
Big brains come with big social groups in whales and dolphins - nabla9
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/10/whale-and-dolphin-brains-are-bigger-if-their-species-is-more-social/
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kkylin
A bit off-topic, but a thing I've always found puzzling is octopus
intelligence. They aren't especially social (as far as we know, unless you
count their arms as semi-independent beings), they don't really live all that
long, and don't teach their young anything (they don't raise their young and
die soon after mating).

Source:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus)

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pascalculator
I've heard some people claim that it's not necessarily the brain/body size
ratio that determines intelligence, but the ability to manipulate the world
around you. An octopus has 8 appendages, a dolphin has none (maybe its snout
and tail could count as two, but are not nearly as efficient as an octupus's
arm).

I've never seen any research that backs this up, but I'd love to read some
more about these claims. If anyone cares to elaborate?

And you'd be surprised about how little we know about animal intelligence. You
should look into the psychology professor Irene Pepperberg and her parrot Alex
(Source:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Pepperberg](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Pepperberg)).
Fascinating.

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ubernostrum
Arthur C. Clarke had a story -- "Second Dawn", if you want to look it up --
playing with the theme of intelligent beings who were unable to do much
physical manipulation of the world around them.

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loa_in_
Or does increased brain capacity promote cooperation?

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matt4077
That's a bit like debating what came first: the large beer or the voluminous
glass?

Anyway, here's an interesting datapoint: there's something called
"domestication syndrome", basically a set of traits that is common to diverse
animals that have adapted to humans, from goldfish to cattle. One of those
traits is reduced brain size. And the loss in brain size is more pronounced in
social animals (dogs), compared to psychopathic loner species like cats. (No
idea about goldfish. Really have to read up on goldfish sociology.)

The causality, per evolutionary theory, must obviously be "randomly larger
brain" -> "better ability to cooperate" -> "increased survival". The other way
around is Lamarckian Evolutions, which doesn't happen.

~~~
infogulch
That's interesting, I've never heard of reduced brain size for domesticated
animals.

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ggm
So if we took the generative/genetic algorithms which invent languages, and we
plug them (eliza/parry) into the ones which recognize cat videos, can we train
the A.I. to be able to talk to each other about the models they are exploring
in Kitteh?

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NicoJuicy
Faster evolution.

The smartest peers mate with the females.

