What Happened to the Hominids Who May Have Been Smarter Than Us? | Human Origins. Even if brain size accounts for just 10 to 20 percent of an IQ test score, it is possible to conjecture what kind of average scores would be made by a group of people with 30 percent larger brains. We can readily calculate that a population with a mean brain size of 1,750 cc would be expected to have an average IQ of 149. This is a score that would be labeled at the genius level. And if there was normal variability among Boskops, as among the rest of us, then perhaps 15 to 20 percent of them would be expected to score over 180. In a classroom with 35 big-headed, baby-faced Boskop kids, you would likely encounter five or six with IQ scores at the upper range of what has ever been recorded in human history.
The Boskops coexisted with our Homo sapiens forebears. They died and we lived, and we can’t answer the question why. Longer brain pathways lead to larger and deeper memory hierarchies. Perhaps the Boskops were trapped by their ability to see clearly where things would head. Brain evolution. So how did brains evolve? If you didn’t know about the theory of evolution, how would you explain where brains came from? One option would be they all appeared on the planet one day (the creationist argument). However, armed with an understanding of evolution, you can look at the world in a new way – and work out how animal bodies and behaviours have given them a survival edge over their competitors. Our brain cells, brain molecules, neurotransmitters and synapses are almost identical in all animals – so the brains of insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals are all made from the same building blocks.
Evolution can even explain how the vast array of animal behaviours came into being. Mammals have a vast variety of brain shapes and sizes. Does size matter? Interestingly, size isn’t everything – and provides us with a bit of a puzzle. The North American ruby-throated hummingbird has a brain weighing less than a gram, where as a blue whale has a 6kg brain. Why has consciousness evolved? A Body Fit for a Freaky-Big Brain. Aiello and Wheeler noted that this dramatic increase in brain size would seem to have required a dramatic increase in metabolism—the same way that adding an air-conditioning system to a house would increase the electricity bill. Yet humans burn the same number of calories, scaled to size, as other primates. Somehow, Aiello and Wheeler argued, our ancestors found a way to balance their energy budget. As they expanded their brains, perhaps they slimmed down other organs. The scientists compared the sizes of organs in humans and other primates.
Relatively speaking, our liver is about the same size as a baboon’s. Aiello and Wheeler christened their idea “the expensive tissue hypothesis.” Then William Leonard, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University, put the expensive tissue hypothesis to a new test. This suggested that the gut-shrinking phenomenon within the primate groups was probably too subtle to explain our increase in brain size completely. Brain's Complexity 'Is Beyond Anything Imagined' The brain has for a long time been compared to man-made computers in its astounding ability to process, store, and route information. But a new imaging technique has revealed that just one brain's connections and capacities far outnumber and outpace those of all the world's computers. And this makes the question of the origin of brains that much more difficult for naturalistic explanations.
The imaging technique, called array tomography, detected light emitted by mouse nervous tissue that had been bioengineered to produce proteins that glow. Additional luminous chemicals were added, and these attached to specific areas in the mouse brains, adding more colors and allowing for the detection of much more information. New computer software processed all the data to produce stunning three-dimensional images of never-before-seen brain cell connections. The more complicated a system is, the stronger it argues for having been intentionally designed. References Micheva, K. . * Mr. The Social Brain Hypothesis. The Language Fossils Buried in Every Cell of Your Body. The Oxford researchers turned back from the boy to the KE family and, using the additional information, discovered that those members with language troubles shared a mutation in FOXP2 as well.
Their mutation was far more subtle, however. Their trouble with language had been caused by the change of a single nucleotide of DNA—just one letter in the genetic sequence. All land vertebrates carry a version of the FOXP2 gene, so some of the Oxford researchers then teamed up with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany to analyze what is unique about the variant in humans and to track how the gene had evolved in our ancestors. They determined that after the gene arose, more than 300 million years ago, it barely changed in most branches of vertebrate evolution to the present day. Several groups are now hard at work gleaning more details about the relationship between FOXP2 and language.
Humans are not the only species to benefit from FOXP2. The Mismeasure of Stephen Jay Gould. Lewis spent four years measuring the skulls and writing his thesis on climate factors. Only then, while juggling graduate studies and fieldwork, did he begin to examine Morton’s original documents and compare Gould’s analysis to the documents and his new data. What he found turned the whole story upside down. The smudged number was just the beginning. All the data relevant to Morton’s alleged bias—his measurements and calculations—contradicted Gould’s claim. Morton’s errors didn’t show a pattern of bias; Gould’s did. Lewis’s analysis, reported with meyer and four other colleagues last June in PLoS Biology, showed that Morton’s measurement errors were marginal and random among populations, except for Egyptian skulls, which he tended to overestimate, thereby inflating what he called the “Negro” average. On the other hand, Lewis and his colleagues found several anomalies in Gould’s analysis.
Perhaps the most damning thing the authors found was Gould’s copy of Morton’s book on the skulls.