tanadrin

[tanadrin]

Jesus Christ, that otter is a madman— it only harassing an alligator but coming back even after the alligator could have eaten him!

don't some crocodilians participate in pack hunting and play behaviour and stuff?

Do they? That sounds really interesting! Send me a link if you can find one.

[tanadrin]

don't some crocodilians participate in pack hunting and play behaviour and stuff?

Do they? That sounds really interesting! Send me a link if you can find one.

[tanadrin]

That’s true, though people do seem to write a fair bit about fish, bird, and (some categories of) invertebrate intelligence.

Unfortunately reptiles and amphibians seem to be pretty dumb in general. Idk if their intelligence is just under-studied or if they come out looking pretty inferior compared to mammals.

[tanadrin]

Pleistocene 4X game where the tech tree is just dozens of slight improvements on stone hand axes.

[tanadrin]

Frankly the body of evidence for Neanderthals having language and generally being as intelligent as AMHs is not very robust at all. And of course we have even less evidence to go on where Denisovans are concerned

They had tool use, large social groups, and similar degrees of technological development as H. sapiens in the same period, yeah? We can’t examine their brains and soft tissue like the larynx doesn’t preserve well, but given how similar they were to us anatomically I don’t think it strains credulity to assume they had comparable cognitive capabilities. The tech for both H. sapiens and Neanderthals during their period of coexistence was the Mousterian industry, so it’s not like there’s some radical difference in Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon archeological sites, AFAIK.

[tanadrin]

Unfortunately reptiles and amphibians seem to be pretty dumb in general. Idk if their intelligence is just under-studied or if they come out looking pretty inferior compared to mammals.

[tanadrin]

I have tried to choose a wide distribution of animals representing many different clades, aiming for relatively intelligent species within their respective clade. There are only 12 poll options possible, so no asking “what about X?” Inevitably some species will have to stand in for a much broader class than others, e.g., the Humboldt squid for all cephalopods. (But the Humboldt squid is probably a good choice: they’re fairly gregarious and cooperative, unlike the octopus.)

Uplifted species will have the capacity for language, abstract thought, tool use, episodic memory, planning, and self-awareness. Their cognition may in other respects be radically different from our own, especially if they are not mammals.

[tanadrin]

This is wild. You'd think having only 100,000 neurons would be a very hard limit on intelligence! It would be hard to make a quantitative comparison, but it would be interesting to attempt to qualitatively compare different animals that are relatively smart for their brain size--maybe they make use of more efficient neural architecture. Maybe they just brute force problems by taking a long time to think through them. Probably these would be too small to uplift, but it would be a cool experiment to see if you could breed mega-smart Portia and what constraints on, like, minimum body size that imposed.

[tanadrin]

Taxonomists, get your shit together.

[tanadrin]

@yavieriel

Eh, this is where as a somewhat monogamous person I'm going to have to disagree. If I consent to a monogamous relationship, then changing the terms of the relationship to non-monogamy is grounds for me to revoke consent. (Honestly to me non-monogamy sounds exhausting, one sexual relationship is more than enough for me.)

as mentalwires pointed out, though, this isn't about declaring the relationship open, it's about saying, "hey, would you be interested in an open relationship?" Which in Redditland is apparently a question someone only asks if they're already a dirty filthy sociopathic cheater who's secretly plotting to emotionally castrate their partner

and while i'm sympathetic to the "one relationship is enough work already" take, there seem to be a lot of monogamous people who think that they need to constantly police their one relationship for evidence of a thing they should just assume to be true (your partner finds other people hot sometimes) or who draw conclusions from the general concept of monogamy i think are entirely unwarranted (your partner occasionally wanting to fuck other people means they never loved you, in fact they hate you, don't respect you, and want to emotionally castrate you).

i realize i'm being a little unfair here--the venn diagram of monogamous people and people who are super fucking anxious about monogamy is not a circle--but enough people are super weird about monogamy that i can't help but think a big chunk of the population would be better served by not holding up sexual exclusivity as the end-all and be-all of romantic relationships.

One of the wildest ideas that bounces around the Reddit relationship advice echo chamber is the idea that merely asking your partner if they would go for an open relationship is perfectly reasonable grounds for divorce.

[tanadrin]

One of the wildest ideas that bounces around the Reddit relationship advice echo chamber is the idea that merely asking your partner if they would go for an open relationship is perfectly reasonable grounds for divorce.

#monogamous people sound fucking exhausting tbh

[tanadrin]

@bluecarnations

we’re pretty reliant on prison labor, but in the sense that prisoners are the custodians at most of our govt buildings. 25% of our economy would be like, the entirety of our manufacturing industry

according to this article, 80% of US prison labor is in service of prison maintenance, like cleaning and repair work. even if you replaced all prisoner-janitors with overpaid private contractors, the increase in public expenditure would be extremely modest. around $220 million per state--which for Louisiana (for example) would be one-half of one percent of the annual state budget.

on that basis I strongly dispute the notion that anywhere is in any sense "reliant" on prison labor. there just aren't enough prisoners to contribute a significant amount to either the economy or public budgets through prison labor!

Saw someone claim in a comments section that something like 25% of Louisiana’s GDP comes from prison labor. Which would be insane if it was true. They must be running the most technologically advanced prisons in the country. They’re using prison labor to build microchips or some shit while everybody else is still using it to make license plates.

[tanadrin]

That would be my intuition, yeah--certainly I think the prey species would wipe out the predator species if they could, and the predator species might wipe out the prey species simply by accidental overhunting (cf. humans and most Pleistocene megafauna). Then again, the megafauna we evolved alongside in Africa have always been a bit better at avoiding us--so maybe if the two clades were in close proximity long enough, they could coexist for a while. Until one got really good at tool use, anyway.

Peter Watts has a solution to this that I think is rather elegant: his version of vampires are predators on humans, so they have to be much smarter than humans, but they're also solitary (and so have a much lower population, so they're unlikely to hunt humans to extinction). But their low population left them vulnerable, and they were ultimately wiped out due to a combination of cooperative human hunting and a genetic anomaly.

Do you think it's possible there's a planet with multiple stable sentient species who interact? Or would such a situation inevitably end up with one getting wiped out or the two hybridizing

Well, they could only hybridize if they were closely related, like humans and Neanderthals. And IIRC there's some evidence that humans and Neanderthals/Denisovans probably weren't all that interfertile to begin with, with most coding Neanderthal alleles getting weeded out of our genome.

I think it would be very difficult for two sentient species that shared overlapping niches to survive. H. sapiens and Neanderthals were both smart, seem to have both had language and culture, and had similar levels of technological sophistication, but the latter had a much lower population and so couldn't really compete when their cousins invaded their territory. And maybe some of this is a function of the wider human clade's tendency to engage in warfare and ecologically disruptive hunting--there's a big wave of megafauna extinction that seems to have followed the expansion of human populations all over the globe--but I'm not sure how many species of big-brained tool-users any niche could support.

But I do think that species with very different niches could coexist peacefully, at least long enough to work out that species in other niches were sentient, and to develop the ethical frameworks necessary for coexistence. If there were superintelligent squid, they wouldn't ever compete directly with humans for habitat (though we might have eaten a fair few by accident). We have also managed (just!) not to render extinct cetaceans, which are fairly intelligent, or our close cousins the chimpanzee. I could also imagine a science fictional scenario where two intelligent species were in some kind of important symbiotic or commensalist relationship that would stabilize their coexistence.

I think the other tricky thing though would be timing. It took a long time for the genus Homo to develop intelligence. AFAICT the australopithecines were closer to chimpanzees in terms of intelligence than they were to us; H. erectus was a lot smarter, but probably didn't have language; it's not until 700,000 to 200,000 years ago you get human species that are more fully developed in terms of their intelligence, and that feels like a super narrow window in terms of evolution for another intelligence species to also emerge. Because once you do get intelligent tool-users who spread over most of the globe, they seem likely to me to start to modify their environment in profound ways, like we have. So if another intelligent species doesn't already exist, the circumstances in which it is likely to arise after one species comes to prominence are going to be very different--more of an uplift scenario, maybe. Like I think if we discovered a group of chimpanzees with rudimentary language tomorrow, we would do our best not to fuck with them, but we would inevitably have some kind of impact on their existence for better or worse, right?

Maybe your best bet for multiple sentient species would be to have a reason that the first species (singular or plural) that arose didn't come to dominate the entire planet--they were aquatic, and so never mastered fire; or they were otherwise highly restricted in the biomes they could inhabit; or they were small in number like the Neanderthals, but could retreat to refugia in mountains and forests rather than be wiped out; or they were a diverse clade like early humans, but they also spread out very rapidly, and were subsequently isolated by climate conditions. Like, imagine Denisovans (who were already in Asia) had crossed the Bering Strait land bridge to the Americas, and then sea levels rose cutting them off until the Age of Discovery. If you had a planet that didn't effectively have a two supercontinents like Earth, you might have many more opportunities for related-but-geographically-divided species to develop (though that doesn't avoid the problem of what happens when they meet each other and start competing then).

[tanadrin]

Do you think it's possible there's a planet with multiple stable sentient species who interact? Or would such a situation inevitably end up with one getting wiped out or the two hybridizing

Well, they could only hybridize if they were closely related, like humans and Neanderthals. And IIRC there's some evidence that humans and Neanderthals/Denisovans probably weren't all that interfertile to begin with, with most coding Neanderthal alleles getting weeded out of our genome.

I think it would be very difficult for two sentient species that shared overlapping niches to survive. H. sapiens and Neanderthals were both smart, seem to have both had language and culture, and had similar levels of technological sophistication, but the latter had a much lower population and so couldn't really compete when their cousins invaded their territory. And maybe some of this is a function of the wider human clade's tendency to engage in warfare and ecologically disruptive hunting--there's a big wave of megafauna extinction that seems to have followed the expansion of human populations all over the globe--but I'm not sure how many species of big-brained tool-users any niche could support.

But I do think that species with very different niches could coexist peacefully, at least long enough to work out that species in other niches were sentient, and to develop the ethical frameworks necessary for coexistence. If there were superintelligent squid, they wouldn't ever compete directly with humans for habitat (though we might have eaten a fair few by accident). We have also managed (just!) not to render extinct cetaceans, which are fairly intelligent, or our close cousins the chimpanzee. I could also imagine a science fictional scenario where two intelligent species were in some kind of important symbiotic or commensalist relationship that would stabilize their coexistence.

I think the other tricky thing though would be timing. It took a long time for the genus Homo to develop intelligence. AFAICT the australopithecines were closer to chimpanzees in terms of intelligence than they were to us; H. erectus was a lot smarter, but probably didn't have language; it's not until 700,000 to 200,000 years ago you get human species that are more fully developed in terms of their intelligence, and that feels like a super narrow window in terms of evolution for another intelligence species to also emerge. Because once you do get intelligent tool-users who spread over most of the globe, they seem likely to me to start to modify their environment in profound ways, like we have. So if another intelligent species doesn't already exist, the circumstances in which it is likely to arise after one species comes to prominence are going to be very different--more of an uplift scenario, maybe. Like I think if we discovered a group of chimpanzees with rudimentary language tomorrow, we would do our best not to fuck with them, but we would inevitably have some kind of impact on their existence for better or worse, right?

Maybe your best bet for multiple sentient species would be to have a reason that the first species (singular or plural) that arose didn't come to dominate the entire planet--they were aquatic, and so never mastered fire; or they were otherwise highly restricted in the biomes they could inhabit; or they were small in number like the Neanderthals, but could retreat to refugia in mountains and forests rather than be wiped out; or they were a diverse clade like early humans, but they also spread out very rapidly, and were subsequently isolated by climate conditions. Like, imagine Denisovans (who were already in Asia) had crossed the Bering Strait land bridge to the Americas, and then sea levels rose cutting them off until the Age of Discovery. If you had a planet that didn't effectively have a two supercontinents like Earth, you might have many more opportunities for related-but-geographically-divided species to develop (though that doesn't avoid the problem of what happens when they meet each other and start competing then).

[tanadrin]

Bums me out sometimes that there are no known sentient species on Earth besides humans. Would be cool as hell to have like. Squid friends we could trade with.

[tanadrin]

Apparently Ernst Haeckel’s original name for the Neanderthals was H. stupidus. Did he stub his toe on a Neanderthal bone or something? Seems unnecessarily harsh!

[tanadrin]

This assumes linguistic monogenesis, which is contentious to say the least! There may not be a “proto-World” ancestral to all living languages. Unfortunately we don’t have a very good idea of how language emerged in the first place (and we know of at least one language which emerged without any relatives in modern times, Nicaraguan Sign Language).

There’s a reason “proto-World” and “the first human language” both didn’t make it into the poll—I wanted languages we can fairly confidently conjecture existed, and “proto-World” may not have existed at all. (“The first human language” OTOH is just too ill-defined a concept, pending a better understanding of language’s origins.)

The Yana Culture was ancestral to the population from which both early Paleo-Indians and the Ancient North Siberians arose.

By “the builders of Stonehenge,” I mean the earliest builders, ca. 3100 BCE.

Note that the last language spoken by a Denisovan/Neanderthal or by a community of Denisovans/Neanderthals may not necessarily be a Denisovan/Neanderthal language—it may be a language of anatomically modern humans they adopted. (It will at any rate be about 40-50,000 years old).