Comments on: The social intelligence hypothesis

By: Monkeyaround

Monkeyaround — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 07:23:17 +0000

From what I understand, the lifestyle of the Orangutans disprove this theory. They have large brains relative to their body size, yet they live mostly solitary lives.

By: Anibal

Anibal — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 20:58:00 +0000

In response to Pixeline and his/her first paragraph in the post above, i think that the answer is in the proocess and concept of “Niche Construction” how the coupled interactions between organisms and enviroment mutually affect both, the organism and the enviroment, redirecting them to new selection pressures. In its nuts and bolts the “social intelligence hypothesis” is a very good heuristics.

By: brian1625

brian1625 — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 20:13:14 +0000

Well the correlation of brain size and social size has been made in Primates. A Zoologist can estimate social size based on brain size. It’s that simple really. The larger the social group, the larger the brain.
Humans have been the largest social group, thus the largest brain. Interesting yet, humans have a very vast social group in the sense that our history and culture are so preserved [writing, video, religion, culture] so in some sense our social group consist of people who are now dead. This gives you an idea of how massive our social group is.
Now your internet example may get our brains to bigger, IF there is a selective force involved, but there isn’t. People will continue to reproduce regardless of wither or not they can retain blog information. However, in a more primitive environment, having a smaller brain would put your genes at risk.

By: pixeline

pixeline — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 16:24:16 +0000

Put under Darwinian eyes, this somehow does sound odd. If there ever were a link between the size of the brain and our social behaviours, it would be the other way around : we would become more social because our brain allows it, not grow our brain because the environment requires it.
We all know our ancesters standing straight allowed the brain to have more space to expand. Some developed bigger brain, which, hypothetically, would allow these individuals to keep better track of social activities, thus giving them advantages over smaller brains, thus smaller brains disappearing eventually, and our species becoming big brains species.
this just does not sound realistic to me.
It’s a bit like saying our brain will get bigger because we have the internet and so many blogs to keep track of. Sounds really more funny than serious to me