They have been known to engage in activities like playing with other species, using tools, teaching one another new behaviors, and even gossiping. Yet their brains vary a great deal from our own — which makes sense, given that they evolved in entirely different environments. However, dolphins are still capable of self-recognition and may even be able to recognize themselves in mirrors at younger ages than chimpanzees and humans. Dolphins also have an entirely unique brain structure — the paralimbic lobe — which is absent in humans.
Dolphin fresco found on the Greek island of Crete, ; Source: Wikipedia. The human brain, then, is not a wholly distinct achievement. We, like every other species, are the result of our earthen environment. If you could somehow throw a human into an ant colony, they'd probably be the least "intelligent" ant in town — because our brains evolved in response to an entirely different set of circumstances. Each species encounters its own particular mixture of environmental pressures, leading to the development of brains that help it excel in whatever its ecological context might be.
Some species even run into similar pressures in different environments, leading to different brains with parallel functions. We are, after all, products of the same mother: nature. An ever updating blog post with our current shipping status, so you know what to expect when you order our candles! With the holidays almost upon us, we want to share our plans for a calm and restorative holiday season ahead.
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Shop See More "Close Cart". Social Media. Down From the Trees As we made our way down from the trees we were careful. What our ancestors ate — including the nutrient-rich fig — may have played a decisive role in the development of human intelligence.
Tools reflect brainpower, but also culture, our hardware and software. Humans in ancient times lacked smartphones and spaceflight, but we know from studying philosophers such as Buddha and Aristotle that they were just as clever. That creates a puzzle. If Pleistocene hunter-gatherers were as smart as us, why did culture remain so primitive for so long? Why did we need hundreds of millennia to invent bows, sewing needles, boats? And what changed?
Probably several things. First, we journeyed out of Africa , occupying more of the planet. There were then simply more humans to invent, increasing the odds of a prehistoric Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci. We also faced new environments in the Middle East, the Arctic, India, Indonesia, with unique climates, foods and dangers, including other human species. Survival demanded innovation. Many of these new lands were far more habitable than the Kalahari or the Congo.
Climates were milder, but Homo sapiens also left behind African diseases and parasites. That let tribes grow larger, and larger tribes meant more heads to innovate and remember ideas, more manpower, and better ability to specialise. Population drove innovation.
This triggered feedback cycles. The nature and origins of hominid intelligence is a much-studied and much-debated topic, of natural interest to humans as the most successful and intelligent hominid species.
There is no universally accepted definition of intelligence, one definition is "the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend ideas and language, and learn. It is a misunderstanding of evolutionary theory, however, to see this as a necessary process, and an even greater misunderstanding to see it as one directed to a particular outcome.
There are primate species which have not evolved any greater degree of intelligence than they had 10 million years ago: this is because their particular environment has not demanded this particular adaptation of them. Intelligence as an adaptation to the challenge of natural selection is no better or worse than any other adaptation, such as the speed of the cheetah or the venomous bite of the cobra.
At that moment in time, when our ancestors were living in small bands of hunter-gatherers , such an outcome may have seemed quite unlikely. Although humans possessed quite extensive knowledge about the animals and plants in their immediate environment, and knew enough about the physics of everyday objects to know their way around and come up with some clever tools, there was nothing resembling scientific activity.
There was no writing, no mathematics, no artificial devices for extending the range of our sense organs. As a consequence, almost all of the beliefs held by these people about the broader structure of the world were completely wrong. Evolution has equipped this upright, walking ape with primitive sense organs to pick up some information that is locally relevant to them, such as vibrations in the air caused by nearby objects and persons and electromagnetic waves within the nanometer range, as well as certain larger molecules dispersed in their atmosphere.
However, these creatures are completely oblivious to anything that falls outside their narrow perceptual range. Likewise, their brains have evolved to think about the behaviour of medium-sized objects mostly solid under conditions of low gravity.
None of these earthlings has ever escaped the gravitational field of their planet to experience weightlessness, or been artificially accelerated so as to experience stronger gravitational forces. But those extraterrestrials would have been dead wrong.
Biologically, we are no different than we were 40, years ago, but now we know about bacteria and viruses, DNA and molecules, supernovas and black holes, the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum and a wide array of other strange things.
By using various tricks and tools, humans have vastly extended their grasp on the world. The thought experiment above should be a counsel against pessimism about human knowledge. Who knows what other mind-extending devices we will hit upon to overcome our biological limitations? Biology is not destiny. If you look at what we have already accomplished in the span of a few centuries, any rash pronouncements about cognitive closure seem highly premature.
In making such a claim, McGinn assumes knowledge of three things: the nature of the mind—body problem itself, the structure of the human mind, and the reason why never the twain shall meet. But McGinn offers only a superficial overview of the science of human cognition, and pays little or no attention to the various devices for mind extension.
If you claim that some problem will forever elude human understanding, you have to show in some detail why no possible combination of mind extension devices will bring us any closer to a solution. That is a taller order than most mysterians have acknowledged. Moreover, by spelling out exactly why some problems will remain mysterious, mysterians risk being hoisted by their own petard. It is quite true that we can never rule out the possibility that there are such unknown unknowns, and that some of them will forever remain unknown, because for some unknown reason human intelligence is not up to the task.
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