Brain Size

In response to Patrick (full post here)

Hey, I think it's interesting that you mentioned the sizes of brains as a reason to believe that we are more intelligent than other species. I wasn't aware that people still held that opinion; I thought it died like 40 years ago, still I would not be horribly surprised if I heard some person saying it on the street.

Obviously, as you pointed out, believing that brain size has anything to do with intelligence is largely unfounded. From our studies of animals, the closest science is to this view, is the view, which may actually be truthful, that intelligence is more closely related to the ratio of body-size to brain-size. We can see evidence of this in the animal kingdom, even excluding humans. Many parrots have small brains, while horses have larger brains. Still, the parrot brain is larger compared to the size of the body; the parrot is also more intelligent.

It's also interesting because the majority of the most intelligent animals on the planet are around middle-sized. It seems like, starting from the smallest organisms, increase in size generally coincides with increase of intelligence, but at a certain point of size, the increase of size starts to coincide with decreased intelligence. This is not a rule by any means (as there are many exceptions), but it might be more than coincidence.