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Peter_McCluskey comments on Beware of Stephen J. Gould - Less Wrong
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"progress in quality of vertebrate brain software (not complexity or size per se), and this shift in adaptive emphasis must necessarily have come at the expense of lost complexity elsewhere. Look at humans: we've got no muscles, no fangs, practically no sense of smell, and we've lost the biochemistry for producing many of the micronutrients we need." This looks suspicious to me. What measure of complexity of the brain's organization wouldn't show a big increase between invertebrates and humans? For the lost complexity you claim, only the loss of smell looks like it might come close to offsetting the increase in brain complexity; I doubt either of us has a good enough way of comparing the changes in complexity to tell much by looking at these features. If higher quality brains have been becoming more complex due to a better ability to use information available in the environment to create a more complex organization, there's no obvious reason to expect any major barriers to an increase in overall complexity.
We may also have better error-correcting mechanisms than those simple invertebrates do, though I'm not enough of a biochemist to know myself. (By the way: "invertebrate" is a terrible category---akin to being a non-unicorn---and gets especially bad when the concern is intelligence; it ranges from the near-mindless oyster to the brilliantly clever octopus.)
Good point. Can you (or anyone else) suggest anything better?
Don't try to refer to non-chordates as a single class, would be my suggestion. Mark chordates (and tetrapods particularly) linguistically as the unusual case instead.
with a little judicious editing, becomes:
Biologists typically talk of chordates, arthropods, molluscs, annelids, nematodes, rotifers, etc. individually; I still suspect there is some anthropocentric bias in our taxonomy (are we really different enough from chimps to justify a separate genus?), but far less than there is in the general population.
Amusing example: At the Creation Museum, they have a chart of their taxonomy (as opposed to the standard biological taxonomy). It lists "man" as a separate category distinct from everything else, but then it ties together with a common ancestry groups as diverse as "dinosaurs", "insects", and (my personal favorite) "fungi". So the entire domain of fungi, from yeast to mushrooms, is allowed to have a common ancestor; but God forbid anyone suggest that humans and chimps are related.
I think there's a good argument that we are. (But I do not actually advocate a terminological change and am happy to let the biologists cut reality along whatever joints are convenient for them.)
Edit: By "terminological change" I mean the one suggested in the linked quote.