Comment by iambateman
4 days ago
One of the most beautiful, amazing things about parenting a child is thinking about “where would this child be at this age if it were another animal.”
A three day old horse can walk.
A three year old tiger is often a MOTHER to her own cubs already.
But then by six years-old the human child can do things mentally which are orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done. It’s really amazing.
What if a 3 day old human knew how to walk? I don't think that would look any different, because they physically can't do it anyway.
The first couple years of human development completely change the structure of the body. Walking is only possible after a significant amount of that process has happened, and the body keeps developing even after you learn how to walk.
A three minute old horse is both structurally and mentally prepared to run. A three year old horse will be taller and heavier, but not structurally different enough to change what walking is to their brain.
What a horse can never do as well as a human, is to learn a completely new behavior. Our brains are unmatched for flexibility in learning. Infant humans don't need to be born with the knowledge or the structure for waking. Both can develop together over time because our brains are able to develop new behavior.
The mystery here is the difference between a horse thinking "legs go" and a human thinking "legs that are just ready to hold me up, do what I see other people do, and don't fall over". We only have a vague linguistic model to express our understanding of the underlying complexity.
It really is strange how slowly humans grow to full size, and then stop.
Other animals grow in under a year or two, or never stop growing until they die.
How closely is physical size related to mental maturity?
Do other animals mentally mature approximately when they reach full size?
I'm not sure it's all _that_ unique. Elephants are physically mature at 15 to 20, say, so not that different to humans. Other apes are also similarish to humans in this.
Many cetaceans show similar dependency on their parents. They're also some of the few species where the females undergo menopause, like humans. (Elephants might have menopause, too.) Perhaps not coincidentally, maternal elders are very important for these species, often helping their children and grandchildren for decades after they are born.
Example of an animal which keeps growing until it dies ?
goldfish, lobster, crocodile, crab, python, shark to name a few. It's referred to as indeterminate growth.
> orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done.
I can't be the only person to find thinking about cognition like this to be a little odd. It's like the biological myth of progress. It's true we can reason about the world in ways many animals can't, but we're also biased to view reason (and recursive language, which is its engine) as "more advanced" as that's primarily what distinguishes us from other animals (and even then certainly to a lesser extent than we are able to know!), and obviously we are extremely attenuated to how humans (our own babies!) mature. Meanwhile ants in many ways have more organized society than we do. Why is this not considered a form of advanced cognition? I think we need more humility as a species.
Next time I’m at the zoo, I’ll run this by the zebras to see what they think.
:) I’m being sarcastic but it seems self evident to me that human cognition is a unique treasure on this planet and—while it’s true that ants and octopus and other creatures do some amazing things—-they’re not even close to us. We can agree to disagree but I’m just psyched about the psyche.
While I agree with you, I think, having cognition is not black and white. There are animals with great cognition skills especially among predators. Our brains are essentially anticipation machines capable of predicting the future — a trait uniquely advantageous when hunting other animals. We just happen to have specialized on this trait to the extreme (and otherwise lack good sensory organs or impressive innate weapons).
Whenever this topic comes up I have to think about this octopus who escaped an aquarium. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inky_(octopus)
I think it’s pretty fair to say humans have advanced cognition. There is no myth here, other animals barely use tools, change the world around them, create and pass on information, etc
> There is no myth here
The myth is in reducing complex behavior to a single dimension and calling it "advanced" rather than, well, more human-like. I'm skeptical of the utility of this "advanced" conception. There's no objective reason to view tools, language, etc as particularly interesting. Subjectively of course it's understandable why we're interested in what makes us human.
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Homan cognition is more advanced than in any other animal. I think it is clear enough. Humans are not the only animals that evolved higher intelligence, but we have a combination of attributes that made it really effective: we are larger animals (with room for a big brain) with a social structure and a relatively long lifespan (good for passing knowledge).
Ants beat us when it comes to society, but in a sense, we may also consider multicellular organisms as a society of single cells. Still impressive, and there is a good chance for ants to outlive us as a species, but we are still orders of magnitude more intelligent than ants, including collective intelligence.
By intelligence, I mean things like adaptability and problem solving, both collective and individual. It is evident in our ability to exploit resources no animals could, or our ability to live in places that would normally be unsurvivable to us. It doesn't mean we are the pinnacle of evolution, we have some pretty good competitors (including ants) but we are certainly the most advanced in one very imporant area.
I think this is the best argument yet. Not sure how much I agree, but it's a satisfying analysis. Cheers.
The whole "3 year old tiger is already a mother" thing makes perfect sense when you think about relative life spans.
I don't expect my dog to wait to have puppies until it's past 18, because many dogs don't even live that long!
Scaling for lifespan they are having kids at ~14 which humans can do, but the average first time mother in the US is 27.5.
And something human beings used to do.
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> But then by six years-old the human child can do things mentally which are orders of magnitude more advanced than anything another animal has ever done.
It is amazing.
I would make a stronger claim, however. That is, I would qualify these comparisons as analogous. When people say that adult members of some species are "smarter" than a human child of age X, because they can do Y while the child still can't, then this is an analogous comparison. Many intellectual errors are rooted in the false dichotomy between the univocal and equivocal. So, if I ask, if an animal of species X doing Y is doing the same thing as a human being doing Y, some people will take the univocal position, because there is an appearance of the same thing going on (few will take the equivocal position here and deny any similarity), but it is more accurate to say that something analogical is happening. A dog eating is like a human being eating in some sense, but they are not univocal, nor are they totally dissimilar.