[Basic] Skill of the week: Paleontology

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by whswhs

...
Given that human beings had spread out from Africa to Scandinavia, Australia, and South America before we got out of the Paleolithic, there's some case to be made that high intelligence was useful in adapting to varied environments.

Useful sure, but if it was so awesome it would have developed more than once like how often eyes did. I just don't see it as having anywhere near as much incremental usefulness as vision, for example.

Stone age technology is very intricate and complex. I wouldn't imply it to be so simple. It was that "jump" from late australopithecines to homo genus that really was the main change from super smart ape to something different, in my opinion.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by RogerBW

In a Mars-Horror scenario I ran a while back, one of the pregen PCs has Micropaleontology and her player can solve the adventure by asking the right question - which happened one time out of three. ("Solve" != "Survive" - it just means the players get the answers to what's really going on in character during play, rather than when I chat with them afterwards.)

What's the gist of the scenario?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Useful sure, but if it was so awesome it would have developed more than once like how often eyes did. I just don't see it as having anywhere near as much incremental usefulness as vision, for example.

Stone age technology is very intricate and complex. I wouldn't imply it to be so simple. It was that "jump" from late australopithecines to homo genus that really was the main change from super smart ape to something different, in my opinion.

Being useful isn't the only prerequisite for evolving.

And human-like intelligence is a much narrower category than vision.

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

What's the gist of the scenario?

I don't have the files to hand, but as far as I remember: supernatural-seeming events caused by the spores of deeply encysted ancient Martian microbiota, exposed to Earth-type temperatures (and atmosphere). (There's more to it than that...)

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

Being useful isn't the only prerequisite for evolving.

And human-like intelligence is a much narrower category than vision.

But it takes so much more resources. Massive energy nutrient hungry brains and reliance on features other than more tried and true instincts.
Human intelligence is very general if modular in use in my opinion. Vision is first light detection/intensity, then light direction, all the way to sharp distant imaging. It's really just a very effective, "what's that over there's appearance?" Of course the more general "what's that over there?" requires experience and intelligence.
But we digress.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

But it takes so much more resources. Massive energy nutrient hungry brains and reliance on features other than more tried and true instincts.
Human intelligence is very general if modular in use in my opinion. Vision is first light detection/intensity, then light direction, all the way to sharp distant imaging. It's really just a very effective, "what's that over there's appearance?" Of course the more general "what's that over there?" requires experience and intelligence.
But we digress.

But really, human eyes are not just generic "vision." They are at the high end of vision, up there with birds and cephalopods. In the animals as a whole that level of vision is as extraordinary as primate intelligence. In fact, human eyesight might well be part of the same adaptive package as human brains; one of the things it enables us to do is perceive subtle differences of expression, after all.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But really, human eyes are not just generic "vision." They are at the high end of vision, up there with birds and cephalopods. In the animals as a whole that level of vision is as extraordinary as primate intelligence. In fact, human eyesight might well be part of the same adaptive package as human brains; one of the things it enables us to do is perceive subtle differences of expression, after all.

Oh I understand, and fully agree that human vision is only bested for resolution by a few raptors. But I was really meaning vision itself as a tool rather than what can be done with it when involving the massive processing power of a human-like brain.
Everything does evolve concurrently affecting nealry every other feature. I was just reading about how our hands didn't evolve just from pressures to hands but also feet as obviously genes affecting one set affect the other.

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

But it takes so much more resources. Massive energy nutrient hungry brains and reliance on features other than more tried and true instincts.

...What is your point here? Human brains being expensive has little to do with whether we'd expect them to have evolved more often. Flight is very physiologically expensive, and I think it's had at least four distinct evolutionary origins (insects, pterosaurs, birds, bats).

If you're trying to suggest that the metabolic cost makes the brain of questionable value I think the medium of this discussion makes that pretty silly, but whswhs' prehistoric success story more directly refutes the concern.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Oh I understand, and fully agree that human vision is only bested for resolution by a few raptors. But I was really meaning vision itself as a tool rather than what can be done with it when involving the massive processing power of a human-like brain.

But then you're defining "vision" broadly and "brain" narrowly. We could, for example, define "vision" narrowly, and say that raptorial visual acuity has only evolved once in the entire existence of the Earth. Or, conversely, that sophisticated enlarged brains have evolved in primates, cetaceans, proboscideans, corvids, and psittacids (and perhaps in cephalopods), or even that practically every animal phylum has some form of enlarged neural information processing center, normally associated with the mouth. Choosing different breadths of definition biases your conclusions.

[Flyndaran]

I see your point, but human intelligence and our full language "module" more specifically are qualitatively different from all other forms of smarts.
It seems to have more trouble evolving past that "hump" in ways more straightforward than vision. But I guess, that's more opinion than fully proven accepted fact.