Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

I found this out when asking myself the question "are animals fooled by artificial sweeteners". The rabbit hole that that led into is not only do we not know the answer to that question, many animals don't even taste "sweetness" (or if they taste it they don't like it or don't prefer it). Not even all primates, if I recall correctly.

And we've seen drift -- apparently we used to be able to bait cockroaches with sweet bait (through the middle of the century), but they have adapted to it and it no longer works as bait.

Taste and smell are very strange and defy attempts at reductionism; our brains are basically very evolved olfactory organs. Dealing with smells was so hard that brains evolved to deal with the problem, and then it was just evolution asking the question "what else can we do with this giant block of computational power -- what about ... memory? vision? hearing?"

View on HN

> Dealing with smells was so hard that brains evolved to deal with the problem, and then it was just evolution asking the question "what else can we do with this giant block of computational power -- what about ... memory? vision? hearing?"

Hmm, interesting. If I remember correctly, Stephen Jay Gould argued something similar about the human brain, except it wasn't about smell, it was about walking upright. He argued -- or quoted people who argued this -- that it's likely human intelligence arose as a side-effect from the brain structures needed for an upright stance.

Quoting from Wikipedia [1]:

"Gould was a champion of biological constraints, internal limitations upon developmental pathways, as well as other non-selectionist forces in evolution. Rather than direct adaptations, he considered many higher functions of the human brain to be the unintended side consequence of natural selection."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Jay_Gould

> He argued -- or quoted people who argued this -- that it's likely human intelligence arose as a side-effect from the brain structures needed for an upright stance.

As stated this doesn't pass the smell test because a long list of animals are able to "stand" and walk upright (cats, primates, bears, what have you...) if they so chose. Not to mention kangaroos, birds (who are also capable of things like flight with generally much smaller brains), etc.

On top of that we have taught neural nets to control a humanoid body doing plenty of things, even parkour, but we didn't manage to teach them human levels of intelligence yet. Even non-neural-network solutions do pretty well here with just old-school algorithms.

Walking upright really seems like something you don't need "much of a brain" for. You don't even need to teach a monkey to do it.

You raise some good points, for which I don't have the answer. However:

> Walking upright really seems like something you don't need "much of a brain" for. You don't even need to teach a monkey to do it.

You do need much of a brain for it -- not intelligence, but brain; Gould argued that "intelligence" and higher brain functions arose as a side-effect. Keep in mind that AI researchers found out "the easy things are hard and the hard things are easy" (i.e. locomotion and fine-grained motor skills are harder than they seem, while logic games, chess and go are easier than they seem).

From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox):

"Moravec's paradox is the observation by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, high-level reasoning requires very little computation, but low-level sensorimotor skills require enormous computational resources."

> As stated this doesn't pass the smell test because a long list of animals are able to "stand" and walk upright (cats, primates, bears, what have you...)

None of those walk upright as their primary means of locomotion, nor are they capable of walking exactly like humans do.

> Not to mention kangaroos, birds (who are also capable of things like flight with generally much smaller brains), etc.

Good point. I don't have an answer for this. Guess you'll have to read some Stephen Jay Gould. I recommend his writing, which is fascinating :)

I was just trying to make the point that as stated I wouldn't buy it. I'm sure who you paraphrased gave it some more in-depth thought though.

For instance if you were to tell me that walking upright opened up possibilities, such as creating and using advanced tools, which required larger brains, then I'd definitely be on board with that possibility.

I just choose to interpret that sentence literally and narrowly to make a point about it specifically, not about Gould's theory as a whole (which I haven't read).

> For instance if you were to tell me that walking upright opened up possibilities, such as creating and using advanced tools, which required larger brains

I can't quote him exactly because I don't have the book nearby, but Gould argued that higher brain functions (intelligence) were a byproduct of the brain development required for walking upright, no tools or opened possibilities. It's not that walking upright enabled the development of tools and this in turn helped develop intelligence; it's that the brain structure necessary for bipedal walking had the potential to be used for other things, they had "emergent properties". I think he argued the same about the body shape itself, the shape of hips, legs and arms all "enabled" the emergence of human-like intelligence.

Stephen Jay Gould was a pretty well-known scientist (who sadly passed away in 2002) and, regardless of what you think of my possibly misleading summary, I urge to read his books if you have any interest at all in evolutionary science and biology.

>many animals don't even taste "sweetness" (or if they taste it they don't like it or don't prefer it). Not even all primates, if I recall correctly.

The article said cats are the only mammals that can't taste sweet.

A quick search suggests that's not true.

>Our feline friends carry broken versions of the genes that build sugar detectors on the tongue. As such, they’re completely oblivious to the taste of sweet things. So are Asian otters. And spotted hyenas. Sea lions and dolphins too.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2012/03...

Guess we are getting some https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/ in one of the articles. I suspect you are right.

> Dealing with smells was so hard that brains evolved to deal with the problem,

That's fascinating, where can I read about it?

I found this article: https://www.npr.org/2011/05/20/136473969/the-nose-knows

Kind of like the current ML boom. We evolved faster and faster GPUs for gaming and now are trying to use them for other things.

Without the consumer market (read: games), CPUs probably would have evolved slower, too.

I wonder if the cockroach thing is evolution/selection in action... The cockroaches that preferred sweet all fell for the bait got killed. I believe high protein diets cause roaches to make, so those that weren't drawn to sweets lived and were more likely to reproduce. Maybe it's not that they adapted or their tastes changed, just that certain ones survived with given traits.

Yes, it was an evolutionary drift. Cockroaches do not live enough for any other interpretation of the GP's comment to make sense.

Whoa. Smell was more important than sight for brain evolution? Is there somewhere I can read more about this?

There are lots of blind animals that can smell. I don't know of any sighted animals that can't smell.

some humans have a mutation that means they don't smell

There are animals whose signalling mechanisms are very nearly fully scent/chemical based, ants particularly.

Lower order than mammals, admittedly.

Sight is pretty confined dimensionally. R,G,Bx100x100 + focal plane gets you basically all the resolution you need.

We can’t even model smells.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com