Really there is no finish line for general intelligence—intelligence is a continuous parameter. Chimpanzees and other apes do experience cultural evolution, even though they’re substantially stupider than us.
You are equivocating “cultural evolution”. If you fix the genetic composition of other currently existing apes, they will never build an open-ended technological civilization.
Technological progress makes the average person smarter through environmental improvements, and technological progress is dependent on a very small number of people in society. Let’s say the human race had gotten lucky very early on in its history and had a streak of accidental geniuses who were totally unrepresentative of the population as a whole. If those geniuses improved the race’s technology substantially, that would improve the environment, cause everyone to become smarter due to genetic factors, and bootstrap the race out of their genetic deficits.
It’s basically a new argument. Would you prefer it if I explicitly demarcated that in the future? I briefly started writing out some sort of concession or disclaimer but it seemed like noise.
The problem here is that it’s not clear what that comment is argument for, and so the first thing to assume is that it’s supposed to be an argument about the discussion it was made in reply to. It’s still unclear to me what you argued in that last comment (and why).
So: you are arguing that the point where intelligent design “takes off” is a bit fuzzy—due to contingent factors—chance? That sounds reasonable.
There is also a case to be made that the supposed “point” is tricky to pin down. It was obviously around or before the 10,000 year-old agricultural revolution—but a case can be made for tracing it back further—to the origin of spoken language, gestural language, or to perhaps to other memetic landmarks.
It seems to me that once our ancestors’ tools got good enough that their reproductive fitness was qualitatively affected by their toolmaking/toolusing capabilities (defining “tools” broadly enough to include things like weapons, fire, and clothing), they were on a steep slippery slope to the present day, so that it would take an dinosaur-killer level of contingent event to get them off it. (Language and such helps a lot too, but as they say, language and a gun will get you more than language alone.:-) Starting to slide down that slope is one kind of turning point, but it might be hard to define that “point” with a standard deviation smaller than one hundred thousand years.
The takeoff to modern science and the industrial revolution is another turning point. Among other things related to this thread, it seems to me that this takeoff is when the heuristic of not thinking about grand strategy at all seriously and instead just doing what everyone has “always” done loses some of its value, because things start changing fast enough that most people’s strategies can be expected to be seriously out of date. That turning point seems to me to have been driven by arrival at some combination of sufficient individual human capabilities, sufficient population density, and sufficient communications techniques (esp. paper and printing) which serve as force multipliers for population density. Again it’s hard to define precisely, both in terms of exact date of reaching sufficiency and in terms of quite how much is sufficient; the Chinese ca. 1200AD and the societies around the Mediterranean ca. 1AD seem like they had enough that you wouldn’t’ve needed enormous differences in contingent factors to’ve given the takeoff to them instead of to the Atlantic trading community ca, 1700.
You are equivocating “cultural evolution”. If you fix the genetic composition of other currently existing apes, they will never build an open-ended technological civilization.
Technological progress makes the average person smarter through environmental improvements, and technological progress is dependent on a very small number of people in society. Let’s say the human race had gotten lucky very early on in its history and had a streak of accidental geniuses who were totally unrepresentative of the population as a whole. If those geniuses improved the race’s technology substantially, that would improve the environment, cause everyone to become smarter due to genetic factors, and bootstrap the race out of their genetic deficits.
I don’t see how this note is relevant to either your original argument, or my comment on it.
It’s basically a new argument. Would you prefer it if I explicitly demarcated that in the future? I briefly started writing out some sort of concession or disclaimer but it seemed like noise.
The problem here is that it’s not clear what that comment is argument for, and so the first thing to assume is that it’s supposed to be an argument about the discussion it was made in reply to. It’s still unclear to me what you argued in that last comment (and why).
Trying to argue against a magical level of average societal genetic intelligence necessary for technological takeoff.
You can’t get geniuses who are “totally unrepresentative” in the relevant sense, since we are still the same species, with the same mind design.
So: you are arguing that the point where intelligent design “takes off” is a bit fuzzy—due to contingent factors—chance? That sounds reasonable.
There is also a case to be made that the supposed “point” is tricky to pin down. It was obviously around or before the 10,000 year-old agricultural revolution—but a case can be made for tracing it back further—to the origin of spoken language, gestural language, or to perhaps to other memetic landmarks.
It seems to me that once our ancestors’ tools got good enough that their reproductive fitness was qualitatively affected by their toolmaking/toolusing capabilities (defining “tools” broadly enough to include things like weapons, fire, and clothing), they were on a steep slippery slope to the present day, so that it would take an dinosaur-killer level of contingent event to get them off it. (Language and such helps a lot too, but as they say, language and a gun will get you more than language alone.:-) Starting to slide down that slope is one kind of turning point, but it might be hard to define that “point” with a standard deviation smaller than one hundred thousand years.
The takeoff to modern science and the industrial revolution is another turning point. Among other things related to this thread, it seems to me that this takeoff is when the heuristic of not thinking about grand strategy at all seriously and instead just doing what everyone has “always” done loses some of its value, because things start changing fast enough that most people’s strategies can be expected to be seriously out of date. That turning point seems to me to have been driven by arrival at some combination of sufficient individual human capabilities, sufficient population density, and sufficient communications techniques (esp. paper and printing) which serve as force multipliers for population density. Again it’s hard to define precisely, both in terms of exact date of reaching sufficiency and in terms of quite how much is sufficient; the Chinese ca. 1200AD and the societies around the Mediterranean ca. 1AD seem like they had enough that you wouldn’t’ve needed enormous differences in contingent factors to’ve given the takeoff to them instead of to the Atlantic trading community ca, 1700.
Only if the “improved environment” meant stronger selection pressure for intelligence. That’s not clear at all.