= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gwern comments on Brain shrinkage in humans over past ~20 000 years - what did we lose? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (107)
Flight is not even comparable. Flight is incrementally useful, for gliding or flying occasionally to full life airborne. It is directly useful, and all benefits are internalized - I can't watch you fly and then somehow instantly gain the ability to fly myself; flight is obviously not a public good, and that alone disqualifies it as a comparison.
The point is that even the birds give up the flight on islands despite as you too understand it being so advantageous and internalized and such.
That makes entirely void by counter example your logic chain that if animal (humans) gave up innovation on island (Tasmania), then the innovation must not be very reproductively advantageous in general.
Because regardless of whenever something is or isn't reproductively advantageous on mainland, it can be given up on islands. Islands have empty niches. Bird gets there, bird may fill a niche usually filled by mammal. Human can get there, and fill a niche of a small bear.
If you want to argue that innovation is not selected for sufficiently because it's a public good or not incrementally useful or something (I disagree), then do so without invoking Tasmanians as support (and I won't refer to Dodo).
Continue that line of thought. Why were the birds able to give up their wings?
Because no predators.
Is that true for Tasmanians? Was it a socialist paradise, was it somehow homo homini lupus non est? Was there no pressure for innovation among the groups?
I deny the legitimacy of the comparison; it is as dead and useful as a dodo.
The very (alleged) fact that Tasmanians have lost their technology, yet other groups did not, got to be a fairly good indication that Tasmanians were under less pressure to keep it than other groups. The people that came to far north back during ice age, if they lose their technology there, they promptly die. And on a big continent there's large number of other people that'll swiftly get rid of ya if you lose technology.
Also, look at predators: bears, wolf packs, tigers, etc. Vs tasmanian devil and tasmanian 'tiger' which sounds scary but is the size of a dog and doesn't hunt in packs. I'd guess on Mauritius the Dodo coexisted with similar 'predators' that can't eat the Dodo.
Ohh, and the rhetorical questions: hello to the black n white world, where I'd have to prove zero selective pressure in Tasmania. Not interested. It suffices that the pressure is lower and costs aren't. Humans are very unique animals that evolved under immense external pressure. We barely made it. Homo homini lupus est does not cut it for evolving intelligence, or we'd have the original lupus evolving the intelligence. Every predatory species and it's granma are pressuring themselves, and not progressing nearly as fast as humans did, under external pressure, having been forced off trees.