Sometimes people talk about super-intelligence, like maybe humans will be super-intelligent thousands of years in the future, or aliens that are more intelligent than humans, etc. I think something interesting to consider is what type of environmental factors rewarded our early intelligence increases, and is there anything rewarding increases today or are we pretty much stopped other than some miscellaneous random outliers that will pop up now and then.
Questions:
Is intelligence primarily a tool to combat other intelligence? In other words, if all other animals remained at level X, humans would have stayed at X+1?
Or is intelligence primarily a tool to battle the physical environment? Figure out ways to find food when the normal supplies are gone, or stay warm when cold, etc.
If option #1 is the primary driver then there is hope - we just need to be in constant life or death struggle with some other species - maybe cut the world in half, don’t interbreed, fight for resources and both sides will eventually arrive at “super-intelligence”.
If option #2, then are we stuck other than genetic engineering or computer assisted thinking?
I guess it would be a balance between increased brain power, physical attributes and energy efficiency. Maybe it’s easier to just be a little stronger/faster, or pragmatic and move to a different area and avoid the competition.
But possibly, current human level intelligence was primarily driven by intra-species competition.
If true, it seems like those pressures are pretty much gone, we live in a protected environment these days.
Also known as “the Machiavelli hypothesis”; the idea that we evolved intelligence as an arms race against each other, trying to out-scheme each other. It explains why we got so much smarter than everything else; the one species that is always going to be just as clever as you are is your own.
Not really, there are still plenty of pressures for intelligence in humans. People get themselves killed doing stupid things. And if Bob talks Christine into bed with him and Dave doesn’t, Bob gets a chance to breed that Dave doesn’t. Or on the gender flip side, every time Christine chooses a smooth talker over some idiot with big muscles she’s giving extra breeding chances to the smarter male.
EDIT: If you think about it, one part of the environment that selects for higher intelligence is laws against rape. It gives a reproductive advantage to persuasive men over thugs.
I saw an interesting Nova episode about this. The premise they investigated was sexual selection. People are smart for the reason peacocks have big tails. Intellegence, like big feathers shows an individual is healthy enough to devolop it. Malnutrion and deasise can stunt your potential to be smart. Even today a particular subset of intellegence, social intellegence, greatly boosts your breeding potential.
At the individual level, we are impacted by everything in our environment. The environment is not just the physical stuff, but also other individuals.
When it gets right down to it, whoever is having the healthiest babies determines what our species will look like in the future. If it’s the smartest people, then that means high intelligence is a trait that will be pushed forward. If it’s the tallest people, then height will be pushed forward. If it’s a propensity towards thinness or athleticism or winsome personality, then these traits will be pushed forward, in the degree that they are inheritable.
There’s no “rule” that says humans have to evolve in any particular direction.
It may be that advanced cerebral abilities comes at the expense of other traits that are associated with fitness. We are starting to see this in a cultural sense. As people become more educated and their incomes rise, they delay child-bearing and have fewer children. If this trend continues, there’s no reason to believe that humans will become smarter. There’s no reason to believe we will become dumber either. But the present nature of our society/culture certainly does not promote selection of–in a Darwinian sense–intelligence.
It is true that we are in an arms race against other species, but not as competitors for resources. Viruses, bacteria, protists…the “lesser” organisms are our biggest enemy. We can create vaccines and drugs to “kill” them, but our species isn’t going to become fundamentally more intelligent because of this on-going fight. It can even be argued that this struggle isn’t even going to make us more resistant immunologically or stronger physically since modern medicine now makes it possible for otherwise sick and feeble people to live longer and have children.
Sooner or later we’ll be able to artificially boost human intelligence, so I don’t think it’s of much long-term consequence whether/what kind of intelligence is being selected for right now.
FTR I do think we got as smart as we are by an arms race with other humans.
Intelligence being associated with reproductive success may have worked in our natural environment but I’m not convinced it’s that simple now.
I mean for one thing, the kinds of people you’re implying are not smart – those who take stupid risks, or spend time in prison; seem to me to father more children than mr safe and secure.
(note: I’m leaving aside the value judgement. I’m not saying it’s good to have more, or fewer, children)
To me, it doesn’t seem like we do have the type of pressure on survival that would push intelligence “forward”.
The vast majority of people follow a similar path, school, job, family (or no family) - I don’t see the type of constant elimination of individuals that I think would be required to weed out the “dumbs” and reward the “smarts”.
For us to artificially increase intelligence, it means we have to have a very good understanding of what intelligence is, and what “more intelligent” would look like with respect to that particular skill.
For example: one portion of our intelligence is our ability to model the physical world around us and make accurate predictions - to the extent our accuracy rate goes up, or the amount of information required for an accurate prediction goes down - we can say we are smarter.
So it’s interesting to try to figure out what are the other portions of our intelligence, what does it mean to be “more” intelligent in each of those areas, and what are the trade-offs.
Is it obvious how to improve “general” problem solving? Or is any increase in that ability going to have side-effects, like (just an example) maybe seeing patterns where there are none.
What environmental conditions would select for advanced math skills (short of taking a test by age X and not allowing children if under score Y)?
Don’t focus so much on “survival” but on reproduction. At some level, intelligence could be a hinderance to reproductive fitness (ie, smarter people having fewer children).
The reason I was discounting that is one of magnitude, even though it probably makes a difference (in either direction), it seems that it’s not consistent enough to push the entire species substantially in a direction.
Environment in a way that we came down off trees and walked upright developing appositional thumb is the most significant boost to developing intelligence higher than other animals. Now we can grab things, tinker and make tools & things that provides ourselves unlimited “environmental” variations, so to speak, and upping competitions amongst ourselves.
Well, this gets to the hard part of the question. Why do we always equate mathematical abilities with intelligence?
The traits that correspond to fitness are those that correlate the most with sexual attractiveness. Like being a good (smooth) talker. Having strong social skills (reading body language, empathizing, being a good listener, etc.) Having a strong personality (assertiveness, sense of humor, sense of purpose and drive). These factors are frequently found among smart people, but they aren’t the domain of smart people.
There are only three ways that I can see humans evolving into a more analytical/mathematically-inclined species:
Founder effect/genetic drift. A catastrophic event occurs, greatly reducing the genetic diversity of the population. Due to a combination of random and non-random causes, the new population is skewed towards geeky, engineering and sciency types. Over time, other traits disappear simply due to randomness, until the baseline of the population is overwhelming more analytical/mathematically-inclined (“mathy”) compared to the original population.
A gene associated with mathiness is linked to a gene that confers fitness. For instance, a mathiness gene might be located on the same chromosome, in close proximity to, a gene that promotes sperm longetivity.
Mathiness is a by-product of a gene that confers fitness. A gene that promotes the release of multiple eggs during ovulation might–through some complex cascade effect–cause a woman to be especially good at solving differential equations. So mathiness is selected for, but only by accident.
I cannot think of any realistic environmental condition that would select for mathiness.
As I learn math I find math moves from basic operations, like addition, to deductive reasoning like the quadritic formula. Maybe there’s math, or science, I don’t know about that puts a lie to this but all math and pure science I’ve encountered is deductive reasoning and evidence gathering to fuel the reasoning. I use deductive reasoning heaps at work and in life from computers to social situations.
Anything that selects for deductive reasoning, selects for math potential. Hunter gathering would seem to use a lot of deductive reasoning. Hunting and gathering defined our evolution.
Isn’t there a pretty strong negative correlation between the level of education a woman achieves and the number of children she is likely to have in her life?
It seems to me that for now, we are selecting against intelligence. Assuming of course that intelligence goes hand in hand with higher education. I realize of course this is not always the case.
Or maybe it’s just a myth. Anyone got a cite?
ETA: Found one: A 2008 national census reported that women who had dropped out of high school had the most children on average. And the more education women achieved, the fewer children they were likely to have, with the fewest children being born to women who had finished graduate school.
I see your point. But there is deductive reasoning and then there is “let’s do differential equations in our heads, just for fun!” It’s like saying that the ability to walk upright leads to being able to run a five-minute mile, so selecting for the first selects for the latter.
I don’t think anyone would argue that walking upright didn’t put us at a competitive advantage over our competitors. But unless we are suddenly besieged by armies of flying monkeys with laser-beam eyes, running a five-minute mile isn’t going to be a must-have trait anytime soon. Likewise, being able to do advanced calculus isn’t going to be a must-have trait anytime soon, under reasonable circumstances.
We still have lots of niches in our society where high intelligence actually handicaps rather than advantages (i.e., menial jobs). And even in professions that esteem intelligence, technology is making those areas accessible to people with a wide variety of strengths. For instance, back in the day if you didn’t have the patience to feed punch cards into your college campus’s computer to run a SAS program that you’d spent a month writing, you probably weren’t going to make it as a scientist. Nowadays you don’t even need to know how to write a program to use SAS. So more people can become scientists. That doesn’t mean we’re smarter, though. It just means that improved technology has lifted a filter that had previously screened out people who had low endurance, couldn’t program, or were afraid of giant, clunky computers. So as technology has gotten more complex, there has been less of a need to be uber-intelligent to be successful. I see no reason to think this will change any time soon.
Isn’t it likely that women who get pregnant in high school are more likely to drop out and then not go on to higher education? And that women in higher ed are more likely to put off childbearing?
The argument I have heard for intelligence is similar to what der trihs was talking about. The more (socially) intelligent someone is the more utility they can extract from others while contributing as little as possible. So intelligence breeds social freeloaders, but it also creates an arms race of people both trying to freeload but avoid being taken advantage of at the same time. The argument for that is that cognitive and academic intelligence just piggybacks on social intelligence, and that social intelligence is what we were selecting for.
If anything in today’s society (which obviously is different than history) the less intelligent tend to breed more. Not only in the US, but internationally. The nations that can’t get their act together (Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Uganda, etc) have about 5-7 kids per woman. At the same time the functional technocracies like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, etc. have so few children there are fears the societies won’t be sustainable.
There is a reason why poor countries who can’t get their act together produce more children.
They have higher mortality rates. Esp. infant and childhood. If you watch footage of people in famine-ravaged countries, you’ll see stories about mothers trying to decide which of their 3-5 kids to feed. 'Cuz they know at least one of them is going to die. And that’s only this year.
It’s a strategy that works, and other living creatures follow it too. When resources are sporadic and crazy, it’s better to produce many offspring and cross your fingers that a few will make it, rather than putting all your proverbial eggs in one basket. This strategy only works under stable, sustainable conditions.