Boksops -- Ancient Superintelligence?

Thanks for damning this!

I had a lesser form of this reaction. Isn't superintelligence a keyword in AI discussion? I thought it meant more than, "Really, really smart species."

Re: "Also, it's generally accepted that it's the brain mass ratio that matters (for some reason), not the absolute brain size."

Contrary citation:

"Overall Brain Size, and Not Encephalization Quotient, Best Predicts Cognitive Ability across Non-Human Primates"

• http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?doi=10.1159/000102973

The focus on ratio seems to me to transparently be an effort to preserve the status-ordering that humans confidently believe in rather than ceding status to elephants and other large animals. You clearly don't need a huge computer to run a sauropod brain.

I suspect that abnormally costly brain size is a strong indicators of intelligence. If evolution increased brain size at such a large cost in order to increase intelligence it probably ALSO altered or narrowed other parameters in the brain in order to increase intelligence.

Regardless, 25% is twice the male-female brain size difference, hardly indicative of superintelligence. Within a gender, under modern conditions (which increase the heritability of g) such a size difference would predict a bit over a standard deviation increase to IQ (about 3SD above typical human brain size, 40% brain size correlation with IQ).

We've had this discussion before here: Neanderthals were, in all likelihood, smarter than Homo sapiens

When we had that discussion, I asked for the evidence they were smarter, and you said all you really knew was that they had bigger brains. This is becoming a circular argument here...

Beyond that, even if these boskops did have big brains, that only means that had potential intelligence, not actual intelligence.

Take humans for example: our intelligence crucially depends on language and culture - a child literally raised by wolves won't be intelligent. Our language has a biological basis: chimps can't learn it, and we have genes which if knocked out preclude language skills from developing.

But that doesn't explain how language first evolved in the first human community to evolve all the necessary genes. It's theoretically possible that "boskops", or other completely unremarkable hominid lineages, had had "intelligence potential" that was never actualized because the right culture didn't develop to take advantage of it.

I think the reason it keeps coming up is that Eliezer used recent evolutionary history as an example that intelligence is easily improved by evolution.

He makes the assumption that we are more intelligent than our forebears (erectus etc). However I think it is hard to control for culture, which has a big impact on what we can do and was developing from that time.

This (other disadvantages outweighed) would be my guess as well. The facial neoteny makes me suspect some kind of global growth disruption, with harmful effects on the rest of the body.

Also, to the (probably substantial, though I haven't read much about the question) extent that intelligence in the EEA was about within-group competition, Boskop wouldn't have had an advantage over H. sapiens.

Neanderthals were, in all likelihood, smarter than Homo sapiens

We're here and they're not, which suggests to me they weren't smarter than us.

It may be that Neanderthals were over-engineered, and so needed more food.

Come on, this isn't some random other species; these are very near relatives living only 10-30K years ago. Just how much do you think brain architecture changed over that period? Clearly something went wrong with them, but I don't see why we should assume that would be lower intelligence.

and there's little or no correlation between brain size and intelligence among humans.

Not exactly true. (Non-paywalled draft paper here). According to that meta-analysis, the correlation between brain volume and intelligence is 0.41 for female adults, 0.37 for female children, 0.38 for male adults and 0.22 for male children.

This was pretty much my response. I've read a bit about the issue, and my understanding is that the size of the brain compared to the body is somewhat useful as a rough guide to intelligence on a species level, and that the relative sizes of the different specialized regions of the brain are about as important as overall (relative) size. Neither of those factors could be extrapolated from skull fragments, as far as I know.

Can you say anything about the credibility of the source?

Wow.

Interesting quote from that link

To be sure, there has been a reduction in the average brain size in South Africa during the last 10,000 years, and there have been parallel reductions in Europe and China -- pretty much everywhere we have decent samples of skeletons, it looks like brains have been shrinking. This is something I've done quite a bit of research on, and will continue to do so, because it's interesting. But it is hardly a sign that ancient humans had mysterious mental powers -- it is probably a matter of energetic efficiency (brains are expensive), developmental time (brains take a long time to mature) and diet (brains require high protein and fat consumption, less and less available to Holocene populations).

This still requires some explanation although not to the level of the 150 IQ lineage.