Is there a level cap for fish intelligence where an individual fish won't gain any more benefit from increased intelligence? Being the smartest fish may not help you as much as swimming with the pack would help you.
Are humans the same way? I feel like human intelligence is just on the verge of "knowing thyself" in a much bigger way. There are plenty of examples of super-intelligent people that can have a global platform now thanks to modernity, but until 100 years ago they may have suffered in their communities. How many would-be geniuses died without procreating because their brains were wired differently and it happened that any use for skills in which they excelled were not available to them at the time? You can't be the next Einstein if you died in the Steppes of Asia in 1292.
It probably depends on the definition of intelligence, as it mostly does. A human capable of creative and complex problem solving might have still had an advantage in 1292 in the steps of Asia. Maybe not by creating the theory of relativity, but by inventing hunting and warfare strategy, or solving some other problems in their society.
> Is there a level cap for fish intelligence where an individual fish won't gain any more benefit from increased intelligence?
Think of it this way: intelligence has costs (metabolic, anatomical, etc) as well as benefits. At some point, costs outweigh benefits. That point is highly dependant on environment.
You’re missing out on societal costs as well. We as humans needed civilizations, eg farming, where one person could cultivate more than one persons food thereby freeing up time for others in the community to work on other things. If a community doesn’t have that the cost is too high to let one person whittle away days trying to invent.
> The size of the neonatal skull is large relative to the dimensions of the birth canal in the female pelvis. This is the reason why childbirth is slower and more difficult in humans than in most other primates.
Being the smartest person in the room almost always has advantages.
Da Vinci was offered several times the opportunity to procreate (I think even his brother's wife) just to grab some of that DNA.
Probably Ramanujan is the most famous example we can point to - whilst not 13th C steppes, rural Victorian India is not a hotbed of education, yet people around him recognized his genius (at least relative to them) and gave him what opportunity they could. (No idea about the offers of sex however)
Genius usually will out. For a fair society we need to worry about the rest of us. For a technologically prosperous society we need to ensure the few geniuses get a good education.
Luckily for us, we don't know where the geniuses will be born, so we need to build a fair society, and then we will get the technological advances for free - so glad that's solved.
You're right this is survivorship bias, but I think it also illustrates that my premise is unfalsifiable. I'll try to restate it, keep in mind we are talking about evolution:
There must have been people throughout history who where of such high intelligence that it impeded their ability to procreate, while their circumstances didn't allow their exceptional abilities to be realized, and they died in obscurity. High profile, high intelligence historical figures cannot be an example of this because their circumstances allowed their intelligence to be realized.
In the best of circumstances, high intelligence can be exported from an individual and impact the entire culture, region, or even species (like a printing press). The meme can procreate without the individual procreating, and the impact of an individual like Leonardo da Vinci can permeate without him contributing DNA to the human experiment.
Here's my speculation: Maybe a gene that's too smart could possibly be self-defeating, and it won't be replicated.
Natural selection depends on environment, which changes all the time. A gene that is advantageous today might become fatal tomorrow so asking whether a gene is self defeating doesn't maker sense without specifying the environment. Floods, asteroids, droughts, fires, and so on are all random events that constantly change things up so only genes that are foundational to our biochemistry are immune to selective pressure - largely because most mutations in those genes are catastrophic or the genes are very redundant.
Humans have a complex social environment on top of everything else so whether a gene is useful or not might depend on which ideology is in power, the predominant religion of the day, or hygiene etiquette.
Pol Pot's purges come to mind, where he exterminated intellectuals, the educated, anyone wearing glasses, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if there were pre-industrial revolution tribes/city-states that were wiped out because they became "too smart" - i.e. focusing so much on education that they neglect their military.
Yes. Isnt it also said, that Mensa members (IQ needs to be 130+, if I remember correctly) do not correlate with success in life. It seems that probably conscientinousness is orthogonal to IQ and more important.
I think that joining an organisation which celebrates your (only?) positive feature is possibly indicative of a hidden variable which may correlate inversely with success in life... I'm not sure Mensa are an unbiased sample.
There is something to this: most people (i.e. the majority but not all), when faced with intelligence beyond their own, get excited and interested automatically. This is good for intelligent kids and gives them a fighting chance.
Those positive feelings aren't true of other evolutionary advantages in kids, like when people are faced with sociopathy beyond their own.
I think that a complete understanding of life and consciousness and the nature of reality would cause people to check out of the whole economic and reproductive cycle. What’s the point of doing anything if you’re just a collection of particles whirring around in a universe that doesn’t give a shit about you.
The continuation of the human race more or less depends on people not fully understanding reality and maintaining the illusion of the self.
Are humans the same way? I feel like human intelligence is just on the verge of "knowing thyself" in a much bigger way. There are plenty of examples of super-intelligent people that can have a global platform now thanks to modernity, but until 100 years ago they may have suffered in their communities. How many would-be geniuses died without procreating because their brains were wired differently and it happened that any use for skills in which they excelled were not available to them at the time? You can't be the next Einstein if you died in the Steppes of Asia in 1292.