A Hammer. Imagine yourself floating around in a spaceship, at zero gravity. You are holding a hammer, and when you let it go it floats around, same as you. Things have no weight in space. Now take this hammer and knock yourself on the thumb. Do you think it can hurt your thumb? After all the hammer has zero weight on space.

THE ART OF WAR. BY Sun Tzu. First issue 700 Before Christ.

Are we the most intelligent species?

Most people regard our human race as the crown of evolution or creation. Einstein used to say: What makes you think, your assumptions are true? We like to derive this from our brain size. If we would derive this from social behaviour, definitely many animal speices have to be called higher developped. Still when looking at brain size, there are some rare cases of brains that were removed from dead bodies of known to be highly intelligent people. Generally their brains were not larger size at all. Some had a larger brain than avarage, and some other a smaller brain just as well and yet known to be extremely clever and very high ranked in society. So the answer is the quality, not the volume. Like only the side lobes of Einstein's brain were found to be 15% above average size, and only those parts. In fact his social IQ was very low. If we go that way, we have to look at a fact, the Neanderthal had a larger brain volume all together as homo sapiens, and more windings too. So not some specific parts were larger, but the whole brain was a stunning 20% larger as a total. Imagine what Einstein was capable of, while his brain was rather normal size, apart from two labes which itself were 15% larger. The Neandertal complete brain was 20% larger than ours.

Only skull bones were found, and some very small residue of tissue. From the brain we do have something remarkable. A brain leaves an imprint in the skull, and the windings can be observed even! So a model of the Neanderthal brain can be made. Some non believers are looking for a way out of this problem, by asking for proof. Besides, how could they have gone extinct if they were so intelligent? I think the general opinion of Neanderthal making raw sounds, and fighting like monkeys over a piece of food, does not fit to their highly developed brain. Also this does not fit to the fact, they survived five (!) glacial periods. Surviving extreme conditions require not just muscles. It requires most of all: brains.

So what was the IQ of a Neanderthal compared to ours? Of course we don't know this. Saying this, we must count with both options. Their IQ may have been lower, or higher. Apart from IQ, two major elements separate humans from animals. These are: Humans can speak, and humans can lie. Some animals can hide objects, or show wrong intentions, but that's about where their lying ability stops.

For human speech, a tongue bone is needed, which is something no animal has. The control functions of the tongue are so extremely complex, that the human tongue has an extra thick tongue nerve. This nerve has to pass through the skull bone, somewhere on it's way from the brain to the tongue. This position is the same for any mammal. With monkeys and any other non-speaking creature, this nerve is thin. It controls only the tongue for eating and drinking. There is no other function. The nerve is thin, and so is the hole in the jaw bone where it passes through. Just with humans, this hole is exceptionally wide, allowing the thick tongue nerve to pass. (also named speech nerve.)

But.... is this only so with humans? It depends what you define as a human. With Neanderthals, this speech nerve has the same diameter as with us. Same position, same everything. Recently two samples of Neanderthal tongue bones were found, and together with the large tongue nerve diameter, this proves they could speak same as us. So they did not shout "hu hu hu" as in the movies. But they had the ability to speak just like us.

So the brain volume of Neanderthals was 20% larger than ours. How come they got extinct if they had more brain was better developed than ours? The answer is as simple as can be. You may as well say, brain size is reverse to the mulitplication rate of a species. This hard fact this can be observed throughout nature everywhere. So when Homo Sapiens arrived on the scene, 50.000 years ago, Neandertal had no chance against them, because with the lower brain size, Homo Sapiens would multiply faster.

Even today, it can be observed that a higher IQ leads not to having more children. I mean if this was so, every race, or group of people would gain intelligence continuously, and this seems not the case. To the contrary, a stunning relation exists, the lower development a culture has, and the lower the intelligence a group has, the more children they produce, and the lower their life expectancy is. People with high IQ tend to get older.

I think it has to be like this. So get as many children as possible, by using whatever body parts that serves this function best, is a proven strategy for all that lives. I do not think this body part is the brain. At least not today. It may have been 100.000 years ago.

There is a strong contradiction too. It is widely agreed upon, that a small brain is not desirable. Even less IQ people say so. It needs really a very low IQ, before somebody says, IQ is totally unimportant. Yet, the contradiction is, women feel more attracted by curly hair, than by IQ. And men do not behave any different.

So what was the advantage of the Neanderthal brain, being 20% larger than ours? We do not know much, but we do know, from the brain imprint, the had a night vision center in their brain. Which modern humans do not have. Also our ape ancestors did not have that, so you can call it a further development. A night vision center is useful for hunting. The normal vision center is located in the back of your head, with all mammals, so any night vision center must have been there as well. With Neanderthal, that part was much larger, the skull was much extended to the back. So that observation makes a lot of sense. Yet that uses only a fraction of that extra 20%, and we have no clue what the additional or higher developed functions may have been. It is a fact, they had this 20 % extra brain, and sure is that must have had some function, because the brain is our largest consumer of energy, and food was hard to get by during glacial periods. .

So this thinking, we are the highest form of life? I would say yes, today. But 50.000 years ago, there was a higher form of life walking around.

Here is another valid observation. History of species shows this clearly: The lower intelligence, the longer a species survived throughout history. Yet, if a new race came, it always had more brain mass than the previous. As we have LESS brain mass than Neanderthal, this seems to indicate they are not our ancestors but a higher developed side line. So the previous species gets extinct, but newer species even sooner will be extinct when they have higher brain mass. So intelligence and complexity seem to be nice for the moment, but on a very long time scale, intelligence was always reason for extinction. This is a remarkable DNA mechanism, which in the end can only lead to higher intelligence. Such animals, that do not have this "long term improvement" mechanism in their DNA, they just existed ever since, and do not improve their brains. So as long as they have other virtues, they will continue to live as they are. We call them living fossils. This has been an iron rule ever since life appeared. So it is unlikely this rule changed recently just for our sake. What we do know for sure, the Neanderthal (Homo Neanderthalis) survived a total of five glacial periods, which is a highly remarkable achievement. The changes from a non-glacial period to a glacial period was always the end of many species, but not so for Neanderthal Whereas we (Homo Sapiens) have yet to prove we can survive only one glacial period. Is our elegant, skinny body made for that? Would you not rather have the more massive body, and larger brains of a Neanderthal when you need to hunt in the ice, for your bare survival?

Note, glacial periods always used to come and go, and when they come, stay for 50.000 years or so. Now, for modern Humans it means if we are going to be more successful than Neanderthals, we must exist another 360.000 years (we only exist 40.000 years). Nothing may go wrong, or we're gone. During that time we have to survive four or six glacial periods, that come statistically every 50.000 years. (We never had one yet). We live now in 2013. So 360.000 years later, in the year 362013 after Christ, if we still exist, we can say we existed the same amount of time. Folks, that's a very long time to go, and many things can happen. Sure is, the last record in surviving tough times is held by the Neanderthal and honestly, I think it will never be broken. It is a matter of time until the world climate cools down again 30 degrees, and the earth is covered under a 50 meter thick layer of ice for the next 50.000 years. This is not bad dream. This is a 100% reliable prediction. Will we survive that? What we do know, the Neanderthal was capable of surviving that SIX times, and they had no teeth like a crocodile or a skin like an elephant. They were about the same weight as we are, a bit more more mass in the upper part of the body, and they were a bit shorter. Just normal differences as you can see between a big or a small person today on a street. They must have survived the glacial periods with "brains", and not with brute force. Source: Jac

What is a coincidence?

Our planet Earth's lifetime is approximately at half now. So the first half is used up, and another half is yet to come. So time was not endlessly available in the past, and will not be in the future either. Based on this, mathematics say, if something has chance lower t han 1:10^50 it will not happen at all. (So a one with 50 zeroes). Also this number of 1: 10^50 means following: The chance our DNA material was formed by coincidence, is zero, since the complexity of DNA exceeds this number by far.

Someone described it to me once like this: Suppose you take apart a house, and put each stone and little piece into an airplane, and fly over the place where the house used to be. Then you throw out the first brick, and by coincidence if falls on the ground in the right position. Sure, this can happen. A brick has only 6 sides, and if it doesn't break you have a chance of 1:6. That's quite an acceptable chance. Now you throw out the second brick. You aim it as good as you can, and with some coincidence, it falls exactly on the right position too, just beneath the first brick. Can this happen? Well chances are extremely low, like a one in a billions. But yes it is possible, and we sure do not have 1: 10^50 here. So let's just say yes, it's an extreme coincidence, but indeed there is a certain chance, and we do not spoil this story. Now we throw the third brick. And another one, and this takes too long. So we throw the whole stuff out of the airplane, all bricks and parts, and windows panes, the light switches of the house, the bath, the kitchen, and the whole mess gets dumped out of the airplane at once. Now it falls on the ground and by coincidence, all on the right position, and you have the house again, the way it was. This is very unlike of course, but we want to talk about an extreme coincidence. When talking about coincidence, how big is this chance? I think you will agree this is NOT possible at all, also not if you repeat it for as long as Earth will exist. Everybody will agree with that.

Still some people have no other explanation, our DNA was formed by coincidence. Now if I compare the building plan of my house with the building plan of DNA molecule, it looks like this: The building plan of my house is printed on 12 sheets of paper, and a tiny little book about what the rooms are for, and colored pictures how it could look when it's all decorated. For printing the DNA code of a human body cell, in small printing, you would need a five meter long row of books. Its called the human genome. Then in those books is only a bulk of code, not the explanation how it works and what it can do. So together with the five row of books with code, it would need a 200 meter long row of books along with it, describing how the human body works in complete detail. Even so, we could only write in there what we know, and the part we don't know is probably the greater even. So reserve a few hundred meter empty books, for missing information.

For me it is accepted if someone says he cannot explain where DNA code comes from, but I think it is invalid to say it was formed by coincidence. You need to look at the complexity of those molecules, look at the mathematical situation, and calculate the chance that all this was formed by coincidence. Like you cut out all letters of a five meter long row of books, you throw out all those millions of letters from an airplane, and when it falls on the ground, all letters fall in the same position as they were. Now THAT is what it needs for such a coincidence.

Then you will soon see that 1:10^50 is not enough. And you see, even when 1:10^50 was enough of a coincidence, what rests you then, is the logical conclusion, the chance it was NOT a coincidence is calculated as: 1-(1:10^50). That can be written as 99,99999.... percent. You need to write 50x a nine.