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▲ iambateman 10 hours 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.

▲lupire 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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?

▲rsynnott 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲retrac 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

▲begueradj 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Example of an animal which keeps growing until it dies ?

▲skmurphy 4 hours ago | parent [-]

goldfish, lobster, crocodile, crab, python, shark to name a few. It's referred to as indeterminate growth.

▲thomastjeffery 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲Der_Einzige 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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!

▲Retric 8 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

▲lo_zamoyski 8 hours ago | parent [-]

And something human beings used to do.

▲Retric 8 hours ago | parent [-]

The average was significantly higher than 14 even in hunter gatherer societies. Women in studied hunter gather societies had their first kid around 19 with a mix of teens and early 20’s being common.

▲pfannkuchen 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Wasn’t puberty later back then too? Like people weren’t waiting around post puberty saving themselves for whatever, puberty just happened alongside full adult body maturation, not before as often happens today.

▲frankest 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Puberty even today has to do somewhat with body weight. You have to reach a certain level to get it. Malnutrition may have delayed it in prehistoric times.

▲micromacrofoot 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

actually the later puberty ages may have been a temporary side-effect of malnutrition common during industrialization, there's some evidence that hunter-gatherers (and even people during medieval times) had good access to animal protein, fats, and other necessary vitamins and minerals from plant life (nutrition plays a big role in puberty onset)

▲micromacrofoot 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Biologically this may simply be because it's safer to give birth when you're fully grown

▲lo_zamoyski 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That may be true, but I'm thinking of much of the ancient world. It would not have been unusual then.

▲MangoToupe 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

▲iambateman 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

▲G3rn0ti 8 hours ago | parent [-]

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)

▲LPisGood 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

▲MangoToupe 9 hours ago | parent [-]

> 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.

▲throwaway2562 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Good grief. This is what 20 years of language policing has wrought. People who are nervous (hiding behind ‘skeptical’) about words like ‘advanced’ when, by any number of dimensions, human cognition is uncontroversially superior, more advanced, more fluid, more deep, more adaptive, more various (pick one, nervous people) to that of spiders or cows.

Or is that all just a ‘myth?’

▲CamperBob2 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This entire subthread belongs on the 'HN Simulator' story.

▲MangoToupe 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Heart-making-hands-emoji-with-skin-tone-1

▲MangoToupe 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not nervous, I just don't see the utility. Perhaps you can elucidate this for me.

▲Espressosaurus 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're communicating ideas across unknown thousands of miles with a stranger in near realtime and are able to comprehend each other, for one.

No cat or dog has managed that feat yet.

No cat or dog has managed to reproduce fire to the degree that evolution has changed their gut to adapt to the increase in available calories.

The big brain comes with down sides, but one thing it does have is utility.

Germ theory of disease has made it so a scratch isn't fatal anymore. Why, after all, do cats play with their prey? To tire it out so there's less chance of injury when they go in for the kill.

We just figure out how to farm it instead and mold it to our needs.

▲MangoToupe 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't disagree with any of this, but what is the utility of viewing this ability as "more advanced"?

▲throwaway2562 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What is the utility of denying it?

What do you or anyone else actually get from such obvious absurdity, I wonder?

If it helps - and I have doubts - does (say) a working knowledge of Galois theory require more advanced mathematical cognition than arithmetic?

Would it be immoral to introduce such ghastly, hierarchical language? Etc.

I see you ignored the obvious rejoinder downthread, which stated that the utility of classifying behaviours or capacities is to help you predict outcomes.

How much more help do you need here? It’s not very complicated, but you prefer to showboat.

▲munificent 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Let's say you're about to embark on a cross-oceanic sailing voyage. For safety reasons, you think it's best to bring another living being with you who can help if things go south or you are incapacitated.

Are you going to bring another human, or a goat? Can a goat navigate while you sleep? Can it apply first aid to you? Can it respond on the VHF radio if you get hailed? Can it operate the bilge pump?

▲MangoToupe 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Embarking on a cross-oceanic sailing voyage seems to be a particularly human brand of tomfoolery. Why not just stay at home with the goat?

▲munificent an hour ago | parent [-]

I honestly can't tell if you think you're being funny, deep, or just trolling.

▲antisthenes 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I don't disagree with any of this, but what is the utility of viewing this ability as "more advanced"?

Because that's the most accurate description of what it is. The more accurately you describe something, the more effectively you communicate, an aspect of more advanced cognition.

▲aoeusnth1 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The utility is that it's predictive of future observations, like all good language.

▲goatlover 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Tool use allowed humans to colonize the planet and outcompete all rivals. We became a super predator species. We even gained the ability to look beyond our home. We look for evidence of other such advanced tool users in space.

▲observationist 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Humans have fingers and thumbs and sophisticated wiring of throat, lips, and tongue.

Wire up a gorilla with the equivalent hands and vocalization capacity, negate the wild hormonal fluctuations, and give that gorilla a more or less human upbringing, and they're going to be limited in cognition by the number of cortical neurons - less than half that of humans, but more than sufficient to learn to talk.

The amazing thing isn't necessarily that brains get built-in environmental shortcuts and preprogrammed adaptations, but that nearly everything involved in higher level cognition is plastic. Mammalian brains, at the neocortical level, can more or less get arbitrarily programmed and conditioned, so intelligence comes down to a relative level of overall capacity (number, performance of neurons) and platform (what tools are you working with.)

Give a whale, dolphin, or orca some neuralink adapters for arms and dexterous hands, and a fully operational virtual human vocal apparatus, and they'd be able to match humans across a wide range of cognitive capabilities.

By co-opting neural capacity for some arbitrary human capabilities equivalent, you might cripple something crucial to that animal's survival or well-being, the ethics are messy and uncertain, but in principle, it comes down to brains.

What makes us interesting as humans is that we got the jackpot set of traits that drove our species into the meta-niche. Our ancestors traits for adaptability generalized, and we started optimizing the generalization, so things like advanced vocalization and fancy fingerwork followed suit.

▲kbenson 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> Give a whale, dolphin, or orca some neuralink adapters for arms and dexterous hands, and a fully operational virtual human vocal apparatus, and they'd be able to match humans across a wide range of cognitive capabilities.

While I don't disbelieve this out of hand, I can think of different things that might easily make this untrue. On what evidence is this assertion based? Is it just "our brains are essentially similar and much of it is not hard wired therefore they should perform the same" or is there deeper science and/or testing behind this?

▲observationist 3 hours ago | parent [-]

There's a lot of data that seems to fit. I'd say the science heavily leans this way - things like the dog/cat talking button studies, AI vocalization research in primates, whales, and birds, a whole ton of biological research across mammals, and most data start to paint a picture of mammalian brain structure being more important than particular quirks of human brain biology.

There are some theories of function out there, like that of Numenta, which seems consistent across mammal brains, and is at least partially explanatory of cognitive function at a cellular level. There's also value to be found in LLMs and AI research in understanding networks and recursion and what different properties of structures that perform different functions have to conform to.

Pilot whales and blue whales and some other species have upwards of 45B cortical neurons, and if higher cognitive function is conserved across species, then they'd have the potential to be significantly more intelligent than humans - all else being equal.

A useful thought experiment is to compare different species to feral humans. Absent culture, the training, education, knowledge, and framework for understanding reality, without language, natural and wild living is pretty grim and intense. There's a whole lot we take for granted underpinning our abilities to reach the heights of technology and abstract use of language and thought.

It could be humans and primates have some sort of magic sauce - a particular quirk of networking or neurochemistry that augments relative capabilities, as opposed to embodiment or other factors. People have sought the magic sauce for decades, however, and that doesn't seem to be a viable explanation.

▲pyridines 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Animal intelligence is often underestimated, (e.g. there's a famous test that shows that chimpanzee working memory is better than ours) but our use of language is qualitatively different from other animals. Some animals have rudimentary communication, but no other animal is capable (as far as we know) of recursive, infinitely variable language structure like us.

▲rolisz 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Objective reason: humans have done the most change to the planet (and have put stuff into space). No other species has done that.

▲oceanplexian 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Also objective:

As far as we know humans are the only species to leave Earth’s gravity well. No other species has been able to do that in 4 billion years.

▲NobodyNada 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Humans have not left Earth's gravity well. We've built probes that have, but humans have only gotten as far as orbit.

▲pezezin 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Did you forget about the Moon landings?

▲NobodyNada 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That's pretty close to escaping the Earth's gravity well, but not quite out, since the Moon is definitely still orbiting the Earth.

▲MangoToupe 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> humans have done the most change to the planet (and have put stuff into space).

I think we have a long way to go to catch up with algae.

▲kruffalon 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Please never change (in thus regard at least)!

I agree with you, it's not obviously clear what "advanced" means in this context if we don't automatically equate it with humanlike.

▲anthonypasq 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

brother we could easily eliminate 99% of life on the planet tomorrow or drastically alter the composition of the atmosphere if we wanted to.

▲shpx 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That remaining 1% are then actually the most advanced species, since they can continue their billion year existence through a blip of a couple thousand years when the environment became a bit more radioactive. We're so fragile that we're effectively biologically unstable, they're so advanced that they don't even need to know what happened.

▲MangoToupe 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not our capacity that matters but our actual behavior. Sure, we could cause even greater mass extinction. But will we choose preservation over suicide? That matters in evaluating our role in the hierarchy of life

▲cindyllm 4 hours ago | parent [-]

[dead]

▲stray 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it's funny that humans think humans are uniquely advanced. The brain thinks the brain is the most awesome machine in the universe :-)

▲GuB-42 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

▲MangoToupe 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I think this is the best argument yet. Not sure how much I agree, but it's a satisfying analysis. Cheers.

▲ 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
▲lo_zamoyski 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.