If the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis is the correct explanation for the runaway explosion of human intellect—that we got smarter in order to outcompete each other for status, not in order to survive—then solitary species like the octopus would simply never experience the selection pressure needed to push them up to human level. Dolphins, in contrast, are a social animal, and maybe dolphins would be susceptible to intra-species selection for intelligence.
However, dolphins would hit a different filter, with their unfortunate body plan, lacking any type of fine manipulator limb whatsoever, making it infeasible to build complex tools.
If the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis is the correct explanation for the runaway explosion of human intellect—that we got smarter in order to outcompete each other for status, not in order to survive—then solitary species like the octopus would simply never experience the selection pressure needed to push them up to human level.
Octopuses also have the feature that they die after mating (it’s unclear why this evolved). This makes it impossible for them to develop a culture that they can pass on to their children.
Not necessarily. A culture that include the concept of a “raiser”—an octopus with the job of raising the babies, and passing the culture on to them, without mating at all—can avoid that issue. The “raiser” would also improve his average genetic fitness if he is a sibling of one of the parents, since the children would then all have approximately one-quarter of his genes.
(it’s unclear why this evolved)
If it’s not enough to kill off the species, evolution generally won’t drop the feature.
A culture that include the concept of a “raiser”—an octopus with the job of raising the babies, and passing the culture on to them, without mating at all—can avoid that issue. The “raiser” would also improve his average genetic fitness if he is a sibling of one of the parents, since the children would then all have approximately one-quarter of his genes.
This is a lot less motivation than for parents.
If it’s not enough to kill off the species, evolution generally won’t drop the feature.
Well, for starter if you don’t die after mating you might be able to mate again.
According to my source, which is a blog comment that doesn’t site its sources, the death is a form of controlled cell-death and scientists have been able to remove the gene responsible and the resulting octopuses (or squid) can mate again later.
Well, for starter if you don’t die after mating you might be able to mate again.
This might—purely hypothetically—lead to a massive boom in octopus population, causing the octopi to eat everything edible, causing mass starvation.
Or it might be that octopi lack any form of parental instinct; that, six months after the babies are born, the parents see them as “food”, severely reducing the probability of there being another generation. (This would even be an advantageous mutation for octopi that die after mating, because it means that a given genetic line will work towards eradicating the children of any other genetic lines, giving their children less competition...)
Either way, until an octopus in the wild develops the “does-not-die-after-mating” mutation on its own (or possibly escapes from the lab, if what those scientists did is inheritable), evolution will do nothing to get rid of it. And once it does turn up in the wild—well, all else being equal, I’d expect that mutation would supplant the previous, “die-after-mating” model eventually… after a few thousand years or so. Evolution is not, by any means, a completed process.
I’m not quite sure; I think it might be because of the claim that one of the possibilities I’d suggested required invoking group selection to work (a claim which I’m not sure is valid, but I’m also not sure enough of my grounds to argue against). That’s the only reason I can think of...
For a species driven entirely by instinct, yes. But given a species that is able to reason, wouldn’t a “raiser” who is given a whole group to raise be more efficient than parents? The benefit of a small minority of tribe members passing down their culture would certainly outweigh those few members also having children.
In addition, cultural memes can evolve and be passed down completely independently of genes.
It doesn’t matter to the cultural memes if they propagate using genetically unfit people; celibate monks were a culture where celibate monkhood was a real thing.
From the genes’ point of view, the soma is just a vehicle for transporting the genes through time. With each generation, the genes shed the soma like people change their car. If the parent is unnecessary for the survival of the children, the genes in the children may be better off for not having the parent around to compete for food.
If the parent is unnecessary for the survival of the children, the genes in the children may be better off for not having the parent around to compete for food.
The world-building in the first Ender’s Game book can be made roughly consistent if we assume that all the adults have turned their decision-making over to a computer program (which does not eat the solar system Because Magic). But the later books have no standard or intended models.
However, dolphins would hit a different filter, with their unfortunate body plan, lacking any type of fine manipulator limb whatsoever, making it infeasible to build complex tools.
Do you expect animals with human-like intelligence and dolphin-like bodies will fail to develop technological civilization? As a first approximation, I expect a community of modern human engineers (with basic technical background, but no specific knowledge) in dolphin bodies can manage to do that eventually, if they form a society conductive to long-term pursuit of the project. It’s less clear if at human level this happens spontaneously, since it did take 200,000 years for humans with hands to get to technological civilization, and an additional difficulty could make it millions of years if intelligence is kept fixed.
(Assuming that machiavellian intelligence pressure can run further than it did with humans, machiavellian dolphins could at some point become even smarter than humans, which can be used to overcome the no-hands difficulty more effectively than human-level dolphins could. Alternatively, human-level dolphins can learn of selective breeding and create smarter dolphins irrespective of whether smarter dolphins would arise on their own.)
There’s also an important difference in their environment. Underwater (oceans, seas, lagoons) seems much more poor. There are no trees underwater to climb on, branches or sticks of which could be used for tools, you can’t use gravity to devise traps, there’s no fire, much simpler geology, lithe prospects for farming, etc.
I wonder—if an underwater civilisation were to arise, would they consider an open-air civilisation impossible?
“You’re stuck crawling around in a mere two dimensions, unless you put a lot of evolutionary effort into wings, but then you have terrible weight limits on the size of the brain; you can’t assign land to kelp farms and then live in the area above it, so total population is severely limited; and every couple of centuries or so a tsunami will come and wipe out anything built along the coast...”
It’s hard to evaluate for the same reason it’s hard to evaluate whether off-world life could be non-carbon/water-based (maybe we just don’t have the imagination), but I think that excluding humans, land-based ‘civilization’ would still look superior on the merits of what animals and other creatures have done. If we look at compilations of tool use like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals land life dominates.
Complex sea life mostly consists of octopuses and cetaceans; the former seem to only use rudimentary tools for shelter, while the latter do ‘bubble netting’ (interesting but not a step towards anything), nose protection with sponges (proto-clothing?), and shells as scoops. Otters hammer open sea urchins with rocks, similar to some fishes. Further, they’re cut off from sea sources of metal and minerals like deep-sea vents—dolphins can’t go that deep.
In contrast, land life has tool use spread over all sorts of creatures from insects to birds. They benefit from sharp unworn stones (smashing, throwing), abundant sticks and thorns (which can be used in all sorts of ways—picking up termites, jabbing for fish, measuring water depth, impaling & storing prey like the shrikes, walking sticks, bridges, digging, cleaning nails & ears, etc); and many of those uses make little sense in water—you can hardly drop or throw a big stone in the ocean—which also means the rewards to tool use are lower.
termite mounds, wasp and beehives, burrow complexes of rodents, beaver dams, elaborate nests of birds, and webs of spiders...These constructions may arise from complex building behaviour of animals such as in the case of night-time nests for chimpanzees,[2] from inbuilt neural responses, which feature prominently in the construction of bird songs, or triggered by hormone release as in the case of domestic sows,[3] or as emergent properties from simple instinctive responses and interactions, as exhibited by termites, or combinations of these.[4] The process of building such structures may involve learning and communication,[4] and in some cases, even aesthetics.[5] Tool use may also be involved in building structures by animals.[6]...building behaviour is common in many mammals, birds, insects and arachnids. It is also seen in a few species of fish, reptiles, amphibians, molluscs, urochordates, crustaceans, annelids and some other arthropods. It is virtually absent from all the other animal phyla.[6]
So in other words, it’s almost exclusively a land animal thing; it’s not that you can’t build structures in the sea, but that it doesn’t make sense for most creatures—such as otters or cetaceans, which were some of our best candidates. This loses out on more benefits from tool use.
And then there’s the issue that the sea seems to punish big-brained animals: cetaceans and octopuses may have high encephalization quotients, but what else at sea does?
So I think if aliens were to come to earth a million years ago and poke around the ocean and land, they would note that a variety of the species on land seem to be using a lot of tools in all sorts of ways and often building structures and their brains tend to be fairly big, and conclude that yes, it looks like the land really is better for the activities closest to technology—after all, if the sea is so great, why aren’t the creatures there doing much?
You make a very compelling argument, and on balance I think that you are probably correct in your conclusions.
Part of it may be because, for a land animal, the ground is always there. There’s always a strong probability of a rock at your feet to pick up. For sea creatures, it’s possible (in theory) to wander around for months without seeing another solid object. So, land animals have less space to move about in, but have an easier time finding simple tools.
This, of course, relies on the idea that tools—unliving lumps of matter used for a purpose—are a necessary component of a civilisation. It goes without saying that tools are a necessary component of our civilisation; but are they a necessary component of all possible civilisations?
The theoretical underwater civilisation has one thing in great abundance—space. The oceans cover three-quarters of our planet, and sea creatures can move up and down easily enough. Is there any way that that space can be used, as a foundation for some form of aquatic civilisation?
Thinking about bubble netting—it should be possible for dolphins to practice a form of agriculture, herding and taming schools of edible fish, much like shepherds. (I believe ants do something similar with aphids, and I’m pretty sure a dolphin is more intelligent than an ant). Once one has shepherds, one can easily move towards the idea of breeding fish for a purpose—breeding big fish with big fish to get bigger fish, for example. Or breeding tasty with tasty to get tastier. There’s certainly space in the oceans for the dolphins to create a lot of fish farms… and then for these fish farms to swap and interbreed particularly interesting lines.
I’m not quite sure how to believably get beyond a basic agricultural/nomadic existence, though. (Unless perhaps the dolphins start breeding intelligent octopi with intelligent octopi to get more intelligent octopi or something along those lines).
Dolphins are able to herd schools of fish, cooperating to keep a ‘ball’ of fish together for a long time while feeding from it.
However, taming and sustained breeding is a long way from herding behavior—it requires long term planning for multi-year time periods, and I’m not sure if that has been observed in dolphins.
Do you expect animals with human-like intelligence and dolphin-like bodies will fail to develop technological civilization? As a first approximation, I expect a community of modern human engineers (with basic technical background, but no specific knowledge) in dolphin bodies can manage to do that eventually,
How? You can not have fire (no magnesium, phosphorus and so on do not count, since you do not get them without fire), thus you do not get metals, steam and internal combustion engine. Since you do not get metals, you do not get precision tools, or electricity. You are more or less stuck with sharpened rocks and whale bones as a very poor substitute for wood (if you get them in the first place). I am very curious how you think a human or even smarter than human inteligence might bootstrap an industrial civilisation from there.
Mostly I expect creative surprises based on overall impression about the power of engineering. Let’s try to do a bit of exploratory engineering, consider projects that include steps that are clearly suboptimal, but seem like they could do the trick. (A practicing engineer or ten years of planning would improve this dramatically, removing stupid assumptions and finding better alternatives; a hundred thousand years of actually working on the subprojects will do even better.)
Initially, power can be provided by pulling strong vines (some kind of seaweed will probably work) attached together. It should be possible to farm trees somewhere on the shoreline, if you don’t mind waiting a few decades (not sure if there are any useful underwater plants, but there could be). A saw could be made of something like a shark jaw with vines attached to the sides, so that it can be dragged back and forth. This could be used to make wooden supporting structures that help with improving control of what kind of change is inflicted on the material by a saw. Eventually, incremental improvements in control and precision of saws would allow getting to something functionally similar to sawmills, bonecraft and woodcraft tools.
These enable screws, joints, jars and all kinds of basic mechanical components, which can be used in the construction of tools for controlling things on surfaces of rafts, so that in principle it becomes possible to do anything there given enough woodcrafting and bonecrafting work. At this point we also probably have fire and can use tides to power simple machinery, so that it’s practical to create bigger controlled environments and study chemistry and materials. And we get concrete/cement to create watertight buildings and possibly canals with locks for land access. Something like ironsand or ores from surface exploration can be used to initially get metal and develop precision tools, at which point we get electricity and more powerful chemistry capable of extracting all kinds of things from available materials, however inefficiently. After that, there doesn’t appear to be much difference from what’s available to humans.
I think the basic problem here is that I have to proove a negative, which is, as we all know, impossible. Thus I am pretty much reduced to debating your suggestions. This will sound quite nitpicky but is not meant as an offense, but to demonstrate, where the difficulties would be:
Initially, power can be provided by pulling strong vines (some kind of seaweed will probably work) attached together.
Power to what? Whatever it is it has to be build without hands !!! and with very basic tools. No Seeweed would not work, because there is no evolutionary pressure on aquatic plants to build the strong supportive structures we use from terrestrial plants.
It should be possible to farm trees somewhere on the shoreline
No, trees do not grow in salty environment (except mangroves). How does a dolphin plant, and harvest mangroves without hands and without an axe or a saw (see below).
A saw could be made of something like a shark jaw with vines attached to the sides, so that it can be dragged back and forth.
No it can not: Shark teeth would break quickly and even if they would not, they do not have the correct form to saw wood. Humans allmost exclusively used axes and knives for woodcrafting before the advent of advanced metallurgy. And you do not get wines.
These enable screws, joints, jars and all kinds of basic mechanical components, which can be used in the construction of tools for controlling things on surfaces of rafts, so that in principle it becomes possible to do anything there given enough woodcrafting and bonecrafting work. At this point we also probably have fire and can use tides to power simple machinery, so that it’s practical to create bigger controlled environments and study chemistry and materials.
I think you severely underestimate just how helpless a dolphin would be on such a raft or are we talking remote operation? Without metall? Without precision tools? (I mean real 19th century precision tools—lathe, milling cutter and so on, not stone age “precision tools”)
To get land access and do uesful work there (gather wood, create fire, smelt metal ect.) a dolphin would imho need something like a powered exoskeleton controlled perhaps by fin movement or better by DNI. Modern humanity might perhaps be able to build something to enable a dolphin to work on land, but not a medival or a stone age human civilisation and certainly not a stone age civilisation without hands.
I hope I have brought across which kind of difficulties I think would prevent your dolphin engineers from ever getting anywhere. If you disagree on a certain point I am willing to discuss it in greater detail
I think the basic problem here is that I have to prove a negative, which is, as we all know, impossible.
It’s not impossible. Significant evidence of the negative will be obtained if performing a thorough investigation (which would be expected to solve the problem if it can be solved) fails to solve the problem. Applying this to flaws in particular steps, the useful goal is to show that something can’t be done (that we won’t find an alternative solution), not just that something won’t work if done in a particular way.
For constructing a plan, I have another idea. Start with the simpler problem of developing technology as dolphins with hands. This hypothetical isolates the problem of dealing with underwater environment, from the problem of dealing with absence of hands.
Let’s suppose that it’s possible to solve this simpler problem. Then, I’m not sure that when we have a particular tiny operation that could be performed with hands (a step in the process of developing technology by dolphins with hands, such as smashing something with something else, or tying a knot), it’s impossible to reproduce it without hands (much more laborously, slowly, using more people). Can you come up with a particular example of a very simple action that can be performed with hands (underwater, etc.), which doesn’t look like it can be reduced to working without hands?
Go to a prehistoric museum, even the simplest items you see (stones tied to sticks very securely for example) are not at all easy to do with your hands and are going to be so hard to do with just the snouts that they could be deemed impossible (and would be properly impossible if you consider e.g. the rate of decay of your materials combined with the minimum time to build it, or the like. Sufficient difficulty is impossibility). It’s not that you can’t tie some knot, it’s that you can’t do so reliably and with high precision in the spot where you need it.
I think we can all agree that the difficulty gap is absolutely immense. Perhaps dolphin bodies, with no magical knowledge, could do it, but at an intelligence level that is utterly, immensely superhuman.
It’s not impossible. Significant evidence of the negative will be obtained if performing a thorough investigation (which would be expected to solve the problem if it can be solved) fails to solve the problem.
You could allways argue that we are both not creative / inteligent enough to find a solution and that this is not indicative that a whole society would not find a solution. And this argument may well be correct.
Start with the simpler problem of developing technology as dolphins with hands.
What does that even mean? A dolphin body with functional human arms and a human brain attached and the necessary modifications to make that work? Well now you have got more or less a meremaid with very substantial terrestrial capabilities (well exeeding those of a seal; watch this to get an impression of what I mean ). A group of creatures like that with general knowledge of science might well make it.
Now imagine this creature as strictly waterbound and I think even in this much simpeler problem we can identify a major showstopper: Iron smelting. Imagine this meremaid civilsation with propper hands, and flintstone tools (Can flintstone be found in the oceans? I don’t know) and modern scientific knowledge trying to light a fire. They gather mangrooves using their flint axes, build a raft and throw some wood atop to dry. What now? They cannot board the raft to strike or drill fire so they might try to bulid a mirror to use sunlight. Humans did not do that, but they did not know science, so granted. How do they build it without glass or metal? I don’t know, but let’s say they manage. So now they have fire, not controlled fire, but a bonfire atop a wooden raft. But they don’t need a bonfire they need something like a bloomery and then they need to do some very serious smithing only to build something like a very crude excavator arm to do very basic manipulations in a terrestrial environment. And you cannot do smithing under water.
Let’s suppose that it’s possible to solve this simpler problem … Can you come up with a particular example of a very simple action that can be performed with hands (underwater, etc.), which doesn’t look like it can be reduced to working without hands?
Can you imagine a way a group of quadruplegics ( imho a good aproximation of a stranded dolphin with a human brain—except that their skin does not dry out - ) could fell a tree with stone tools? And delimb it? And bring it to the construction site? And erect it as a pillar?
Can you imagine a way a group of quadruplegics ( imho a good aproximation of a stranded dolphin with a human brain—except that their skin does not dry out - ) could fell a tree with stone tools?
I don’t know about quadruplegics, but I can imagine a way that a group of dolphins might be able to fell a tree using only stone tools and a bit of seaweed.
First, they would need a suitable tree. One that grows near the water (probably near a river they can swim up) where it’s easy enough to get to (and other dolphins can stay in the river and splash the woodcutter to prevent his skin from drying out).
Then, they need a stone axehead. This can be made, fairly laboriously, using only stone; chipping away until is is the right shape and sharp enough.
The dolphins then elect one of their number to be the woodcutter, and use the kelp to tie the axehead to his tail, at a carefully chosen angle. (This part can be done underwater, where the dolphin(s) tying the knots can swim around at all angles to get the kelp in position; another dolphin would probably need to hold the axehead in position while this is going on).
A dolphin’s tail can certainly swing back and forth (or, up and down) with some force, as this motion is used when swimming. So the woodcutter would then need to climb out of the water, turn on his side, and strike the tree repeatedly with the axehead...
If he has a better idea of what he’s doing than I would, he may even be able to arrange for the tree to fall into the river, at which point transportation is comparatively easily handled.
You could always argue that we are both not creative / intelligent enough to find a solution and that this is not indicative that a whole society would not find a solution. And this argument may well be correct.
Given an expectation of how hard it is to solve the problem if it can be solved, inability to solve it with given effort produces corresponding evidence of impossibility of solving the problem. Not responding to inability to solve the problem amounts to actually expecting the problem to be very hard. If I don’t expect that, I would be wrong in suggesting that inability to solve the problem is not evidence for impossibility of solving it.
Another framing is to generalize “inability to solve the problem” upon the conclusion of the project, to a situation where the expectation that the problem can be solved eventually is reduced. Correspondingly, generalize “ability to solve the problem” with expectation having gone up upon the project’s conclusion. This way, it’s clear by conservation of expected evidence that you can’t expect that the estimate for the probability that the problem is solvable will go in a particular direction upon the conclusion of the project. Either the expectation will go up (and so the project produces evidence of the possibility of eventually solving the problem), or else it must go down (and so you gain that elusive evidence of the negative).
Can you imagine a way a group of quadriplegics (imho a good aproximation of a stranded dolphin with a human brain—except that their skin does not dry out - ) could fell a tree with stone tools? And delimb it? And bring it to the construction site? And erect it as a pillar?
Sure, depending on what you are thinking about as the reference procedure of, say, chopping down a tree when using hands. Dolphins with hands won’t just be swinging an axe on the surface, as they would first need to solve the problem of being able to move around, so I’m responding to the analogy with humans who have to do the task without hands, but do have legs. For dolphins, we would need to start with the reference procedure where it’s clear how dolphins with hands can do something.
To chop down a tree, you need to strike it repeatedly with an axe (this is what I assume you meant). To strike it repeatedly, you need to be able to strike it once. It’s such actions as striking a tree with an axe once that I meant as something that I expect can be reduced.
Let’s make the handle of the axe a much longer stick, and also attach another stick perpendicularly to control the tilt of the head of the axe, so that it’s possible to make sure that the blade is turned in the correct direction without having to apply torque directly to the handle. The long handle can be placed on top of a third stick perpendicular to it, and ride along that third stick, with the end (knob) of the handle fixed in place. When it does so, the head of the axe swings. Now, if we let the head of the axe fall under its weight while guided by (“riding” on) the third stick, or alternatively pull it in order for the axe to gain the necessary speed, and use the second stick to direct the blade, the result is the axe head striking the tree with the blade at sufficient speed to dent it. Perhaps such method would be a hundred times slower, so that it would take a year to do a job that would otherwise take a day, and that is just what I meant by the process being much less efficient, more laborous.
Now imagine this creature as strictly waterbound
(Not sure what you mean by “strictly waterbound”, though this distinction doesn’t seem important for this discussion. The hypothetical considers creatures that are like dolphins in all relevant respects excepts they also have hands (maybe as additional retractable limbs, to preserve swimming capabilities). So they should be about as waterbound as dolphins. If this hypothetical allows technology, we could pose the more difficult problem of developing technology without the ability to surface even for a short time (which dolphins have).)
Given an expectation of how hard it is to solve the problem....
Agreed
… like dolphins in all relevant respects excepts they also have hands (maybe as additional retractable limbs, to preserve swimming capabilities). So they should be about as waterbound as dolphins.
No they are not. They are much less waterbound than seals (watch the video), because they can move around on their hands and use their hands to cover themselves with seaweeds or somesuch to protect against drying / sun. I fully agree with you that such creatures are can bootstrap a civilisation especially if they have scientific knowledge.
Where I disagree is the point where an unmodified dolphin or a strictly waterbound (arbitrarily defined as cannot leave the water for more than 5 seconds) “dolphin with hands” gets anything done on the surface without having significant technology to start with (arbitrarily defined as anything humans could not build 40000 years ago). They would run into the problem that they have to build complex contraptions
Let’s make the handle of the axe a much longer stick, and also attach another stick perpendicularly...
to perform simple tasks (felling a tree) without being able to build those complex contraptions without the help of even more complex contraptions (You cannot build what you described in the above quote without having wood and being able to work with it—and do that in a terrestrial environment, where you can not do anything in the first place, because you can not move.).
For example, out of animal skins. This construction is supported by internal pressure, it does not need strength.
More to the point, why would they want to? What would drive them to do so?
Want exactly what? If “smelt metal”, then probably the same as humans, accidentally placing copper or tin ore in furnace. If “having underwater furnace”—it is easier to operate than one placed on raft. If “why use fire at all”—to make watertight pottery.
The dolphins could practice eugenics and evolve hands or lungs. If they find that unethical, they could selectively breed other organisms for various tasks. The same way us humans bootstrapped our civilization. We didn’t start farming and building cities overnight, we had to selectively breed productive crops first. Then useful work animals like horses.
if they form a society conductive to long-term pursuit of the project
Why would they want to? A modern dolphin can get basically all the food its needs with minimal effort,so the main competition is intra-species. So for a dolphin society to advance technologically you would require every individual within it to give up their own reprodutive fitness but putting time and energy into the great project with no immediate benefit. For a technological society to develop it isnt enough that with sufficient coordination they could do so, but that it is in their self interest at every step along the way.
edit
It may also be possible to fall into local maxima and not get out of them even once a species has got a starting level of technology. Consider that humans spent 2.6 million years or so at paleolithic technology levels, and were probably only knocked out of it y sudden environmental change not by a gradual process of improving technology.
if they form a society conductive to long-term pursuit of the project
Why would they want to?
This is part of a hypothetical intended to explore the issue of technical feasibility of developing technology using only dolphin bodies (underwater, etc.). This hypothetical removes two other most obvious issues in order to focus attention on this one. It removes the issue of developing useful-in-practice understanding of science by assuming that we have modern engineers. It removes the issue of unfavorable incentives by assuming that the incentives are directed towards the project.
You can explore other issues in other hypotheticals.
But how you imagine that would work? How will a longer timespan help?
Let’s picture that we literally took 10 000 top human engineers and scientists, with all our human knowledge, into dolphin bodies, on another planet with no human artefacts. So, our dolphin people now need to somehow develop a way of writing down their knowledge underwater, which they can only do very laboriously because they haven’t got hands. They can write very large letters with immense energy expenditure per letter. They can barely store any knowledge. They also got short lifespan and sharks to worry about.
And on the tools side, you need tools that are good enough so you can use them to make better tools. That generally requires ability to harden things—make something while it’s soft, let it harden, use something softer to crack apart something harder. And to get that started, you need hands, because without hands you can only make the kind of tools that doesn’t help you make better tools.
If you can’t make an improvement in any single generation, you can’t make any improvement in a thousand generations either.
Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies—hell, dog bodies, cat bodies, elephant bodies—would’ve had it all sorted out in no time. They’d have steel, electricity, running water, radio, and so on, in less than a generation—hell even 10 people can do that.
(assuming they all cooperate).
The gap due to the body shape and environment appears utterly immense. The only hope would be that dophins would evolve much greater than human intelligence and come up with something that we can’t come up with (e.g. mind controlling some animal with hands).
edit: That is not to say a small number of top scientists and engineers would single handedly create industrial manufacturing, but that is to say they would re-create pre-industrial village level technology and then hand-make many important bits of 20th century technology. You can take a 16th century blacksmith’s forge and make an electric generator in there, a spark gap transmitter, a coherer receiver, a carbon arc lamp, and the like, using most basic materials and hand manufacturing techniques. Indeed that’s how the early instances of all those things were made—by a small number of top engineers, often in their spare time, without advance knowledge.
Let’s picture that we literally took 10 000 top human engineers and scientists, with all our human knowledge, into dolphin bodies, on another planet with no human artefacts.
That’s a bad start. The issue is not whether intelligent dolphins will be able to replicate human civilization, the issue is whether they might be able to develop their own—one which will look very different from human and which, I suspect, would be largely beyond our imagination at the moment.
The point of the example is to provoke a concrete discussion. Appeals to unimaginable are not very useful. The underwater environment doesn’t seem as conductive to technological visible-from-a-distance civilization, in any case. Dramatically different civilizations may not go into space, and if we are discussing civilizations whose apparent absence in the sky is suspicious, those recreate a huge chunk of our own civilization.
edit: let’s put it this way. The only data point we got on things such as civilization not becoming stagnant, or civilization becoming visible, is our own. The further we go from there the less reason we have to expect those to occur.
Generalizing from the sample of one is where you get the idea that we’ll see them from. edit: let’s just agree that the assumption that aliens would be visible has uncertainties, that are much larger for some really really alien unimaginable aliens.
Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies—hell, dog bodies, cat >bodies, elephant bodies—would’ve had it all sorted out in no time.
Taken literally, no. There will not be any civilization above hunter-gatherers without domesticated plants and animals, and that cannot be done in one generation. Remember that ox and wheat also are human artefacts. Well, realistically (in human variant) most of them will be dead very soon, survivors become nomadic hunters.
And as for the most of them getting dead very soon… I dunno, wildlife survival is not really that hard in general. We only have wildlife left in the regions where it’s very hard for humans to live, so if you drop people into the remaining regions of wilderness, they don’t fare very well. And we didn’t start on the wheat cultivation with the grand plan of going to the moon, we did that because the wheat as it was naturally gave huge and immediate benefits.
I don’t think you’d end up with a culture resembling any culture that existed in history. You have those smartest engineers and scientists, who already know how to make bows, steel, glass, firearms, electrical generators, and so on, and once settled in, they have a lot of free time (because there’s a ton of wildlife—buffalo herds, passenger pigeons, all that other easy to kill stuff that’s extinct—which will take many generations to deplete. They’re not in the modern day wilderness in the region where people can barely survive and almost all the food is extinct. They’re the new predator).
First, hunting with stone age weapons is far fom easy. Second, most engineers and scientists are not hunters, noone of them know how to hunt with spear and almost noone with bow. Third, they have no food supplies and so no time to learn. They will survive olny in very favourable conditions, like on tropical island with plenty of shellfish and tortoises (I think most people can hunt those).
I were thinking of my experience in Russia where engineers, mathematicians, and physicists absolutely loved going out on various nature trips (Didn’t really think of Sheldon and US tv shows). Of course, not everyone did, but we’re dropping a huge number of people, and those who know can teach those who don’t. Healthy person can go for 2 months without food.
Let’s say that they spawn on 1kmx1km zone in a grid with 10m spacing, in the temperate climate in the late spring, clothed in earliest stone age clothing (for same reason why we don’t spawn dolphins into a desert, we don’t spawn people into the Arctic).
If it looks too different, we won’t see them in space, though.
Our own intelligence is at the level where it’s just barely sufficient to build a civilization when you got hands, fire, and so on. Note that orcas have much larger brains than humans, and had those larger brains for quite a long time, yet we’re where we are, and they’re where they are.
Our own intelligence is at the level where it’s just barely sufficient to build a civilization when you got hands, fire, and so on.
Likely because the first beings that could do that, did do that—no need to wait for the evolution of higher intelligence (so, in particular, this doesn’t show that higher intelligence couldn’t evolve).
Yeah, that’s precisely my point. If there’s more obstacles, intelligence has to go further before the technological civilization. We did get higher intelligence but only by other means (e.g. having paper and pencil helps, better nutrition gives higher IQ, and so on).
The Wikipedia article listing number of neurons in the cerebral cortex shows humans as significantly higher than whales, even though raw brain size may look better for whales. Wikipedia also describes an encephalization quotient which takes account of the fact that the brain is used for bodily functions, and on which whales don’t score as highly as they may seem to from brain size.
The Wikipedia article listing number of neurons in the cerebral cortex shows humans as significantly higher than whales, even though raw brain size may look better for whales
Yeah, that’s quite interesting. Raises the question though, why do they not have more neurons? They do have larger glia to neuron ratios, it’s not like everything’s simply bigger. Perhaps aquatic environment simply doesn’t reward intelligence that much.
which takes account of the fact that the brain is used for bodily functions
Well, the bodily functions are the same but occurring at a lower rate, for a larger mammal. Most of whale’s body is fat, anyhow, which doesn’t need to be controlled by brain, and it’s not generally the case that people drop many IQ points when they become overweight. Nor are smaller people with same sized heads more intelligent.
edit: on the other hand, EQ may be a (very crude) measure of how well brain tissue pays off for an animal. If you have high quality brain tissue and you’re in a complex environment, at the equilibrium between costs and benefits you would haul around more brain mass per body mass. With the obvious caveat that this tradeoff is very different between land animals, flying animals, and aquatic animals.
Nor are smaller people with same sized heads more intelligent.
Women are in average approximately as intelligent as men (though it depends on how you weigh visual intelligence vs verbal intelligence, and anyway their variance is smaller) even though they have smaller heads.
But is it because of the smaller body sizes using less brain for the bodily functions? I don’t think so.
edit: I frankly don’t get the point with EQ. If we had to make a computer control for bodily functions (e.g. to grow ethical meat), we could do with a weaker cpu for larger animals because they work slower. It just doesn’t make sense that body size would be using up brain to control it, irrespective of the composition of that body.
Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies—hell, dog bodies, cat >bodies, elephant bodies—would’ve had it all sorted out in no time. They’d have steel, electricity, running water, >radio, and so on, in less than a generation—hell even 10 people can do that.
You greatly underestimate population size nesessary for civilization.
10 people, of course, can’t rebuild the whole civilization, but 10 top scientists and engineers with relevant expertise, given access to the natural resources, can make iron, steel, copper, tooling, build an electric generator, and so on [assuming they don’t get eaten by wildlife early on]. Of course, when they die out, it’s gone with them—the heavily inbred future generations aren’t going to be able to continue that, and probably won’t even survive.
No they cant. For example to make copper you need copper mine workers, smeltery workers, woodcutters, charcoal burners, wagon drivers to transport wood, ore and coal, carpenters to make wagons, builders to build mine and smeltery and farmers to feed them. That is impossible for population less then few thousands at least. Industry nesessary to make a generator requires population in millions.
To make copper, you need copper ore and charcoal and a fire and bellows out of animal hide. Those things weren’t produced in a modern industrial manner until something known as “industrial revolution”. You had a little town, it had a blacksmith, and the blacksmith could smelt his own iron (and copper, if he has the ore, as copper smelting is pretty easy). You’d be surprised how much technology existed entirely locally within a small village.
Heh, yeah. But when you don’t have transportation and it’s just 10 people it may be difficult to find such things without a metal detector… I was just recalling one time I made a little bit of copper from low grade malachite, using a torch. It is really easily reduced from the ore. More easily than iron.
So, our dolphin people now need to somehow develop a way of writing down their knowledge underwater, which they can only do very laboriously because they haven’t got hands.
They don’t need to write it down, they just need to store it. A certain amount of knowledge can be “stored” as oral tradition; alternatively, a lot more knowledge can be stored as (say) a pattern of rocks, carefully gathered and moved into position, in an area that can be easily visited.
Some knowledge will almost certainly be lost in the first few generations, despite that.
Oral traditions decay quickly, though. And rock placement is an example of far higher effort per letter. The point is, they find it much harder to retain knowledge. If the rate of loss is greater than the rate of creation, there’s no progress at all.
And even after you’re storing the knowledge, you’re still entirely out of luck on tools. Even if they have waterproof’d encyclopaedia handed to them, they still have this make tools to make tools to make tools cycle that they can’t even bootstrap.
The point is, putting that side to side with humans in some land animal bodies, you have on one hand a bunch of dolphin people who lost pretty much everything in a few generations, save for a few myths that are of no practical use, and on the other hand you have those land people with electricity, radio, and everything, a good chunk of 20th century tech.
Yes, there would be some significant losses in the first few generations. But if you teleport the top 10 000 scientist and engineers onto an alien world with no human artifacts and leave them in human bodies, there will also be some significant losses in the first few generations. Once data storage technology is able to keep up with the volume of knowledge retained, then the losses will stop, and knowledge will slowly start to be regained.
If they’re sensible, they’ll realise that they can’t retain everything, and put some effort into retaining that which is important.
And even after you’re storing the knowledge, you’re still entirely out of luck on tools. Even if they have waterproof’d encyclopaedia handed to them, they still have this make tools to make tools to make tools cycle that they can’t even bootstrap.
Why not? Hydraulic cement will harden underwater, and can be carefully pressed and moulded into shape. And while I have no idea how dolphins can get to that point, apparently even underwater welding is possible.
’cause nothing they know is particularly useful for future generations. You just get distorted myths, and it doesn’t take much distortion until technical knowledge becomes entirely non trustworthy and thus worthless.
Why not? Hydraulic cement will harden underwater
But can you make hydraulic cement underwater? I was under the impression that you needed fire to make it.
’cause nothing they know is particularly useful for future generations.
Knowing how to make hydraulic cement isn’t useful?
I am quite certain that the 10 000 top engineers and scientists know quite a few things that would be very useful for future generations. Since I am not in that number, and since I am only one person, I do not know what those things would be, but I estimate a high probability that they exist.
But can you make hydraulic cement underwater? I was under the impression that you needed fire to make it.
I’m not sure. The Wikipedia article mentions that the ancient Romans used a mixture of volcanic ash and crushed lime, and you certainly do get underwater volcanoes, so the ash should be available… there are probably industrial processes now, but just mixing volcanic ash with the right sort of mud and getting something that hardens if you leave it for a day or two sounds usable underwater to me.
I do not know what those things would be, but I estimate a high probability that they exist.
But it’s not enough to convey the formulas, you need also to convey the context. And you need to do so reliably, without later generations adding in nonsense of their own. When the knowledge is in use, it’s naturally checked against reality and protected against decay.
re: cement, my understanding is that you still need to fire components to make hydraulic cement, and underwater ash won’t work.
But it’s not enough to convey the formulas, you need also to convey the context. And you need to do so reliably, without later generations adding in nonsense of their own. When the knowledge is in use, it’s naturally checked against reality and protected against decay.
Which means that they will best remember things that they can immediately put to use, yes. Such as how to breed fish for desired characteristics, maybe? Or how to create some basic tools.
But what those tools may be, besides the tools real dolphins already invented? And breeding fish requires some sort of enclosure, ability to manipulate individual fish, etc. It’s not even clear there’s anything to gain from breeding fish if you don’t do some underwater agriculture for fish food (and thus need fish very different from available species to make full use of that).
Perhaps the reasons dolphin’s large brains are not particularly optimized (comparing to ours) in terms of neural density, despite ample time at their brain volume, is that they already do pretty much everything that a greater intellect would do.
On the ground and with the hands, when our intelligence was the same as of dolphins, we had a lot of complex and useful things we could have been doing if we were a little smarter, and that’s how we evolved our intelligence (and conversely, how they didn’t evolve much further).
Not necessarily. For reasons that are completely intuitive, I imagine our top 10 000 scientist et al. would be able to fashion tools, that could be used very effectively.
You make the assumption (albeit loosely) that progress happens along a straight pre-determined path, where things happen in a specific sequence, much like they did in human history. This is far from so. We are talking about a different planet out here. I’m not suggesting that different laws of physics will be applicable.
But the odds are that the oceanography, will be vastly different, with all sorts of different materials that would be available. There’s no guarantee that this planet (from here on called “Dolphin Alpha”) that steel would even exist or the necessary elements are present on the planet. On the other hand, you could possibly have all manner of other material. Perhaps, under water civilization would have a very different set of social rules.
HEAVY USE OF HYPERBOLE FOLLOWS
Given that these are the most brilliant 10 000 scientists that are present on the planet, I’d expect a sizeable number of them to know morse code, which can then be replicated in dolphin sounds (am no expert, but you’d need only two distinguishable sounds if I’ve got the concept correct). A good number more would be experts in Game theory. The homo sapiens dolphinus (again no expert, but this sounds authentic enough to me! How about we call them HSD for short?) that happen to know both morse code and be well versed in the more salient features of Game Theory, would probably rise to political power within the ranks of the HSD, and since these arent politicians who are in it for material gain (that part comes much later in the advent of a civilisation) and are truly interested in the welfare of the civilisation, would probably find ways to domesticate (or if you prefer the harsher equivalent “enslave”), all sorts of smaller creatures that could work for them!!
For the sake of simplicity, if we assume that marine life on Dolhin Alpha evolved roughly in parallel with that of Earth, the Dolphin Alpha Crabs (resembling the ones that live under water not the other type) and Dolphin Alpha Lobsters could work like minions. The HSD could decipher which fish are poisonous and use that knowledge to hunt larger and more meatier underwater species (I was thinking sharks, but that takes experimentation and I somehow see the world’s leading scientists thinking long and hard and then deciding that there are safer options at hand, except for the few who were also born adrenaline junkies and are now flapping their fins in excitement)
Before I get further carried away, I would just like to say that the body shape is something that can be easily overcome.
Whether intelligence would arise to a greater degree, really is a matter up for debate, but I would b inclined to think the answer is no, until the HSD discovers the equivalent of computing.
I have your ‘domesticate other animals’ listed in a footnote. Would take a long time and getting the domesticated animals to the point where they’re a replacement for your hands… that’s on par with a breeding program to regrow your own hands.
The time during which you can make environment easy enough that your intelligence de-evolves.
If the Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis is the correct explanation for the runaway explosion of human intellect—that we got smarter in order to outcompete each other for status, not in order to survive—then solitary species like the octopus would simply never experience the selection pressure needed to push them up to human level. Dolphins, in contrast, are a social animal, and maybe dolphins would be susceptible to intra-species selection for intelligence.
However, dolphins would hit a different filter, with their unfortunate body plan, lacking any type of fine manipulator limb whatsoever, making it infeasible to build complex tools.
Octopuses also have the feature that they die after mating (it’s unclear why this evolved). This makes it impossible for them to develop a culture that they can pass on to their children.
Not necessarily. A culture that include the concept of a “raiser”—an octopus with the job of raising the babies, and passing the culture on to them, without mating at all—can avoid that issue. The “raiser” would also improve his average genetic fitness if he is a sibling of one of the parents, since the children would then all have approximately one-quarter of his genes.
If it’s not enough to kill off the species, evolution generally won’t drop the feature.
This is a lot less motivation than for parents.
Well, for starter if you don’t die after mating you might be able to mate again.
According to my source, which is a blog comment that doesn’t site its sources, the death is a form of controlled cell-death and scientists have been able to remove the gene responsible and the resulting octopuses (or squid) can mate again later.
That is true.
This might—purely hypothetically—lead to a massive boom in octopus population, causing the octopi to eat everything edible, causing mass starvation.
Or it might be that octopi lack any form of parental instinct; that, six months after the babies are born, the parents see them as “food”, severely reducing the probability of there being another generation. (This would even be an advantageous mutation for octopi that die after mating, because it means that a given genetic line will work towards eradicating the children of any other genetic lines, giving their children less competition...)
Either way, until an octopus in the wild develops the “does-not-die-after-mating” mutation on its own (or possibly escapes from the lab, if what those scientists did is inheritable), evolution will do nothing to get rid of it. And once it does turn up in the wild—well, all else being equal, I’d expect that mutation would supplant the previous, “die-after-mating” model eventually… after a few thousand years or so. Evolution is not, by any means, a completed process.
This relies on group selection to work.
Why was this down-voted?
I’m not quite sure; I think it might be because of the claim that one of the possibilities I’d suggested required invoking group selection to work (a claim which I’m not sure is valid, but I’m also not sure enough of my grounds to argue against). That’s the only reason I can think of...
For a species driven entirely by instinct, yes. But given a species that is able to reason, wouldn’t a “raiser” who is given a whole group to raise be more efficient than parents? The benefit of a small minority of tribe members passing down their culture would certainly outweigh those few members also having children.
In addition, cultural memes can evolve and be passed down completely independently of genes.
It doesn’t matter to the cultural memes if they propagate using genetically unfit people; celibate monks were a culture where celibate monkhood was a real thing.
From the genes’ point of view, the soma is just a vehicle for transporting the genes through time. With each generation, the genes shed the soma like people change their car. If the parent is unnecessary for the survival of the children, the genes in the children may be better off for not having the parent around to compete for food.
See my comment about group selection below.
This is competition between the parents and their own offspring. No group selection.
Orson Scott Card uses this dynamic in the later Ender’s Game books.
The world-building in the first Ender’s Game book can be made roughly consistent if we assume that all the adults have turned their decision-making over to a computer program (which does not eat the solar system Because Magic). But the later books have no standard or intended models.
Do you expect animals with human-like intelligence and dolphin-like bodies will fail to develop technological civilization? As a first approximation, I expect a community of modern human engineers (with basic technical background, but no specific knowledge) in dolphin bodies can manage to do that eventually, if they form a society conductive to long-term pursuit of the project. It’s less clear if at human level this happens spontaneously, since it did take 200,000 years for humans with hands to get to technological civilization, and an additional difficulty could make it millions of years if intelligence is kept fixed.
(Assuming that machiavellian intelligence pressure can run further than it did with humans, machiavellian dolphins could at some point become even smarter than humans, which can be used to overcome the no-hands difficulty more effectively than human-level dolphins could. Alternatively, human-level dolphins can learn of selective breeding and create smarter dolphins irrespective of whether smarter dolphins would arise on their own.)
There’s also an important difference in their environment. Underwater (oceans, seas, lagoons) seems much more poor. There are no trees underwater to climb on, branches or sticks of which could be used for tools, you can’t use gravity to devise traps, there’s no fire, much simpler geology, lithe prospects for farming, etc.
I wonder—if an underwater civilisation were to arise, would they consider an open-air civilisation impossible?
“You’re stuck crawling around in a mere two dimensions, unless you put a lot of evolutionary effort into wings, but then you have terrible weight limits on the size of the brain; you can’t assign land to kelp farms and then live in the area above it, so total population is severely limited; and every couple of centuries or so a tsunami will come and wipe out anything built along the coast...”
It’s hard to evaluate for the same reason it’s hard to evaluate whether off-world life could be non-carbon/water-based (maybe we just don’t have the imagination), but I think that excluding humans, land-based ‘civilization’ would still look superior on the merits of what animals and other creatures have done. If we look at compilations of tool use like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool_use_by_animals land life dominates.
Complex sea life mostly consists of octopuses and cetaceans; the former seem to only use rudimentary tools for shelter, while the latter do ‘bubble netting’ (interesting but not a step towards anything), nose protection with sponges (proto-clothing?), and shells as scoops. Otters hammer open sea urchins with rocks, similar to some fishes. Further, they’re cut off from sea sources of metal and minerals like deep-sea vents—dolphins can’t go that deep.
In contrast, land life has tool use spread over all sorts of creatures from insects to birds. They benefit from sharp unworn stones (smashing, throwing), abundant sticks and thorns (which can be used in all sorts of ways—picking up termites, jabbing for fish, measuring water depth, impaling & storing prey like the shrikes, walking sticks, bridges, digging, cleaning nails & ears, etc); and many of those uses make little sense in water—you can hardly drop or throw a big stone in the ocean—which also means the rewards to tool use are lower.
Then we pass from tool use to structure building https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structures_built_by_animals
So in other words, it’s almost exclusively a land animal thing; it’s not that you can’t build structures in the sea, but that it doesn’t make sense for most creatures—such as otters or cetaceans, which were some of our best candidates. This loses out on more benefits from tool use.
And then there’s the issue that the sea seems to punish big-brained animals: cetaceans and octopuses may have high encephalization quotients, but what else at sea does?
So I think if aliens were to come to earth a million years ago and poke around the ocean and land, they would note that a variety of the species on land seem to be using a lot of tools in all sorts of ways and often building structures and their brains tend to be fairly big, and conclude that yes, it looks like the land really is better for the activities closest to technology—after all, if the sea is so great, why aren’t the creatures there doing much?
You make a very compelling argument, and on balance I think that you are probably correct in your conclusions.
Part of it may be because, for a land animal, the ground is always there. There’s always a strong probability of a rock at your feet to pick up. For sea creatures, it’s possible (in theory) to wander around for months without seeing another solid object. So, land animals have less space to move about in, but have an easier time finding simple tools.
This, of course, relies on the idea that tools—unliving lumps of matter used for a purpose—are a necessary component of a civilisation. It goes without saying that tools are a necessary component of our civilisation; but are they a necessary component of all possible civilisations?
The theoretical underwater civilisation has one thing in great abundance—space. The oceans cover three-quarters of our planet, and sea creatures can move up and down easily enough. Is there any way that that space can be used, as a foundation for some form of aquatic civilisation?
Thinking about bubble netting—it should be possible for dolphins to practice a form of agriculture, herding and taming schools of edible fish, much like shepherds. (I believe ants do something similar with aphids, and I’m pretty sure a dolphin is more intelligent than an ant). Once one has shepherds, one can easily move towards the idea of breeding fish for a purpose—breeding big fish with big fish to get bigger fish, for example. Or breeding tasty with tasty to get tastier. There’s certainly space in the oceans for the dolphins to create a lot of fish farms… and then for these fish farms to swap and interbreed particularly interesting lines.
I’m not quite sure how to believably get beyond a basic agricultural/nomadic existence, though. (Unless perhaps the dolphins start breeding intelligent octopi with intelligent octopi to get more intelligent octopi or something along those lines).
Dolphins are able to herd schools of fish, cooperating to keep a ‘ball’ of fish together for a long time while feeding from it.
However, taming and sustained breeding is a long way from herding behavior—it requires long term planning for multi-year time periods, and I’m not sure if that has been observed in dolphins.
Kelp and fish can be farmed.
How? You can not have fire (no magnesium, phosphorus and so on do not count, since you do not get them without fire), thus you do not get metals, steam and internal combustion engine. Since you do not get metals, you do not get precision tools, or electricity. You are more or less stuck with sharpened rocks and whale bones as a very poor substitute for wood (if you get them in the first place). I am very curious how you think a human or even smarter than human inteligence might bootstrap an industrial civilisation from there.
Mostly I expect creative surprises based on overall impression about the power of engineering. Let’s try to do a bit of exploratory engineering, consider projects that include steps that are clearly suboptimal, but seem like they could do the trick. (A practicing engineer or ten years of planning would improve this dramatically, removing stupid assumptions and finding better alternatives; a hundred thousand years of actually working on the subprojects will do even better.)
Initially, power can be provided by pulling strong vines (some kind of seaweed will probably work) attached together. It should be possible to farm trees somewhere on the shoreline, if you don’t mind waiting a few decades (not sure if there are any useful underwater plants, but there could be). A saw could be made of something like a shark jaw with vines attached to the sides, so that it can be dragged back and forth. This could be used to make wooden supporting structures that help with improving control of what kind of change is inflicted on the material by a saw. Eventually, incremental improvements in control and precision of saws would allow getting to something functionally similar to sawmills, bonecraft and woodcraft tools.
These enable screws, joints, jars and all kinds of basic mechanical components, which can be used in the construction of tools for controlling things on surfaces of rafts, so that in principle it becomes possible to do anything there given enough woodcrafting and bonecrafting work. At this point we also probably have fire and can use tides to power simple machinery, so that it’s practical to create bigger controlled environments and study chemistry and materials. And we get concrete/cement to create watertight buildings and possibly canals with locks for land access. Something like ironsand or ores from surface exploration can be used to initially get metal and develop precision tools, at which point we get electricity and more powerful chemistry capable of extracting all kinds of things from available materials, however inefficiently. After that, there doesn’t appear to be much difference from what’s available to humans.
I think the basic problem here is that I have to proove a negative, which is, as we all know, impossible. Thus I am pretty much reduced to debating your suggestions. This will sound quite nitpicky but is not meant as an offense, but to demonstrate, where the difficulties would be:
Power to what? Whatever it is it has to be build without hands !!! and with very basic tools. No Seeweed would not work, because there is no evolutionary pressure on aquatic plants to build the strong supportive structures we use from terrestrial plants.
No, trees do not grow in salty environment (except mangroves). How does a dolphin plant, and harvest mangroves without hands and without an axe or a saw (see below).
No it can not: Shark teeth would break quickly and even if they would not, they do not have the correct form to saw wood. Humans allmost exclusively used axes and knives for woodcrafting before the advent of advanced metallurgy. And you do not get wines.
I think you severely underestimate just how helpless a dolphin would be on such a raft or are we talking remote operation? Without metall? Without precision tools? (I mean real 19th century precision tools—lathe, milling cutter and so on, not stone age “precision tools”)
To get land access and do uesful work there (gather wood, create fire, smelt metal ect.) a dolphin would imho need something like a powered exoskeleton controlled perhaps by fin movement or better by DNI. Modern humanity might perhaps be able to build something to enable a dolphin to work on land, but not a medival or a stone age human civilisation and certainly not a stone age civilisation without hands.
I hope I have brought across which kind of difficulties I think would prevent your dolphin engineers from ever getting anywhere. If you disagree on a certain point I am willing to discuss it in greater detail
It’s not impossible. Significant evidence of the negative will be obtained if performing a thorough investigation (which would be expected to solve the problem if it can be solved) fails to solve the problem. Applying this to flaws in particular steps, the useful goal is to show that something can’t be done (that we won’t find an alternative solution), not just that something won’t work if done in a particular way.
For constructing a plan, I have another idea. Start with the simpler problem of developing technology as dolphins with hands. This hypothetical isolates the problem of dealing with underwater environment, from the problem of dealing with absence of hands.
Let’s suppose that it’s possible to solve this simpler problem. Then, I’m not sure that when we have a particular tiny operation that could be performed with hands (a step in the process of developing technology by dolphins with hands, such as smashing something with something else, or tying a knot), it’s impossible to reproduce it without hands (much more laborously, slowly, using more people). Can you come up with a particular example of a very simple action that can be performed with hands (underwater, etc.), which doesn’t look like it can be reduced to working without hands?
Go to a prehistoric museum, even the simplest items you see (stones tied to sticks very securely for example) are not at all easy to do with your hands and are going to be so hard to do with just the snouts that they could be deemed impossible (and would be properly impossible if you consider e.g. the rate of decay of your materials combined with the minimum time to build it, or the like. Sufficient difficulty is impossibility). It’s not that you can’t tie some knot, it’s that you can’t do so reliably and with high precision in the spot where you need it.
I think we can all agree that the difficulty gap is absolutely immense. Perhaps dolphin bodies, with no magical knowledge, could do it, but at an intelligence level that is utterly, immensely superhuman.
You could allways argue that we are both not creative / inteligent enough to find a solution and that this is not indicative that a whole society would not find a solution. And this argument may well be correct.
What does that even mean? A dolphin body with functional human arms and a human brain attached and the necessary modifications to make that work? Well now you have got more or less a meremaid with very substantial terrestrial capabilities (well exeeding those of a seal; watch this to get an impression of what I mean ). A group of creatures like that with general knowledge of science might well make it.
Now imagine this creature as strictly waterbound and I think even in this much simpeler problem we can identify a major showstopper: Iron smelting. Imagine this meremaid civilsation with propper hands, and flintstone tools (Can flintstone be found in the oceans? I don’t know) and modern scientific knowledge trying to light a fire. They gather mangrooves using their flint axes, build a raft and throw some wood atop to dry. What now? They cannot board the raft to strike or drill fire so they might try to bulid a mirror to use sunlight. Humans did not do that, but they did not know science, so granted. How do they build it without glass or metal? I don’t know, but let’s say they manage. So now they have fire, not controlled fire, but a bonfire atop a wooden raft. But they don’t need a bonfire they need something like a bloomery and then they need to do some very serious smithing only to build something like a very crude excavator arm to do very basic manipulations in a terrestrial environment. And you cannot do smithing under water.
Can you imagine a way a group of quadruplegics ( imho a good aproximation of a stranded dolphin with a human brain—except that their skin does not dry out - ) could fell a tree with stone tools? And delimb it? And bring it to the construction site? And erect it as a pillar?
I don’t know about quadruplegics, but I can imagine a way that a group of dolphins might be able to fell a tree using only stone tools and a bit of seaweed.
First, they would need a suitable tree. One that grows near the water (probably near a river they can swim up) where it’s easy enough to get to (and other dolphins can stay in the river and splash the woodcutter to prevent his skin from drying out).
Then, they need a stone axehead. This can be made, fairly laboriously, using only stone; chipping away until is is the right shape and sharp enough.
The dolphins then elect one of their number to be the woodcutter, and use the kelp to tie the axehead to his tail, at a carefully chosen angle. (This part can be done underwater, where the dolphin(s) tying the knots can swim around at all angles to get the kelp in position; another dolphin would probably need to hold the axehead in position while this is going on).
A dolphin’s tail can certainly swing back and forth (or, up and down) with some force, as this motion is used when swimming. So the woodcutter would then need to climb out of the water, turn on his side, and strike the tree repeatedly with the axehead...
If he has a better idea of what he’s doing than I would, he may even be able to arrange for the tree to fall into the river, at which point transportation is comparatively easily handled.
Given an expectation of how hard it is to solve the problem if it can be solved, inability to solve it with given effort produces corresponding evidence of impossibility of solving the problem. Not responding to inability to solve the problem amounts to actually expecting the problem to be very hard. If I don’t expect that, I would be wrong in suggesting that inability to solve the problem is not evidence for impossibility of solving it.
Another framing is to generalize “inability to solve the problem” upon the conclusion of the project, to a situation where the expectation that the problem can be solved eventually is reduced. Correspondingly, generalize “ability to solve the problem” with expectation having gone up upon the project’s conclusion. This way, it’s clear by conservation of expected evidence that you can’t expect that the estimate for the probability that the problem is solvable will go in a particular direction upon the conclusion of the project. Either the expectation will go up (and so the project produces evidence of the possibility of eventually solving the problem), or else it must go down (and so you gain that elusive evidence of the negative).
Sure, depending on what you are thinking about as the reference procedure of, say, chopping down a tree when using hands. Dolphins with hands won’t just be swinging an axe on the surface, as they would first need to solve the problem of being able to move around, so I’m responding to the analogy with humans who have to do the task without hands, but do have legs. For dolphins, we would need to start with the reference procedure where it’s clear how dolphins with hands can do something.
To chop down a tree, you need to strike it repeatedly with an axe (this is what I assume you meant). To strike it repeatedly, you need to be able to strike it once. It’s such actions as striking a tree with an axe once that I meant as something that I expect can be reduced.
Let’s make the handle of the axe a much longer stick, and also attach another stick perpendicularly to control the tilt of the head of the axe, so that it’s possible to make sure that the blade is turned in the correct direction without having to apply torque directly to the handle. The long handle can be placed on top of a third stick perpendicular to it, and ride along that third stick, with the end (knob) of the handle fixed in place. When it does so, the head of the axe swings. Now, if we let the head of the axe fall under its weight while guided by (“riding” on) the third stick, or alternatively pull it in order for the axe to gain the necessary speed, and use the second stick to direct the blade, the result is the axe head striking the tree with the blade at sufficient speed to dent it. Perhaps such method would be a hundred times slower, so that it would take a year to do a job that would otherwise take a day, and that is just what I meant by the process being much less efficient, more laborous.
(Not sure what you mean by “strictly waterbound”, though this distinction doesn’t seem important for this discussion. The hypothetical considers creatures that are like dolphins in all relevant respects excepts they also have hands (maybe as additional retractable limbs, to preserve swimming capabilities). So they should be about as waterbound as dolphins. If this hypothetical allows technology, we could pose the more difficult problem of developing technology without the ability to surface even for a short time (which dolphins have).)
Agreed
No they are not. They are much less waterbound than seals (watch the video), because they can move around on their hands and use their hands to cover themselves with seaweeds or somesuch to protect against drying / sun. I fully agree with you that such creatures are can bootstrap a civilisation especially if they have scientific knowledge.
Where I disagree is the point where an unmodified dolphin or a strictly waterbound (arbitrarily defined as cannot leave the water for more than 5 seconds) “dolphin with hands” gets anything done on the surface without having significant technology to start with (arbitrarily defined as anything humans could not build 40000 years ago). They would run into the problem that they have to build complex contraptions
to perform simple tasks (felling a tree) without being able to build those complex contraptions without the help of even more complex contraptions (You cannot build what you described in the above quote without having wood and being able to work with it—and do that in a terrestrial environment, where you can not do anything in the first place, because you can not move.).
It is not a major problem at all. Given that creatures have hands and can keep them out of water, they can build a bloomery inside a diving bell.
Chicken and egg problem. What are you building the diving bell out of?
More to the point, why would they want to? What would drive them to do so?
For example, out of animal skins. This construction is supported by internal pressure, it does not need strength.
Want exactly what? If “smelt metal”, then probably the same as humans, accidentally placing copper or tin ore in furnace. If “having underwater furnace”—it is easier to operate than one placed on raft. If “why use fire at all”—to make watertight pottery.
The dolphins could practice eugenics and evolve hands or lungs. If they find that unethical, they could selectively breed other organisms for various tasks. The same way us humans bootstrapped our civilization. We didn’t start farming and building cities overnight, we had to selectively breed productive crops first. Then useful work animals like horses.
Why would they want to? A modern dolphin can get basically all the food its needs with minimal effort,so the main competition is intra-species. So for a dolphin society to advance technologically you would require every individual within it to give up their own reprodutive fitness but putting time and energy into the great project with no immediate benefit. For a technological society to develop it isnt enough that with sufficient coordination they could do so, but that it is in their self interest at every step along the way.
edit
It may also be possible to fall into local maxima and not get out of them even once a species has got a starting level of technology. Consider that humans spent 2.6 million years or so at paleolithic technology levels, and were probably only knocked out of it y sudden environmental change not by a gradual process of improving technology.
They don’t. They either starve, be killed by predators, humans or by something.
They haven’t escape this bloody cycle of exponential population grow on one, and mass death on other hand.
There is nothing like a “stable population” among dolphins.
This is part of a hypothetical intended to explore the issue of technical feasibility of developing technology using only dolphin bodies (underwater, etc.). This hypothetical removes two other most obvious issues in order to focus attention on this one. It removes the issue of developing useful-in-practice understanding of science by assuming that we have modern engineers. It removes the issue of unfavorable incentives by assuming that the incentives are directed towards the project.
You can explore other issues in other hypotheticals.
This group of dolphins might do it as a (long-term) way to better compete with that group of dolphins over there.
But how you imagine that would work? How will a longer timespan help?
Let’s picture that we literally took 10 000 top human engineers and scientists, with all our human knowledge, into dolphin bodies, on another planet with no human artefacts. So, our dolphin people now need to somehow develop a way of writing down their knowledge underwater, which they can only do very laboriously because they haven’t got hands. They can write very large letters with immense energy expenditure per letter. They can barely store any knowledge. They also got short lifespan and sharks to worry about.
And on the tools side, you need tools that are good enough so you can use them to make better tools. That generally requires ability to harden things—make something while it’s soft, let it harden, use something softer to crack apart something harder. And to get that started, you need hands, because without hands you can only make the kind of tools that doesn’t help you make better tools.
If you can’t make an improvement in any single generation, you can’t make any improvement in a thousand generations either.
Meanwhile, a planet populated with those same scientists and engineers in human bodies—hell, dog bodies, cat bodies, elephant bodies—would’ve had it all sorted out in no time. They’d have steel, electricity, running water, radio, and so on, in less than a generation—hell even 10 people can do that.
(assuming they all cooperate).
The gap due to the body shape and environment appears utterly immense. The only hope would be that dophins would evolve much greater than human intelligence and come up with something that we can’t come up with (e.g. mind controlling some animal with hands).
edit: That is not to say a small number of top scientists and engineers would single handedly create industrial manufacturing, but that is to say they would re-create pre-industrial village level technology and then hand-make many important bits of 20th century technology. You can take a 16th century blacksmith’s forge and make an electric generator in there, a spark gap transmitter, a coherer receiver, a carbon arc lamp, and the like, using most basic materials and hand manufacturing techniques. Indeed that’s how the early instances of all those things were made—by a small number of top engineers, often in their spare time, without advance knowledge.
That’s a bad start. The issue is not whether intelligent dolphins will be able to replicate human civilization, the issue is whether they might be able to develop their own—one which will look very different from human and which, I suspect, would be largely beyond our imagination at the moment.
The point of the example is to provoke a concrete discussion. Appeals to unimaginable are not very useful. The underwater environment doesn’t seem as conductive to technological visible-from-a-distance civilization, in any case. Dramatically different civilizations may not go into space, and if we are discussing civilizations whose apparent absence in the sky is suspicious, those recreate a huge chunk of our own civilization.
edit: let’s put it this way. The only data point we got on things such as civilization not becoming stagnant, or civilization becoming visible, is our own. The further we go from there the less reason we have to expect those to occur.
I see absolutely no reason for that to be so. Generalizing from the sample of one is foolhardy.
Generalizing from the sample of one is where you get the idea that we’ll see them from. edit: let’s just agree that the assumption that aliens would be visible has uncertainties, that are much larger for some really really alien unimaginable aliens.
Taken literally, no. There will not be any civilization above hunter-gatherers without domesticated plants and animals, and that cannot be done in one generation. Remember that ox and wheat also are human artefacts. Well, realistically (in human variant) most of them will be dead very soon, survivors become nomadic hunters.
Hunter gatherers had a lot of free time, though.
And as for the most of them getting dead very soon… I dunno, wildlife survival is not really that hard in general. We only have wildlife left in the regions where it’s very hard for humans to live, so if you drop people into the remaining regions of wilderness, they don’t fare very well. And we didn’t start on the wheat cultivation with the grand plan of going to the moon, we did that because the wheat as it was naturally gave huge and immediate benefits.
I don’t think you’d end up with a culture resembling any culture that existed in history. You have those smartest engineers and scientists, who already know how to make bows, steel, glass, firearms, electrical generators, and so on, and once settled in, they have a lot of free time (because there’s a ton of wildlife—buffalo herds, passenger pigeons, all that other easy to kill stuff that’s extinct—which will take many generations to deplete. They’re not in the modern day wilderness in the region where people can barely survive and almost all the food is extinct. They’re the new predator).
First, hunting with stone age weapons is far fom easy. Second, most engineers and scientists are not hunters, noone of them know how to hunt with spear and almost noone with bow. Third, they have no food supplies and so no time to learn. They will survive olny in very favourable conditions, like on tropical island with plenty of shellfish and tortoises (I think most people can hunt those).
I were thinking of my experience in Russia where engineers, mathematicians, and physicists absolutely loved going out on various nature trips (Didn’t really think of Sheldon and US tv shows). Of course, not everyone did, but we’re dropping a huge number of people, and those who know can teach those who don’t. Healthy person can go for 2 months without food.
Let’s say that they spawn on 1kmx1km zone in a grid with 10m spacing, in the temperate climate in the late spring, clothed in earliest stone age clothing (for same reason why we don’t spawn dolphins into a desert, we don’t spawn people into the Arctic).
This strikes me as very human centric. Why should another species’ hypothetical ascension look so much like the one we happened to observe in humans?
If it looks too different, we won’t see them in space, though.
Our own intelligence is at the level where it’s just barely sufficient to build a civilization when you got hands, fire, and so on. Note that orcas have much larger brains than humans, and had those larger brains for quite a long time, yet we’re where we are, and they’re where they are.
Likely because the first beings that could do that, did do that—no need to wait for the evolution of higher intelligence (so, in particular, this doesn’t show that higher intelligence couldn’t evolve).
Yeah, that’s precisely my point. If there’s more obstacles, intelligence has to go further before the technological civilization. We did get higher intelligence but only by other means (e.g. having paper and pencil helps, better nutrition gives higher IQ, and so on).
The Wikipedia article listing number of neurons in the cerebral cortex shows humans as significantly higher than whales, even though raw brain size may look better for whales. Wikipedia also describes an encephalization quotient which takes account of the fact that the brain is used for bodily functions, and on which whales don’t score as highly as they may seem to from brain size.
Yeah, that’s quite interesting. Raises the question though, why do they not have more neurons? They do have larger glia to neuron ratios, it’s not like everything’s simply bigger. Perhaps aquatic environment simply doesn’t reward intelligence that much.
Well, the bodily functions are the same but occurring at a lower rate, for a larger mammal. Most of whale’s body is fat, anyhow, which doesn’t need to be controlled by brain, and it’s not generally the case that people drop many IQ points when they become overweight. Nor are smaller people with same sized heads more intelligent.
edit: on the other hand, EQ may be a (very crude) measure of how well brain tissue pays off for an animal. If you have high quality brain tissue and you’re in a complex environment, at the equilibrium between costs and benefits you would haul around more brain mass per body mass. With the obvious caveat that this tradeoff is very different between land animals, flying animals, and aquatic animals.
Women are in average approximately as intelligent as men (though it depends on how you weigh visual intelligence vs verbal intelligence, and anyway their variance is smaller) even though they have smaller heads.
But is it because of the smaller body sizes using less brain for the bodily functions? I don’t think so.
edit: I frankly don’t get the point with EQ. If we had to make a computer control for bodily functions (e.g. to grow ethical meat), we could do with a weaker cpu for larger animals because they work slower. It just doesn’t make sense that body size would be using up brain to control it, irrespective of the composition of that body.
You greatly underestimate population size nesessary for civilization.
10 people, of course, can’t rebuild the whole civilization, but 10 top scientists and engineers with relevant expertise, given access to the natural resources, can make iron, steel, copper, tooling, build an electric generator, and so on [assuming they don’t get eaten by wildlife early on]. Of course, when they die out, it’s gone with them—the heavily inbred future generations aren’t going to be able to continue that, and probably won’t even survive.
No they cant. For example to make copper you need copper mine workers, smeltery workers, woodcutters, charcoal burners, wagon drivers to transport wood, ore and coal, carpenters to make wagons, builders to build mine and smeltery and farmers to feed them. That is impossible for population less then few thousands at least. Industry nesessary to make a generator requires population in millions.
To make copper, you need copper ore and charcoal and a fire and bellows out of animal hide. Those things weren’t produced in a modern industrial manner until something known as “industrial revolution”. You had a little town, it had a blacksmith, and the blacksmith could smelt his own iron (and copper, if he has the ore, as copper smelting is pretty easy). You’d be surprised how much technology existed entirely locally within a small village.
Actually, to make copper tools all you need is copper nuggets (which aren’t all that rare) and a couple of rocks.
Humans made tools out of meteorite iron before they developed metallurgy.
Heh, yeah. But when you don’t have transportation and it’s just 10 people it may be difficult to find such things without a metal detector… I was just recalling one time I made a little bit of copper from low grade malachite, using a torch. It is really easily reduced from the ore. More easily than iron.
They don’t need to write it down, they just need to store it. A certain amount of knowledge can be “stored” as oral tradition; alternatively, a lot more knowledge can be stored as (say) a pattern of rocks, carefully gathered and moved into position, in an area that can be easily visited.
Some knowledge will almost certainly be lost in the first few generations, despite that.
Oral traditions decay quickly, though. And rock placement is an example of far higher effort per letter. The point is, they find it much harder to retain knowledge. If the rate of loss is greater than the rate of creation, there’s no progress at all.
And even after you’re storing the knowledge, you’re still entirely out of luck on tools. Even if they have waterproof’d encyclopaedia handed to them, they still have this make tools to make tools to make tools cycle that they can’t even bootstrap.
The point is, putting that side to side with humans in some land animal bodies, you have on one hand a bunch of dolphin people who lost pretty much everything in a few generations, save for a few myths that are of no practical use, and on the other hand you have those land people with electricity, radio, and everything, a good chunk of 20th century tech.
Why on earth would they lose everything?
Yes, there would be some significant losses in the first few generations. But if you teleport the top 10 000 scientist and engineers onto an alien world with no human artifacts and leave them in human bodies, there will also be some significant losses in the first few generations. Once data storage technology is able to keep up with the volume of knowledge retained, then the losses will stop, and knowledge will slowly start to be regained.
If they’re sensible, they’ll realise that they can’t retain everything, and put some effort into retaining that which is important.
Why not? Hydraulic cement will harden underwater, and can be carefully pressed and moulded into shape. And while I have no idea how dolphins can get to that point, apparently even underwater welding is possible.
’cause nothing they know is particularly useful for future generations. You just get distorted myths, and it doesn’t take much distortion until technical knowledge becomes entirely non trustworthy and thus worthless.
But can you make hydraulic cement underwater? I was under the impression that you needed fire to make it.
Knowing how to make hydraulic cement isn’t useful?
I am quite certain that the 10 000 top engineers and scientists know quite a few things that would be very useful for future generations. Since I am not in that number, and since I am only one person, I do not know what those things would be, but I estimate a high probability that they exist.
I’m not sure. The Wikipedia article mentions that the ancient Romans used a mixture of volcanic ash and crushed lime, and you certainly do get underwater volcanoes, so the ash should be available… there are probably industrial processes now, but just mixing volcanic ash with the right sort of mud and getting something that hardens if you leave it for a day or two sounds usable underwater to me.
No, the ash would react with water immeadetly and thus be useless and you need burned lime (CaO or (CaOH)2), not limestone (CaCO3)
Ah, thank you. I wasn’t sure about that.
But it’s not enough to convey the formulas, you need also to convey the context. And you need to do so reliably, without later generations adding in nonsense of their own. When the knowledge is in use, it’s naturally checked against reality and protected against decay.
re: cement, my understanding is that you still need to fire components to make hydraulic cement, and underwater ash won’t work.
Which means that they will best remember things that they can immediately put to use, yes. Such as how to breed fish for desired characteristics, maybe? Or how to create some basic tools.
But what those tools may be, besides the tools real dolphins already invented? And breeding fish requires some sort of enclosure, ability to manipulate individual fish, etc. It’s not even clear there’s anything to gain from breeding fish if you don’t do some underwater agriculture for fish food (and thus need fish very different from available species to make full use of that).
Perhaps the reasons dolphin’s large brains are not particularly optimized (comparing to ours) in terms of neural density, despite ample time at their brain volume, is that they already do pretty much everything that a greater intellect would do.
On the ground and with the hands, when our intelligence was the same as of dolphins, we had a lot of complex and useful things we could have been doing if we were a little smarter, and that’s how we evolved our intelligence (and conversely, how they didn’t evolve much further).
Not necessarily. For reasons that are completely intuitive, I imagine our top 10 000 scientist et al. would be able to fashion tools, that could be used very effectively.
You make the assumption (albeit loosely) that progress happens along a straight pre-determined path, where things happen in a specific sequence, much like they did in human history. This is far from so. We are talking about a different planet out here. I’m not suggesting that different laws of physics will be applicable.
But the odds are that the oceanography, will be vastly different, with all sorts of different materials that would be available. There’s no guarantee that this planet (from here on called “Dolphin Alpha”) that steel would even exist or the necessary elements are present on the planet. On the other hand, you could possibly have all manner of other material. Perhaps, under water civilization would have a very different set of social rules.
HEAVY USE OF HYPERBOLE FOLLOWS
Given that these are the most brilliant 10 000 scientists that are present on the planet, I’d expect a sizeable number of them to know morse code, which can then be replicated in dolphin sounds (am no expert, but you’d need only two distinguishable sounds if I’ve got the concept correct). A good number more would be experts in Game theory. The homo sapiens dolphinus (again no expert, but this sounds authentic enough to me! How about we call them HSD for short?) that happen to know both morse code and be well versed in the more salient features of Game Theory, would probably rise to political power within the ranks of the HSD, and since these arent politicians who are in it for material gain (that part comes much later in the advent of a civilisation) and are truly interested in the welfare of the civilisation, would probably find ways to domesticate (or if you prefer the harsher equivalent “enslave”), all sorts of smaller creatures that could work for them!!
For the sake of simplicity, if we assume that marine life on Dolhin Alpha evolved roughly in parallel with that of Earth, the Dolphin Alpha Crabs (resembling the ones that live under water not the other type) and Dolphin Alpha Lobsters could work like minions. The HSD could decipher which fish are poisonous and use that knowledge to hunt larger and more meatier underwater species (I was thinking sharks, but that takes experimentation and I somehow see the world’s leading scientists thinking long and hard and then deciding that there are safer options at hand, except for the few who were also born adrenaline junkies and are now flapping their fins in excitement)
Before I get further carried away, I would just like to say that the body shape is something that can be easily overcome.
Whether intelligence would arise to a greater degree, really is a matter up for debate, but I would b inclined to think the answer is no, until the HSD discovers the equivalent of computing.
I have your ‘domesticate other animals’ listed in a footnote. Would take a long time and getting the domesticated animals to the point where they’re a replacement for your hands… that’s on par with a breeding program to regrow your own hands.
The time during which you can make environment easy enough that your intelligence de-evolves.