To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 8:18 UTC (Mon) by forthy (guest, #1525)
In reply to: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet) by MisterIO
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

This "body size proportion" is the most stupid idea I've ever heard. Let's just take this absurd theory into analogy with robots: Take robot A, which is a huge caterpillar robot (weights 80 tons) and a 5kg brain (cooling and hard disk all included). It's supposed to be idiot-level, since the brain takes such a small fraction of the body weight. Now we use the same robot brain inside a small soccer robot (10kg total), so that robot would be highly intelligent, since half of its weight is brain.

Come on, nobody would argue like that. It's exactly the same brain. There's no relationship whatsoever between how a brain works and the body size. The only thing there is is that smaller bodies have an evolutionary pressure to utilize their brain better, because they simply can't afford more brain. It's unlikely that during human evolution, no attempt to make the brain more efficient had happend.

Anyway, if efficiency is the only point, there's probably little difference between the male and the female brain. The only think we know for sure is that there's different specialization. A significant amount of the 100g more weight of the male brain is used to think about sex. That's one of the reasons why standard IQ tests don't detect a difference - sexual "intelligence" isn't tested ;-). The other reason is that the tests are carefully calibrated to average to 100 for both males and females.

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To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 9:12 UTC (Mon) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (2 responses)

I think the argument is a bit more involved. For instance, consider skin surface. All those neurons firing from your skin so that you can sense from the full area of the body will require some brain volume to handle, probably proportional to the skin area, but the relationship could be different, who knows.

As to why brain size is often compared to body *volume*, I got no idea. Large parts of the body seem to work autonomously, so it would seem nonsensical to do so indeed. I completely believe, however, that a larger body uses more brain power merely to keep track of what is happening in, on and around it. It's the details, as usual, that are difficult.

The argument doesn't seem to be without merit, the specific equation of brain mass divided by body volume is bad.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 11:32 UTC (Mon) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] (1 responses)

The "skin size" has nothing to do with the number of neurons there. If you draw a human and reshape it so that the sensitivity neurons have the same area density, you'll see something with large hands and testicles, and almost no back at all. The number of neurons per area depend on how important that part of the body is for sensing things, not how big you are. There are a number of things which compensate each other. E.g. a small animal can react quickly and move its legs fast. It needs short neural connections for that, and due to the low dead time of its body, it needs to operate fast to balance things out. Large animals however have high dead times and long "wires", so they can't react so fast, and also they don't have to. An elephant moves in slow motion. You don't need a better brain for that - you can run your brain slower. Elephants use their large brains to remember a lot, not to be artistic.

IMHO the point of the brain size/body volume equation was because someone figured out that we don't have the largest brain on the planet, but think we are the most intelligent life form. So there comes the brain size/body volume equation, which puts us in advantage of elephants, whales, and especially fat Americans (for which then somebody invented the fat-free encephalization quotient ;-). However, it also puts mice as equal to us, and small birds far ahead.

To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Oct 1, 2007 12:23 UTC (Mon) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link]

Fair enough, you gave my argument a good beating. I have no real comments to reply back to you about that. We both agree that the size of the animal does matter, and that is what I wanted to tease out of you.