3 ms·
This makes me speculate if intelligence was enabled by the slop available from nocturnal animals becoming diurnal. As in, perhaps intelligence would be much har
by sfink 4y ago
This makes me speculate if intelligence was enabled by the slop available from nocturnal animals becoming diurnal. As in, perhaps intelligence would be much harder to achieve in a step by step fashion, but the adaptations to night living left some things on the table that enabled a random walk to intelligence: richer sensory input, and more energy available for processing that input. And perhaps faster and more flexible outputs. If intelligence hadn't come about, presumably evolution would have pushed things back towards faster / extreme sized (smaller or bigger) / more streamlined, basically repopulating the non-mammalian design points.
(Note that by "intelligence" I'm not referring to human intelligence, just the basic form of using mental processing power to facilitate survival. Which is not specific to mammals, nor necessarily strong in all mammals.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tomjakubowski 4y agoI like the theory. If true, it's another example of the virtue of leaving some slop in your systems.
- elevaet 4y agoThis is extremely tangential and speculative, but I've always thought ancient practices of sacrifice served as slop, or a safety margin. When times are lean, you can leave a little less food for the gods and do a little more praying.
- yakubin 4y agoOr become a priest and eat the offerings.
- eru 4y agoOctopuses and corvids are plenty smart, more than comparable to most mammals. Not sure they had a nocturnal bottleneck in their evolution? So that is probably not required. Looking at plenty of relatively dumb mammals, I don't think the nocturnal bottleneck is sufficient either. Of course, it might be a more complicated correlation than just sufficiency / necessity.