Intelligence also has costs and has components that have to be invented, which explains why not all species are already human-level smart. One of the questions here is which selection pressures were so especially and exceptionally strong in the case of humans, that humans fell off the cliff.
Fighting wars with neighboring tribes
Extractive foraging
Persistence hunting (which involves empathy, imagination (cf cave paintings), and tracking)
Niche expansion/travel (i.e. moving between habitat types)
In particular, sometimes entering harsh habitats puts various pressures
Growing up around people with cultural knowledge (advantage to altriciality, language, learning, imitation, intent-sharing)
Altriciality demands parents coordinate
Children’s learning ability incentivizes parents to learn to teach well
etc.
There’s a whole research field on this FYI.
Or briefly, intelligence is good for everything.
Intelligence also has costs and has components that have to be invented, which explains why not all species are already human-level smart. One of the questions here is which selection pressures were so especially and exceptionally strong in the case of humans, that humans fell off the cliff.
Thanks!
What’s the ect? Or do you have links for where to learn more? (What’s the name of the field?)
(I thought wikipedia would give me a good overview but your list was already more useful to me.)
IDK, fields don’t have to have names, there’s just lots of work on these topics. You could start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_anthropology and google / google-scholar around.
See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz-L2Ll85rM&list=PL1B24EADC01219B23&index=556 (I’m linking to the whole playlist, linking to a random old one because those are the ones I remember being good, IDK about the new ones).