Human Evolution; Is the Hobbit's brain unfeasibly small?

ScienceDaily ^ | 1/28/2010 | EnderWiggins

[EnderWiggins]

Homo floresiensis, a pygmy-sized small-brained hominin popularly known as 'the Hobbit' was discovered five years ago, but controversy continues over whether the small brain is actually due to a pathological condition. How can its tiny brain size be explained?

The commonly held assumption that as primates evolved, their brains always tended to get bigger has been challenged by a team of scientists at Cambridge and Durham. Their work helps solve the mystery of whether Homo floresiensis -- dubbed the Hobbit due to its diminutive stature -- was a separate human species or a diseased individual.

The team combined previously published datasets of brain and body mass with measurements from fossil remains. They then used three different mathematical methods to reconstruct patterns of brain evolution across the primate family tree from these 37 existing and 23 extinct primate species.

The results show that while brains evolved to be larger in both relative and absolute terms along most branches of the primate family tree, the opposite happened along several lineages. For example brain size shrank during the evolution of Mouse Lemurs, Marmosets and Mangabeys.

[EnderWiggins]

The interesting point this article makes is that evolution is not directional, i.e. it is not a constant progression from simple to advanced. In fact, it is non-directional except in the direction of fitness... a criterion that changes as the environment changes.

Sometimes brains get bigger. Sometimes they get smaller. And sometimes, they stay the same.

[Tijeras_Slim]

Ask Tiger Woods and John Edwards... they did most of their thinking with smaller heads than that.

[FastCoyote]

[Sometimes brains get bigger. Sometimes they get smaller. And sometimes, they stay the same]

You certainly went out on a with that prediction. :)

[FastCoyote]

out on a limb, sigh

[Tijeras_Slim]

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, sometimes it rains.

Think about that for a while.

[GeronL]

I thought this hobbit thing had been debunked years ago. I guess its like AGW in that people love pop-science

[Above My Pay Grade]

Or: “Evidence that Hobbits were Liberals?”

[Cold Heart]

I think you missed a debunk of the debunk. I clicked on this thread just trying to keep up with which debunk we’re on:)

[BigEdLB]

The Master Hobbit, Frodo Baggins...



May the hair on his feet never fall out!

[Inyo-Mono]

Interesting article, thanks for posting.

[Grut]

The Master Hobbit, Frodo Baggins...

I kept looking at the movie and thinking "Damn, he looks like Bjork...!"

[EnderWiggins]

"I thought this hobbit thing had been debunked years ago. I guess its like AGW in that people love pop-science"

You were misinformed.

:D

[EnderWiggins]

"You certainly went out on a with that prediction. :)

lol... oh much further than merely out on a (limb).

It's actually a very, very important point if one really wants to understand evolution, or respond to some of the classic Creationist canards like, "why are there still apes?"

The caricature of evolution is that it is some sort of inexorable unrolling from simple to complex, when in fact the overwhelming evidence is that it is non directional. Sometimes it goes from simple to complex. Sometimes from complex to simple. Most of the time it just goes sideways.

For example, bacteria rule the planet. They have always ruled the planet. They probably will always rule the planet. We glibly talk about "The age of reptiles," or "The age of mammals."

In point of fact, it has always been "The age of bacteria."

;)

[count-your-change]

Yep, just like global warming. If it gets colder, that proof of global warming, if it gets warmer, that proof of global warming, if temperatures neither rise nor fall, case closed for proof of AWG,, climate change, global warming, the consensus is in..everything is proof.

Yep, big brain, little brain, no change, all change, all proof of evolution.

Outstanding.

[ExGeeEye]

dibs on de top bunk

[EnderWiggins]

Lol... what an odd response. Who even raised any of this as "proof" of anything? I understand that not all of us have time to actually read and understand the posts we respond to, but sometimes it actually helps to make time.

If I wanted to talk about "proof" I'd be chatting up endogenous retroviruses, or the demonstrated increase in genetic information created by gene duplication, or ring species. But that was not the purpose of this post.

The purpose was to debunk a common false caricature of evolution as a progressive process that inexorably proceeds from simple to complex. It's not.

The change in brain size either way is evolution. And changes in brains even without changes in their size are evolution. The evolutionary difference between a horse and a zebra (which many creationists accept as having occurred) is far greater than the evolutionary difference between humans and chimpanzees.

Evolution does not take place according to some creationist caricature. It instead proceeds according to invariant natural law.

[SunkenCiv]

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[ApplegateRanch]

Is it bigger than a weasel’s brain?

Then it’s not unfeasibly small for a Democrat; kind of iffy for a Libertarian or many “Establishment” Republicans; definetly unfeasibly small for a Conservative.

That ugly enough? LOL!

[SunkenCiv]

;’)

[wendy1946]

The problem is with the basic laws of mathematics and probability, with which evolution is essentially incompatible. A reasonable person could entertain a theory which required one or possibly even two probabilistic miracles in the history of the universe, or possibly even in the history of our own planet.

But evolution(ism) requires infinite series of probabilistic miracles and zero-probability events. That basically stands everything we know about modern mathematics and probability theory on its head.