Comments on: Homo floresiensis, Crows, and the Baldwin Effect

By: Reg Morrison

Reg Morrison — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 02:21:08 +0000

The Retiarius or Net-casting spider makes orb-weaving spiders, crows, chimps, and even many modern humans, look like dummies. This spider is the real genius of the animal world.
Yet it achieves this breathtaking level of engineering competence with little more than 1,000 neurones!
You can read the full story on my website under the heading “Meet the Toolmaker” (www.regmorrison.id.au)

By: Evolution: The concept and how we talk about it

Evolution: The concept and how we talk about it — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 09:38:01 +0000

[...] Homo floresiensis, Crows, and the Baldwin Effect Subscribe [...]

By: meles znweai

meles znweai — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 19:07:10 +0000

what is the used of homo floresiensis?

By: Paul H. Smith, Ph.D.

Paul H. Smith, Ph.D. — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 17:17:06 +0000

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.

By: Wednesday Rojak #59 | SEAArch - The Southeast Asian Archaeology Newsblog

Wednesday Rojak #59 | SEAArch - The Southeast Asian Archaeology Newsblog — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:33:19 +0000

[...] Why should we be surprised that the small-brained hobbits used tools? Eric Drexler shows us examples of tool use in animals with much smaller brains in Homo floresiensis, Crows, and the Baldwin Effect [...]

By: Scott Jensen

Scott Jensen — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:23:50 +0000

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.

By: Marcel F. Williams

Marcel F. Williams — Sat, 30 May 2009 19:15:41 +0000

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.

By: Bruce Cohen (SpeakerTo

Bruce Cohen (SpeakerTo — Sat, 30 May 2009 16:06:22 +0000

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.