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.
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.