Sunday, 9 March 2008

zoology - Is life expectancy linked to intelligence in animals?

This is too long to be a comment. Life expectancy is apparently affected the size of an animal, and this is especially evident in mammals and supported by the heartbeat hypothesis. This hypothesis says that all mammals have a similar number of heartbeats, and that the larger an animal is, the less heart beats it has per minute. Therefore, the larger an animal, the longer it lives. A larger size is also associated with a larger brain (which is associated with higher intelligence, although this is not true in all cases since for example some dinosaurs were very large but had very tiny brains). All I'm saying is that any correlation between intelligence and life expectancy may not necessarily be brought about directly by intelligence, but by the size of the animal. Hope this helps.

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