectacularly rude and imaginative cave paintings, which are currently barred from public view, and truly astonishing amounts of a DNA-bearing substance on the bedding material in their "cribs".
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Bunk. Utter bunk. This whole like of research was abandoned in the 1950s because it became evident that the "Boskop" skull was simply an unusual individual, possibly suffering from hydrocephalus (a condition where too much spinal fluid is produced, causing cranial overpressure and often an enlarged head).
The cranial volume of the skull is within the range of variation of the living human population. The volume is estimated at about 1800 ml, which is right in the distribution for male skulls.
And, in any event, it's been well established that there is no correlation between brain volume and apparent intelligence among modern humans (anyone alive 10,000 years ago is firmly in this category). For a detailed history of this quackery and hogwash, see Stephen Jay Gould's The Missmeasure of Man.
Didn't anyone bother to Google "boskop"?
What a ridiculous statement. Why would you say that?
I think your sense of ridiculousness stems from the idea that islam taking over the earth is undesirable. It may be for us, but, what if it is the natural course of things? Like, why does the West have to not get taken over by Islam?
This is my sig.
From what I have seen, and I have lived in several states, the less educated and clever folks are, the more kids they tend to produce.
Conversely, the majority of my well educated and intelligent friends tend to have 1 child at most.
It would seem that a less advanced race of morons (i.e. Humans) could very quickly run these Uber-smarties to extinction just by our numbers alone.
Brain size is a factor in intelligence, just not the only factor. And whales have an extremely limit ability to use tools, so there not really building shit.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Who is to say? evidence, that's who. You ahve some evidence, bring it forward otherwise it's just a complete waste of time.
WWIII DID happen, it was just an economical war. I'm not sure why people assume WWIII would have had to have nukes detonating.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
.But I am not a biologist so what do I know. I do know in the US the Conservatives will kick the crap out of Liberals unless the liberals start breeding better.
I think you would be right if there were not so many Catholics. Catholics are liberal baby makers. Catholics have big families, tend to be urban, with loads of babies, and so to them, the whole liberal idea of everyone getting along and sharing just makes a lot of sense. Don't believe me? Just look at the demographics.
Catholics would overwhelming be Democrats, if it were not for abortion, and I would expect that trend to continue, with the influx of so many catholic immigrants. People look at Ted Kennedy's career and what he did with immigration don't get it at all - despite his faults, he didn't see the world through a racial prism, but a religious one, and so he was the guy that shifted immigration to tilt to predominantly catholic countries.
Despite the present rap of liberalism and even communism as secular things, there is a huge underpinning of catholicism in both. In particular, because catholicism equates its religion with both an oral tradition and a book tradition, its easier to let go of the bible as a completely inerrant book because catholic doctrine holds that the bible was never actually meant to be the one book that rules them all... its a helper for priests. And, because catholicism borrows the jewish notion of demands deeds to go with the worship, its tough to ignore Christ's teachings to save the poor and all that stuff.
This is my sig.
Maybe they didn't die out, maybe they went somewhere with less hostile neighbours.
Pre-Inca skulls from the Paracas area of Peru have been estimated to have a cranial capacity of 2500ccs.
Of course, it cannot possibly be the case that a culture of humans somewhere at some time in the past had the intelligence to develop breeding techniques and then got the bright idea that maybe breeding for even greater intelligence was desirable. For them to have done so would have required that they be either Jews or Nazis and we all know Jews and Nazis didn't exist until WW II.
Seastead this.
In most of human history ruthlessness and tenacity would take you a lot further than a high IQ.
We only happen to be living in an age where smart people are generally not beaten to a bloody pulp.
Everyone knows elephants are way smarter than humans.
I don't think intelligence has anything to do with long term survival of a species. It's more luck and how much offspring you produce. Things that lay lots of eggs are typically the most succesful. What is your personal breeding plan to insure survival of the human race?
As a paralimbic cortex, the insular cortex is considered to be a relatively old structure.
And I will blindly hold to that belief, even over the sound of my own inconsolable weeping.
All you braniacs on Slashdot should know exactly why this hominid went extinct.
The possibility of successfully breading is inversely proportional to IQ.
Look in the mirror and sadly you know it's true.
France has always had a high birth rate, particularly since the end of WW2. French people love to fuck, you can't blame the Muslims for that one. France has also never been "the only European country that doesn't have a falling birthrate", that's racist propaganda meant to play to the angry white man fear of a brown planet.
If dating the water erosion on the Sphinx holds any water, then it would date back to 10,000 B.C. when that area was grasslands and experience significant water fall. If the Sphinx was built back then, it would align with the era of the last of the "Boskop Man" placing them in the area of the Nile.
Incidentally, the Egyptian pharaohs were usually depicted having large skulls, and married siblings (to preserve the bloodlines?). Maybe there's some correlation between the knowledge to build the Pyramids and these Boskop Men.
How about an infection? What if they couldn't get the vaccine injected intramuscularly through a bamboo needle?
No doubt the ancestors of Glen and Sarah where annoyed at all that "thinking and stuff" and immediately eliminated them.
"My ex-wife is tarded, now she's a pilot"
Apparently these guys have never seen idiocracy. If they had, they might have come to the conclusion that maybe because these hominids were smarter, they made more conscientious decisions concerning the carrying-capacity of their environs. As such, they would most likely have had fewer children, and been monogamous, while their less intelligent cousins were eating or screwing anything that didn't run fast enough to evade capture (the same way modern hominids act when they drink too much). Either that or they mastered space travel about 7000 years ago and bailed this dumb-assed planet
-Oz.
FTA
Longer brain pathways lead to larger and deeper memory hierarchies. These confer a greater ability to examine and discard more blind alleys, to see more consequences of a plan before enacting it. In general this enables us to think things through. If Boskops had longer chains of cortical networks—longer mental assembly lines—they would have created longer and more complex classification chains. When they looked down a road as far as they could, before choosing a path, they would have seen farther than we can: more potential outcomes, more possible downstream costs and benefits. ...
Perhaps the Boskops were trapped by their ability to see clearly where things would head. Perhaps they were prisoners of those majestic brains.
This conclusions strikes me as illogical. After all, the world is a chaotic place, and even doubling the brain power would likely not allow the Boskops to see much farther down the road. Supposing that each juncture in a hypothetical chain of events consists of 2 paths, the possibilities will grow exponentially of what may happen in the future. So, for example, if we humans can process 64 events with our brain, then that would be about 6 steps into the future (since 2^6 = 64). If the Boskops can process twice as many events, then that is only 1 more step into the future, which doesn't seem terribly useful.
On that same token, perhaps this is the reason that this species didn't thrive the same way humans did. The extra brain wasn't particularly useful, yet still brought along problems (birthing, etc.).
erroneous is absolutely correct!
You are factually, historically and scientifically mistaken, dood! The lowbrow has always been, and will always be, the bane of the civilized and intelligent! The Roman soldier who slew Archimedes most probably didn't realize who he was, and therefore didn't kill him because he was the tactical support of his Grecian state, it was the soldier's natural lowbrow impulse. Genghis Khan a genius? Judging by his descendants, difficult to prove!
You aren't seriously suggesting Bush, Bernanke, Greenspan, Paulson, Geithner, Blankfein are truly superior? Try asking any of them to code a simple program! Nope, in the long run the sociopath wins, which is why humanity will have a short run indeed....
And the internal competition did them in? :-)
I wrote my undergraduate senior thesis on the topic of the limits of intelligence in relation to evolution and survival about twenty five years ago ("Why Intelligence: Object, Stability, Evolution, Model"). A lot depends on context. Also, how did these people cooperate? And what were their values, assumptions, and choices of tools of thought? What was their culture? Were they symbiotic with other species like dogs? Lots of specific issues. With that said, studies seem to indicate the human brain has been getting bigger over the last 5000 years or so. There may be plenty of value to intelligence in the right context. Whales and dolphins that have much bigger brains than humans seem pretty happy. :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'd imagine their additional brain served some function, maybe mating related, maybe just carrying out other tasks less efficiently, very unclear exactly how they differed from us.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
evidence ? we dont have any evidence to the contrary of that too. only 1 skeleton. yet, academicia is way fast in deducting extinction and even stupor of a species from it. we dont even know what were their genetics affecting brain structure. all is being deduced based on homo sapiens sapiens.
Read radical news here
The Jocks drove them to extinction.
There's only so many times one can get stuffed in their locker or so many wedgies the genetic material can take before one gives up.
Have gnu, will travel.
its our ability to communicate richly
i don't care what these hominid's brainpower was like. if all they could do is grunt and hoot, they're 150 iq points of nothing. whatever that went on in that braincase that was truly amazing doesn't mean a damn thing if it has no way to get out of that braincase. and lo and behold, they're extinct. completely unsurprising
social intelligence is far, far more important than things like spatial intelligence, mathematical intelligence, or even strategic intelligence. and the iq test doesn't test social intelligence. the whole cult of the iq test is really pointless. the iq test has a very limited specific application and it is given far too much weight than what it actually deserves in contemporary society. i think it has something to do with the panic the west was experiencing as the soviets overtook the west in the space race in the 1950s, and suddenly the emphasis on math and the sciences became paramount. but even in scientific disciplines, its the guys with the social intelligence that dominate: jobs, gates, ellison: these are business guys first, programmers second
a guy with subpar intelligence with good communication skills dominates the guy with the stellar iq who doesn't have very good communication skills. you see it in these forums: "i hate my phb boss". well, why is your phb boss your boss? simply because he communicates better than you. yeah, he's dumber than you. but he COMMUNICATES better than you. this is not some perverse warping of justice, this is very much in line with the way things should be. i don't care how many games of chess you can play in your head at the same time, if you have no charisma and you cannot communicate well, you have less influence, and therefore less power, and less money. its perfectly logical how this plays out
a bad idea communicated well is FAR more important than a good idea communicated badly. not because i say so, but simply because of how reality works. if there is any injustice in this world, its that someone told you because you have a high iq you somehow deserve something superior, or that you yourself believe you are superior because of a test that only determines how well you manipulate complex 3D topologies in your head. guess what: its an amazing skill, but it doesn't actually help you get ahead in life about the things that really matter. your social iq is what really matters, and if you don't have it, you won't go far in this world, no matter how much your iq score is off the charts. in fact, we have a name for people who are extremely brilliant in limited ways but can't communicate: autistic savants. in some iq tests they would be way off the charts. but, like in the movie "rainman", they can't tell the difference between the price of a car and the price of a candy bar
that's a hard cold truth a lot of people in these forums probably still haven't accepted, but its true: your iq score means far less than you think. meanwhile, the idiot down the hall who knows how to talk the panties off girls: he will be your boss some day
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the meek will inherent the earth, maybe we are the meek lol
If they'd also evolved kitty-ears and a characteristic love of french-maid outfits, they would be the master race.
Brain size does not correlate with IQ.
Brain size does not correlate with intelligence.
IQ doesn't correlate with intelligence.
Trying to force any of these into existence is equal in validity to telling someone's personality traits from the bumps on their head.
Anyone who wants to take issue with the statements above regarding intelligence would first need to provide a definition of intelligence with an objective and replicable measurement of it. They'd also have to justify using it despite the enormous of disparity of opinions from cognitive psychologists on what intelligence is. Most of them have an opinion on the matter. The ones that know the most will acknowledge it as an opinion and will acknowledge the disparity.
Now as to TFA and IQ, if such beings existed, it's no wonder they're extinct. IQ is a measure of how well one does on an IQ test. If these beings' claim to evolutionary fame is their IQ, one can envision them sitting around taking tests, making them easy targets for predators. One can also envision them getting eaten while other hominids with smaller brains (and one would assume from TFA lesser IQs) run away. One can then meditate on the meaning of intelligence with respect to IQ since sitting around getting eaten doesn't seem to be a very intelligent behavior. If IQ made them smart, they'd have recognized the fact that running away was working for the others and adopted the technique.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
There is a correlation between human IQ and brain size. It is weak. SO weak that it proves itself of little use to anyone.
The review articles I went over showed correlations between 0.3 and 0.4. What does that explain? The amount of variance accounted for in a correlation is found by squaring the correlation. Thus, the amount of variance account for by the IQ/size correlation is between 0.09 and 0.16.
In other words, the best we have in scientific examination of IQ and brain size leaves between 84% and 91% unexplained. Logic dictates that betting on less than a 50/50 chance is a losing proposition. Betting on 'IQ = brain size' is right about 6 to 1 against. Not quite lottery ticket odds, but not where you'd want to put your money.
As for anything having to do with intelligence, you can find correlations for those too. But my comment regarding definition of intelligence stands. While they obviously had to use some definition of intelligence and stated what they're using, that doesn't mean their, or any, definition of intelligence is objective, measurable, accurate, reliable, or generally acceptable to anyone, least of all cognitive psychologists who specialize in intelligence.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
We don't know if these "smarter" humans were over run by less intelligent ones, or if some natural influence wiped them out ( like plague, or weather shifts ).
Making assumptions like this is a mockery of science.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This Boskop stuff was first postulated in 1913.
And IQ is intended, by design, to be objective. It is not called a "Human" Quotient.
This Boskop stuff began in 1913. It seems the greatest secrets really ARE kept secret by consensual incredulity.
In regards to IQ:
Rotating a square object to fit in a square hole is the same problem for all, regardless of species. The question is, can you do it, and how well? The answer to this question = IQ. I am not, however, stating that our measurment methods are perfect.
In regards to evolution:
Biological evolution DEFINATELY has a goal - it just depends on how you define it. One example might be: To extract the most efficient use of sustainable energy, and optimise the output, within a given environment. Non reproductive mechanical evolution is happy to fall into entropic death. I dont think there is a great deal of life that embraces death, and if there is, it wont be around too long. Living without unexpectedly dying IS a goal. And there is bound to be a way to do it "better".
When one accepts this and takes a macroscopic view, one can make certain predictions on the direction of evolution. e.g:
A theoretical hippy could soundly postulate the theory that the goal of life is to create a psuedo-biological entity, with a close-to-zero-energy economy, who's substrate spans the entire universe, creating non-local quantum decoherance - a Bose-condensate - a single organism governed by the universal wavefunction. And it would be VERY difficult to launch a coherant attack on this theory.
Scientists needs to beware the pitfalls of the human psychology also. A justified, concerted and prolonged attack on creationism and intelligent design has the potential to alter subjective perceptions of the universe and reality, and it shouldn't. Simply because people make unsubstantiated claims about the universe is no reason to universally rule out any apparently similair patterns that are independently witnessed.
Just an idea.
I guess I have to stop bad-mouthing the last episode of Battlestar Galactica...
This article is pure nonsense, as is the book it is based on.
Read: http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/brain/paleo/lynch-granger-big-brain-boskops-2008.html
for a short review of the topic.
Hugh, it never hurts researching a little before helping idiocy spread.
I think the Intelligence Quota is an anthropocentric way to pin any amount of intellect. Anyhow, this may coincide with another story about how genetically-same branches of human in Africa were separated for possibly over 100,000 years: http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre60104l-us-antarctica-plane/
You are a complete, uneducated and ignorant effingtard, dood.
The Nobel Prize in Economics always goes to the politician, never the real economists.
Michael Hudson and Steve Keen have never won the prize, to my knowledge.
It has always gone to the 10th raters and clowns, like looney tunes Milton Friedman, political clown Krugman and 10th rater Stiglitz, etc., etc. ad nauseum
The rest of what you said is pure drivel...."Humanity has been around for millions of years" Righto, dood, that's why we have pix of men riding dinosaurs....What a dweeb!!!
What is intelligence?
Albert Einstein, one of my heroes, was smart in very specific fields of human endeavour, but in others it seems like he was as utterly incapable as anybody.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
JS Bach.
Cervantes.
Newton.
By that measure exactly.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.