Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
Even with larger brain pans the discription of them as being more complex may not infact be a completely true statement. Did they have vocal cords that were sophisticated enough to produce real language? Did they all have something akin to autism spectrum disorder. Did the added brain capacity lead to any actual increase in computational, creative or otherwise survival enhancing benifit over Homo Sapien? Or, as maybe more likely, it was useless fatty tissue that wasn't utalized and became a burden. History tends to show that if you don't fit the niche some one else will supplant you that does.
Further, being born with a huge head is hard on female. With out C-sections, how would a woman survive? Maybe they procreated with homo sapians and lost the genetic destinction.
Or maybe they were eaten by zombies
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.
Well, a dollar is a dollar, a pound is a pound and a euro is a euro... until you start measuring one against the other. 100 on the IQ scale for Boskops is 150 on the scale for us.
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
Yes, I'm sure they found it easy to create a standardized and unbiased IQ test for an extinct family based solely on their postulated brain size. *snicker*
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Take a peek... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/61/Ele-brain.png
The brain seems larger, but seeing as the pre-frontal cortex isn't marked its relative size is difficult to guess. It is also worth bearing in mind that elephants are pretty intelligent animals.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
We aren't in competition with most bacteria (or viruses), so it doesn't really make sense to say that evolution favours one over other.
The bacteria and viruses of today have exactly as long evolutionary history than us.
And the concept of "more evolved" doesn't really make sense. "Better adapted" does, as does "more complex", but "more evolved" doesn't mean anything because, all together now, "evolution doesn't have a goal, so there's no way to say which entity is more and which less evolved".
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
And Einsteins prefontal cortex was much smaller than average. However he is arguably among the smartest humans to have ever lived.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Huh? The brain is the most costly organ for the body to run, any opportunity to reduce that cost will be aggressively pursued by evolution. The size of the brain matters *drastically* for evolution purposes...
Einstein's brain had an unusually large number or glial cells which support neuronal function. It's the brain equivalent of cardiovascular conditioning due to aerobic exercise although it's not clear if they facilitated or resulted from complex intellectual pursuits.
The idea that hominids got dumber is kind of charming but isn't supported by measuring cranial volume. If these early hominids with large brains are postulated to be ancestors of modern humans, it's possible the larger brains were evolutionarily pared down. An analogy might be an early creature with very large wings that was an ancestor of one with smaller, more efficient wings that enabled faster, more agile flight.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
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.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Einstein did not have some intimate insight on how the universe worked, he made mistakes on even basic principles (heat capacity comes to mind).
Really? In what way. Wiki states:
But experiments at low temperatures showed that the heat capacity changes, going to zero at absolute zero. As the temperature goes up, the specific heat goes up until it approaches the Dulong and Petit prediction at high temperature. By employing Planck's quantization assumption, Einstein's theory accounted for the observed experimental trend for the first time. Together with the photoelectric effect, this became one of the most important evidence for the need of quantization. Einstein used the levels of the quantum mechanical oscillator many years before the advent of modern quantum mechanics.
Seems like it was mostly correct to me.
He made some great discoveries, but also had a wasteland of failed ideas.
Thats a bold statement. Back this up please.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Those big brains would not have evolved without an evolutionary advantage of some sort...
You're right, what you posted is "typical evolutionary muddle". It's a common misconception that traits evolve because they pose some sort of advantage. In fact, all traits, both advantageous and disadvantageous, evolve at random. Traits don't necessarily persist because they're advantageous, either. They do often disappear when a species is placed under stress if they are maladaptive, but only if they aren't paired with some other more adaptive trait (often completely randomly), and this is only if the species is stressed in such a way as to make the trait a significant disadvantage. In short:
The fact that a trait evolved does not indicate that it was in any way an evolutionary advantage.
The fact that a trait persisted does not necessarily indicate that it was in any way advantageous.
The fact that a trait persisted does not necessarily indicate that it was not in any way disadvantageous.
The fact that a species persisted when others failed indicates that its entire package of traits was, considered as a whole, likely better for it that the competition, but this does not mean every single trait was advantageous, or that no traits were disadvantageous, even under the specific stressed they were subjected to.
During times when a species is not under stress, what traits evolve, and which increase or decrease in frequency, is essentially random and indicates nothing at all beyond population dynamics.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
But Einstein's model was not wrong - before him, there was no model at all. The Debye model is a minor correction in that there are multiple frequencies instead of just one. The Debye model corrects for extremely low temperatures - it is inaccurate at intermediate temperatures.
assuming the universe was not changing until Hubble's discovery
What do you mean? Hubble's expanding universe theory is consistent with Einstein's general relativity.
his flawed challenges to QM in the Bohr-Einstein debates
QM is bases on Einsteins discoveries, but QM is flawed, especially the uncertainty principle which is the part Einstein had a problem with. Here's an example of the problem with uncertainty: Uncertainty states you cannot know both an objects position and velocity at the same time. This also extends to the complete absence of particles, so if you know there is quantity zero of something, you then know the position but by definition you can then not know how fast that nothing is going.
error in clock synchronization for Special Relativity
Clock synchronization is a thought experiment. Those that claim the clock synchonization are wrong are using it to (incorrectly) show that the speed of light is not a constant. Einstein was not wrong here - the speed of light is constant.
a number of failures in proofs including E=mc^2
Not failures - mistakes. He always admitted he was poor in math. I'd like to see you do better.
Even what he considered his greatest mistake - the cosmological constant - new research shows that this constant my be necessary after all.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.