Is there any indication of increased intellegence over time within the Human species?

I'd like to pose this open question:Which of the following organisms would you say had intelligence? (And why do you draw the line where you do?)

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

When I first made my list I would have plumped for the same answer as you (only mice --> men have intelligence), but having done a bit of research into snail psychology, I think they might sneak in as well. The following link describes some interesting research on learning and memory in snails: Marine snail study gives insights into human brainI would suggest that if an organism can learn then it can adopt novel ways of dealing with problems, which meets your definition of intelligence.The case of Jellyfish is interesting. They have a very rudimentary nervous system, but I'm not sure whether it's sophisticated enough for us to say they're intelligent. The following link has a fascinating description of how the jellyfish nervous system works: The Cnidarian Nervous SystemIntelligent behaviour in mammals seems to be associated with areas in the brain called the association areas. These integrate signals from different sensory areas, and the motor and limbic areas (the limbic area is responsible for modulating emotional repsonse). In effect they seem to provide a mechanism for inhibiting or overriding immediate sensory/emotional responses, allowing the organism to apply learned knowledge to deal with a situation.Here's a brief description of the association areas in the human brain: Cognitive FunctionsInterestingly, one of the things that distinguishes the human brain from the brains of other higher primates is that we have lots of connections between association areas (these association area to association area connections are very rare in higher primates). What this means is that we seem to have another level of response inhibition that other mammals don't share.Here's a document that describes these higher-order association areas in the human brain: The Cerebral CortexThis message has been edited by JavaMan, 08-11-2005 12:25 PMThis message has been edited by JavaMan, 08-12-2005 07:20 AMThis message has been edited by JavaMan, 08-12-2005 07:20 AM

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

I'd like to take issue with your claim that knowledge and intelligence are equivalent. It's clear from research on problem-solving that knowledge is required for success (I'm assuming Jar's definition of intelligence here). The more knowledge you have about a particular domain, the more chance you have of successfully solving problems in that domain.But what we normally mean by intelligence is something more than having a lot of knowledge about a particular domain. For example, imagine we have two atomic scientists, one who's been working in his particular field for 25 years, and another who has just started his career. When thinking about their relative intelligence I think most of us would agree that we could imagine the novice being more intelligent than the expert. So what do we mean by more intelligent in this case? Do we mean that the novice has more knowledge about general problem-solving strategies than the expert? Or do we mean that the hard-wiring in the novice's brain makes him innately better at solving problems than the expert?Take another example. Imagine we compare our expert atomic scientist with a master carpenter, and let's assume that our atomic scientist isn't a genius - he's got an excellent knowledge of the facts in his domain and has a disciplined approach to gathering his data, but doesn't have a particularly imaginative way of interpreting that data. On the other hand, our master carpenter is equally knowledgable in his own domain, but also has a reputation of coming up with imaginative solutions to construction problems. Would we be justified in saying the master carpenter was more intelligent?My final point is that the general intelligence of individuals isn't necessarily increased by either their own, or their culture's accumulation of knowledge in particular academic domains. The kind of problems that neolithic man had to address would leave your average atomic scientist on the verge of starvation within a few days!This message has been edited by JavaMan, 08-12-2005 08:21 AMThis message has been edited by JavaMan, 08-12-2005 08:22 AMThis message has been edited by JavaMan, 08-12-2005 08:24 AM

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Granted. Sorry for the misrepresentation.However, I don't quite understand why you have a problem with the word 'intelligent'. Within this thread we're using it on the understanding that what we mean by it is 'problem solving abilities'. So when I say that someone is more intelligent than someone else I simply mean they have better problem solving skills. (Problem solving being one of the standard areas of research in modern cognitive science). I'm not making a claim, I'm asking a question, i.e. if one person is better at solving problems than another, is that because their brains are hard-wired in a particular way, or is it because they have some knowledge the other person doesn't have?This question isn't trivial. In fact, it's been the cause of controversy for well over a century. Scientific opinion has been, and still is divided, and scientific fashion (and public policy) has tended to drift first one way, then another. Until the 1970s in England, for example, the 'hard-wired intelligence' theory held sway. The state education system was split into two tiers and children were assigned to one tier or the other based on whether they passed a national IQ test at age 11. During the 60s and 70s the scientific orthodoxy changed and the theory of 'hard-wired intelligence' fell out of fashion. Public policy followed the scientific fashion and by the end of the 1970s, the national selective system in England was abolished.It's a question that interests me because, as a child of the 70s, my bias has always been against the notion of hard-wired intelligence. But the more I learn about the brain, the less likely it seems that there isn't at least some hard-wiring of problem-solving abilities. The various types of autism, for example, are caused by faulty hard-wiring; schizophrenia seems to be at least partly caused by faulty wiring. Is it such a leap, then, to suggest that some element of problem-solving ability might be hard-wired and that the effectiveness of this wiring varies across the human population? Surely whether a term or concept has explanatory or predictive power depends on what level you're working at. At the level of brain chemistry, clearly the term 'intelligence' has no explanatory or predictive power, but at the level of behaviour it certainly has.It is useful because it distinguishes a particular subset of cognitive abilities, i.e. 'problem solving skills' rather than 'object recognition', say, or 'language understanding'. It provides us with a useful category label for this set of skills.As to explanatory and predictive power, suppose we want to investigate the question, 'How is it that some children in my class are better at solving problems than other children'. According to our 'hard-wired intelligence' model the reason why the children have differential problem solving abilities is because, to a certain extent, those skills are hard-wired and this limits their ability to learn and to apply learned knowledge. On the other hand our 'intelligence is knowledge' model suggests that the difference is due to differences in acquired knowledge.Clearly, given these two models we can make predictions about what will happen to the childrens' problem solving abilities under different conditions, and because we can make predictions we can test the models. Mmm...yes, sorry, I think I got carried away and started arguing about something you wrote in another thread...just put it down to the wiring getting crossed!

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

The storage and manipulation of knowledge is obviously an important component in problem solving, but there are other equally important components such as attention and planning.If we want to understand problem solving abilities in humans or animals we need to investigate all of these areas, not just focus on knowledge. If two children have differences in problem-solving ability, for example, is it because they have different knowledge (or different knowledge acquisition skills), or is it because they have different abilities to block out distractions, or different skills in planning the approach to a problem? And when we've answered this question we still have the further question, Can we overcome these knowledge/attention/planning differences by training, or are they hard-wired in some way?Returning to the topic of this thread, one of the questions we're asking is, What is it about the human brain that makes humans better at problem solving than chimpanzees? From the evidence of your previous messages I'd guess your answer might contain the word 'knowledge'. However, it has been suggested that the thing that really gives humans the edge, when it comes to problem solving, is attention, i.e. the ability to filter out distracting sensory input. An amusing example of this ability is the famous Gorillas in Our Midst experiment performed by Dan Simons at the University of Illinois in the 1990s.For those who haven't heard about this experiment, here's a brief description. A group of subjects were asked to watch a video of a basketball game and count the number of passes one team made. During the game a woman dressed in a gorilla costume walks into the frame, turns to face the camera, beats her breast a few times, then walks off. Amazingly, half of the subjects watching this film don't see the gorilla at all - they're so focused on the task they've been set that they're effectively blind to it. Gorillas in Our Midst
Videos of the experimentsAccording to at least one animal behaviourist (Temple Grandin, Animals in Translation) this inattentional blindness is something peculiar to humans. Animals, even higher primates like chimpanzees, simply don't have the neural architecture to inhibit their sensory inputs in such a radical way. Temple Grandin

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

I hope gravity waves aren't affecting my memory! (Although it could explain a few things).I wasn't saying that 'intelligence' couldn't affect brain chemistry (although I'd need a fair bit of evidence to accept that claim), I was just saying that for someone investigating the structure of neural membranes, say, or the binding effect of neurotransmitters, the term 'intelligence' isn't very useful. Obviously if you could prove that external 'intelligence' can affect the chemistry of the brain, that would be a different matter!

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

What's your brother's book called? Was it ever published? What is it that impresses you about Dr. Gladyshev's work? I've read a couple of his papers (prompted by your many references to him!), but I can't see why you find his ideas so exciting. He seems like just another scientist with ambitions to become a dietician-cum-alchemist (I'm half expecting a whole rash of books on The Gladyshev Diet to appear on the bestseller lists next year).

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

What are these 'supramolecular structures'? They seem to be integral to Gladyshev's theory, but I've no idea what they correspond to. Can you give me an example?

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Thanks, Brad. Those references, particularly the last one, are very informative. Ironically, it's precisely the field I specialized in during my chemistry degree, although we didn't use the term 'supramolecular structures' in those days (I was at college around the time Lehn and Pedersen were awarded their Nobel Prize).

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

There's no justification for your claim that Australian Aborigines as a group are less intelligent than modern Europeans as a group. They're Homo sapiens sapiens and we're Homo sapiens sapiens - the two groups have similar variations in cognitive abilities.IQ tests aren't a useful measure of intelligence across cultures for the reasons Nuggins gave.The technological differences between modern Homo sapiens groups are not due to differences in intelligence but to differences in (amongst other things):1. Availabilty of resources (you can't develop iron tools, for example, if you don't have access to iron ore or fuel to do the smelting);2. Access to technology developed by others (most cultures receive their new technology by contact with other groups rather than inventing it themselves);3. Cultural attitudes to innovation (many cultures, unlike our own, have negative attitudes to innovation)Personally, I always smile when people take pride in the technological superiority of western culture. I always want to ask them, 'So which bit of it did you invent?'

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

So, if you brought up a group of Aborigine and a group of French children under identical cultural conditions, would you expect the average IQ between the two groups to be pretty much the same?

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

So is the difference between Neanderthal intelligence and modern Homo sapiens intelligence also a cultural difference, or is there a biological difference too? What about the differences between Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, or between Australopithecus and Homo erectus?

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

I can think of a different reason for Neanderthals failing to copy Cro-Magnon technology (if there is evidence that they tried and failed). The attempt to copy the technology already shows a high level of intelligence - perhaps they failed simply because they didn't have the very fine motor skills required, rather than because they lacked the intelligence. (I can't help picturing to myself a group of Neanderthals sitting around a campfire, trying to compensate for their clumsiness by composing clever satires on the lives of their nerdy Cro-Magnon neighbours!)Evidence about technology isn't enough on its own to make a judgement about the relative intelligence of hominid groups. As we've seen in our discussion of Australian aborigines, a difference in technologies is not a clear cut indicator of biological differences in intelligence (and biological difference is what we're really talking about here).Comparing Australopithecus and Homo erectus, or Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, we have clear differences in the morphology of the cranium as well as the tool-making evidence, so we can say fairly confidently, 'Homo erectus was more intelligent than Australopithecus, and Homo sapiens was more intelligent than Homo erectus'.However, the evidence is not so clear cut when we compare Neanderthals and modern man. The morphology of the cranium is pretty similar, except that the Neanderthal cranium tends to be larger than that of Cro-Magnon (although we have no idea whether this means that the upper cortical areas were larger in Neanderthals - suggesting higher intelligence - or that the cranium was packed with insulating material.So, on balance, I'd say the jury was still out on this question.

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The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible