Why does brain size not matter when comparing the intelligence of different species while having bigger organs like hearts, lungs, kidneys allows those organs to function better?
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Brain size is important, but it isn’t the deciding factor, instead it is the number of connections within the brain that increase intelligence of course the larger the brain the easier it is to make a great number of connections within it.
Intelligence is more a factor of how the neurons in the brain communicate with each other, so density, distance, connections per neuron etc all play a massive role
It’s like the difference between a modern computer and one of those 1980s IBM mainframes that takes up a small warehouse – the size is not the most important difference
Brains don’t just control intelligence, they control all your organs, bodily functions and nervous system. So larger animals will have larger brains but not necessarily more intelligence.
One way of defining intelligence is the brain to body mass ratio, this assumes some amount of brain controls some amount of the body and any ‘excess brain’ is used for thinking and problem solving.
I’ll stick to lungs, but the concept applies to other organs as well. The primary function of the lungs is to exchange CO2 for O2. This is a physical process, so the more space available, the more exchange that can take place with each breath.
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