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Hypothesis: The main evolutionary benefit social animals get from IQ is understanding the thinking of others and communication. Thinking and understanding o
by MAXPOOL 8y ago
Hypothesis: The main evolutionary benefit social animals get from IQ is understanding the thinking of others and communication.
Thinking and understanding others is more important than thinking better. Slightly higher than average IQ is beneficial, but too much higher is net negative.
You can understand others in two ways.
1) Build a internal model for how others think. This is a difficult problem. It involves complex decode-encode process that eats resources and can fail. For social animal this process must be almost always on.
2) Have the same underlying thinking process as other individuals. The communication and understanding is now effortless.
If this hypothesis is true, social species have lower IQ variation than species where individuals live alone.
- zawerf 8y agoThis is a very interesting hypothesis on the evolutionary origins of anti-intellectualism! So I agree that a homogeneous population will be much better at communication (no one needs to "talk" down to each other). But given that social animals often form a hierarchy, do you think it still matters as much? The "smarter" ones can get others to follow him without the rest understanding his internal thought process. Group selection should vastly favor tribes that are good at producing these intellectual leaders then.
- MAXPOOL 8y agoSocial intelligence that leads to the top may not be related to IQ or fluid intelligence. It may be ability to communicate, read and project ideas, not thinking better ideas. ps. Group selection is very controversial theory. I think most evolutionary biologists reject it.