Uff. It is not even a contest: Orcas have the second biggest brains (after Sperm Whales) with a weight of 6-7 kg. White Sharks have a brain of 35 grams. 200 times less!
I thought air (23%) also has more oxygen than water (1%), so Orcas have a big advantage in endurance here, but googling it water is much more dense than air and has more oxygen counted as mass. My guess is, that oxygen is more accessible with breathing air in lungs than with having gills?
Are you implying that brain weight has a direct relationship with intelligence? So if someones brain is heavier that means they are more intelligent right?
That effect almost certainly exists, but whether it amounts to anything much at the small relative differences you'd see between members of the same species is much less apparent. And of course, you're sort of implying that this it is absurd to suggest that brain weight explains intelligence; but note that just because there's a correlation between brain mass and intelligence doesn't mean it's the only factor or even major factor. Not that it's trivial to even measure intelligence or that it's even a well-defined concept, but hey.
But while the effects in humans may be small, the difference between 35g and 7kg is... huge, so even if the effect might be imperceptible and in any case likely irrelevant between healthy humans, that's another story at that kind of ratio. Not to mention that I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and conjecture that metabolic differences may even increase that difference (i.e. the orca's brain may be running hotter, too).
I am baffled by your statement. Can you explain your position more? Are you maybe spiritual and believe thought is independent from physical matter?
A brain is metabolically a costly organ, it uses disproportionately much energy, so evolutionary brain matter or number of neurons would have been minimized if the extra capacity wouldn’t be useful and had advantages like better thinking/memory.
There are some interesting outliers, for example parrots/crows are surprisingly intelligent for their brain size, but they make up for it with densely packed number of neurons:
Maybe human intelligence / IQ rest can be argued to be either incomplete or not a great measure of raw human intelligence, but you can’t seriously be saying all intelligence is made up and subjective. I think it’s pretty clear for example that humans are a bit more intelligent than a gold fish.
IQ tests are ridiculous and unscientific. Comparing cross-species capacity has no point or relevance or i'm not sure why you did it.
Comparing humans to other humans, as I suggested, is flawed as well. If you go by "ability to do something well-paid" like coding, then you have the definition SV gives to intelligence. However made of these individuals are completely lacking in social/artistic/humor and other forms of intelligence.
Like I said, intelligence is not a single thing, and if it was it would be impossible to accurately measure.
I've killed enough SV sacred cows for one post, go ahead with your downvoting.
It's the new woke thing to downplay human intelligence in comparison to other species and AI.
So you wouldn't say "Human intelligence is singularly spectacular and bridging the gulf between human and goldfish intelligence would be harder than traveling from one edge of the universe to another". You would say "Human and goldfish are smart at different things. Goldfish are smart at breathing in water and humans are smart at.. being smart".
I find this unnecessarily condescending. If you want to honestly characterize the argument, you could use realistic examples of intelligence. For instance: Goldfish brains are probably more adept at integrating their particular sensory environment than ours would be. Humans excel at navigating our symbolic and memetic social environment which lies completely outside the realm accessible to the goldfish.
We are definitely the smartest things in our known universe. But we will, by definition, not know what we can't know. So our universe is limited, and we are the only ones keeping score.
It's woke to respect other related biological systems. Respect doesn't imply a reduction to absurdity.
No. Large differences in brain weight (e.g. factors of 10 or more) can sometimes matter. But weight is just a poor proxy for more important factors: Number of neurons, number of neuronal interconnections, and specialization of brain areas. Within a species, brain weight differences are unimportant. Even between species it's often unimportant. Blue whale brains are 4x as heavy as human brains but the whales have fewer neurons, and most of those neurons are dedicated to audio processing.
it's absolutely true between species, along with how developed particular areas are. Within a species with roughly the same relative size and brain area development it is not the case. The poster didn't imply anything else. Scientists tend to condition it with brain to weight ratio as a close correlation to intelligence. It's easy enough to find on the internet if you're interested.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-very-primitive-brain-like-in...
I thought air (23%) also has more oxygen than water (1%), so Orcas have a big advantage in endurance here, but googling it water is much more dense than air and has more oxygen counted as mass. My guess is, that oxygen is more accessible with breathing air in lungs than with having gills?