Big-Headed Guy Says Absolute Brain Size Matters
From Edge.org:
The thing that stuck out was that self-control is simply a
product of absolute brain size. It had more to do with your feeding
ecology: How complex was your diet? How many things do you rely on to
survive? That was a big surprise, because the idea that diet is shaping
cognition has faded in many circles as the leading hypothesis for
thinking about how psychology evolves. So, how do we move forward on
testing ideas about the evolution of psychology? ... It's interesting to
think about how this all came about. It all started in a bar.
BRIAN HARE is an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at
Duke University in North Carolina and founder of the Duke Canine
Cognition Center. He is the co-author (with Vanessa Woods) of The Genius of Dogs: How Dogs Are Smarter Than You Think. Brian Hare's Edge Bio Page
ABSOLUTE BRAIN SIZE MATTERS
The questions that I’m thinking about involve how humans are
different from other animals. I’m also interested in how that happened,
how we became so different in terms of our psychology. The area in
psychology that is fertile for a lot of growth is thinking about how our
psychology evolved. How did we go from having psychology more like
other apes to being like we are now, and what was the process by which
that happened? How did either natural selection or random forces of
evolution produce what we are today? That’s a hard problem that I'm
excited to think about.
What are we doing to try to look at that? Well, we compare different
animals. Historically, we’ve been lucky if we could do a comparison of
two animals. Say I compare dogs and wolves to each other and try to
understand how they’re different from one another, if I can understand
how they’re different, then maybe I can make some guesses about how
those differences evolved.
My hope for the future is that comparative psychology can move past
just comparing pairs of species and look at lots of different species,
using the tree of life to make predictions and test ideas about how
psychology might evolve in different species so that we can come up with
ideas about how our own species may have happened. The idea that we
have culture, that we have language, that we can think about the
thoughts of others, that we have the ability to deceive or care about
others and have empathy—one of the big hypotheses for how humans ended
up with these unusual abilities is that evolution favored more complex
social skills.
To test that, though, you have to look at lots of different species,
and you have to have data on how those different species solve social
problems to be able to trace how those social skills may have evolved.
That’s been difficult, but it's also exciting to think about how to get
around that problem. One of the things we’ve tried to do is pioneer
these large-scale collaborations, like the genomicists have done. We
published a paper two or three years ago that involved fifty-six
co-authors. We got people from all over the world to contribute data on a
variety of primate species, and even non-primates, like birds and
elephants. We had almost forty species. Everybody had done some
cognitive tests with their species they had available to them and,
remarkably, it was the first time that people who study animal
psychology had ever worked together in this way. We led the charge to do
that because we know that if we want to understand the evolution of
human social psychology, if we want to test why we are the way we are
and the hypotheses that we think are necessary to make us human, we’re
going to have to look at a large range of species and understand how they have been shaped by evolution.
We measured inhibitory control, which is basically your ability to
not do something that might be counterproductive. We had two measures of
this on these forty species. We thought that by testing the big
hypothesis—that there’s been selection on social psychology in
animals—we might be able to learn about the human case. When we looked
at these forty species, that’s not what we saw. We thought it would be
that animals with more complex social systems need the ability to
control their behavior to not do something that might be
counterproductive. You can imagine that if you’re competing with one
another, you don’t want to get in a fight with the wrong guy, right?
Self-control would seem to be incredibly important in social endeavors.
That’s not the pattern we saw when we did the measurements....MUCH MORE
