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How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

bbc.com

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Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#91

Post by dghughes »

david-given wrote: post #82
sqeaky wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good word for something that encompasses all things creepy, crawly and tiny without involving scientific classification is "bug". Most english would agree that most spiders, ants, bees, centipedes and other like it are all bugs. This breaks down in Australia where the spiders are as big as your head or in Puerto Rico where the foot long centipedes eat bats. Those aren't bugs, those are nightmare fuel.

'Bug' in that context is mostly American dialect. I'm British, and 'bug' in that context is infantile; by adults, it's either a verb or a small device planted by MI5. But the OP is right, of course. Spiders are not insects. Although I suspect that most people I'd talk to in the UK would call them such. I'll have to hand in my Pedant's Society card (which is actually made out of plastic)...

Then again the little grey oval Pill bug is a crustacean not an insect and not an arachnid.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#92

Post by andrewflnr »

mrybczyn wrote: post #81
joshmarlow wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep! Watts' novels are how I first heard about Portia. I can't wait for the third in the trilogy. In general, I love a good novel with a bibliography.

What, it's a trilogy? Has Watts confirmed a third novel? Last I saw, was what looked like a video game based on Blindsight.

What, there's a video game?

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#93

Post by pcrh »

Xophmeister wrote: post #28
pizza wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe something along the lines of "our brains would overheat" - there's a small temperature window in which proteins won't denature, it takes k T log 2 joules to erase one bit of information (Landauer's principle), and our brain uses around 20 Watts of power. Maybe tin foil hats make good heatsinks.. Interestingly enough there is some evidence that the Gibbs free energy of ketone metabolism is more thermodynamically…

Doesn't that imply that people who live in hotter climates have...how can I put this politely?...a disadvantage when it comes to the stability of their brains? I would assume that the brain has a certain amount of redundancy, but has this ever been researched: How hot can it get before people start getting noticeably "stupider"?

There's no association of human body temperature with latitude.

So endogenous human thermal regulation is efficient enough to deal with the normal range of terrestrial environments inhabited by humans. And when it can't (if you're naked in the arctic, for example), you die.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#94

Post by drcross »

BurningFrog wrote: post #87
jly wrote: post #49

Eusocial insects like honeybees, some wasps, and ants take this even one step further by combining the extraordinary but limited powers of one individual insect to make highly-complex decisions with the coordinated input from thousands or millions of individuals. It's often stated that after humans, these eusocial insects are the most advanced life form on earth. After studying, for example, the fascinating voting pr…

Bees, ants, and (I think) other hive living insects share ~75% of their DNA with their hive mates. This makes it reasonable to think of the hive as one individual! Just like we are made of individual cells and organs, an ant hill is made up of individual ants. That the parts can move separately is a fairly superficial difference.

I think you mean 100% because ants are clones. The only difference between them and the queen is the nurturing process they go through which influences epigenetics.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#95

Post by NotThe1Pct »

I cant recall the video (NGeo or BBC) but there was a study they compared brain size in primates with many other variables and the only variable with significant statistical correlation was group size.

The big takeaway was that social skills take so much brain power that only big brains can form societies.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#96

Post by sctb »

acqq wrote: post #78
pavel_lishin wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are very smart.

You too, Pavel, my dear, thanks for identifying yourself. I know you say it only because it's true. I'm very impressed how you masterfully contributed to the discussion.

Please don't be so thorny when other users are clearly participating with such earnest curiosity. This is exactly the attitude that Hacker News flourishes under and it's important not to squash it with such dogged ellipsis litigation.

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#97

Post by hexagonc »

richardboegli wrote: post #53

Slightly off-topic but related. BEAM robots created by Mark Tilden who later founded WowWee might be of interest to readers. From Wikipedia[0]: BEAM robotics (from Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics and Mechanics) is a style of robotics that primarily uses simple analogue circuits, such as comparators, instead of a microprocessor in order to produce an unusually simple design. .... BEAM robots may use a set of the anal…

I would also suggest anyone that is interested in BEAM robotics to take a look at Braitenberg Vehicles[1]. These are simple reflex-based robots that can exhibit complex behaviors due to their interaction with their environment. Originally, they were thought experiments by the psychologist Valentino Braitenberg who showed in his book, Vehicles[2], how one might ascribe complex emotional and mental states to a simple automaton if one only observed its external behavior. For a fascinating earlier example of analog robotics, (and the first example of true autonomous robotics to my knowledge) one has the work of Grey Walter and his "tortoise" robots[3].

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

[2] https://books.google.com/books?id=7KkUAT_q_sQC (there appears to be excerpts available for free as pdfs)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Grey_Walter

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#98

Post by pacaro »

dghughes wrote: post #91
david-given wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Bug' in that context is mostly American dialect. I'm British, and 'bug' in that context is infantile; by adults, it's either a verb or a small device planted by MI5. But the OP is right, of course. Spiders are not insects. Although I suspect that most people I'd talk to in the UK would call them such. I'll have to hand in my Pedant's Society card (which is actually made out of plastic)...

Then again the little grey oval Pill bug is a crustacean not an insect and not an arachnid.

And also another source of British vs. American dialect difference/confusion. In my experience, they're known in the U.K. as "woodlice", but in the US it's entirely reasonable for grown adults to refer to them as "roly-polys"

The American use of "critter" also bemuses

Re: How insects like bumblebees do so much with tiny brains

#100

Post by hexagonc »

Read Complex Worlds from Simpler Nervous Systems[1] if you want more information on how very complex behavior can emerge from jumping spiders and bees. After reading that book, it seemed to me that AI researchers should focus much more time on duplicating the feats of these simpler animals (in similarly computationally limited contexts) rather than focusing on duplicating extremely high level human faculties like reasoning and even playing Go. I mean, imagine a robot with the intelligence of a parrot or the smartest birds in the corvidae family[2]. I think people would probably be afraid of autonomous robots of this level of intelligence.

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/complex-worlds-simpler-nervou...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Caledonian_crow

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