Re: "It's uncertain whether intelligence has any long term

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Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 15:35:24 +0000 (UTC)

gmsizemore2@yahoo.com (Glen M. Sizemore) wrote in message news:<cdjf2t$1uag$1@darwin.ediacara.org>...
> > There is ample evidence that "intelligence" has had considerable
> > long-term evolutionary advantage.
>
> HT: For those species who possess it, intelligence (given an
> appropriate
> definition) has probably been a selective advantage.
>
> GS: You might want to think about whether or not it makes sense to say
> that "intelligence" is a thing that can be possessed. You might also
> want to think about how it is that one has license to define
> colloquial terms as one wishes.
>

Words are your servants - not your masters. In technical discourse, it
is routine to stipulate definitions for words. For instance, Einstein
defined 'time' as what clocks measure and 'distance' as what measuring
rods measure. What he concluded about time and distance relates only
to the definitions he stipulated, but he wasn't asserting that other
definitions are not possible or valid.

Without making it clear what your terms mean in a particular context,
it is impossible to evaluate the correctness of statements like
"intelligence has had considerable long-term evolutionary advantage"
or "intelligence is a thing that can be possessed".

Of course, as a practical consideration, you should define your terms
so that they are as close to their everyday intuitive meanings as
possible so that people aren't mislead about the applicability of your
conclusions.

Philosophers who argue about what the 'correct' meaning of a word is,
are completely wasting their time in my opinion.

[snip]
>
> > That is, it is evident if one has
> > some clue as to what is being called "intelligence." If one views it
> > as some "thing" that is measured as "G" and so forth, then one can
> > make the argument that there is no evidence. If, however, one views
> > "intelligence" as a murky, nonscientific, simplistic description of a
> > person's (or non-human animal's) behavioral repertoire, then it is
> > obvious that there is such evidence. In what sense? If one views the
> > behavioral repertoires of humans and non-human animals as products of
> > processes that are shared by a great many animals ? especially operant
> > conditioning ? the argument disappears. Operant conditioning (and
> > other common behavioral processes) CAN account for the complex
> > behavioral repertoires of humans (see Skinner's "Science and Human
> > Behavior" and "Verbal Behavior," and, no, Chomsky didn't) and the
> > process is obviously widespread in the animal kingdom. This is because
> > animals that can acquire new responses are frequently in a better
> > position than those that don't since the environment is always in some
> > flux.
>
> HT: You've raised a lot of issues here.
>
> Chomsky's review of "Verbal Behavior" is a pretty thoroughgoing
> demolition of Skinner's position and was one of the most important
> events triggering the cognitive revolution against the old-school
> Behaviourism.
>
> GS: No, it is widely regarded as "?a pretty thoroughgoing demolition
> of Skinner's position," that does not make it so. It is correct,
> though, that it "?was one of the most important events triggering the
> cognitive revolution against the old-school Behaviourism."
> Unfortunately, Skinner had already begun dismantling "old-school
> Behaviourism" 20 years earlier. The version of behaviorism that
> Chomsky attacked is not the version that Skinner advocated, despite
> Chomsky's numerous quotes. Anyone who has read both Verbal Behavior
> and Chomsky's "review" can see easily that Chomsky never read the
> book, and he admitted as much to Searle.
>

Something doesn't sound quite right about what you've said here
especially when we put these two comments alongside one another:
"Chomsky never read the book", "despite Chomsky's numerous quotes".

[snip]
> HT: Your comments about general learning mechanisms that you say we
> share
> with other animals run up against a critical problem - we are capable
> of things that other animals are not (language being the obvious
> example). This leads inevitably to the conclusion that humans possess
> different 'learning' devices.
>
> GS: I don't think so. Natural selection propels some species along a
> path in which more and more of their behavior is not elicited like
> reflexes or "fixed-action patterns" etc. In primates, this trajectory
> has been followed to the extreme and when the vocal musculature became
> sensitive to its consequences, "language" arose. Put simply, the
> argument is that there is a continuum of, let's call it, "percent of
> repertoire that is not elicited" (i.e., a matter of degree) and that
> the extraordinary flexibility and utility of sounds produced by the
> vocal musculature made the emergence of "language" inevitable. Once
> "language" and culture emerge, much of what is extraordinary about
> humans follows, even though we are just a little "smarter" than other
> mammals, and the mechanisms are the same.

Language is language whether it is spoken, written, signed or
whatever. I wasn't making a comment about speech which you seem to be
conflating with language. Various ape language experiments have been
performed using sign language and a mode of communication which
involves pointing to lexigram symbols on a board. Neither task exceeds
the perceptual/motor abilities of apes in the way that speech does.
Nevertheless, there are still extremely severe limitations in the
communication systems that develop in terms of vocabulary size and
basic grammar.

Brain damage can also affect language without inhibiting other aspects
of intelligence and vice versa. This suggests that they are processed
in different parts of the brain although conceivably using similar
kinds of circuitry.

Language is also acquired without apparently making much use of
negative feedback about what is and isn't grammatical. Infants are
much more likely to be corrected when they say something that is
untrue rather than something that is ungrammatical so the feedback is
extremely noisy. Infants also spontaneously use structures universal
to language that they haven't heard in the input (most notable in the
phenomenon of creolisation).

In short, there is ample evidence that the ability to acquire language
is within the range of phenotypic expression of human genomes, but not
the genomes of other species and for reasons to do with cognitive
abilities rather than perceptual/motor abilities.

There is a small amount of evidence of continuity between ape-language
abilities and that of humans, but not enough to draw serious
conclusions about the evolution of language. Apes never acquire exotic
properties like case systems, subject-verb agreement, phrasal movement
and embedding, relative clauses and so on. The comparative method is
therefore limited in what it can tell us about where these abilities
came from.

> HT: On your last point, 'learning' is not always an advantage. If what
> is
> learned is always the same thing, then it would pay to be equipped
> with this knowledge/ability at birth or as soon as it can be
> exploited. Having to learn this thing would mean a delay that could be
> costly.
>
> GS: And this is exactly why many things are "hard-wired." But learning
> has obviously been an advantage, as is evidenced by its widespread
> representation in the animal kingdom.

A property that is widespread is not necessarily adaptive. Most
animals fall to the ground if you drop them, for instance.

An ability to adjust behaviour according to environmental conditions
is present to varying extents in the animal kingdom. I don't know if
it's really appropriate to say that it's widespread. Maybe among
mammals and birds, but not really among say, reptiles and fish.

Let me ask you a question. Can you draw a principled distinction
between 'learning' and other types of phenotypic plasticity such as
muscle development (a function of exercise) and callus formation (a
function of pressure on, or repeated rubbing against, skin)? Both of
these developments are adaptive responses of the body to environmental
input. Would you call these 'learning'? If not, why would you be any
more inclined to group all 'learning' processes under one label? Is
there some reason to suppose that the same mechanisms are involved in
all cases of learning?

H.
 

---
Like-minds don't notice shared mistakes. Talk to someone else.

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