'If you were to come up with a sort of objective zoological IQ based on amount of evolutionary work required to reach a certain level, complexity of brain struc

'If you were to come up with a sort of objective zoological IQ based on amount of evolutionary work required to reach a certain level, complexity of brain structures, etc, you might put nematodes at 1, cows at 90, chimps at 99, homo erectus at 99.9, and modern humans at 100. The difference between 99.9 and 100 is the difference between “frequently eaten by lions” and “has to pass anti-poaching laws to prevent all lions from being wiped out”.' [EDITED: the intended quote is below. the quote above is the next paragraph of OP, which is only slightly less relevant than the intended one] 'Why should we expect this to happen? Multiple reasons. The first is that it happened before. It took evolution twenty million years to go from cows with sharp horns to hominids with sharp spears; it took only a few tens of thousands of years to go from hominids with sharp spears to moderns with nuclear weapons. Almost all of the practically interesting differences in intelligence occur within a tiny window that you could blink and miss.' Yudkowsky's position paper on this idea explains this in more detail: http://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf http://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf