Read it. Astonishing to not read what I would have expected: larger animals may have larger brains then smaller animals as an extra gram of brain has a smaller impact on e.g. the amount of energy to keep it working.
(To clarify: suppose a powerlaw exists: to be equally 'smart' one needs a brain the weight of A*(mass)^B, with A and B constants, e.g. B being 0.3. The 'cost' of having that brain is then much smaller for a large animal, so it can grow a larger brain without the energy needed to keep it going being (percentage wise) larger then the smaller animal.)
And how about evolution: that really smart fish with twice the brainpower of the equally sized fish just vanished, as it did not compete energy wise with its competition.
Indeed, humans may be special in that babies are more and more just enough developed to be born, so that they just can be born through normal labour.
These two simple notions (perhaps not explained perfectly in a single comment) are absent from the article, and hence I felt something missing;-)
> Indeed, humans may be special in that babies are more and more just enough developed to be born, so that they just can be born through normal labour.
I think a corollary of this is maybe the simplest (while still compelling) argument for the possibility of greater than human intelligence (be it alien, modified human, AI, etc).
For it to be true that greater than human intelligence is impossible, all of the following would have to be true:
1) after some point, bigger brains have diminishing returns wrt intelligence
2) the maximum beneficial brain size just happens to fit through a primate pelvis modified for an upright walking gate
3) the maximum beneficial brain size can be competitively powered by a hunter gatherer diet
To me, that seems like a very unlikely conjunction!
With C-Sections there’s a good chance that like bulldogs, human beings are freed to have as big a brain as possible, so maybe we’ll see an increase in brain sizes in the next thousand years for human beings.
Where a hundred years ago the mother an infant with a giant cranium would have just died, now the pregnancy can be viable.
And how about evolution: that really smart fish with twice the brainpower of the equally sized fish just vanished, as it did not compete energy wise with its competition.
Indeed, humans may be special in that babies are more and more just enough developed to be born, so that they just can be born through normal labour.
These two simple notions (perhaps not explained perfectly in a single comment) are absent from the article, and hence I felt something missing;-)