Interesting video I thought. A facetious suggestion I know, but if domestication has selected for smaller human brains then globalisation could select for even smaller brains. Somehow I don't find that difficult to envisage.
6 comments:
Doonhamer
said...
The hips, and the pelvis, of the ideal women have shrunk. These women have looked at big headed suitors and have said " Get tae........ No way Jose. "
As with all hypotheses based on evolutionary history there will be little chance of a single change being sufficient to explain any one of our characteristics.
I do like the third hypothesis because it seems to map onto environmental changes in a more timely way. But I don't think it goes far enough. Yes, we have externalised knowledge. Yes we have shifted major decisions to the crowd around us. But we have also externalised some of our cognition into others around us too - we accept leaders leading, experts experting, religious beliefs directing our behaviour, mass communication to inform us... and we correct our individual thinking through the effect of feedback over our connections with others.
If we have more 'brain' than we need to live, then evolution will trim away inefficiency, over time. Arguably, over the generations, the use of AI will reduce the need to do our own thinking in our own skulls even more.
Doonhamer - the hips and the pelvis of women round here haven't shrunk though. Just the opposite as far as I can see.
DJ - imagine a future with smaller and smaller brains - in a few generations figures from the Ministry of Numbers could show that over 100% of young people go to university.
While the cranial capacity may be marginally smaller, what about capacity to think or neural density(trying to think of another word in this context). AFAIK its not physical size that matters is the number of internal connections in the brain?
6 comments:
The hips, and the pelvis, of the ideal women have shrunk.
These women have looked at big headed suitors and have said " Get tae........ No way Jose. "
As with all hypotheses based on evolutionary history there will be little chance of a single change being sufficient to explain any one of our characteristics.
I do like the third hypothesis because it seems to map onto environmental changes in a more timely way. But I don't think it goes far enough. Yes, we have externalised knowledge. Yes we have shifted major decisions to the crowd around us. But we have also externalised some of our cognition into others around us too - we accept leaders leading, experts experting, religious beliefs directing our behaviour, mass communication to inform us... and we correct our individual thinking through the effect of feedback over our connections with others.
If we have more 'brain' than we need to live, then evolution will trim away inefficiency, over time. Arguably, over the generations, the use of AI will reduce the need to do our own thinking in our own skulls even more.
Doonhamer - the hips and the pelvis of women round here haven't shrunk though. Just the opposite as far as I can see.
DJ - imagine a future with smaller and smaller brains - in a few generations figures from the Ministry of Numbers could show that over 100% of young people go to university.
Technology always gets smaller as time goes by. In a few millennia, you'll be able to fit the human brain on the head of a pin.
While the cranial capacity may be marginally smaller, what about capacity to think or neural density(trying to think of another word in this context).
AFAIK its not physical size that matters is the number of internal connections in the brain?
Bucko - which brain though?
Nessimmersion - it could be that but I imagine there is no way to tell from the skulls. I'm not sure why they seem to assume it isn't that though.
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