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Some species have properties that seem way beyond what would be necessary for evolutionary success. For example, an inland taipan has enough venom in a single b

Some species have properties that seem way beyond what would be necessary for evolutionary success. For example, an inland taipan has enough venom in a single bite to kill 100 people. There is no imaginable situation where a taipan is going to need to bite an entire village and take them all out. Why on Earth did it evolve such insanely strong venom? When you dig into it, these outliers are often the result of an evolutionary arms race [1]. In teh case of the inland taipan, they are often prey for mulga snake and perenties, who have evolved immunity to their venom. So you've got a feedback loop where the taipan keeps evolving stronger venom to fight back against predators, who continue evolving stronger immunity to the same venom. Run that loop a million years and you get a snake who can kill a busload of people. Human intelligence is another such outlier. I know it's popular to talk about how animal intelligence is underestimated but even so, human intelligence is just astronimcally greater than any other species. Sure a squirrel can find a bunch of nuts it buried. Humans have built machines and landed them on other planets. Our intelligence is orders of magnitude greater than any other species. My pet hypothesis for years is that this must be the result of an evolutionary arms race within the species. Humans are a profoundly social species. We are mostly too fragile to survive in the wild on our own. The functioning survival unit of humans is a hunter-gatherer group. We are sort of like eusocial animals like ants. But unlike ants who can mostly rely on simple chemical signals to tell which other ants are part of their anthill, we have to rely on social cues. There is a very strong incentive to be able to deceive humans in other groups and infiltrate or sabotage their group. If you're smart enough to sneak in, you can steal a lot or do a lot of damage. Likewise, there's an equally strong incentive to be able to suss those bad actors out to prevent them from doing that. The smarter you are, and the better you're able to remember people and describe them to others, the harder it is to get taken advantage of. Turn that evolutionary crank a few hundred thousand years, and you get a species so smart that the only other animals that can possibly hope to compete with them in terms of intelligence are other Homo sapiens. If we weren't so deeply social, I don't think we'd be so smart. We have these huge brains in order to navigate the fantastically complex social world which we have in turn created by having these huge brains. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_arms_race https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_arms_race

hanjeanwat 2y ago
I'd argue that it's not intelligence alone that lets us land a machine on the moon — it's our cooperation, written language, learned culture, communication. An individual person cannot land a machine on the moon on their own. It is not intelligence that produces that, but intelligence contained and continually improved upon within a superorganism of social culture.
- munificent 2y ago
  Yes, but it requires intelligence for cooperation to be evolutionarily viable. Dumb but cooperative animals are too easy for a freeloader to take advantage of. And it obviously requires massive intelligence for written language and high fidelity communication.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- ordu 2y ago
  I think that there are two sides of an intelligence, intelligence as an inborn ability to become intelligent and intelligence as the result of the process of becoming intelligent. People are more intelligent then animals in the first sense, AND they developed a process of training the "raw" inborn intelligence into an adult mind.
ordu 2y ago
> My pet hypothesis for years is that this must be the result of an evolutionary arms race within the species. Frans de Waal studied primates and defended just this hypothesis. He wrote a bunch of books, so you may be interested in reading at least some of them. BTW, my pet hypothesis is the social roots of our intelligence is the reason why people mostly hopelessly dumb. They kinda go on intuition and it works in normal social situations, but when it comes to politics or science the intuition fails them. One needs to train their mind to stick to logic and rationality, without taking sides which seem the most beneficial for them. But training is hard and training can easily be overcome by the intuition, which is the natural way for brain to work. You need to keep your brain working against its nature to not lose your intelligence in situations which are not hierarchy games.

hanjeanwat 2y ago

I'd argue that it's not intelligence alone that lets us land a machine on the moon — it's our cooperation, written language, learned culture, communication. An individual person cannot land a machine on the moon on their own. It is not intelligence that produces that, but intelligence contained and continually improved upon within a superorganism of social culture.

munificent 2y ago
Yes, but it requires intelligence for cooperation to be evolutionarily viable. Dumb but cooperative animals are too easy for a freeloader to take advantage of. And it obviously requires massive intelligence for written language and high fidelity communication.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
ordu 2y ago
I think that there are two sides of an intelligence, intelligence as an inborn ability to become intelligent and intelligence as the result of the process of becoming intelligent. People are more intelligent then animals in the first sense, AND they developed a process of training the "raw" inborn intelligence into an adult mind.

ordu 2y ago

> My pet hypothesis for years is that this must be the result of an evolutionary arms race within the species. Frans de Waal studied primates and defended just this hypothesis. He wrote a bunch of books, so you may be interested in reading at least some of them. BTW, my pet hypothesis is the social roots of our intelligence is the reason why people mostly hopelessly dumb. They kinda go on intuition and it works in normal social situations, but when it comes to politics or science the intuition fails them. One needs to train their mind to stick to logic and rationality, without taking sides which seem the most beneficial for them. But training is hard and training can easily be overcome by the intuition, which is the natural way for brain to work. You need to keep your brain working against its nature to not lose your intelligence in situations which are not hierarchy games.