Researchers are developing a system that will allow humans and dolphins to speak to one another. Can I get a "woah! dude!" please? This is straight out of Star Trek. We were supposed to have to wait another 300 years at least for this kind of technology.
This is incredibly interesting stuff. Much is made about the existence or nonexistence of extraterrestrial intelligence, but we've been sharing this planet with several other intelligent species the whole time - and we haven't been able to communicate with them much at all. Gorillas and chimpanzees have learned American Sign Language and given us some clues about what it's like to be a different kind of ape, and Alex the parrot helped prove that higher cognition isn't just the purview of mammals, but what kind of culture develops underwater? What differences in the development of mind does an aquatic environment make? What's it like not to have fire or opposable thumbs? Learning from the other inhabitants of this planet can give us a much better idea of how self-awareness arises in response to wildly differing environments.
Read more here: Underwater Translator May Finally Let Us Talk to Dolphins via Techland.Time.com
Showing posts with label intelligence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label intelligence. Show all posts
Saturday, May 14, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
The Clevon Fallacy
Used to be, you grew up and got married and had kids, and that was how it was for everyone - but a larger percentage of couples now are simply opting out of that traditional lifestyle, and saying no to children. Details magazine online this month features a neatly polarizing article about the virtues of remaining childless. Seems like people have some quite pointed opinions on the subject. But, really, kids or no kids - so what?
Well, if you've seen Mike Judge's cult hit Idiocracy, you'll be familiar with what I'll call the Clevon theory of human evolution. In a nutshell, Judge notes the inverse correlation between IQ and having kids; that the more intelligent we get, the fewer children we have. Follow this observation to its logical conclusion, and eventually all the smart people die out and you wind up with a planet populated entirely by dunces almost too stupid to remember to breathe.
That's a good basis for a funny movie, but it's way too simplistic of a take. Yes, the correlation exists, but look closer: it's specifically the women who are controlling the birth rate, and it doesn't have anything to do with native IQ (which is also a measure of Western enculturation, not just of simple problem-solving intelligence). It's EDUCATION that makes the difference. The more educated we become, the fewer children women choose to have, across the board, regardless of race or nationality.
So, really, does this mean we should ban smart women from college just so we can keep having smart babies? I'd like to note that I know many intelligent, college-educated women who have families - but that in general they chose to have two kids, not seven. Not only that, but Judge has been thinking about intelligence as if it's hard-wired, ignoring all the myriad influences that environment can have upon the expression of genes. There are indeed some really stupid people out there who just drew short straws genetically, but I'd bet that for every one of those you'd find three who just didn't get enough vitamin D as children, or whose mothers were exposed to punishingly high levels of stress while they were in the womb, or who were exposed to any of thousands of different intelligence-busting developmental influences. Poverty hurts everyone. Moreover, if it wasn't possible for intelligence to arise spontaneously as an adaptive response to our richly interactive environment, we'd never have bothered coming down from the trees and taming fire in the first place, never mind inventing space flight and the Internet.
The human population of Earth is brushing 7 billion, which in this blogger's humble opinion is just too damned many. So educate the women, let us choose when and if to have kids, and could we please ditch the Malthusian melodramatics? We're doing OK; we really are. Rather than sweating the population analytics, we'd do better to spend effort getting over our entrenched and purely reflexive preference for whatever culture we were raised in. We need to teach the children we have to see the web of life on this planet as it truly is - a single entity to whose health we individually contribute or detract depending upon how well we run our own lives.
Read more here: THE NO-BABY BOOM via Details.com
Well, if you've seen Mike Judge's cult hit Idiocracy, you'll be familiar with what I'll call the Clevon theory of human evolution. In a nutshell, Judge notes the inverse correlation between IQ and having kids; that the more intelligent we get, the fewer children we have. Follow this observation to its logical conclusion, and eventually all the smart people die out and you wind up with a planet populated entirely by dunces almost too stupid to remember to breathe.
That's a good basis for a funny movie, but it's way too simplistic of a take. Yes, the correlation exists, but look closer: it's specifically the women who are controlling the birth rate, and it doesn't have anything to do with native IQ (which is also a measure of Western enculturation, not just of simple problem-solving intelligence). It's EDUCATION that makes the difference. The more educated we become, the fewer children women choose to have, across the board, regardless of race or nationality.
So, really, does this mean we should ban smart women from college just so we can keep having smart babies? I'd like to note that I know many intelligent, college-educated women who have families - but that in general they chose to have two kids, not seven. Not only that, but Judge has been thinking about intelligence as if it's hard-wired, ignoring all the myriad influences that environment can have upon the expression of genes. There are indeed some really stupid people out there who just drew short straws genetically, but I'd bet that for every one of those you'd find three who just didn't get enough vitamin D as children, or whose mothers were exposed to punishingly high levels of stress while they were in the womb, or who were exposed to any of thousands of different intelligence-busting developmental influences. Poverty hurts everyone. Moreover, if it wasn't possible for intelligence to arise spontaneously as an adaptive response to our richly interactive environment, we'd never have bothered coming down from the trees and taming fire in the first place, never mind inventing space flight and the Internet.
The human population of Earth is brushing 7 billion, which in this blogger's humble opinion is just too damned many. So educate the women, let us choose when and if to have kids, and could we please ditch the Malthusian melodramatics? We're doing OK; we really are. Rather than sweating the population analytics, we'd do better to spend effort getting over our entrenched and purely reflexive preference for whatever culture we were raised in. We need to teach the children we have to see the web of life on this planet as it truly is - a single entity to whose health we individually contribute or detract depending upon how well we run our own lives.
Read more here: THE NO-BABY BOOM via Details.com
Thursday, March 17, 2011
So Long And Thanks For All The Fish
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars and so on — whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.
- Douglas Adams
As Adams has pointed out so concisely, humans have historically had rather a narrow view of what constitutes intelligence. Cetacean researchers have long been able to vouch for the functional intelligence of their subjects, but a new report now suggests that sperm whales may possess names, pronounced with different timing inflections in their eerie clicking, singing language. It is one thing to be intelligent enough to work out how to solve a problem; squirrels raiding bird feeders do that in back yards all over America every day. It is quite another to have a sense of your own self-awareness, and to possess a theory of mind that allows you to extrapolate the existential experience of another being. Personal names would be one indicator of such self-awareness. Could you kill someone so easily if you knew his name and history?
Used to be, the guys that lived on the other side of the mountain were stupid idiots because they didn't do things our way. Then we saw how much we had in common with them compared to the people who lived on the other continents, who were even weirder. Now we feel such empathy for these people we've never met, people who live thousands of miles away from us, that we text hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of aid to them within days of a devastating earthquake.
We recognize the intelligence of others, and we understand their capacity to suffer. The human ability to expand our empathic reaction is proven, and it may yet save us all, including the whales.
Read more about it here: Sperm Whales May Have Names via Wired.com
- Douglas Adams
As Adams has pointed out so concisely, humans have historically had rather a narrow view of what constitutes intelligence. Cetacean researchers have long been able to vouch for the functional intelligence of their subjects, but a new report now suggests that sperm whales may possess names, pronounced with different timing inflections in their eerie clicking, singing language. It is one thing to be intelligent enough to work out how to solve a problem; squirrels raiding bird feeders do that in back yards all over America every day. It is quite another to have a sense of your own self-awareness, and to possess a theory of mind that allows you to extrapolate the existential experience of another being. Personal names would be one indicator of such self-awareness. Could you kill someone so easily if you knew his name and history?
Used to be, the guys that lived on the other side of the mountain were stupid idiots because they didn't do things our way. Then we saw how much we had in common with them compared to the people who lived on the other continents, who were even weirder. Now we feel such empathy for these people we've never met, people who live thousands of miles away from us, that we text hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of aid to them within days of a devastating earthquake.
We recognize the intelligence of others, and we understand their capacity to suffer. The human ability to expand our empathic reaction is proven, and it may yet save us all, including the whales.
Read more about it here: Sperm Whales May Have Names via Wired.com
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