Question about evolution

[Tsavo]

Most recent conclusions lend to intelligence being fluid.

...not after 7 bottles of beer it ain't.

 

[OverVolt]

Humans actually carry a mutation in the genes that codes for our muscle proteins, making us pretty weak sauce at building muscle mass and weak sauce at strength for our size.

Monkeys that weight the same as humans are like 8x stronger. AFAIK one theory goes that the mutation that disabled stronger muscles allowed us to grow bigger brains because previously as seen in apes and such their giant mandible muscles were putting alot of structural pressure on the skull.

The skull would have been surrounded by muscle, except the orbitals/eyes, used to power the huge mandibles. That should give you an idea behind the theory.

Once that mutation occurred I think we developed to walk upright because it was more efficient and we were endurance predators, running down prey to exhaustion. I don't think its a coincidence that all the animals we domesticate are slow as shit at endurance traveling. Being weak sauce meant we had to live down on ground level and didn't have the safety of trees so we had to have safety in numbers.

 

[moonbogg]

Humans actually carry a mutation in the genes that codes for our muscle proteins, making us pretty weak sauce at building muscle mass and weak sauce at strength for our size.

Monkeys that weight the same as humans are like 8x stronger. AFAIK one theory goes that the mutation that disabled stronger muscles allowed us to grow bigger brains because previously as seen in apes and such their giant mandible muscles were putting alot of structural pressure on the skull.

The skull would have been surrounded by muscle, except the orbitals/eyes, used to power the huge mandibles. That should give you an idea behind the theory.

Once that mutation occurred I think we developed to walk upright because it was more efficient and we were endurance predators, running down prey to exhaustion. I don't think its a coincidence that all the animals we domesticate are slow as shit at endurance traveling. Being weak sauce meant we had to live down on ground level and didn't have the safety of trees so we had to have safety in numbers.

Interesting post. I could imagine the difficulty in trying to raise gazelle or something for food, lol. Fat, slow cows work out well for us.

 

[Pray To Jesus]

IQ has been discredited for many years. Most recent conclusions lend to intelligence being fluid.

Just because you discredit it doesn't mean science agrees.


IQ is king.

 

[Tsavo]

Just because you discredit it doesn't mean science agrees.


IQ is king.

Science has never agreed about IQ.

I tested higher than Feynman (and no, not on some internet IQ test that most interweb warriors cuddle up to), and I'm no Feynman.

I'm not even in the same league as Feynman.

Not on Sunday. Not on Monday. Not after a bagel. Not on Tuesday, nor on Wednesday. Not after a burger, nor a beer. Certainly not on Thursday...or Friday. Saturday? Not even close.

The only thing that IQ tests measure is your ability to take IQ tests.

 

[Murloc]

I've learned that over the years, early human's brains grew in size due to their eating of meat. How can an effect like that get passed on in the genes?
If you eat meat and your body and brain grow larger from the nutrition in the meat, that makes sense. What I don't get is how your bigger brain gets passed on to your kids. It sounds ridiculous but i'm sure they got it all figured out, so that's why I am asking.

I guess
more intelligent -> more meat because better tools, conservation systems and hunting tactics -> more protein -> can support yourself and have kids, meanwhile the small-brained guy doesn't even reproduce because he has no food to offer.

Eating better as a kid means you have a better brain/body later in life for sure, but that isn't what gets passed down I think, it just exacerbates the advantage more advantaged animals have.

 

[Pray To Jesus]

The only thing that IQ tests measure is your ability to take IQ tests.

That's a lie. Maybe you should read some current papers in the field.

 

[richaron]

The only thing that IQ tests measure is your ability to take IQ tests.

That's a lie. Maybe you should read some current papers in the field.

Hehehe, you're really trying to argue a truism?

You need to find the source.

 

[infoiltrator]

Humans use "brain power" to adapt and find "ecological niches." Humans "use" brain mass to survive from the Arctic to equatorial desert islands.
Humans "make and build," stone chipping became an art form. Tools and barter "encouraged" bigger is better brain selection.

 

[mammador]

Just because you discredit it doesn't mean science agrees.


IQ is king.

No, psychologists discredit it. And have done for a long time.

And prove your assertion. Prove it's accepted as fact via peer review, just as caffeine is a proven stimulant. It IS fact that intelligence is subjective.

 

[Paul98]

Throughout life there are genetic changes that can be passed on.

 

[Pray To Jesus]

You should read more Mammador. Wikipedia is good for an overview. However, if you really want to get into a subject, it's better to read recent primary research papers published in highly regarded journals, such as Intelligence.

Mainstream Science on Intelligence was a public statement issued by a group of academic researchers in fields associated with intelligence testing that claimed to present those findings widely accepted in the expert community.

It was drafted by professor of psychology Linda Gottfredson and signed by Gottfredson and 51 other university professors specializing in intelligence and related fields, including around one third of the editorial board of the journal Intelligence,[1] in which it was subsequently reprinted in 1997. The 1997 editorial prefaced a special volume of Intelligence with contributions from a wide array of psychologists.


The letter to the Wall Street Journal set out 25 conclusions:[2]

1. "Intelligence is a very general mental capability ... it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings ..."
2. "Intelligence, so defined, can be measured, and intelligence tests measure it well. They are among the most accurate (in technical terms, reliable and valid) of all psychological tests and assessments."
3. "While there are different types of intelligence tests, they all measure the same intelligence."
4. "The spread of people along the IQ continuum ... can be represented well by the ... ‘normal curve'."
5. "Intelligence tests are not culturally biased"
6. "The brain processes underlying intelligence are still little understood"
7. "Members of all racial-ethnic groups can be found at every IQ level"
8. "The bell curve for whites is centered roughly around IQ 100; the bell curve for American blacks roughly around 85; and those for different subgroups of Hispanics roughly midway between those for whites and blacks. The evidence is less definitive for exactly where above IQ 100 the bell curves for Jews and Asians are centered"
9. "IQ is strongly related, probably more so than any other single measurable human trait, to many important educational, occupational, economic, and social outcomes ... Whatever IQ tests measure, it is of great practical and social importance"
10. "A high IQ is an advantage because virtually all activities require some reasoning and decision-making"
11. "The practical advantages of having a higher IQ increase as life’s settings become more complex"
12. "Differences in intelligence certainly are not the only factor affecting performance in education, training, and complex jobs ... but intelligence is often the most important"
13. "Certain personality traits, special talents, [etc] are important ... in many jobs, but they have narrower (or unknown) applicability or ‘transferability’ across tasks and settings compared with general intelligence"
14. "Heritability estimates range from 0.4 to 0.8 ... indicating genetics plays a bigger role than environment in creating IQ differences"
15. "Members of the same family also tend to differ substantially in intelligence"
16. "That IQ may be highly heritable does not mean that it is not affected by the environment ... IQs do gradually stabilize during childhood, however, and generally change little thereafter"
17. "Although the environment is important in creating IQ differences, we do not know yet how to manipulate it"
18. "Genetically caused differences are not necessarily irremediable"
19. "There is no persuasive evidence that the IQ bell curves for different racial-ethnic groups are converging"
20. "Racial-ethnic differences in IQ bell curves are essentially the same when youngsters leave high school as when they enter first grade ... black 17-year-olds perform, on the average, more like white 13-year-olds"
21. "The reasons that blacks differ among themselves in intelligence appear to be the same as those for why whites ... differ among themselves"
22. "There is no definitive answer as to why bell curves differ across racial-ethnic groups. The reasons for these IQ differences between groups may be markedly different from the reasons for why individuals differ among themselves within any particular group"
23. "Racial-ethnic differences are somewhat smaller but still substantial for individuals from the same socio-economic backgrounds"
24. "Almost all Americans who identify themselves as black have white ancestors – the white admixture is about 20% ... research on intelligence relies on self-classification into distinct racial categories"
25. "The research findings neither dictate nor preclude any particular social policy, because they can never determine our goals. They can, however, help us estimate the likely success and side-effects of pursuing those goals via different means."

"Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns" stated that many different theories of intelligence have been proposed. Many questions were still unanswered. Most research had been done on psychometric testing which was also by far the most widely used in practical settings. Intelligence quotient (IQ) tests do correlate with one another.

IQ scores are fairly stable during development in the sense that while a child reasoning ability increases, the child relative ranking in comparison to that of other individuals of the same age is fairly stable during development. The report stated that IQ scores measure important skills as they correlate fairly well (0.5) with grades. This implied that the explained variance (given certain linear assumptions) is 25%.

"Wherever it has been studied, children with high scores on tests of intelligence tend to learn more of what is taught in school than their lower-scoring peers. There may be styles of teaching and methods of instruction that will decrease or increase this correlation, but none that consistently eliminates it has yet been found."

IQ scores also correlated with school achievement tests designed to measure knowledge of the curriculum. Other personal characteristics affecting this may be persistence, interest in school, and willingness to study which may be influenced by the degree of encouragement for academic achievement a child receives and more general cultural factors. Test scores were the best single predictor of an individual's years of education. They were somewhat more important than social class as measured by occupation/education of parents.

 

[OverVolt]

..

 

[Moonbeam]

Human brains did not grow due to eating meat. They grew more due to eating fat in the marrow bones of large animals. But this is still backwards. It is the fact that we began to eat a more calorie rich diet that enabled evolution to select for greater brain size and the survival capacity that concomitant greater intelligence confers. Large brains burn a lot of calories. They can't evolve in a life form that can't supply them. Mutations that occur for higher intelligence via larger brains have a selective survivability potential only if the calories to support it are available. Increased intelligence enabled better fool sourcing which enabled increased intelligence.

 

[moonbogg]

Human brains did not grow due to eating meat. They grew more due to eating fat in the marrow bones of large animals. But this is still backwards. It is the fact that we began to eat a more calorie rich diet that enabled evolution to select for greater brain size and the survival capacity that concomitant greater intelligence confers. Large brains burn a lot of calories. They can't evolve in a life form that can't supply them. Mutations that occur for higher intelligence via larger brains have a selective survivability potential only if the calories to support it are available. Increased intelligence enabled better fool sourcing which enabled increased intelligence.

That sounds solid.

 

[Moonbeam]

That sounds solid.

The theorie is that stone tool use enabled early man in particular to crack large marrow bones in carcasses left by other predators plus using them to mechanically obtain and process vegetable matter as well as the use of fire to chemically alter consumables for easier digestion.

 

[Zxian]

You should read more Mammador. Wikipedia is good for an overview. However, if you really want to get into a subject, it's better to read recent primary research papers published in highly regarded journals, such as Intelligence.

The main issue with IQ is that it's a sliding scale. Someone with an IQ score of 100 today is typically "more intelligent" than someone with an IQ score back in 1914.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Gene-environment_interaction

I've also known people with doctorate degrees, but couldn't reason themselves out of a hole in the ground. They might be considered intelligent by many, but I wouldn't call them smart.

 

[jafery]

Evolution. ADN.
How

 

[norseamd]

Our brains are decreasing in size today. Food for thought. Pun intended.

true in some ways. but i wonder how much of that decrease from 10000 to 20000 years ago happened with the rise of thin framed neolithic farmers from the middle east. most of the western europeans and their descendents are of this ethnicity. northern and eastern europeans are more descended from mesolithic hunter gatherers than western or southern europeans are. scandanavians actually have both the largest brains and eyes in the world. grain only has so much protein to sustain larger individuals than meat and fish.

 

[norseamd]

Monkeys that weight the same as humans are like 8x stronger.

show me a monkey that weighs the same as a human. most monkeys top out at like 120. would have to go through wikipedia. baboons, geladas, drills, and mandrills would cause huge problems for people. but there are probably quite a few people who might be just as if not stronger than them. the fangs are going to cause a lot more problems though.

all the animals we domesticate are slow as shit at endurance traveling.

horses? wolves? our major evolution is sweat glands. horses have them. wolves are also good at endurance hunting.

 

[norseamd]

Sure, but how can eating protein change your DNA structure in a favorable way such as making your brain big and powerful? I eat lots of protein and I feel stupid most of the time. If eating protein made people's brains bigger, then American's brains should be the size of basketballs by now.

there are a lot of studies coming out just recently that have been finding that life experiences are passed down to offspring. lamarck and darwin are coming together.

go to some of the major genetics websites and you will find articles on these studies. anyone who still thinks there is nothing but natural selection is just being ignorant and clining to mainstream theories that are often supported by career scientists and such. the same stuff happens in physics. they often say nothing einstein said is ever wrong like he is jesus or something. and he would likely say that he is only human. he had trouble with quantum physics after all. so would i. how would you get from a to b without traveling inbetween. there are very possibly other forces at work that may involve travel though another state or deminsion that we do not know about yet. you do not bend the findings to the theories. but people often do that

 

[norseamd]

You're skating into Lamarkian territory with your phrasing.

see above

 

[norseamd]

IQ has been discredited for many years. Most recent conclusions lend to intelligence being fluid.

relative intelligence. iq is a valid measure but it is limited in scope

 

[OverVolt]

show me a monkey that weighs the same as a human. most monkeys top out at like 120. would have to go through wikipedia. baboons, geladas, drills, and mandrills would cause huge problems for people. but there are probably quite a few people who might be just as if not stronger than them. the fangs are going to cause a lot more problems though.



horses? wolves? our major evolution is sweat glands. horses have them. wolves are also good at endurance hunting.

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040322/full/news040322-9.html

They can say it better than I can. I suppose the two facts are unrelated. Though pound for pound I recall non-human primates being stronger than humans. Nothing 2 million years ago is set in stone, just plausible theories. Its fun to think how they could fit together. Not really meant to be something that people bicker over. Endurance hunting theory is something different altogether but I do agree with the idea. I'm 100% certain on a hot day we can chase a horse to exhaustion. It would be faster initially of course, but humans are good at tracking by sight long after something like a smell trail would be too weak. I really don't think thats a coincidence. You know how crime rises in high temps because everyone's adrenaline levels are elevated? I think there could be a relationship there between that and how humans might have hunted without tools. I could be wrong, thats fine. It would make a cool research idea. Maybe see if there are animals that predominantly hunt in the cool if they have higher adrenaline levels when it is colder. All sorts of stuff to learn. Then look at the actual proteins and receptors involved with genetics, etc.

 

[norseamd]

have you ever tried to hunt a horse to exhaustion? they are the only mammal besides us with major sweat glands all over our body. there are several types of sweat glands of course so both of us use a certain type that other animals only have so many of.

already knew about the loss of jaw muscles. not sure what the effect really was. these things could have been huge or they could have other effects without the brain. but like others say jaw muscles might not neccessarily make a big brain impssible. i am 5'11.5"+ and weigh 230+ and wear 13 4e shoes but i am very smart by most standards. i can easily test 130 or so on many of the online iq tests in 10 minutes without any studing. also scored above 130 in the end of elementary school. i am sure if i actually started learning a lot i could easily get 140+ maybe even 150 or higher.