I will side with Ganapati on this particular point. We humans are spending much more cognitive capacity, with much more success, on inventing new ways to make ourselves extinct than we do on asteroid defense. And dinosaurs stayed around much longer than us anyway. So the jury is still out on whether intelligence helps a species avoid extinction.
prase’s original argument still stands, though. Having a big brain may or may not give you a survival advantage, but having a big non-working brain is certainly a waste that evolution would have erased in mere tens of generations, so if you have a big brain at all, chances are that it’s working mostly correctly.
ETA: disregard that last paragraph. It’s blatantly wrong. Evolution didn’t erase peacock tails.
The asteroid argument aside it seems to me bordering on obvious that general intelligence is adaptive, even if taken to an extreme it can get a species into trouble. (1) Unless you think general intelligence is only helpful for sexual selection it has to be adaptive or we wouldn’t have it (since it is clearly the product of more than one mutation). (2) Intelligence appears to use a lot of energy such that if it wasn’t beneficial it would be a tremendous waste. (3) There are many obvious causal connections between general intelligence and survival. It enabled us to construct axes, spears harness fire, communicate hunting strategies, pass down hunting and gathering techniques to the next generation, navigate status hierarchies etc. All technologies that have fairly straight forward relations to increased survival.
And the fact that we’re doing more to invent new ways to kill ourselves instead of protect ourselves can be traced pretty directly to collective action problems and a whole slew of evolved features other than intelligence that were once adaptive but have ceased to be—tribalism most obviously.
The fact that only a handful of species have high intelligence suggests that there are very few niches that actually support it. There’s also evidence that human intelligent is due in a large part to runaway sexual selection (like a peacock’s tail). See Norretranders’s “The Generous Man”″ for example. A number of biologists such as Dawkins take this hypothesis very seriously.
There’s also evidence that human intelligent is due in a large part to runaway sexual selection (like a peacock’s tail).
Thats an explanation that explains the increase in intelligence from apes to humans and my comment was a lot about that but the original disputed claim was
Simple Darwinian survival ensures that any conscious species that has been around for hundreds of thousands of years must have at least some capacity for correct cognition, however that is achieved.
And there are less complex adaptive behaviors that require correct cognition: identifying prey, identifying predators, identifying food, identifying cliffs, path-finding etc. I guess there is an argument to be had about what a ‘conscious species’ but that doesn’t seem to be worthwhile. Also, there is a subtle difference between what human intelligence is due to and what the survival benefits of it are. It may have taken sexual selection to jump start it but our intelligence has made us far less vulnerable than we once were (with the exception of the problems we created for ourselves). Humans are rarely eaten by giant cats, for one thing.
The fact that only a handful of species have high intelligence suggests that there are very few niches that actually support it.
No species have as high intelligence as humans but lots of species of high intelligence relative to, say, clams. --- Okay, that’s a little facetious but tool use has arisen independently throughout the animal again and again, not to mention the less complex behaviors mentioned above.
Are people really disputing whether or not accurate beliefs about the world are adaptive? Or that intelligence increases the likelihood of having accurate beliefs about the world?
Are people really disputing whether or not accurate beliefs about the world are adaptive? Or that intelligence increases the likelihood of having accurate beliefs about the world?
Well, having more accurate beliefs only matters if you are an entity intelligence enough to general act on those beliefs. To make an extreme case, consider the hypothetical of say an African Grey Parrot able to do calculus problems. Is that going to actually help it? I would suspect generally not. Or consider a member of a species that gains the accurate belief that it can sexually self-stimulate and then engages in that rather than mating. Here we have what is non-adaptive trait (masturbation is a very complicated trait and so isn’t non-adaptive in all cases but one can easily see situations where it seems to be). Or consider a pair of married humans Alice and Bob who have kids that Bob believes are his. Then Bob finds out that his wife had an affair with Bob’s brother Charlie and the kids are all really Charlie’s. If Bob responds by cutting off support for the kids this is likely non-adaptive. Indeed, one can take it a step further and suppose that Bob and Charlie are identical twins. So that Bob’s actions are completely anti-adaptive.
Your second point seems more reasonable. However, I’d suggest that intelligence increases the total number of beliefs one has about the world but that it may not increase the likelyhood of beliefs being accurate. Even if it does, the number of incorrect beliefs is likely to increase as well. It isn’t clear that the average ratio of correct beliefs to total beliefs is actually increasing (I’m being deliberately vague here in that it would likely be very difficult to measure how many beliefs one has without a lot more thought). A common ape may have no incorrect beliefs even as the common human has many incorrect beliefs. So it isn’t clear that intelligence leads to more accurate beliefs.
Edit: I agree that overall intelligence has been a helpful trait for human survival over the long haul.
Are people really disputing whether or not accurate beliefs about the world are adaptive?
That seems a likely area of dispute. Having accurate beliefs seems, ceteris paribus, to be better for you than inaccurate beliefs (though I can make up as many counterexamples as you’d like). But that still leaves open the question of whether it’s better than no beliefs at all.
Mammals are a clade while reptiles are paraphyletic. Well, dinosaurs are too when birds are excluded, but I would gladly leave the birds in. In any case, dinosaurs win over mammals, so it wasn’t probably a good nitpick after all.
No dinosaur species did live along with humans, so direct competition didn’t take place.
I will side with Ganapati on this particular point. We humans are spending much more cognitive capacity, with much more success, on inventing new ways to make ourselves extinct than we do on asteroid defense. And dinosaurs stayed around much longer than us anyway. So the jury is still out on whether intelligence helps a species avoid extinction.
prase’s original argument still stands, though. Having a big brain may or may not give you a survival advantage, but having a big non-working brain is certainly a waste that evolution would have erased in mere tens of generations, so if you have a big brain at all, chances are that it’s working mostly correctly.
ETA: disregard that last paragraph. It’s blatantly wrong. Evolution didn’t erase peacock tails.
The asteroid argument aside it seems to me bordering on obvious that general intelligence is adaptive, even if taken to an extreme it can get a species into trouble. (1) Unless you think general intelligence is only helpful for sexual selection it has to be adaptive or we wouldn’t have it (since it is clearly the product of more than one mutation). (2) Intelligence appears to use a lot of energy such that if it wasn’t beneficial it would be a tremendous waste. (3) There are many obvious causal connections between general intelligence and survival. It enabled us to construct axes, spears harness fire, communicate hunting strategies, pass down hunting and gathering techniques to the next generation, navigate status hierarchies etc. All technologies that have fairly straight forward relations to increased survival.
And the fact that we’re doing more to invent new ways to kill ourselves instead of protect ourselves can be traced pretty directly to collective action problems and a whole slew of evolved features other than intelligence that were once adaptive but have ceased to be—tribalism most obviously.
The fact that only a handful of species have high intelligence suggests that there are very few niches that actually support it. There’s also evidence that human intelligent is due in a large part to runaway sexual selection (like a peacock’s tail). See Norretranders’s “The Generous Man”″ for example. A number of biologists such as Dawkins take this hypothesis very seriously.
Thats an explanation that explains the increase in intelligence from apes to humans and my comment was a lot about that but the original disputed claim was
And there are less complex adaptive behaviors that require correct cognition: identifying prey, identifying predators, identifying food, identifying cliffs, path-finding etc. I guess there is an argument to be had about what a ‘conscious species’ but that doesn’t seem to be worthwhile. Also, there is a subtle difference between what human intelligence is due to and what the survival benefits of it are. It may have taken sexual selection to jump start it but our intelligence has made us far less vulnerable than we once were (with the exception of the problems we created for ourselves). Humans are rarely eaten by giant cats, for one thing.
No species have as high intelligence as humans but lots of species of high intelligence relative to, say, clams. --- Okay, that’s a little facetious but tool use has arisen independently throughout the animal again and again, not to mention the less complex behaviors mentioned above.
Are people really disputing whether or not accurate beliefs about the world are adaptive? Or that intelligence increases the likelihood of having accurate beliefs about the world?
Well, having more accurate beliefs only matters if you are an entity intelligence enough to general act on those beliefs. To make an extreme case, consider the hypothetical of say an African Grey Parrot able to do calculus problems. Is that going to actually help it? I would suspect generally not. Or consider a member of a species that gains the accurate belief that it can sexually self-stimulate and then engages in that rather than mating. Here we have what is non-adaptive trait (masturbation is a very complicated trait and so isn’t non-adaptive in all cases but one can easily see situations where it seems to be). Or consider a pair of married humans Alice and Bob who have kids that Bob believes are his. Then Bob finds out that his wife had an affair with Bob’s brother Charlie and the kids are all really Charlie’s. If Bob responds by cutting off support for the kids this is likely non-adaptive. Indeed, one can take it a step further and suppose that Bob and Charlie are identical twins. So that Bob’s actions are completely anti-adaptive.
Your second point seems more reasonable. However, I’d suggest that intelligence increases the total number of beliefs one has about the world but that it may not increase the likelyhood of beliefs being accurate. Even if it does, the number of incorrect beliefs is likely to increase as well. It isn’t clear that the average ratio of correct beliefs to total beliefs is actually increasing (I’m being deliberately vague here in that it would likely be very difficult to measure how many beliefs one has without a lot more thought). A common ape may have no incorrect beliefs even as the common human has many incorrect beliefs. So it isn’t clear that intelligence leads to more accurate beliefs.
Edit: I agree that overall intelligence has been a helpful trait for human survival over the long haul.
That seems a likely area of dispute. Having accurate beliefs seems, ceteris paribus, to be better for you than inaccurate beliefs (though I can make up as many counterexamples as you’d like). But that still leaves open the question of whether it’s better than no beliefs at all.
Dinosaurs weren’t a single species, though. Maybe better compare dinosaurs to mammals than to humans.
Or we could pick a partciular species of dinaosaur that survived for a few million years and compare to humans.
Do you expect any changes to the analysis if we did that?
Nitpicking huh? Two can play at that game!
Maybe better compare mammals to reptiles than to dinosaurs.
Many individual species of dinosaurs have existed for longer than humans have.
Dinosaurs as a whole probably didn’t go extinct, we see their descendants everyday as birds.
Okay, this isn’t much to argue about :-)
I love nitpicking!
Mammals are a clade while reptiles are paraphyletic. Well, dinosaurs are too when birds are excluded, but I would gladly leave the birds in. In any case, dinosaurs win over mammals, so it wasn’t probably a good nitpick after all.
No dinosaur species did live along with humans, so direct competition didn’t take place.
I can’t find a nit to pick it here.