Jun 7, 2016 06:27 PM
(This post was last modified: Jun 7, 2016 07:36 PM by C C.)
http://nautil.us/blog/did-preemies-make-humans-smart
EXCERPT: [...] They started with about 100 hypothetical species, each with a random combination of brain size (which the authors used as a proxy for intelligence) and gestation time. In the model, as in real life, bigger brains relative to body size meant a more dangerous birth. Each hypothetical species started with 1,000 individuals, which then ran through 100 generations. Most species gravitated toward a combination of smaller brains and longer gestations; like a gazelle’s, their hypothetical babies were born ready to rock, but remained forever dumb. There were also a few species, though, that drifted toward a combination of big brain size and early births. These species were the ones that had started out smart and early-born, which allowed them to fall into a feedback loop that reinforced those traits.
[...] The model also correlates with what Cantlon has observed in her studies of young humans and apes. “Monkeys and apes mature much faster than humans,” she says. “A one-year-old monkey infant is as good at solving a number task—like identifying the cup that has more food—as a three-year-old human child is.” As a way to ground-truth the model, Kidd and Piantadosi compared the relative intelligence of a wide variety of primate species to their gestation and weaning times. Sure enough, they found, the smarter the primate, the less the time its baby spent in the womb.
The study dovetails nicely with a number of theories of human evolution, says Jingzhi Tan, a post-doctoral associate in primate cognitive evolution at Duke, and could even point to why humans are so uniquely cooperative. Chimps will occasionally work together to hunt monkeys, he says, but most of the time they feed themselves. “They can just find a tree and get some fruit,” he says. Humans, by contrast, would be hard-pressed to fend entirely for themselves (as amply evidenced by five seasons of Naked and Afraid). Cooperation is especially important, Tan says, in helping pregnant women get enough to eat, and in taking care of the newborn. A feedback loop of intelligence and helpless babies would also lead to greater cooperation, he says.
Not everybody is convinced....
Archerfish Can Recognize Faces, Too
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brie.../07/15645/
EXCERPT: Next time you peer into the water, be careful — the fish looking back at you might know more about you than you realize. In a study published Tuesday in Science Reports, researchers from the United Kingdom and Australia trained a species of fish to recognize individual human faces. While it took a bit of practice, the archerfish could pick out specific faces from a lineup with reasonable accuracy, indicating that animals can learn to recognize faces even if they don’t possess the neural hardware thought to be a prerequisite for the skill....
EXCERPT: [...] They started with about 100 hypothetical species, each with a random combination of brain size (which the authors used as a proxy for intelligence) and gestation time. In the model, as in real life, bigger brains relative to body size meant a more dangerous birth. Each hypothetical species started with 1,000 individuals, which then ran through 100 generations. Most species gravitated toward a combination of smaller brains and longer gestations; like a gazelle’s, their hypothetical babies were born ready to rock, but remained forever dumb. There were also a few species, though, that drifted toward a combination of big brain size and early births. These species were the ones that had started out smart and early-born, which allowed them to fall into a feedback loop that reinforced those traits.
[...] The model also correlates with what Cantlon has observed in her studies of young humans and apes. “Monkeys and apes mature much faster than humans,” she says. “A one-year-old monkey infant is as good at solving a number task—like identifying the cup that has more food—as a three-year-old human child is.” As a way to ground-truth the model, Kidd and Piantadosi compared the relative intelligence of a wide variety of primate species to their gestation and weaning times. Sure enough, they found, the smarter the primate, the less the time its baby spent in the womb.
The study dovetails nicely with a number of theories of human evolution, says Jingzhi Tan, a post-doctoral associate in primate cognitive evolution at Duke, and could even point to why humans are so uniquely cooperative. Chimps will occasionally work together to hunt monkeys, he says, but most of the time they feed themselves. “They can just find a tree and get some fruit,” he says. Humans, by contrast, would be hard-pressed to fend entirely for themselves (as amply evidenced by five seasons of Naked and Afraid). Cooperation is especially important, Tan says, in helping pregnant women get enough to eat, and in taking care of the newborn. A feedback loop of intelligence and helpless babies would also lead to greater cooperation, he says.
Not everybody is convinced....
Archerfish Can Recognize Faces, Too
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brie.../07/15645/
EXCERPT: Next time you peer into the water, be careful — the fish looking back at you might know more about you than you realize. In a study published Tuesday in Science Reports, researchers from the United Kingdom and Australia trained a species of fish to recognize individual human faces. While it took a bit of practice, the archerfish could pick out specific faces from a lineup with reasonable accuracy, indicating that animals can learn to recognize faces even if they don’t possess the neural hardware thought to be a prerequisite for the skill....
