Fascinating facts of human evolution
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- Опубликовано: 7 сен 2024
- 0:35 - Human brain size and brain/body ratio have been rapidly decreasing for the last 20,000 years
11:02 - Homo Floresiensis
14:24 - counter hypothesis to guns, germs, and steel theory
17:45 - humans' relatively unique ability to sweat and what it indicates
18:45 - humans' unique finger and toe wrinkling and aquatic ape theory
19:40 - humans and many animals digest fiber somewhat like termites
21:21 - Channel update & information - if you want to contact me regarding this, just send a message through RUclips, thanks.
Interesting as always, thank you.
great lecture
Very interesting, the interviews would be awesome!
It makes me so happy when you upload a new video. Thank you Loren.
Thanks for the longer video and brain stimulation.
Always a pleasure. Enjoy your travailing and share more interesting and important-to-know facts. Thank you.
I'm glad that I did find your channel, and this is a very good video at that.
I am just a poor dumb fellow but I find your discussions very interesting. Thanks for flipping the light switch for me.
I love your channel because you provide valuable information in every video. I have watched every single video you put out and learned something new from all of them. I don't think you will reach a broad audience any time soon without actually spending money to promote yourself and I doubt it would pay off in youtube ads in the end. Only a handfull of people out there actively search for videos in your category but I can tell you we appreciate your channel a lot more than anyone else. You could make videos more frequently but you face the delima of diluting your content and I see that problem with many self improvement channels. You could improve your video quality by getting a camera with a better sensor 10 megapixel or more. You can probably get that from a smartphone like the samsung galaxy s4 which is getting cheaper every year because of how much faster smartphones are evolving compared to everything else. I hope more people find you soon because you are doing a great public service.
I would find it very interesting to see you have conversations on Google chat. Have you ever considered doing a conversation based podcast of some sort?
Thanks for the interesting facts by the way, and your perspective on western civilisations historical dominance, correlating with the printing press and a faster spread of information.
Yea probably a good idea to focus on volume then focus on quality for the search engines.
Perhaps the old saying, "if you don't use it you lose it".
Awesome video. Here are my thoughts (not criticism): First of all, it is critical to understand how evolution actually works. 99% of people misunderstand it. The quickest way to learn this is to watch episode two of "Cosmos: Some of the Things that Molecules Do." It's on Netflix. Prior to 20,000 years ago, societies consisted of tribes and population was limited by resource availability. Under these living conditions, all men necessarily played a direct role in the procurement of resources, namely, food. Human's only real survival trait is our intelligence; we don't have claws or fangs, move with stealth, or have any relative speed. Therefore, because food was always scarce, only those with the most intelligence (largest skulls) lived long enough to reproduce. Eventually we reached a critical mass at which point we developed simple civilizations in which specific tasks were delegated to different individuals including pastoralism and cultivation among many other developing trades. This increased overall efficiency and allowed those with less intelligence (smaller skulls) to thrive and reproduce along side their more intelligent counterparts. As civilization progressed, so did efficiency. Now stretch this scenario out to today, a world in which a small percentage of the population produces the things we actually need to survive and everyone else "does other things." Walk into a Wal-Mart once; most of the patrons don't have the intelligence to tie their shoes much less survive indefinitely in the wilderness. With computers and the internet, we don't even have to remember anything anymore. Our species is becoming dumber at a faster rate than ever right now. Think of the dumbest person you know; they probably have kids. Not to worry, upon the collapse of this system, which I calculate will happen within 30 years, 90% of the population will perish and only those with the highest survival intelligence will be selected by nature to survive. This brings me to my next point.
I find the whole IQ system based on a false premise; it's confined to a narrow band of cognition. I see intelligence as existing on a spectrum: on one side are the arts (music, drawing/painting, etc.) and on the other side, mathematics. In between is everything from philosophy to communication to physics. Those areas of intelligence which have been historically necessary for survival (hunting, combat, troubleshooting, collusion) probably lie in the middle of the spectrum and are probably more balanced among people. Everyone has some level of intelligence across the spectrum and thus, you could chart it with a line on a graph. Then one could measure the total area beneath the line to measure total intelligence. Who's to say Euclid was more intelligent than Beethoven? For some reason, we seem to hold the deviations to the right side of the spectrum in high regards in terms of intelligence. This is false. What is the value of intelligence if not for survival? When resources go back to being scarce, it will be those with "survival intelligence" that will live on, not Salvador Dalis or Sean Carrolls. I find it fascinating that "great" minds like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku are apparently oblivious to the grave danger our species is in. They both seem to subscribe to the idea that we will keep advancing civilization without first collapsing. I saw Dr. Kaku give a presentation on "The Coming Age of Abundance", an era when civilization is so efficient that people won't know what to do with all of their free time and resources. WTF? The intelligence they possess can put people on Mars, but sadly, won't help them make it through really tough times, or see those times coming, any more than the Wal-Mart shoppers.
Not sure about the whole brain to body ratio thing. You could have the highest brain to body ratio on Earth but if you're only three feet tall and 42 pounds, your brain is probably still pretty small.
Horses sweat.
I'm not trying to sound pompus, just making a point. I try to judge people by their character rather than their intelligence. Judging people by their intelligence is no different than judging them by the color of their skin. It's not a choice, you're born with it.
+V for Veracity Great comment. About horses sweating, yes they are an interesting exception although their sweating mechanism is still not as advanced as man's. As I recall there is debate that perhaps conditioned humans could even beat horses at endurance running partly because a horse's large gut presses the lungs while galloping.
3:20 Well Microchips have been getting smaller.
What you said about the hominid on the island and brain size to function makes me think of split brain patients who function just fine with only half of the brain but may only see half of your fact etc but dont notice it? Could it be at all to do with consciousness and the being becoming more conscious as a whole (all parts combined) so does not need the old central processing unit (brain) as much = what you more or less say about phone/computer tech? Less brain because brain is now becoming primitive and consciousness gaining more weight as a whole. Very good and thought provoking video, really enjoyed it, as always as a hardcore lorax subber.
Very interesting to learn about the how the printing press acted as a major catalyst in European global expansion. You said I believe that the type or font lent itself to the invention? What do you mean, the block-ish style of English vs the more fluid script of, say, Arabic? This relates to a thought I had earlier in the video and that is what role do you think written language played on the proposed reduction on average human brain mass? Surely the ability to externalize consciousness, or conscious matter (knowledge, memory, instructions, etc.), onto a page and to then be able to share that information non-verbally and irrespective of time would impact the necessity for certain structures of the brain. Thanks for making the videos, happy travels.
Does any one know of other similar small good channels?
One of the problems with your view that the Europeans dominated Asia because they invented the printing press is refuted by the fact that the printing press was invented in Asia several centuries before.
drmodestoesq Yes, but as mentioned it could never be widely used because character based writing systems were too complex/inefficient for mass printing on early presses. Imagine having to sort and place 50,000 characters by hand vs 26 letters. True Korea did finally begin the switch to a phonetic alphabet a few hundred years after they invented the printing press (about the same time the Gutenberg press was invented) but too late for full and mature implementation of the secondary competing writing system and too small a country to compete with all of Europe.
lorax2013 Also, phonetic languages allow for an individual to invent their own word and vis a vis a published work have it disseminated and potentially accepted. This act of logogeneration (there, I invented a word) is much more difficult in ideogram based languages. Without the state and the publishing industry in a synergistic alliance the creation of new words is problematic. Thus, one could argue, and what the hell, I will argue it now, that phonetic languages have a greater potential to unleash creative individualism in a society. This individualism when harnessed by the state can be used to crush and dominate less individualistic societies. C'est ironique, n'est pas?
Well, if all humans came from adam and eve and we're losing our IQ slowly every year.......adam and eve must have been geniuses!!! Or the bible is a load of crap
maybe the brain is getting more efficient
look at computer processors.
over time they have reduced in size from room sized behemoths to postage stamp squares.
***** That's probably the most popular theory, perhaps since a falling IQ goes so strongly against conventional beliefs. However I tend to disagree with the "smaller but smarter brain" theory for several reasons:
The shrinking brain is an ongoing process - apparently in all world regions. This would mean not just a few, but an ongoing series of mutations would have to be occurring in relatively isolated populations at a remarkable frequency. Then, we would apparently have to "give up" most or all of the positive benefit of each mutation by reducing brain size at the same time. So, still, we would apparently be losing overall intelligence compared our already achieved potential.
Secondly there is still no explanation for this sudden reversal in the 5 million year trend of larger hominid brain/body ratios correlating to higher intelligence. Why did this series of theoretical mutations only begin occurring 20,000 years ago - and to such a strong degree?
Lastly, today as in the past, larger brain/body ratio does, arguably, appear to correlate with higher overall IQ. It is probably easier to argue test data shows aspects of verbal IQ and executive function are not related to brain/body ratio however. Rather than a long series of unprecedented mutations in all populations for 20,000 years, I think the simpler explanation is some technology or language advance/mutation that allowed an atrophy in many but not all aspects of IQ.
We had significant atrophy in photographic memory compared to chimps and nobody is too shocked about it. You can see exactly the same thing happening with musculature and nobody conjectures there was an ongoing series of mutations making small muscles stronger. Humans are simply more emotionally attached to the idea of our superior intelligence than our muscles, in my opinion.
If you watch some documentaries on youtube on Neanderthals, you will see that their brains were larger than ours today. Yet these guys in 250,000 years had not developed any culture or civilization that we know of. No artwork that we can locate and certainly no settlements beyond caves.
The only thing they left behind were spear tips and stone axes. What were they doing with all that brain mass is a mystery. Supposedly they lived in the dark winters of Europe and had much larger eye sockets than we do. So perhaps a part of their brain was dedicated to night vision.
But definitely larger brain does not necessarily equal greater intelligence - at least as we know it.
Do you feel or not that the communication skills ability is because of IQ?
O,,,
hi lorax, i am not a relgious man but the first words in a common bible ' first there was the word, the word was god ' the anciants knew the language was the majer facter in getting ahead in life. just a thought you did not speak of..... peace
Let's look at it from a Dickensian point of view. Oliver Twist's mother died in childbirth. Not an uncommon outcome of a pregnancy back in the days of yore. A probable reason was that Oliver had a giant Cockney head which was too large for the birth canal.
In this day and age the obstetrician would probably recommend a Caesarean procedure. Thus, both the child and the mother would be free to pass on the giant head gene to the next generation. So I predict we will have gigantic heads like the overlords in the the Star Trek pilot episode. Maybe even disembodied brains like in the episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion."
The reason people are so stupid in the current generation is because of adding lead to gasoline and mercury dental fillings back in the hippie days. Thankfully those days are over and a brave new giant headed destiny awaits us.
I wager 200 quatloos on the future of humanity.