are you implying meateaters are smarter

Post #63,708 by boxley 11/18/02 10:43:04 PM Reply	are you implying meateaters are smarter or that carrots are prey :-) thanx, bill will work for cash and other incentives [link\|http://home.tampabay.rr.com/boxley/resume/Resume.html\|skill set] "Fifty-one percent of a nation can establish a totalitarian regime, suppress minorities and still remain democratic." Correction: All that can be achieved with 51 percent of the voters!" Ilanna Mercer
Post #63,709 by ben_tilly 11/18/02 10:48:24 PM Reply	Neither I am saying that over millions of years both lions and gazelles are gradually getting smarter as each adjusts for the capability of the other. (As well as faster, with better vision, etc.) Humans are, of course, well off the trendline. :-) Cheers, Ben "Career politicians are inherently untrustworthy; if it spends its life buzzing around the outhouse, it\ufffds probably a fly." - [link\|http://www.nationalinterest.org/issues/58/Mead.html\|Walter Mead]
Post #63,715 by JayMehaffey 11/18/02 11:26:04 PM Reply	Gould questioned that Stephen Jay Gould did an article for his long running series where he argued that the intelligence of herbivores was actually a random walk. If I understood and am remember it correctly, it went like this. For any particular species of herbivore, if you trace the cranial capacity of it's decendents, there is an equal chance of it having a higher and lower capacity. With the exception of course that there is a practical mininum necissary for the animal to function. This sort of bounded random walk creates the illusion of a directed trend because the the highest value and the average value tend to go up over time. Jay
Post #63,717 by ben_tilly 11/18/02 11:45:07 PM Reply	If he wrote about it... then that article is slipping my mind. Based on [link\|http://fp.bio.utk.edu/skeptic/Book_Reviews/gould-full_house.htm\|http://fp.bio.utk.ed...ld-full_house.htm] I think I know which book to look in to see if he talks about the far more restricted herbivore example that I had in mind. Furthermore even if Gould did talk about it, he is not always right. Or he might have been talking about a more general trend which this specific subtrend is an exception of. My recollection is that this was somewhat of a standard textbook example. For instance look on page 4 of [link\|http://biosci.usc.edu/courses/2002-spring/documents/bisc313-Coevolution.pdf\|http://biosci.usc.ed...3-Coevolution.pdf] to see it listed along with other standard exmples of coevolution. And [link\|http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~GEL107/w02_cowen/coevolutionadv.html\|http://www-geology.u...evolutionadv.html] gives me the following reference: Radinsky, L. 1978. Evolution of brain size in carnivores and ungulates. American Naturalist 112, 815-831. Cheers, Ben "Career politicians are inherently untrustworthy; if it spends its life buzzing around the outhouse, it\ufffds probably a fly." - [link\|http://www.nationalinterest.org/issues/58/Mead.html\|Walter Mead]
Post #63,916 by JayMehaffey 11/19/02 9:54:33 PM Reply	Overstated the case What I was thinking of came from Full House, but the argument I mentioned wasn't against intelligence specifically. It was against the idea that there is a tend in increasing animal size over time. In the book he argues against tends towards increasing size and increasing complexity. But he only mentions intelligence in passing, while pointing to research that shows that the increasing development of the vertebra over time is a random walk Jay
Post #63,942 by ben_tilly 11/19/02 11:11:52 PM Reply	That fits my recollection as well :-) "Career politicians are inherently untrustworthy; if it spends its life buzzing around the outhouse, it\ufffds probably a fly." - [link\|http://www.nationalinterest.org/issues/58/Mead.html\|Walter Mead]

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