It is not as popular of a theory as it was when I was taught it, but it still is useful for thinking about ecological succession. For instance, there’s a reason why “old growth” forests are comprised of trees that take awhile to produce biggity, not-so-abundant seeds (oaks can take 50 years before they start producing acorns), while vacant lots are full of weeds that produce bazillions of little seeds that fly all over the place. Vacant lots are disturbed, degraded, suboptimal places. It just doesn’t make sense for an oak tree to set up shop there 'cuz it will die before it gets a chance to reproduce.
The law of allocation predicts that fewer resources will be had for making offspring under limited, unfavorable conditions. But if an organism is already adapted to limited, unfavorable conditions, such as a dandelion, it will maximize output as much as it can because the genetic variation in a larger output is more diverse. It increases the likelihood of at least one of the offspring surviving and reproducing doing it this way rather than investing all of its energy in producing a smaller, less diverse set of offspring. Ecologists refer to this as “bet-hedging”.
The r/k strategist theory breaks down because our own species shows that it is possible for a population to show characteristics of both. Thus, it’s hard to say that either is completely “adaptive”.
Which was my point. If they could get things to work more smoothly (collectively) then they would have the stability that makes having 5-7 kids seem like a bad idea. In much of the world that is what has happened over the last 50 years. But in the countries that are still struggling, not so much. How much of that is due to the population vs. events not under their control (geography, international politics, natural disasters, warfare, etc) I don’t know. But it seems like a nation of people who can recover from disaster, war, topography issues, international politics, etc. and still develop stability will have fewer kids than a society of people who can’t.
I think our math does reflect the limitations of our evolutionary environment. We managed to work out hyper spatial geometry, but the results look like nonsense to our senses.
Also human intelligence is as much biological as it his cultural. True you have to be smart with math to do differential calculus, but you also have to be born after Newton, or be a Newton born into the right situation to be a Newton. You don’t get calculus without trigonometry and algebra.
One thing that’s always intrigued me is what I call the blind idiot dilemma. There’s probably a name for this because it’s so plain someone had to have seen it before me, but I don’t know who, which is actually a bit ironic.
Assume you want to know the rate of change. You brought up differential calculus. After thousands of years human math hit a point where it could do differential calculus. Good, but how do we know there isn’t a simpler way that our brains just aren’t built to think of? That’s the dilemma. Further in that context you seem to present it as difficult. How do we know that? Maybe there’s a way of seeing math so differential calculus is actually bloody simple, but our brains just aren’t meant for it. How do we know? That’s also the dilemma. The dilemma is you can’t know know what you don’t know about, nor have a clue of, but how do we critique ourselves in that big unknown.
People in trades run into a version of this when they come back to what years ago they thought to be their best work, Only to see it full of flaws. I’ve done that. “This is the query I was proud of?? It’s terrible.”
A lot of math comes not from fun, but from need. It’s my understanding trigonometry comes ancient surveying. Computers do math for us, but yet so much of our society runs on numbers.
Even if we’re terrible with math we still need it. We’ll struggle with it, and every now and then get lucky and figure something out. Calculus is only a few hundred years old, but humans have been fighting with math for much longer.
I’m not arguing with your point, but it seems to me math was going to happen even if we suck at it and hate it. However a lot of people do enjoy math, doing multi variable calculus for fun. Some people also cut themselves, eat glue, dress up as Cardassians, keep up with the Kardashians, play sports, write books, and do all sorts of things. Humans have a wide range of personalities. This in its self is arguably a survival trait. Villages with wide interests have more to develop from than those without. There’s bound to be at least a few humans who love math.
However, even if humanity’s best efforts in math were dumb and inelegant, we would never know if we’re bared from seeing a better way by our limits. We’d celebrate our successes and see the slightly less mathematically stupids, those that put away their dinner glue for calculator love as math gods among men.
I guess what I’m saying is a species of math idiots will bring math down to thier level then beat it with experiance, and over thousands of years we may have done just that.
This is very interesting. I’ve wondered about that. I have a nice computer job, but punch cards? Yuck. I like my code full of comments, descriptively named, and high level. That isn’t happening on punch card systems.
One thing I want to do with my life, the thing I’m hoping to do at my current job, and point my education toward, is investigating using computers to enhance human human language, human ability, and maybe human intelligence. I have a dream of people solving most of our problems, war, hunger, etc. The things we could fix now but can’t be bothered. I think computers can be used to improve human education, and give people the ability to better understand things so through better presentation, access, and communication of information.
You cite computers developing to a point where more people can become scientists without needing to be smarter. I think before it limited science to a particular kind of intelligence that could be bothered with punch cards. Science is logic and discipline, but it’s also creativity and passion for understanding. Further while anyone can do science, only just so many can make a living at it. It’ll still be limited to the best and the lucky. It’s just now best has a pool wider than computer intelligence. It still requires deductive reasoning, or your experiments will fail in unuseful ways and be poorly received, and your data will be unreliable.
Although I believe you’re a scientist, working in a science environment with presumably a lot more contact and insight with the personal qualities that make a person a good scientist than me. So I’m totally open to the possibility I don’t know what I’m talking about on that.
Also I’d like to submit the duck hypothesis. If it walks, talks, and cliches like a duck, it’s probably a cliche about ducks. If people can use software to do things they would otherwise need to be more intelligent to do maybe the combined system of them and the software is in fact more intelligent. Maybe human intelligence will evolve around tools the way our hands have evolved to use tools to make us stronger than we were. The mind enabled greatly the fruit of the hands, now the fruit of the hands can return the favor.
This is exactly the type of thing I was thinking of. Is it possible some alien world has some attributes that would significantly reward the ability to perform advanced math in the head, resulting in a brain geared towards that type of thinking?
One that involves throwing thjngs. Throwing accuretly at a target means knowing the rate gravity will change its direction. Humans do this a lot in sports, and previously as hunters.
The big innovation with calculus is the ability to represent this math with logical symbols and descret values , instead of fuzzy vague intuition, so we can work out orbits with out having to practice throwing planets.
Using symbols means needing to evolve with a notation system, or a langauge.