How is it Animal brains are not developing as human brains were thousand of years ago

[pretender]

When you think about it. Animals are mentaly at the same stage they were a long long time ago, why is this??? It is strange that the human brain has developed in leaps and bounds, does anyone think that Animals could progress or are they that different, is it that we have a different type of brain, if so how did that happen. confussed here?? :confused:

[ecoli]

are you sure that's true? How do you know where animals used to be, mentally. Please back up your claims.

[pretender]

Animals are doing nothing more than what they did in past times, they roam in packs as they did, we on the other hand, now have computers, phones, T V, etc etc etc. I dont think any more needs to be said. How did one brain progress and another didnt.???????Any ideas Ecoli???

[AzurePhoenix]

Animals are doing nothing more than what they did in past times, they roam in packs as they did, we on the other hand, now have computers, phones, T V, etc etc etc. I dont think any more needs to be said. How did one brain progress and another didnt.???????Any ideas Ecoli???

Other species are mentally where they need to be for the niche in which they're evolved to fill, and based on the opportunities evolution has presented to them. Human evolution met a few roads that specifically led to intelligence based on our lifestyle and the traits that were beneficial to survival, the resources available (if fish oil-rich diets were indeed key), and it all happened rather damned fast (all originating from the random mutations that made it all possible of course).

[pretender]

So AzurePhoenix did we have the brain to evolve the way we did first. or did the chances come first. Either way I'm sure chances came to animals also and why didn't they take that chance????????

[AzurePhoenix]

So AzurePhoenix did we have the brain to evolve the way we did first. or did the chances come first. Either way I'm sure chances came to animals also and why didn't they take that chance????????

Keep in mind, I'm keeping this simplified...

 

The genes for intelligence combined with a social partially-predatory species' (our ancestors) opportunies that arose are what drove us to intelligence. Considering our physical abilities, intelligence was a great boon to us and really helped us make it through.

 

Other species are fine where they are, and even if they get the genes for greater intelligence, it might not necessarily make it into the species' gene pool if it isn't much of a benefit. Take sloths for instance. Would being a really smart sloth be all that useful?

 

Intelligence is just another adaptive trait to benefit the species. In some cases, it'll be a great benefit, in others, non-intellectual abilities and/or behaviors are what count.

[ecoli]

Animals are doing nothing more than what they did in past times, they roam in packs as they did, we on the other hand, now have computers, phones, T V, etc etc etc. I dont think any more needs to be said. How did one brain progress and another didnt.???????Any ideas Ecoli???

 

Well, obviously, human brains have evolved more then some animals, but how do you know that animal brains have remained static? Maybe animals travel in packs in ways that are better then they used to.

 

Perhaps, these days, fish school is ways that are smarter. We don't really have a way of testing how animals used to do things... do we?

[AlienUFO]

Hey, wasn't ourself are animals long ago?

[silkworm]

Hip structure gave free hands.

 

Free hands led to higher brain function.

 

It's our bipedalism.

 

It's all in the hips.

[AzurePhoenix]

Hey, wasn't ourself are animals long ago?

Well, we still are. People just seem to think we aren't. In fact, we're still apes.

 

If we wanted to go into specific means of getting smarter like silkworm is doing, I'd also like to point out that our behavioral existance as social creatures and part-time predators was good for intelligence, some think living in the trees in earlier forms helped foster the brain-abilities needed for spatial understanding to swing and leap, a diet rich in brain-food, whatever mutations helped the actual brain to get along well, and of course, the hands.

[padren]

What I think is that "trying smart stuff" really helped us survive because we happened to by chance have bodies shaped in a manner that could take advantage of it. We could "try something smart" like figure out a tool and actually use it too, since we had thumbs.

 

In most species, if a group starts to get smarter while another group starts to get better teeth, the ones with the teeth will really out compete the ones that got smarter since there is not a lot of ways to take advantage of intellegence for most critters.

 

Since we weren't too strong and didn't have the best teeth etc, something like a very primative tool would help us a ton, whereas a puma...even if it could use a club, would be way less likely to be more effective, since its claws are so sharp and its muscles so strong.

[Sisyphus]

Yeah. Sure, a puma as smart as a human would probably have some advantage over other pumas, but not nearly as much as the advantage we would have over a human as dumb as a puma. But our intelligence costs a whole lot. Our brains eat up nutrients like nothing else, and our complex minds take so long to develop that human children are dependant on their parents for far longer than any other species. There has to be a BIG advantage to being smart for it to be "worth it," (that is, to help us survive and produce children), and we just happen to have the peculiar physiology that allows that.

[Neil9327]

My view is that the evolutionary changes that allowed us to change from uncivilised animals to civilised technically able humans actually occurred slowly hundreds of thousands of years ago. But that when this change occurred, it put in place a scheme where mankind would evolve, with each generation's improvements in technological achievement being proportional to the total degree of improvement that has happened to date.

 

So for example in the stone age 15000 years ago whenever it was man (with a small m) had just the same level of "brain power" as it has now, but that it was only capable of crafting items from stone, which is a "simple" skill. And this "simple" level of technological achievement gave little inspiration for the children to try to achieve more.

 

Then as time went on, the level of achievement increased with the invention of the wheel, hence transport, and more integration between tribes (and wars) and an improved quality of live and living longer. So people had more resources and motivation to improve their lives still further.

 

So this improvement continued at a faster rate than before.

 

This led, IMHO, to an exponential (in the true mathematical sense) growth in the achievement of successive generations, to the level today, where the world is improving at a rate higher than has ever occurred in the past.

 

I think biological evolution is part of this, but only a small part, in the last 2000 years or so.

 

 

One question to ask, to challenge the above, is if you put a modern baby, with a modern age brain, born to an averagely intelligent family, in a bronze age tribe in isolation from the rest of society, how would it develop? I think it would grow up as a bronze age person, throwing spears etc. I don't think they would invent the wheel (literally).

 

The other question is if we took a bronze age baby and brought it up in today's western society, how would it perform? I think it would do OK, but a little below average.

[zyncod]

I don't know why people think that intelligence only has one aspect: abstract reasoning. If you look at a bat brain, the amount of area devoted to hearing is amazing. Their brains can do Fourier transforms on incoming sound to figure out how fast whatever object their chirp bounced off of is moving (useful as insects tend to fly fast). Humans can't even tell if the side of a barn is there by yelling at it, much less how fast it is moving. And I'm sure that pumas have brains that are overdeveloped in respect to humans as far as the physics of moving objects.

[Genecks]

The development and advancement of language.

 

Despite scientific thought, I've always had a conspiracy theory as to why humans were evolved past other animals.

 

Why was it in the past few hundred years that humans made some of the most advanced things? Humans have been around longer than thousands of years; yet a sudden explosion of intellect came about.

 

I've always thought something higher was at play.

Perhaps humans have the ability to exponentially gain new skills.

[pretender]

everyone has stated the same thing in a round about way, What I wanted to know is, where did the spark to have the human mind come from,and why did it happen.

[JaKiri]

When you think about it. Animals are mentaly at the same stage they were a long long time ago, why is this???

 

Lack of selectional pressures to develop it.

 

Remember that the development of the primate brain was, initially, very slow; it's an exponential increase, and it's only in the last few tens of thousands of years that the human brain has reached its current relative stature.

 

everyone has stated the same thing in a round about way, What I wanted to know is, where did the spark to have the human mind come from,and why did it happen.

 

It's a self perpetuation thing. The human brain is large because a larger brain makes it more beneficial to get an even larger brain. So, once random mutation brings about a larger brain, it will, if the conditions are good for intelligence to provide a selection advantage, grow. At first it will go slowly, very slowly. Only once it gets large will it grow at a large rate.

[pretender]

The only way to explain what I would like answered is at the point that we were still part ape????? what caused our brain to become Human??? and ape to stay ape???...

[JaKiri]

The only way to explain what I would like answered is at the point that we were still part ape????? what caused our brain to become Human??? and ape to stay ape???...

 

You're looking at it the wrong way. Human brains weren't human brains until relatively recently; you just had ape brains which were advanced and ape brains which weren't (depending on selectional pressures and just plain chance) and the former either died out or evolved into humans, the latter didn't.

[pretender]

You may be right, but apes are still here.in the form that they were then, so how is this the case. I am sure I am not looking at this the wrong way. This advancement is so much, in so short a time. it cant be the only reason.

[Edtharan]

Just because one trait is advantagous to one species, does not mean that it would be equally advantagous to another.

 

At the root of it this is why humans have a much larger mental capacity than other animals. However there is a lot of mitagating circumstances, but they rely on a case by case analysis. Looking at why chimanzes didn't develop bigger brains (as they are most closely related to humans) is different to why a crocodile didn't.

 

Untill we can acutally look at another intelligent species (at least intelligent enough to comunicate with us), then it is unlikely that we will be able to reach a conclusion to this, other than because it was advantagious for us (in our circumstances) and not for others.

 

The fact that Intelligence is not rampant in other species leads to the conclusion that intelegence (or at least minor rises in mental capacity) is not nessesarily a good survival trait. 100,000 years (roughtly the age of Homo Sapiens) is a flash in the pan when it comes down to geological time. If we anhialated our selves (or got wiped out by some natural disaster) we might not even leave much in the way of evidence that we were ever here in a million years time (though there might be some space junk still around - maybe).

[pretender]

Thank you Edtharan. and I mean that.

[darkangel199]

whenever i hear this question i always see 2001: A space Oddesy in my mind lol.

 

or i think of apes sitting around and one swings a stick and it stuck in a rock, then they pick it up and bam, their destructive potential just increased 5 times, which lead to other using bigger sticks and rocks and other actually throwing rock, etc lol.

[JHAQ]

We all know what a royal flush is in poker & the odds on hitting it are miniscule . The same with intelligence as a survival "tool " . Many things had to be in place before it could evolve -- homothermy , bipedalism , strereo vision , ancestral brachiation etc , etc, etc --------- .Mutation & natural selection are not predestined but random events .

[JHAQ]

---- add opposable thumbs --