Tool maker
Innovative tool maker
Some scientists have expressed surprise that Homo floresiensis made and used stone tools despite having remarkably small brain. I can see two reasons why this should be no cause for astonishment: One is the intelligence of crows, the other is the Baldwin Effect.
Crows
An adult H. sapiens brain typically weights well over a kilogram. H. floresiensis made do with about 1/3 as much brain mass, while Betty (Corvus moneduloides) has only 1/100th of ours.
H. floresiensis and its ancestors made and used stone tools, apparently without change, for many times the span of recorded history. Betty, a New Caledonian crow, not only makes and uses tools, but found a way to make them from a new material.
New Caledonian crows make hooks from tree branches. On her 5th encounter with various pieces of wire and a puzzle requiring a hook, Betty bent a straight wire to make a hook. Her Oxford research group has many videos, including this video of Betty’s 7th trial. The tasty tidbit is in the bucket at the bottom of the transparent tube. She later found better ways to bend the wire.
If a crow can discover how to make tools in new ways, I find it hard to be surprised that a hominin with 30 times more brain mass could learn to make tools in old ways, even though making the tools required more steps.
The Baldwin Effect
Also, evolution can be influenced by learning. If some members of a species can find a solution to a survival-related problem (whether by insight, imitation, or chance), then there is apt to be an advantage if they can learn the solution more easily. The resulting evolutionary pressure is called the Baldwin Effect, and it can compile the learned behaviors of one generation into the inclinations or even instincts of a later generation.
The Baldwin Effect would have helped the ancestors of H. floresiensis to continue imitating their parents, even with moderately smaller brains. It’s an interesting phenomenon, and it deserves mention.
…and spiders, too
If we made complex nets like those of orb-weaving spiders, we’d very likely imagine that this required brains with hundreds of grams of smart neural tissue. But can the brain of a small orb weaver be as much as a milligram — 1/100,000 of ours?
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Ulisses Marioto 05.30.09 at 3:14 pm UTC
It´s possible
It´s a flexible intelligence, but limited, I read some psychologies, Skinner, Pavlov, Jean Piaget, they explain how work our mind, and our cognition.
But Darwin is better, what the difference between animals and humans
The animal don´t project your action, they act by instinct , a biological determinism
We project our action rational, but our brain only didn´t evoluate, because a specie variability, natural seletion and adaptive irradiation.
Our brain and language had origin in the work.
The man organize in group to product your material life, and reproduct that, and how we explore nature to attempt our necessity, determine our conscius.
The first instrument of production, it´s was the hand , the intermediate between us and nature, after that we created a new instruments, and our brain had been developing.
I will post here a Engels Text, a anthropologist.
Bruce Cohen (SpeakerTo 05.30.09 at 4:06 pm UTC
That sort of anthropocentric attitude, that what humans do must be so hard that only humans can do it, has been a real obstacle in understanding exactly what it is that humans do, and how it relates to what not-humans do. A common argument is that if similar behaviors exist in humans and non-human animals, they must spring from different causes and/or different mechanisms. For instance, “animals don’t feel pain the way we do,” and “animals don’t make plans the way humans do.”
This attitude has slowed the acceptance of the idea (beyond the fields of neurological study) that the mechanisms of human behavior aren’t all that complicated, the complexity of our behavior emerges from the interaction of a lot of similar parts. It’s not the neurons themselves that create the behavior, it’s the connections of the neurons into circuits, systems, and tissues, and the interaction of those groupings with the endocrine and immune systems. And any given behavior doesn’t need the entire brain to be performed; it’s likely the basic tool-using capability doesn’t take much more space in the human brain than it does in the corvid brain (certainly not 100 times more). But crows don’t have room in their brains for the circuits that let us catch baseballs.
Marcel F. Williams 05.30.09 at 7:15 pm UTC
I seriously doubt if the Flores hominins made those tools. I think its a lot more likely that they were– the victims– of those tools by predatory Homo sapiens. Its rather difficult to believe that humans could radiate into Australia from the other Indonesian islands during that time and somehow miss a huge island like Flores.
Scott Jensen 06.02.09 at 9:23 am UTC
I wonder if anyone has ever tried to breed a smart animal. Seriously. Anyone know?
It would seem to be a rather simple and straight forward affair. Take the crow. Set up a breeding program. Go out and capture a lot of crows. Test their intelligence. Keep the smartest ones and breed them. Then test their offspring and breed the smartest of them. Generation after generation of such a breeding program should produce smarter and smarter crows.
Or it could be done with dogs (the smartest breed is considered the Border Collie), octopuses, or other such quick to breed animals. While dolphins are one of the smartest animals, breeding them is expensive and hard. Huge water tanks, tons of food, etc.
Paul H. Smith, Ph.D. 07.29.09 at 10:17 am UTC
Well, to suppose a smaller brain, be it Homo or not, is the sign of intellect and learning behaviors; is to second guess our/their being. Humans use 0ne tenth of their brain. Small brain size may not be the criteria we should use to estimate intelligence. Large or small brain and culture- may depend on how we use the brain itself not its size. If size maters then the Elephant would rule the world.
Homo sap. has cognative reasoning while those lower on the chain are belived to have associative reasoning, however, it has been found that this is not necessarily so. Many animals have cognative reasoning- (dogs, cats, parrots, apes) as well as associative. And to say this is all instinct is wrong or at least implies an inproper beliefe. All animals have instinct, species specific behavior, All- even humankind. And lastly, not let us forget genitic memory. I’ll leave it there.
meles znweai 11.10.09 at 12:07 pm UTC
what is the used of homo floresiensis?