I find this comment extremely puzzling. How do you suppose an intelligent species could go about building nuclear bombs without the ability to use tools?
The relevant kind of “ability to use tools” is whatever can be used, however inefficiently at the beginning, to start building stuff, if you apply the ingenuity of an international scientific community for 100000 years to the task; not appendages that a chimp-level chimp can use to sharpen sticks in an evening. You seem to underestimate the power of intelligence.
This is directly analogous to AI boxing, with limitations of intelligent creatures’ bodies playing the role of the box. I’d expect intelligent tortoises or horses should still be capable of bootstrapping technological civilization (if they get better than humans at rationality to sustain scientific progress in the initial absence of technological benefits, or just individually sufficiently more intelligent to get to the equivalent of the necessary culture’s benefit in a lifetime).
There are a lot of species that are almost as smart as humans, and some even engage in tool use. (e.g. many species of corvids). But their tool use is limited, and part of the limit appears to be their lack of useful appendages and comparatively small size. In at least some of these species such as the New Caladonian Crow, tool techniques can be passed on from one generation to the next. This sort of thing suggests that appendages matter a fair bit.
(Obviously they aren’t sufficient even when one is fairly smart. Elephants have an extreme flexible appendage, have culture, are pretty brainy, and don’t seem to have developed any substantial tool use.)
Humans developed tool use well before we had anything resembling the scientific method or a scientific community. Humans had already 2000 years ago become the dominant species on the planet and had a substantial enough impact to make easily noticeable changes in the global environment. Whatver is necessary for this sort of thing, a scientific community doesn’t seem to be on the list.
You are missing the point still. The question was whether the presence of appendages convenient for tool-making is an important factor in intelligent species’ ability to build a technological civilization. In other words, whether creatures intelligent enough to build a technological civilization, but lacking an equivalent of hands, would still manage to build a technological civilization.
Elephants or crows are irrelevant, as they are not smart enough. Human use of tools is irrelevant, as we do have hands. The relevant class of creatures are those that are smart and don’t have hands (or similar), for example having bodies of tortoises (or worse).
Hmm, I’m confused now about what you are trying to assert. You are, if I’m now parsing you correctly, asserting that a species with no tool appendage but with some version of the scientific method could reach a high tech level without tool use? If so, that doesn’t seem unreasonable, but you seem to be conflating intelligence with having a scientific community. These are not at all the same thing.
In the situation where you have smart folks with no ability to build tools, scientific community is one useful technology they can still build, and that can dramatically improve their capability to solve the no-hands problem. For example, I wouldn’t expect humans with no hands (and with hoofs, say) to develop technology if they don’t get good enough at science first (and this might fail to happen at our level of rationality in the absence of technology, which would be the case in no-hands hypothetical). As an alternative, I listed sufficiently-greater individual intelligence that doesn’t need augmentation by culture to solve the no-hands problem (which might have developed if no-hands humans evolved a bit more, failing to solve the no-hands problem).
That sufficiently greater intelligence without hands could succeed is a supposition that seems questionable unless one makes sufficiently greater to be so large as to see no plausible reason it would evolve. And a scientific community is very difficult to develop unless one already has certain technologies that seem to require some form of tools. A cheap and efficient method of storing information seems to be necessary. Humans accomplished that with writing. It is remotely plausible one could get such a result some other way but it is tough to see how that could occur without the ability to use tools.
That sufficiently greater intelligence without hands could succeed is a supposition that seems questionable unless one makes sufficiently greater to be so large as to see no plausible reason it would evolve.
If creatures figure out selective breeding, one way to solve the no-hands problem would be for them to breed themselves for intelligence...
(I didn’t want to reply, but given the follow-up...)
Since they are already intelligent, there’s a road to incremental improvement. For hands, it’s not even clearly possible, will take too long, and psychology will change anyway in the meantime, causing even greater value drift (which is already the greatest cost of breeding for intelligence).
It depends on the attitudes of the species. Non-standard appendages might be a sign of ill-health. Humans are not the only species that uses a heuristic approximating “looks like a normal member of my species” as a proxy for health and general evolutionary fitness. So breeding hands might be tough, in that they wouldn’t be able to breed easily with the other members of the population necessarily. On the other hand, breeding for intelligence doesn’t have that problem. But all of this is highly speculative and to a large extent is a function in detail of what the species is like and what obvious phenotypical variation there is that can be easily traced to genetics.
My understanding is we’re starting from the assumption that the species in question is on average far more rational (and probably more intelligent) than humanity. If creatures that can create a thriving scientific community in the total absence of technology have gotten to the point of saying “You know, things would be a lot easier if we had hands. Hey, how about selective breeding?” I don’t imagine the fact that they’d likely find hands unsexy would be an issue.
That sufficiently greater intelligence without hands could succeed is a supposition that seems questionable unless one makes sufficiently greater to be so large as to see no plausible reason it would evolve.
Well, I expect educated humans could pull this off (that is, assuming development of science/rationality).
And a scientific community is very difficult to develop unless one already has certain technologies that seem to require some form of tools.
An oral tradition of scholarship seems sufficient for all practical purposes, on this level of necessary detail, if reliable education is sustained, and there is a systematic process that increases quality of knowledge over time (i.e. science and/or sufficient rationality).
On the whole, we have a pretty decent estimate for the intelligence levels produced by evolution, There are some potential observer bias issues (if there were another, more highly intelligent species we’d probably be them.) but even taking that into account the distribution seems clear.
There’s a tendency to underestimate how intelligent other species are compared to humans. This is a general problem that is even reflected in our language (look at the verbs “parrot” and “ape” compared to what controlled studies show that they can do.) While there are occasional errors of overestimation (e.g. Clever Hans), and we do have a tendency to overestimate the intelligence of pets, the general thrust in the last fifty years has been that animals are smarter than we give them credit for. So taking all this into account, we should shift our distribution of likely intelligence slightly towards the intelligent side. But even given that, it doesn’t seem likely that a species would evolve to be intelligent enough to do the sort of thing you intend. Keep in mind that intelligence is really resource intensive.
An oral tradition of scholarship seems sufficient for all practical purposes, on this level of necessary detail, if reliable education is sustained, and there is a systematic process that increases quality of knowledge over time (i.e. science and/or sufficient rationality).
At least in humans, oral traditions are not very reliable. There are only a handful of traditions in the world that seem to have remotely accurate oral traditions. See for example, the Cohanic Y chromosome where to some extent an oral tradition was confirmed by genetic evidence. But even in that case there’s a severe limit to the information that was conveyed (a few bits worth of data) and even that was conveyed imperfectly.
An oral tradition would therefore likely need to have many more experiments repeated simply to verify that the claimed results were correct. Moreover, individuals who are not near each other would need to send messengers back and forth or would need to travel a lot. While it is possible (one could imagine messengers with Homeric memory levels keeping many scientific ideas and data sets in their heads) this doesn’t seem very likely.
Moreover, in order for all this to work, the species needs to have some inkling that long-term thinking of this sort will actually be helpful. For humans, until about a hundred and fifty years ago, almost all work had some practical bit unless one was a sufficiently wealthy individual (like say Darwin) that one could easily spend time investigating things. If one has no basic tool use or the like, that problem becomes more, not less severe. And even with humans the tech level differences quickly become severe enough that they outstrip the imagination. No early homo sapiens could have imagined something like Roman era technology. It would have looked to them like what we imagine highly advanced science fiction settings would look like.
I find this comment extremely puzzling. How do you suppose an intelligent species could go about building nuclear bombs without the ability to use tools?
The relevant kind of “ability to use tools” is whatever can be used, however inefficiently at the beginning, to start building stuff, if you apply the ingenuity of an international scientific community for 100000 years to the task; not appendages that a chimp-level chimp can use to sharpen sticks in an evening. You seem to underestimate the power of intelligence.
This is directly analogous to AI boxing, with limitations of intelligent creatures’ bodies playing the role of the box. I’d expect intelligent tortoises or horses should still be capable of bootstrapping technological civilization (if they get better than humans at rationality to sustain scientific progress in the initial absence of technological benefits, or just individually sufficiently more intelligent to get to the equivalent of the necessary culture’s benefit in a lifetime).
There are a lot of species that are almost as smart as humans, and some even engage in tool use. (e.g. many species of corvids). But their tool use is limited, and part of the limit appears to be their lack of useful appendages and comparatively small size. In at least some of these species such as the New Caladonian Crow, tool techniques can be passed on from one generation to the next. This sort of thing suggests that appendages matter a fair bit.
(Obviously they aren’t sufficient even when one is fairly smart. Elephants have an extreme flexible appendage, have culture, are pretty brainy, and don’t seem to have developed any substantial tool use.)
Elephants or crows don’t have scientific communities, so the analogy doesn’t work, doesn’t suggest anything about the hypothetical I discussed.
Humans developed tool use well before we had anything resembling the scientific method or a scientific community. Humans had already 2000 years ago become the dominant species on the planet and had a substantial enough impact to make easily noticeable changes in the global environment. Whatver is necessary for this sort of thing, a scientific community doesn’t seem to be on the list.
You are missing the point still. The question was whether the presence of appendages convenient for tool-making is an important factor in intelligent species’ ability to build a technological civilization. In other words, whether creatures intelligent enough to build a technological civilization, but lacking an equivalent of hands, would still manage to build a technological civilization.
Elephants or crows are irrelevant, as they are not smart enough. Human use of tools is irrelevant, as we do have hands. The relevant class of creatures are those that are smart and don’t have hands (or similar), for example having bodies of tortoises (or worse).
Hmm, I’m confused now about what you are trying to assert. You are, if I’m now parsing you correctly, asserting that a species with no tool appendage but with some version of the scientific method could reach a high tech level without tool use? If so, that doesn’t seem unreasonable, but you seem to be conflating intelligence with having a scientific community. These are not at all the same thing.
In the situation where you have smart folks with no ability to build tools, scientific community is one useful technology they can still build, and that can dramatically improve their capability to solve the no-hands problem. For example, I wouldn’t expect humans with no hands (and with hoofs, say) to develop technology if they don’t get good enough at science first (and this might fail to happen at our level of rationality in the absence of technology, which would be the case in no-hands hypothetical). As an alternative, I listed sufficiently-greater individual intelligence that doesn’t need augmentation by culture to solve the no-hands problem (which might have developed if no-hands humans evolved a bit more, failing to solve the no-hands problem).
That sufficiently greater intelligence without hands could succeed is a supposition that seems questionable unless one makes sufficiently greater to be so large as to see no plausible reason it would evolve. And a scientific community is very difficult to develop unless one already has certain technologies that seem to require some form of tools. A cheap and efficient method of storing information seems to be necessary. Humans accomplished that with writing. It is remotely plausible one could get such a result some other way but it is tough to see how that could occur without the ability to use tools.
If creatures figure out selective breeding, one way to solve the no-hands problem would be for them to breed themselves for intelligence...
Would it be easier for greater-than-human intelligent nohanders to breed themselves for more intelligence or for, you know, hands?
(I didn’t want to reply, but given the follow-up...)
Since they are already intelligent, there’s a road to incremental improvement. For hands, it’s not even clearly possible, will take too long, and psychology will change anyway in the meantime, causing even greater value drift (which is already the greatest cost of breeding for intelligence).
The answer is yes.
It depends on the attitudes of the species. Non-standard appendages might be a sign of ill-health. Humans are not the only species that uses a heuristic approximating “looks like a normal member of my species” as a proxy for health and general evolutionary fitness. So breeding hands might be tough, in that they wouldn’t be able to breed easily with the other members of the population necessarily. On the other hand, breeding for intelligence doesn’t have that problem. But all of this is highly speculative and to a large extent is a function in detail of what the species is like and what obvious phenotypical variation there is that can be easily traced to genetics.
My understanding is we’re starting from the assumption that the species in question is on average far more rational (and probably more intelligent) than humanity. If creatures that can create a thriving scientific community in the total absence of technology have gotten to the point of saying “You know, things would be a lot easier if we had hands. Hey, how about selective breeding?” I don’t imagine the fact that they’d likely find hands unsexy would be an issue.
Well, I expect educated humans could pull this off (that is, assuming development of science/rationality).
An oral tradition of scholarship seems sufficient for all practical purposes, on this level of necessary detail, if reliable education is sustained, and there is a systematic process that increases quality of knowledge over time (i.e. science and/or sufficient rationality).
On the whole, we have a pretty decent estimate for the intelligence levels produced by evolution, There are some potential observer bias issues (if there were another, more highly intelligent species we’d probably be them.) but even taking that into account the distribution seems clear.
There’s a tendency to underestimate how intelligent other species are compared to humans. This is a general problem that is even reflected in our language (look at the verbs “parrot” and “ape” compared to what controlled studies show that they can do.) While there are occasional errors of overestimation (e.g. Clever Hans), and we do have a tendency to overestimate the intelligence of pets, the general thrust in the last fifty years has been that animals are smarter than we give them credit for. So taking all this into account, we should shift our distribution of likely intelligence slightly towards the intelligent side. But even given that, it doesn’t seem likely that a species would evolve to be intelligent enough to do the sort of thing you intend. Keep in mind that intelligence is really resource intensive.
At least in humans, oral traditions are not very reliable. There are only a handful of traditions in the world that seem to have remotely accurate oral traditions. See for example, the Cohanic Y chromosome where to some extent an oral tradition was confirmed by genetic evidence. But even in that case there’s a severe limit to the information that was conveyed (a few bits worth of data) and even that was conveyed imperfectly.
An oral tradition would therefore likely need to have many more experiments repeated simply to verify that the claimed results were correct. Moreover, individuals who are not near each other would need to send messengers back and forth or would need to travel a lot. While it is possible (one could imagine messengers with Homeric memory levels keeping many scientific ideas and data sets in their heads) this doesn’t seem very likely.
Moreover, in order for all this to work, the species needs to have some inkling that long-term thinking of this sort will actually be helpful. For humans, until about a hundred and fifty years ago, almost all work had some practical bit unless one was a sufficiently wealthy individual (like say Darwin) that one could easily spend time investigating things. If one has no basic tool use or the like, that problem becomes more, not less severe. And even with humans the tech level differences quickly become severe enough that they outstrip the imagination. No early homo sapiens could have imagined something like Roman era technology. It would have looked to them like what we imagine highly advanced science fiction settings would look like.
Link is broken, and some other text appears to have gotten folded into the URL.
Thanks. Fixed.