Philip Hart wondered aloud to the group:
>Incidentally, I don't want to get into an argument about the Flynn effect,
>but I've read that a result of our recent evolution during civilization is
>a shrinking of the average brain size, perhaps in order to make us less
>agressively "adult" and hence better village- dwellers - i.e., we've
>domesticated ourselves from wolves to golden retrievers.
This is consistent with the general observation that domestication makes a
species less robust--dogs are generally smaller and weaker than wolves,
cows are much smaller and weaker than aurochs, modern humans are smaller
and weaker than pre-neolithic H. sapiens. We tested domestication on
ourselves first before applying it to other species, in the reverse of the
usual order 8)
Regarding our relative "adulthood", I was under the impression that humans
were in general quite neotenous (youth-like) compared to other apes, and
that one likely consequence and/or driving force was that being relatively
younger in physiology gave us more access to physiological characteristics
associated with youth, in particular, rate of brain growth. Being
relatively youth-like may contribute to our having bigger brains. So
smaller brains would, in that sense, imply that the species was being more
"adult", not less.
Of course, I'm mostly parroting old Stephen Jay Gould essays here, so
probably the state of the science is difference.
As for Dragaera, you can tell that Brust is interested in writing fantasy
rather than science fiction, because, even though he's given his world an
inherently science-fictional origin (genetic experimentation by aliens),
he's barely interested in the obvious derivative science-fictional
questions, e.g. rate of Dragaeran reproduction, jhereg society (unlike,
say, Weber's treecats, or the fuzzies of Piper than they derive from), or
the ways the Necromancer thinks as well as or better than a human, but not
like a human (Campbell's formulation of alien intelligence). Instead, that
narrative energy shows up as fantasy elements--swords, sorcery, and the gods.
So we can ask all sorts of intelligent questions using science to probe the
nature of Dragaera, and the answers won't be forthcoming, or, at least,
won't particularly matter 8)
--
"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties."
--James Madison
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